Religious Imaging in Millennialist America

ASHLEY CR AW FOR D

religious imaging in millennialist america DA R K GNOSIS

Religious Imaging in Millennialist America “Like the old prophets Ballard and Baudrillard, as well as Mark Dery and Slavoj Žižek (on a good day), Ashley Crawford practices cultural criticism as a high-low art of forensic pathology. Casting a scalpel-sharp eye on the enigmas of fleshy abjection in recent American literature, film, and art, Crawford then links this visceral weirdness to the apocalypse cultures of the recent and distant past. Along the way, Crawford convincingly argues that such epidermal eschatology is not so much a symptom of nihilism as a mutant expression of an American gnostic religion now gone feral and deranged.” —Erik Davis, author of Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica “With just the right balance of postmodern theory and pop intellectualism, Ashley Crawford explores the visions of apocalypse that were always there, in the night terrors of our New Jerusalem. Crossing the brio of his fellow Aussie Robert Hughes with an oracular style familiar from Baudrillard’s America, Crawford reveals American Christianity for the mutant thing it is: the dark side of the Enlightenment, haunted by gnostic strains and gothic tendencies. Dark Gnosis should take the place of every Gideons bible in every motel on Route 666.” —Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams “Dark Gnosis takes us into the heart of America’s schizophrenic relationship with the apocalypse, the simultaneous fear and fascination with The End. Crawford’s thrilling analysis of end-time dreaming in the works of influential artists, ­writers and filmmakers shows how the religious imaginary remains integral to our cultural DNA.” —Margaret Wertheim, author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and Physics on the Fringe

Ashley Crawford

Religious Imaging in Millennialist America Dark Gnosis

Ashley Crawford University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-99171-9 ISBN 978-3-319-99172-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951575 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Tom Howey This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Sue Baker, Prof. Barb Bolt, Matthew Barney, Dr. Janine Burke, Arwen Crawford, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Brian Evenson, Dr. Stephen Haley, Prof. Catharine Lumby, Ben Marcus, Prof. Anne Marsh, Assoc. Prof. Adrian Martin, Dr. Elizabeth Presa, Kirsten Rann, Prof. Bernard Rechter, Dr. Bernhard Sachs, Brie Trennery, Margaret Wertheim, and Dr. Duncan White. Special thanks to Philip Getz and Amy Invernizzi at Palgrave Macmillan for their forbearance and generosity in bringing this project to fruition.

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Contents

1 Introduction: American Gnosis 1 2 Delirium: A Brief History of America’s Religious Founding(s) 13 3 Dualism: An Exploration of Good and Evil via David Lynch’s Films 55 4 Delusion: On Mormon and Masonic Symbolism in Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER Films 101 5 Deconstruction: On Judaic Law and the Apocalypse of Language in Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet 159 6 Dereliction and Defecation: On the Religious Underpinnings in Matthew Barney’s Subliming Vessel and Ben Marcus’ Leaving the Sea and the Apocalyptic Imaging of Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament 207

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7 Dark Gnosis 275 Bibliography 283 Index 305

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: American Gnosis

With their carcinomatous prosthetics, their leering, hungry demeanor, their gaping, rotting mouths and their apocalyptic, murderous words they haunt the dark edges of the American psyche. They’ve crept into the literature, the films, the art, the comics, even at times the opera halls and musicals of contemporary culture, these denizens of a dark carnivalesque, hideous figures triggered from reading the Book of Revelations on bad, bad lysergic acid. In some ways, they resemble creatures of the Middle Ages when plague and pestilence ruled the lands. These are the contemporary progeny of Bosch and Breughel. They are the spawn of such contemporary American artists as David Lynch, Matthew Barney and Ben Marcus. Why are they appearing now? And in what ways do they reflect contemporary readings of Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism in the current age? The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) pointed out that: “Religious beliefs prepare a kind of landscape of images, an illusory milieu favorable to every hallucination and every delirium.”1 And, it can be argued, it is America where we see such hallucinations and deliriums made manifest via its creative expressions. Fredric Jameson, in his groundbreaking treatise Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, notes that postmodernism is what we attain when modernization is complete and “nature is gone for good.”2 I would similarly argue that secularization is what we get if and when © The Author(s) 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6_1

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‘religion is gone for good.’ America, it is often stated, is a secular state. Indeed, the essence of this notion is in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” However, it transpires that religion, like nature, is remarkably resilient. And, like nature, it can mutate into radically new forms in order to survive. America, more than any other nation, suffers symptoms of a distinctive form of ‘cultural schizophrenia’ between its gnostic desires and secular status that are expressed through its cultural output. The term cultural schizophrenia is used here to evoke the schisms that are created by the Church/State divide and how they are illustrated in specific cultural artifacts. Indeed, this is perhaps similar to the way William S. Burroughs described the use of such terminology to describe the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference in New York City in the 2014 MIT book on the event: “I think ‘schizo-culture’ here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down.” As a youth during the 1960s and ’70s, it was nigh impossible to avoid what self-styled religious critic Harold Bloom dubs The American Religion.3 With its attendant pseudo-mysticism, strange references to religion appeared in the American comic books of my youth: Ghost Rider, Dr. Strange, Thor, The New Gods. It was on the television: The Night Stalker and reminders of religious systems throughout Star Trek. It was the life-blood of the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and the horror of H. P. Lovecraft. And, of course, what would The American Religion be without the American Apocalypse: THX 138, Silent Running, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, The Planet of the Apes, and the spiritual horrors of The Exorcist and The Shining or the neon-napalm Armageddon of Apocalypse Now?4 Matthew Avery Sutton, in his book American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, cites other examples: “As evangelical apocalypticism penetrated the White House, it also became ubiquitous in American culture. Films like The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby and hundreds more depicted a cataclysmic end to the world, while the music of popular groups like Megadeth, Iron Maiden, KISS, and many others used evangelical motifs to entertain millions of Americans.” He also cites the success of the ‘Left Behind’ series of books by apocalyptic evangelist Tim LaHaye in the mid-’90s. Anthropologists Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding reference what political scientist

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Michael Barkun describes as “the improvisational apocalypticism of the 1990s—a bricolage of disparate elements from religion, ideology, the occult, and bits and pieces of esoteric knowledge covering a vast area including lost continents, astrology, alchemy, unconventional medicine, UFOs, and conspiracy theories—previously marginalized and stigmatized forms of knowledge are mainstreamed and politicized as suppressed truths.”5 Ben Marcus’ novel The Flame Alphabet (2012) and Matthew Barney’s film and exhibition River of Fundament (2014), David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), all of these works can be read as expressions of a form of eschatological crisis, or what may be described as an eschatological aesthetic,6 or form of ‘epidermal Apokálypsis’—the cultural flesh as an expression of decay. Reference to religious ‘mutants,’ of course, suggests there is a true, real, natural or base form of Christianity. Christianity’s history, however, is one of unorthodoxy—it has always been contingent on culture, politics and economics. A ‘masculine’ emphasis herein, I believe, reflects the Abrahamic religions chosen for discussion, reflecting their potent cultural presence in contemporary America and, in turn, the male hierarchy of their institutional frameworks. While there is a powerful history of female deities throughout ancient history, as seen in pagan and Hindu belief systems, Christianity, Judaism and Mormonism are clearly androcentric. The ordination of women as Rabbis and Priests is a comparatively recent phenomenon in historical terms in Judaic and Christian churches and remains a contentious source of debate in some Mormon circles. It is abundantly clear that in Abrahamic systems it is men who hold the reigns of structured power.7 The regular referencing to both teeth and the mouth throughout was inspired by a comment made by the French theorists Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in reference to American musician and poet Patti Smith: “Don’t go for the root, follow the canal …”8 One thing that the charismatic Televangelists—Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al.—have in common is inhumanely perfect teeth which, alongside booming voices and the occasional tear, they utilize to hammer home their sermons. As history has proven, these perfect teeth conceal a cornucopia of mistruths and out-right lies. Televangelism (a term coined by Time magazine in March 1998) remains a distinctly American phenomenon and teeth are among its motifs.

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That said, I shall embrace Bloom’s term, ‘The American Religion,’ for there is none more apt. He summarizes the assumption taken here, that all Americans carry a streak of the Gnostic in their cultural formation, that notions of religiosity in America are “pervasive and overwhelming, however it is masked, and even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists, are more Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate presuppositions.”9 Bloom claims, correctly I believe, that America is “a religiously mad culture …”10 Where my own discussion differs from these writers is by contextualizing the works of the artists discussed within the framework of an inherently American sense of religiosity and the direct (and sometimes indirect) referencing and mutating of Abrahamic structures and a pervading sense of the apocalyptic. I am also not the first to have juxtaposed the works of Matthew Barney and Ben Marcus. In 2004, Duncan White presented a paper at the Manchester Metropolitan University in which he asked whether Marcus and Barney: “offer a robust and divisive critical alternative to America as place or system?”11 The answer to this is in the affirmative, but to which I would add America as belief. Where my work differs is in the stark fact that Dr. White considers Barney and Marcus in terms of spatiality, while I explore their work through a lens of religiosity, the apocalyptic and a sense of eschatological crisis. To illustrate this, I have selected key works by Barney: CREMASTER 2, CREMASTER 3 and River of Fundament, Marcus: The Age of Wire and String (1995), Notable American Women (2002) and The Flame Alphabet (2012) and Lynch: Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. By highlighting references to religiosity in these works there is an argument that the mutation of belief systems is inherent in contemporary America. Religion exists in all aspects of American culture, from pop music to television sitcoms. Indeed, as Karl Marx so famously suggested, and which can certainly be applied to contemporary America: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”12 It represents a perpetual source of solace without the populace often even being aware of it. What I aim to consider is not the mainstream presence of God and Jesus Christ and other deities in everyday America, but the ways in which ‘mainstream’ beliefs such as Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism are warped and deliberately deformed in the context of the Secular/Church divide via cultural artifacts.

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Anthropologists Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding state in their formative essay ‘Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,’ that: “Here, we take American apocalypticism to be not just a set of beliefs but a network of discourses and practices in social and political use and circulation.”13 Social and political, yes, but to this we must add cultural and artistic use and circulation.

Escape Velocity If there is a central obsession at play in this book it is one of escape— one that reflects a core tendency that runs throughout not only The American Religion, but through the entire history of American arts and letters. Barney articulates this desire throughout his oeuvre, from creative energy seeking release (the Drawing Restraint works) to his fascination with physical escape via Houdini, through to the ultimate escape, that from mortality—a theme as old as art and religion themselves. This obsession with escape is a particularly American leitmotif, from its Puritan founding in order to escape the older church systems and oppressive regimes, to its establishing of the dialects of belief expressed through The American Religion, and then in turn attempts to escape The American Religion. From Melville in Moby Dick and Marcus in The Father Costume roaming the seas, to Twain going downriver (in Barney’s case one of feces), to Kerouac on Route 66 through to David Lynch’s existential ending to Lost Highway. Barney’s excursions into Japanese belief systems, Norse and Celtic mythology, Spiritualism, Judaism and Egyptian reincarnation are all linked to a central source: America. In one way or another, these myriad belief systems have touched upon America’s culture, politics, social structures, history and symbolism throughout its development. Barney’s work is in some ways a funhouse mirror to what Mark Dery describes as this ‘pyrotechnic insanitorium.’ Even tackling Egyptology is ‘logical.’ Firstly, if The American Religion has one commonality, it is the sense of an after-life, the center-piece of Ancient Egyptian belief. Secondly, Barney’s source for River of Fundament, Ancient Evenings, was authored by an undisputed American cultural icon, regardless of what one may think of his status in the literary canon, Norman Mailer. Furthermore, American symbolism is resplendent with Masonic imagery, which has much of its symbolic roots in Ancient Egypt and this is matched by the secular in the form of the American dollar bill, replete with pyramid.

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As I have contended throughout, Marcus, Barney, Lynch, and others via their works, seem to be asking the ultimate Gnostic question. As the novelist Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) so perfectly phrased it: What sort of God, the gnostic asks himself, could have organized things the way they are — this munching world of death and dissolution which pretends to have a savior, and a fountain of good at its base? What sort of God could have built this malefic machine of destruction, of self-immolation? Only the very spirit of the dark negative death trend in nature — the spirit of nothingness and auto-annihilation. A world in which we are each other’s food, each other’s prey…14

As Freud noted, the “fateful question” for humanity is whether the instinct for aggression and self-destruction” will dominate, noting that: “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent … [that] they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” Freud hails this as the cause of the general “mood of anxiety,”15 a similar conclusion to what historian Robert Hughes (1938–2012), via Auden, dubbed the “age of anxiety.”16 As Jameson points out: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”17 Author, and for some, prophet, J. G. Ballard identified this dilemma succinctly. He identified American cultural schizophrenia thusly: “It’s a paradox. In fact, in a real sense the US has presented the twentieth century with its greatest excitements, dreams and possibilities—but it’s done so within the format of extreme conservatism.”18 John McClure notes that an influential branch of contemporary cultural theory tends to inscribe postmodernism: “within a secular history of secularization: to see the postmodern period and the cultural products identified with it as thoroughly and satisfactorily secularized.”19 McClure cites this as being the position of Jameson, Lyotard and Brian McHale, but argues for a more Bloomian position: Sociologists of religion describe the period from the 1960s to the present as one of a third ‘Great Awakening,’ yet another in the series of moments in American history when spiritual preoccupations intensify and new spiritualities flourish. Poll-takers tell us that the vast majority of Americans still profess to hold significant religious beliefs. But studies of contemporary spirituality also suggest that the nature of these beliefs, and the way in which they are held, are changing.20

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Changing indeed, as this book attests. The examples proffered are symptoms of these changes. Indeed, as I suggest, that they represent symptoms of a period of eschatological crisis. For Mark C. Taylor: “Religion is an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other hand, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure.”21 Religion, then, as a source of cultural-schizophrenic mania. Reza Aslan, the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, articulates a key issue in these (mis)readings: “The abiding nature of scripture rests not so much in its truth claims as it does in its malleability, its ability to be molded and shaped into whatever form a worshiper requires.”22 The practice of artists such as Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney are a logical end-game to the theories and premises, not of Jameson, but of Bloom. Jameson’s cool language to make his argument, logical and stolidly Marxist, pales against Bloom’s preaching. Of the two critics however, it is Jameson who succeeds against the occasional histrionics of Bloom. It is precisely Bloom’s faith in the American Religion—the American ‘Spirit,’ that makes him the vulnerable writer, the apologist for Mormon founder Joseph Smith and Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and even for Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. Bloom (b.1930) Jameson (b.1934), one a poet, the other a Marxist, suggestive of the Janus-like nature of American intellectual life. Having viewed Barney’s CREMASTER CYCLE in its entirety in 2004, I, like others, left with certain reverberant images, the most powerful being from the second and third chapters of the Cycle—his Mormon and Masonic explorations. In 2013, I re-watched both Blue Velvet during a time period when I was also reading the fictions of the author Ben Marcus. Soon after, Barney’s River of Fundament was released. The result was the recognition of certain recurring patterns or memes or a form of apophenia.23 A clear distinction must be made here between cultural artifacts that reference religion and those that essentially ‘mutate’ religion. A case in point would be the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999). The main protagonist, Neo, is on a mission, foretold by prophets, to reveal the truth that will set humankind free from machine control. He experiences a ‘virgin’ birth. He is sacrificed, and then resurrected from the dead as a more powerful entity, and finally undergoes a form of rapture. There are

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references to Trinity and Zion. The name Trinity alludes to the Holy Trinity: The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. There are numerous references to Zion in the King James Bible, predominantly in Psalms and Isaiah but also in Zechariah 2:10 and Romans 9:33. The hull of the ship bears a plate reading Mark III No. 11. Mark 3:11 reads, “Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and shouted, ‘You are the Son of God!’”24 However Religious Imaging in Millennialist America: Dark Gnosis aims to illustrate not simple referencing of religion, which is the case in The Matrix, but radical adaptations of religion in the creative process. Obviously, Marcus’ books, Barney’s artworks and Lynch’s films have been discussed elsewhere, at times in the context of religiosity. Where my own approach differs from those cited is by attempting to contextualize these artifacts within an inherently American sense of gnosis versus the secular, which leads to mutations of Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism that I read as symptoms of a form of cultural exceptionalism and eschatological crisis. Thus, I set out to prove that the works discussed are a series of deuterocanonical artifacts forming a series of secondary canons of sacred writings and images in an attempt to fill a gnostic void, a secondary canon of already malformed belief systems. Most Christian Americans admit that they have never actually read The Bible. Indeed, in numerous polls taken in America since the year 2000 finds that, at best, six in ten Americans have actually read parts of The Bible (although almost 90% claim to own a copy). Thus, they are reliant on their preachers and televangelists for their reading of scripture. It is the pearly whites of Jerry Falwell et al. that they are relying upon, thus the mouth and voice of the evangelist. The mouth is Christ’s wound turning gangrenous and then talking in tongues. The text is deformed by the mouth of the preacher, thus helping form the cavity of gnosis. The religious-cultural theme is central, but the mouth as the rotting organ of communication, consumption, corruption, sexuality, abject mistruth—all of which resides in these artists’ works—could be argued as being in sympathy with a broader social condition that acutely broods over the end of days and the coming apocalypse. It is a (faintly) secularized expression of a cultural schizoid religiosity that actually longs for the end of days. The religious-cultural thematic is the underlying cause for a range of symptoms that express themselves as revulsion and decline. If

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noted in this way, as symptoms of the underlying cause, the descriptions of artworks herein become central as symptomatic. The ever-present American anxiety about its own decline and imminent erasure, given its triumphant certainty as the chosen land embedded in its Puritanical beginnings, is also a symptom of this wayward religiosity. It is symptomatic via a fervent disgust with the corruption of contemporary existence—a Puritanical hatred of actuality—that would love to see it all washed away, preferably by an end or the Rapture, a puritanical religious impulse bound by secular expression. The repeated imagings of the mouth in Barney’s, Marcus’ and Lynch’s work indicate these as expressions of similar disgust—a Puritanical, while flagrantly hypocritical, revulsion with perceived lies, excess, the abject, the bodily and sheer, gratuitous consumption. These images arise from these artists’ work, but they find sympathetic expression in other areas of culture and in the society itself. Similarly, the automobile is the Biblical Chariot filtered through the American psyche. The skyscraper is the faltering cathedral, the decay of American self-faith and spiritual integrity. These are the End of Days writ large.

Notes



1. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard (Routledge Classics, 1961), p. 204. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), p. IX. 3. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the PostChristian Nation (Simon & Shuster, 1992). 4.  Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press and Harvard University, Cambridge, 2014), p. 360. 5. Kathleen Stewart: Susan Harding, ‘Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 28, 1999, p. 294, http://links.jstor. org/sici?sici=0084-6570%281999%292%3A28%3C285%3ABEAA%3E2. 0.CO%3B2-E. 6. Christian eschatology is a major branch of study within Christian theology. Eschatology, from two Greek words meaning ‘last’ (ἔσχατος) and ‘study’ (-λογία), is the study of the concept of ‘the end,’—the end of a life, the end of the age or the end of the world. The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as “The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell’”.

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7.  There are conspicuous exceptions: In 1774 religious leader Ann Lee (1736–1784) arrived in America and formed a breakaway religious group who became known as the Shakers due to the physical form of their rituals. Ellen G. White (1827–1915) was instrumental to the founding of the Seventh Day Adventists and is officially considered a prophet by their followers while Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) founded the Christian Science movement in the latter half of the nineteenth Century. 8.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987), p. 19. 9. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 22. 10. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 22. 11. Duncan White, ‘Placelessness: A New System of Space in the Work of Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney,’ British Association of American Studies Annual Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2004. Transcript sent via e-mail from Duncan White to the author October 14, 2014. 12. Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ first published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Paris, February, 1844). A.M. McKinnon, Reading ‘Opium of the People’: Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion. Critical Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 1–2, 2005, pp. 15–24. 13. Kathleen Stewart: Susan Harding, ‘Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 28, 1999, p. 290, http://links.jstor. org/sici?sici=0084-6570%281999%292%3A28%3C285%3ABEAA%3E2. 0.CO%3B2-E. 14. Lawrence Durrell, The Avignon Quartet (Faber & Faber, 2004), pp. 134–135. 15. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud), p. 92. 16. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 543. 17. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. xii. 18. J.G. Ballard, interview with V. Vale, in Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara eds., Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967–2008, p. 148. 19. John A. McClure, ‘Postmodern/Post-secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality,’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 141–163. 20. John A. McClure, ‘Postmodern/Post-secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality,’ pp. 141–163. 21. Mark C. Taylor, After God (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007) p. 32.

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22.  Reza Aslan, ‘Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion,’ The New York Times, October 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes. com/2014/10/09/opinion/bill-maher-isnt-the-only-one-who-misunderstands-religion.html?_r=0. Aslan goes on to point out that: “The same Bible that commands Jews to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18) also exhorts them to ‘kill every man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,’ who worship any other God (1 Sam. 15:3). The same Jesus Christ who told his disciples to ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39) also told them that he had ‘not come to bring peace but the sword’ (Matthew 10:34), and that ‘he who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one’ (Luke 22:36)”. 23. ‘Apophenia’ describes a schizotypal cognitive condition—the mental state of perceiving patterns in what would normally be considered unrelated data—coined by German neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad (1905–1961) in 1958, William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003) brought apophenia to public attention. 24. Mark 3:11, King James Bible.

CHAPTER 2

Delirium: A Brief History of America’s Religious Founding(s)

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.1—Revelation 20:11–12

American culture is preternaturally inclined toward millennial musings. From origins that have never been transcended, the specific, puritanical nature of its colonialist beginnings has defined the mutations of its languages, its chthonic imagings and imaginings of itself intimate to a sense of its own demise. It is irrevocably apocalyptic. This book explores specific elements of the evolution of American literature and visual culture with an emphasis on mutations of language that articulate new forms of an apocalyptic sensibility in contemporary, postmillennial America. The oft controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek posits in 2011 in Living in the End Times that there are arguably three different versions of apocalypticism in the Western World in the current day—the New Age, by which he presumably means environmental Armageddon, “techno-digital post-humanism,” a reference to Singularity (The term ‘technological singularity,’ the concept of the tipping point of the melding of human DNA with Artificial Intelligence, was originally coined by Vernor Vinge.)2 and practitioners of Christian Fundamentalism who, Žižek states: “read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, searching for

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(and finding) signs that the final battle between Christ and Anti-Christ is nigh…”3 Strangely, given its growing cultural weight in the Western world, Žižek eschews the more apocalyptic elements of radical Islam. Apocalypse (Ἀποκάλυψις) means ‘revelation,’ “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling.”4 As a genre, apocalyptic imaging details an authors’ visions of the end times as revealed by a heavenly messenger or, depending on the context, environmental catastrophe, other-worldly intervention or nuclear Armageddon. The cultural artifacts I have chosen to discuss do not fall into the purist notion of apocalyptic genre, rather they suggest a sense of the end times via decay and deformation. Indeed, as T. S. Eliot would phrase it in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925): This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

There have been, of course, a plethora of cinematic and literary apocalypses in recent decades with attendant critiques. Where my approach differs is in not only referencing America’s literal religious underpinnings but identifying practitioners who refurbish such elements as the iconography of Judaism and Mormonism to illustrate an aesthetic of apocalypse, the deformation of traditional imagery suggesting an unraveling caused by the (cultural-schizophrenic) sensibility that occurs in the interzone5 between Church and State in America. Barney, Marcus and Lynch (among others) are also linked by a distinct sense of the visceral, the bodily, the morphological and deformity, the aforementioned epidermal Apokálypsis, and by executing their activities around the advent of the year 2000—a powerful—if spurious, date. Spurious because, as author Steve Erickson points out: People discounted the true math of the Millennium, supposedly measured from the birth of Jesus and giving the Year of Our Lord 2000 its particular transcendent and ominous implications — except that, of course, Jesus was not really born in the Year One, or for that matter the Year Zero. Jesus, by most historical reckoning, was actually born closer to 4 B.C. which means that the new Millennium began not in the year 2000, but the year 1996 … we were having a Millennium and didn’t even know it: a Secret Millennium, or at least an unconscious one.6

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America’s Religious DNA Soon after its ‘beginning’ America opened itself to the world and, in its acceptance, acquired virulent viral strains. “Give me your tired, your poor.”7 The result, with its polyglot embrace of cultural referents, was held in place by a document that began with the words “We the People.” The American Constitution is in essence without political precedent. It is also arguably the first public symptom of American cultural schizophrenia. For a country founded by religious fundamentalists, the Constitution is bereft of any form of call for Divine Involvement, “no prayer for divine assistance,” notes historian Mitchell Meltzer. The founders “turned away from the traditional reliance upon religious sanction and engineered a new paradox, what could be called a secular revelation.”8 As scholars Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore note, this flew in the face of the intentions of the Puritans.9 (Moore notes that the Encyclopedia of American Religions (1993) contains 1730 entries. “The 175 mostly unfamiliar entries in the section devoted to Spiritualist, Psychic, and New Age groups reads more like a directory of psychological counselors than a list of churches or places of worship.”) The irony would become that this secular document, the Constitution, rapidly took on a religious aura and came strongly into play during the first physical apocalypse of the fledgling county: The American Civil War. This does not take into count the slaughter of America’s indigenous peoples, which while clearly ‘apocalyptic,’ is difficult to pinpoint as a specific, oneoff ‘event’ and one that arguably continues to this day in one form or another. As opposed to Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari’s (1930–1992) use of the model of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) and elsewhere, or the more linear approach of the Hebrew Tree of Knowledge10 it can be proposed that such cultural shifts share more in common with the fungal, with mold or a virus, and that the works by Marcus, Barney, Lynch et al. attempt to fill a void: the loss of a sense of gnosis, a spiritual cavity not unlike a cavity in a rotting tooth. An orifice. An orifice that Americans seem uniquely desperate to fill. In his mid-1980s book America, Baudrillard preempted some of the following considerations by not predicting some kind of nuclear meltdown, but by referencing more personalized breakdowns—reliance upon

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consumption, immediate consumption as God-given right—whether fast food or fast tech or power by munitions. An attempt to fill a void through glut. One must recall that consumption was also the now-archaic term for tuberculosis, a disease that would ‘consume’ its victims. This text is centered around several fictional narratives, beginning with the popular belief in the fiction of Americas’ founding itself. Indeed, the Americas were a focal point of exploration by the Spanish, French and Dutch, among others, to say nothing of the existing American indigene well before the Mayflower docked. The Pilgrim Fathers who arrived at Plymouth in 1620 were latecomers. The continent had already been named after the Italian explorer Americus Vesputius.11 But it was the Puritans from England who came to dominate the American narrative. It was the Puritans who injected, to quote Robert Hughes, “the tenacious primacy of religion in American life.”12 According to German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), the Puritans’ harsh doctrines regarding the corruption of the flesh created a sense of utter inner isolation and, in part, led to “the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in culture and in religion.” The sensual was of no use in achieving salvation and promoted “sentimental illusions and idolatrous superstitions.”13 Pleasure denying, single-minded, aggressively positive, innocent of any flaw, the Puritans established the basis for an ideal, albeit fictional personality type, and indeed, an entire culture, whose repressed desires would inevitably arise in the form of cultural perversions. It was not just religion per se the Puritans had in mind. As Hughes points out, they created a notion of American newness—the concept of “newness as the prime creator of culture.” The Puritans lived in expectation of something new arising, something very big: the restoration of Christ’s reign on earth, a millennium brought about, in part, by the action of his living saints, as they imagined themselves to be. New, but with ancient precedents that lay in the Old Testament.14

Millennial musings were inevitably global, but appeared to have a particular impact on what Harold Bloom calls the “American Religion”—“a syncretic and prevalent faith” that is in stark contrast to European Christianity:

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Interest in angelology, prophetic dreams, and near-death manifestations as millennial omens is necessarily worldwide, but has particular intensity in the United States. … A nation whose quasi-official high priest is the Reverend Billy Graham, author of Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is rather clearly more likely than most other countries to have strong intimations of the Millennium.15

Apocalypse—the destruction of existing structures—through the strategy of renaming was an imperative of America’s founding Puritans, and stems directly from Deuteronomy via Moses. As Hughes points out, New England and almost all names of America’s founding settlement were prefaced by ‘New’: New Canaan, New Bedford, New Salem, New York, New Orleans, all of which represented “not mimicry but transfiguration. The Indian names were retraced, all too often posthumously: Agawam became Ipswich, Acuchena became Dartmouth. To rename was to take.”16 The claiming of new territory via renaming continues to this day, however rather than the ‘new,’ today it is the ‘post’—the ‘postmodern’ or the ‘posthuman’ or even Bloom’s ‘post-Christian.’ But in the period leading to the new millennium the ‘new’ became the ‘post’—the aftermath or afterbirth of the new. A postmodern postmortem. The Puritans were great fictionalists, writing themselves into a new history of the world and a fiction of discovery. The imposition of Puritan phantasy as physical palimpsest—the discovery of a world where the Book of Revelations would find a perfect home. A home where, to quote de Tocqueville, “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude,” could thrive “to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.”17 A statement that, while written in 1840, remains true to America today: vehement in its self-belief, arrogant in its role as self-appointed Global Leader. To an extent the Founding Fathers were Utopians but, as Fredric Jameson points out, the very notion of an earthly Utopia is, in essence, “sacrilegious.”18 What need for an otherworldly Heaven if Utopia is achieved on earth? It is, arguably, this “contradiction” that lends America its particularly cultural-schizophrenic cultural fulcrum. An earthly Utopia was perhaps not the intention of Christopher Columbus when he set sail on August 3, 1492. “Humanity’s march west through space was also seen as a march West toward the end of time — an apocalyptic notion that medieval theologians had been bandying about for centuries,” writes historian Toby Lester. Columbus had imagined himself to be a central player in this theater of end times—“a

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Messianic figure who, by carrying the Christian message across the ocean, was hastening the coming of the End of Days. He was no longer just Colombo or Columbus. He was also Christopher — that is, Christo-ferens, or ‘Christ-bearer.’”19 Columbus’ belief became an obsession: between 1501 and 1505 he compiled his own book of apocalyptic moments sourced from prophetic passages from the Bible, which he called The Book of Prophecies. God had made Columbus the messenger of a new Heaven and Earth, which had been described in the Apocalypse of St. John. He believed that God had shown the explorer the “spot” to find it. The “spot” Columbus referenced is America. The New World had the End of the World entrapped in its conceptual and cultural DNA, or at least its historical pedigree, from the very beginning.

The American Mythos This fictional notion of ‘home’—the founding of a supposed ‘new’ Israel—begat an excuse for wholesale slaughter—not only of the local indigenous population, but of the flora and fauna so abundantly supplied by God. To refuse this gift would be an affront to God. However it would also lead, inevitably, to Gluttony20—arguably the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Obesity, the plague of McDonalds, KFC and CocaCola, creating what Baudrillard describes as “these obese individuals who have escaped from the hormone laboratories of their own bodies,”21 and, elsewhere, as a “deformity of excessive conformity.”22 For Baudrillard, this would eventually lead to the “dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies”23 of contemporary Americans. A visual correlation of this would be David Lynch’s utilization of obese women in the context of Ben’s apartment in Blue Velvet. The extremes of American appearance, from lean to “grotesquely obese,” probably has less to do with compulsive bulimia than “a general incoherence, which results in a casualness about the body or language, food or the city: a loose network of individual, successive functions, a hypertrophied cell tissue proliferating in all directions.”24 It is a conclusion shared in large part by Bernard-Henri Lévy twenty years after Baudrillard: Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies … another brand of obesity … a social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in

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Willow Creek. … Obesity of SUVs. Obesity of airports. … Obesity of election campaign budgets … Obesity of Hollywood box-office sales … Obesity of memorials … Obesity finally of public deficits, whose exponential program is becoming a warning flag thrown at the whole society. The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today.25

For cultural critic Greil Marcus: “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes: its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, Biblical allusions that lose all their certainties in American air.”26 But it is precisely this “exuberance and suspicion” that led to the ‘promised land’ of the Pilgrims to lead the world, only to be revealed to be rotting from the inside and distrusted by the outside. The apocalypse felt is personal, raw, reflecting North American insecurity and obsession with surface, the hazardous status of the flesh and the apparent ‘spiritual’ void that it conceals: the utilization of a language of theological righteousness and aspirational gnosis which acts as a scab over a pustulating, gangrenous wound. Jameson succinctly suggests that the “hermeneutic task of theological modernism emerges from the desperate requirement to preserve or rewrite the meaning of an ancient precapitalist text within a situation of triumphant modernization, which threatens scripture along with all the other relics of an agrarian past in full-scale liquidation.” Like the Founding Fathers of the new America, the peasants at the time of the English Revolution lived rural lives not so radically different from that of the characters of the Old Testament or New Testaments: “it is no wonder it was still possible for them to stage their revolution in biblical terms and to conceptualize it in theological categories.”27 The Puritans came anticipating—indeed, desiring—fiery conflict, and when it wasn’t home-delivered, the mindset was more than ready to provoke the desired conflagration. The land was plentiful, to be sure, but it required a degree of ‘cleansing’ before its God-wrought destruction, the eradication of Sin encapsulated in the barbarity of the indigenous peoples. As Hughes states, America became “Mythic” due to the Puritans’ self-appointed historical significance. “They started writing themselves into a heroic world history almost as soon as they arrived. … Puritan writers had no hesitation in comparing John Winthrop, leader and elder of the Massachusetts colony, to old Moses.”28 A tendency that would

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be replicated in the deification of Abraham Lincoln and simulated in the adoration by followers of the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, among others. As in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, America’s leaders would become venerated in such sites as Mount Rushmore and the framed Constitution as revered as the Shroud of Turin. The Lincoln Memorial is indeed a ‘religious’ site/sight. To the right of the massive sculptural entity is inscribed The Gettysburg Address and to its left Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It is, eerily, in architectural structure and imposing in situ presence, decidedly Pharaonic and not without solid hints of Masonic structure. In the Inaugural, Lincoln contemplates the end of the Civil War. If recent retellings of that War are any indication, its presence lingers powerfully to this day—see George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Stephen Wright’s The Amalgamation Polka (2007), Robert Kloss’ The Alligators of Abraham (2016) and Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016) in which the Civil War never took place and slavery lingers in certain states of the (dis)union. In Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) a second Civil War erupts in the not-too-distant future over the issues of fossil fuel use. For Steve Erickson, Lincoln describes slavery as America’s “original sin,” and that the Civil War was the price the fledgling country had to pay for “wringing [its] bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” and that “God may well have it that the nation must go right fighting this war into eternity, forever locked in a death’s grip with itself.”29 For Greil Marcus: The story of America as told from the beginning is one of self-invention and nationhood … and before and after the formal founding of the nation, the template, in its simplest, starkest terms, came in the voice of God from the Book of Amos, calling out to the Children of Israel: ‘You only have I known of all of the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.’ From John Winthrop in 1630, with a ‘Modell of Christian Charity,’ describing the mission of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company, to Abraham Lincoln in 1865, delivering his Second Inaugural Address, to Martin Luther King, Jr., ninety-eight years later, speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, America has told itself this story.30

The Puritans left England essentially in order to be allowed to pursue their beliefs. As Winthrop stated in a sermon on their ship the Arbella in 1630: to build “a city on a hill” paraphrasing Mathew: “Ye are the light

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of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”31 Unwittingly Winthrop had supplied a handy catch cry to political speechwriters and the United States presidents from John Adams (1735–1826) to John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) to Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) to Barak Obama. In his inaugural address, JFK described the city and “the glow from that fire” which would “truly light the world.” Ironically, he said these words in the midst of the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear fire was at its height. Continuing in a Biblical tone, the fledgling President described a seemingly endless limbo: “Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need — not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out.”32

God’s People The Puritans’ unshakeable belief that they were God’s people and that America was God’s gift to them is what is known as “American exceptionalism,” notes Greil Marcus. “This is an original and fundamental part of American identity: there is no American identity without it, which is also to say there is no American identity without a sense of portent and doom.”33 Contemporary British philosopher John Gray comes to a similar conclusion, concisely suggesting that: “American exceptionalism is a religious phenomenon.” Both the post-millennial thinking that looked forward to a world transformed in part by human action and more chiliastic pre-millennial beliefs that anticipated cataclysmic conflicts shaped the way Americans interpreted their history and viewed the future. Each gave America a unique role in history, and the result was the Americanization of an apocalyptic myth.34

Pinpointing specific examples of “American exceptionalism,” historian Elizabeth Winthrop notes that it was “the moral engine” during both the Cold War and in the ‘war against terror’: “Consider George H.W. Bush’s ‘thousand points of light,’ or Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill,’ which differed from [John] Winthrop’s only because it was now ‘shining.’”35 But for many cultural critics and commentators, that shine lost its luster early. Cultural critic Mark Dery states:

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America is historically unique in the fervor of its dream of itself as a shining City upon a Hill, showered in God’s grace … and in the pitch blackness of the dark places in its national psyche. In the Big-Man-on-Campus swagger of its self-regard, the sachrymose sentimentality of its self-mythologization … and in the mocking distance between its patriotic fables and the bredin-the-bone bigotry and brutality of its history.36

Among the many blows against that luster was the assassination of J.F. Kennedy, whose death, accurately rendered by J.G. Ballard, represented: “a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular psyche that have not yet closed.”37 The Puritanical fiction of a land of religious freedom—and its accompanying sense of Armageddon—spread rapidly and the Puritans were soon followed by the Quakers, the Amish, Mennonites, Shakers, Lutherans and others, and even grew one of its own, Mormonism. One could arguably add Scientology here however I think it safe to say that the jury is still out on whether Scientology constitutes a large, well-organized cult based on a science fictional premise or a religion per se, regardless of its legal status in the United States. Each held their own specific peculiarities: the Amish, a mutation of the Swiss Anabaptists, arrived in 1737 carrying their obsession that anything ‘New’ was evil, thus conflicting with the Puritans’ desire to rename locales with that very adjective. They were followed in 1774 by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, who would earn “the nickname of ‘Shakers,’ from their shivering community dances that looked so odd to outside observers.”38 In many ways it is the Mormons, that “visionary and hermetic cult” as Erik Davis describes them, that captured the spirit of the new land, a group “steeped in gnostic dreams of self-divinization.” The Mormons had reimagined the “harsh and monumental landscape of the Southwest as an Old Testament desert”—a site where the covenants of old could be restored, Davis argues. This frontier psychology became “an indelible component of America’s peculiarly stubborn optimism, its worship of the free self and free enterprise, its utopian imagination and its incandescent greed.”39 Of course today the final frontier lies just beyond the manicured lawn within the confines of the white picket fence a la Blue Velvet. Other sects, cults, mutated versions of Cuba’s Santería, Brazil’s Candomblé, Haiti’s Vodun and syncretisms invaded America’s psyche via mystics from Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, to say nothing of the

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ever-growing Muslim following and that newest and most virulent of religions: Consumerism (a notion wonderfully explored in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 epic novel American Gods, in which the Old Gods of Norse, Celtic and Egyptian heritage go to battle with the New Gods of media, technology and celebrity culture). As time has passed America has become a polyglot of religious languages—a sweaty mosh-pit of belief systems far removed from the initial hopes of the Puritans. “We have always been a religiously fecund nation …” writes Bloom. “Since our religion tends to be experiential and pragmatic, it increasingly has departed from European Christianity, where the institutional, historical, and theological aspects of the faith have remained relatively strong.”40 In other words, American religious beliefs have mutated into something new. Citing the ‘Great Awakening’ that emerged in America in the 1730s, Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, defines it as a “new born-again Christianity,” inspired largely by the preaching of evangelist George Whitefield (1714–1770), that was “frequently unhealthy and characterized by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals.”41 The Puritans’ God reflected the human psyche in the stressful environment of the period somewhere between the twelfth and second century BC. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, describes this God bluntly and succinctly: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” he states bluntly. Jealous and proud of it: a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak: vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser: misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.42

Bloom would seem to agree, describing Yahweh as “an ambivalent, uncanny, and unpredictable personality, given to violent mood swings.”43 And even the most generous of readings of The Book of Job suggests a far from benign entity. Perhaps, more than any other group, the early settlers felt they possessed a sense of gnosis, described by cultural critic Eric G. Wilson as that which “focuses on raw experience with the divine, an intimate acquaintance that breeds knowledge.”44 This all-pervading belief, even fervor, has infiltrated American creativity since its inception. In Postmodern Belief: American literature and

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religion since 1960, literary critic Amy Hungerford argues that during the late twentieth century many key writers used language “as a religious form” in order to maintain a sense of “literary authority” which many believed was under threat. She suggests this was an eclipse under religious fervor in large part due to “the exhaustion of the older Protestant establishment, and the rise of Pentecostalism and the revival of evangelicalism all underwrite the success of the literary bids for authority.”45 She goes on to explore how Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) utilized notions of glossolalia, Don DeLillo “imagines the novel as the Latin mass,” and Cormac McCarthy’s use of “the literary style of the Bible …”46 Biblical language is ‘remade’ to fill the gnostic void of America. But there is a clear problem with the notion of gnosis in this context. As Wilson points out, Gnosticism (and here he is referring to the more literal form articulated by Valentinus, in which the physical world is an utter illusion, rather than the more generalized one adopted here) is “a system that requires words for its very being.” In this way, Gnosticism finds itself in a double bind: it is dependent upon the linguistic status quo that it wants to annihilate. How can one employ Gnostic critiques of oppressive materials without becoming fully a part of matter? Must a Gnostic necessarily prove the impossibility of Gnosticism?47

Either way, if we take the term ‘gnostic’ as a simple awareness of the presence of God, or we take ‘Gnostic’ as a disavowal of the concrete world, linguistics and art become irrelevant. The Gnostics, as defined by David Katz and Richard Popkin, considered themselves Christians and believed in a supreme God who not only was totally removed from our own world but also had no involvement in creation: “that job having been the bungled job of a lesser, perhaps evil, deity.”48 Katz and Popkin note that: “This belief system was set out in their own texts, some of which were discovered in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945,” John Gray goes so far as to state that in Gnostic faith: “knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.”49 Gray goes on to point out that there have been threads of Gnostic thought in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mithraism, Orphism and elements of Platonic philosophy. Bloom himself describes the dialects of American religiosity as “brazen.”

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Persuasively redefining Christianity has been a pastime through the ages, yet the American difference is brazen. What I call the American Religion, and by that I mean nearly all religions in this country, socially manifests itself as the Emancipation of Selfishness. Our Great Emancipator of Selfishness, President Ronald Reagan, refreshingly evaded the rhetoric of religion, but has been appropriated anyway as the archangel of American spiritualized greed.50

The Rapture If anything could renew and consolidate the American apocalyptic spirit it was 9/11. “The murder of thousands of civilians on 11 September 2001 brought apocalyptic thinking to the centre of American politics,” writes John Gray. “At the same time, it re-energized beliefs that form part of America’s myth.”51 Peter Conrad, the author of Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins, noted that 9/11: “licensed a succession of scare-mongering savants.” He notes that Baudrillard described the catastrophe as “the West’s moral suicide,” suggesting that “God had declared war on himself.” Žižek, Conrad added, “channeling the metaphysical terrorist Morpheus in The Matrix, welcomed us all to the desert of the real, where we eke out our remaining days as Nietzsche’s ‘last men’.”52 But for many in the corridors of power in the new millennium, a number of them Fundamentalist evangelicals, there was little thought of America’s myth or mythology, Gray argues. This was reality, pure and simple, yet another sign of imminent apocalypse: “many of the theo-conservatives who have been George W. Bush’s power base expect an End to come about by divine intervention,” he writes. They maintain that wars and cataclysmic events are all preludes to the coming of the End Days and may anticipate a “Rapture in which they ascend into heaven.”53 Their Fundamentalist beliefs, Mathew Avery Sutton suggests, are best described as: “radical apocalyptic evangelism.”54 It is worth noting that the word or term ‘rapture’ is not to be found in either the New or Old Testaments. It is a peculiarly American term, credited to an Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby (1800– 1882) in the late-nineteenth century and feverishly adopted by the Christian fundamentalist clergy and popularized by such preachers as rabid dispensationalist Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) and Cyrus R. Scofield (1843–1921). (Dispensationalism is a unique interpretation and study of Biblical texts that divides the history of the world history into

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seven eras, or dispensations, beginning with creation and ending with Christ’s second coming, or the Rapture.) Like many other American religious interpretations or mutations, it is not, in fact, sourced literally in Scripture. The actual dates of the End Days are similarly enshrouded in fictions. In the 1830s New York Baptist William Miller (1782–1849) led a movement known as the Millerites. Miller predicted that the End of the World would occur in 1843. When that failed to transpire, his followers, utilizing the Book of Daniel as their source, named the date as October 22, 1844. Note that George W. Bush’s fundamentalist evangelical associates are not some small apocalyptic cult a lá Heaven’s Gate. These were people who took, with utmost seriousness, the words of Thessalonians 4:16–18: For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so, shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.55

It is little wonder then, despite its secular cloak, that religiosity infuses every nook of American culture. There have been other major shifts, not as physically catastrophic as 9/11 or Iraq (or for that matter the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King and the blunders of Vietnam), but also psychologically charged. The abandonment of the Latin Mass after the second Vatican Council (1962–1965) caused a seismic shift in aspects of contemporary American language and thinking. In Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) a protagonist mourns the impotency of the written word: “The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So, we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.”56 For Hungerford: Glossolalia, the Latin mass, small talk, the ritual of conversation or of the sentence: this is how DeLillo imagines fiction as a religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment … not in doctrine, but in prayer: not in instruction, but in vision: not in reason, but in rapture: not in knowledge, but in mystery … DeLillo’s religion of language comes home to its pre-Vatican II, Catholic origin.57

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Glossolalia or ‘speaking in tongues,’ experienced during religious ecstatic frenzy, is the fluid vocalizing and, importantly, on occasions, the writing of syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning, in some cases as part of religious practice. Logical narrative vanishes, as does decipherable language. For almost all of the American faithful, the Latin Mass was incomprehensible, a form, it could be argued, of Glossolalia. Variations of this phenomena appear in a range of the images to be investigated in this discussion. The significance of glossolalia has varied in context, with some minorities considering it a part of a sacred language, but it is most prominently practiced within Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian movements. Similarly, xenoglossy or xenoglossia is a theoretically paranormal phenomenon in which an individual is able to speak or write a language that they could not have acquired by natural means. The catastrophic events surrounding the story of the Tower of Babel among other Biblical referents are, perhaps, the source of such traditions. This may also fall into the zone of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed heteroglossia,58 the coexistence of distinct variations in single languages. The term translates from the Russian raznorechie to ‘different-speech-ness,’ introduced by Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Cлoвo в poмaнe [Slovo v romane], published in English as Discourse in the Novel. Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence and conflict between differing forms of speech within the singular text: a form of what is now most often described as metafiction or metanarrative which can be seen distinctly in such American works as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986), Zach Dodson’s Bats of the Republic (2015) among others. There is another variation of American language that sits strangely alongside glossolalia, in many ways its cultural-schizophrenic twin: that which Ballard dubs “Invisible literature.” This is the morass of technical, legal, medical and other ‘literature(s)’ that remain ‘hidden’ in plain sight, simply because, as Dery points out, nobody considered such material ‘literature.’59 “At least no one did until Ballard began promoting the notion that beyond the narrow bandwidth of the literary narrative as conceived by cultural mandarins at, say, the New York Review of Books lies the vast spectrum of corporate, government, and scientific communications, from Gray’s Anatomy to the Warren Report, interoffice memos to cockpit voice-recorder transcripts, all of it an untapped

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source of inspiration for the postmodern imagination.” Indeed, Ballard describes the Warren Report as resembling the “novelization of the Zapruder film.”60 Abraham Zapruder was a tourist in Dealey Plaza whose amateur cine-film captured the President’s tragic death. The Warren Commission concluded that frame 210 recorded the first rifle shot, which wounded Kennedy in the neck, and that frame 313 recorded the fatal head wound. I forget the significance of frame 230. “The Warren Commission’s Report is a remarkable document, especially if considered as a work of fiction (which many experts deem it largely to be). The chapters covering the exact geometric relationships between the cardboard boxes on the seventh floor of the Book Depository (a tour de force in the style of Robbe-Grillet), the bullet trajectories and speed of the Presidential limo, and the bizarre chapter titles — ‘The Subsequent Bullet That Hit,’ ‘The Curtain Rod Story,’ ‘The Long and Bulky Package’ — together suggest a type of obsessional fiction that links science and pornography.

Ballard also points out the association between language and assassination: Oswald’s Historic Diary … is a remarkable document which shows this inarticulate and barely literate man struggling to make sense of the largest issues of his day. Curiously, many prominent assassins have possessed distinctive literary styles, as if they had unconsciously rehearsed and rationalized their crimes on the verbal level long before committing them. … Manson has a unique apocalyptic style. ‘Paycheck whore wears a dollar bill gown to the funeral of hope and love …’61

David Cronenberg makes clear reference to Ballard’s terminology in his novel Consumed (2014): “‘Set this mode for taking pictures without people,’ A shake of the head, eyes now closed to fully feel the richness of the words. ‘What author of the past century has produced more provocative and poignant writing than that?’”62 To some extent, on the literary front, a parallel could be made with the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore (1940–1977), the reimagined character in Barney’s CREMASTER 2, who quoted Shelley and Hermann Hesse, and asked visitors whether they were familiar with Nietzsche. Similarly, The Manson Family were by no means alone in apocalyptic language or symbolism, they left their victims in “cryptic postures suggesting the rituals of an unknown church,”63 writes Greil Marcus. America had become a malodourous swamp of belief systems

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and cults that have included Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, the Children of God64 and the most prominent of them all, the science-fiction-based Scientologists.65 Sloterdijk more or less sums up Scientology, after it was authorized as a religion per se by the American Supreme Court” “all that is required to be a religion is for a business to claim it is one.” As Umberto Eco (1932–2016) has noted, “masses of American lemming’s rush towards suicide in the name of an unearthly happiness,”66 neo-millenarian and glossolaic movements blossom. “A religiosity of the Unconscious, of the Vortex, of the Lack of Centre, of Difference, of the béance has spread through modern thought as the subterranean counterpoint to the uncertainty of the nineteenth-century ideology of progress.”67 The often surreal and extreme response of secular authorities to such movements is captured by Baudrillard: “In Philadelphia, a radical sect named ‘MOVE’, with a bizarre set of rules, including one forbidding both the practice of autopsy and the removal of rubbish, is cleared out by the police, who kill 11 people by fire and burn down thirty adjacent houses.”68 Fictional cults are no stranger than reality. For Greil Marcus the Log Lady in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks is a mystic: “The log is an oracle: it makes her a medium. Founder of a religion of which she remains the only adherent.”69 Like Christ, she carries her piece of timber without complaint (see Mark Frost’s 2016 novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks for a variation of this reading). The Log Lady may be alone, but, “The future belongs to crowds,” DeLillo declares in the opening scenes of Mao II—a Moonie wedding which assembles a chanting mass, utilizing the familiar scene of a baseball diamond for his setting. This mass wedding is based on the real-life collective marriage ceremonies performed by Revered Sun Myung Moon. Moon founded the Unification Church in Korea, which found fecund soil in America and allowed its followers a means of losing their identity in the collective. Reviewing Mao II, Martin Amis notes that: We are in an intensified millennial present, the Last Days — what the Moonies call ‘hurry-up time’. ‘When the Old God leaves the world,’ DeLillo writes, ‘what happens to all the unexpended faith?’ It’s not that people will start believing in anything: they will start believing in everything. ‘When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops.’70

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American Glossolalia Fictional or semi-fictional cults appear throughout contemporary American letters, including Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) (the cult-like, cryonics-obsessed believers of The Convergence), Steve Erickson’s The Sea Came In At Midnight (1999) (a suicide cult in the opening pages), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) (a cult of amputated, wheelchair bound terrorists), Blake Butler’s 300,000,000 (a group of youths acting under a mysterious entity plan to murder every American), Brian Evenson’s Last Days (2009) (a cult of murderous self-amputees), Victor LaVelle’s Big Machine (2010) (a cult of African American’s called The Washerwomen) and Ben Marcus’ Notable American Women (2002) (a cult of women devoted to silence) and The Flame Alphabet (2012) (the cult-like Forest Jews). These were, of course, preempted in numerous American novels, most notably H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928).71 But the lines between fiction and fact blur dramatically. For Umberto Eco: The strangest thing about the story of the People’s Temple suicides is the media reaction, both in America and Europe. Their reaction is: ‘Inconceivable, an inconceivable event.’ In other words, it seems inconceivable that a person long considered respectable, like Jim Jones … could then go mad, turn into a bloodthirsty autocrat…, It seems incredible that so many nice people followed him blindly, and to the point of suicide.72

Eco points out that there was nothing new in this event, that the media and the politicians were blind-sided by their own lack of historical awareness, that there is a long and vast history of millenarian sects (as a powerful introduction to this see Norman Cohn’s masterful The Pursuit of the Millennium73). In this context what is unique about the United States is its evident insistence on declaring itself as a ‘secular’ state. In keeping with the general purview of this book, Eco cites the fictional example of Dashiell Hammett’s (1894–1961) The Dain Curse (1929), with its central figure being a charismatic prophet who has established a Holy Grail cult “naturally set in California — where else?”74 Eco then echoes Hammett’s central character, noting that: “They brought their cult to California because everybody does, and picked San Francisco because it held less competition than Los Angeles.”75 Jameson strikes a similar tone when he notes that Philip K. Dick was: “the virtual poet laureate of this

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material: of squabbling couples and marital dramas, of petit bourgeois shopkeepers, neighborhoods, and afternoons in front of television, and all the rest. But, of course, he does something to it, and it was already California anyway.”76 Cults and/or utopian communities have been legion in America’s history,77 which is particularly byzantine in Los Angeles. As Mike Davis notes in Ecology of Fear: “Kooky religious cults and (un)natural disaster — often with racist or anti-Semitic undertones — became pea and pod in Los Angeles fiction after 1930. The initial coupling of the two had, however, been made nearly a century earlier, when, according to the Reverend William Money, Jesus Christ accosted him on a New York Street corner and ordered him to go west, to Los Angeles.” Davis recounts how Money cornered the market in such realms as faith healing and astrology, and accordingly came into confrontation not only with the local authorities, but also with Hollywood, with both sides resorting to “doomsday imagery to damn and excoriate the other.”78 Georges Bataille, in his Encyclopaedia Acephalica, includes a Los Angeles movement for his entry under Cults: Los Angeles, 6 October — Police carrying out a search of the cellar of a house in which was practiced one of the mysterious cults so widespread in the city discovered the body in a hermetically sealed chest, alongside the bodies of seven small dogs. Mrs Willa Rhoades, ‘princess’ of the cult and adoptive mother of the victim, would appear to have acknowledged that the woman whose body was discovered died while following a course of medical treatment prescribed by the cult. The body had been preserved in ice for more than a year, in the hope of a resurrection. The presence of the small dogs was supposed to facilitate the resurrection.79

This was, after all, the Los Angeles of bizarre cults, a realm where “physics and metaphysics continued to rub shoulders in a variety of weird circumstances,” writes Mike Davis. A land where “Luciferian Magick” met “Cal Tech and the founders of the American Rocket State, and then, through an extraordinary ménage á trois, to the first world religion

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created by a science fiction writer.”80 Davis is here referring to the strange confluence in the 1940s of occultist Aleister Crowley (1875– 1947), science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) who went on to found Scientology and rocket scientist Jack Parsons (1924–1952). In a further link to the esoteric, Parson’s supervisor at the time was Professor Theodore von Kármán, a descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, legendary creator of Prague’s Golem discussed in the next chapter. California is a locale where even the likes of visiting German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) saw fit to analyze Los Angeles astrology columns.81 But it was not just in Los Angeles that cult-like behavior thrived. In 1848 industrialist John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886), believing he had a “condition of sinless union with God,”82 established the Oneida community in upstate New York who espoused notions of Biblical Communism. Similarly, in 1825 Robert Owen (1771–1858), a wealthy industrialist, acquired the entire township of Harmonie, Indiana to practice a form of Christian communal living.

The Age of Anxiety Referring to the late 1980s, Jameson noted that: The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class: the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called Postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.83

And it was, of course, during this period—the end of the ’50s—that the American Dream went ‘live’ via the new medium of television (Television was first commercialized in the United States in the 1940s). Writing on the artist Ed Keinholz (1927–1994), but in a phrase that could be more broadly adapted, Robert Hughes noted that: “to Keinholz, the TV set was both America’s anus and its oracle.”84 Where once human travails were personalized or community-based, suddenly they were abundantly global. The ‘Dream’ of white picket fences and evergreen lawns (a la Lynch’s Blue Velvet) quickly unraveled to reveal a very different world indeed. In quick succession the ’60s imploded in violence—November

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22, 1963: the assassination of JFK. April 4, 1968: The assassination of Martin Luther King. June 6, 1968: The assassination of Robert Kennedy. December 6, 1969: Altamont. August 8, 1969: The Tate Murders. And, of course, the ongoing travesties of Vietnam: the “cold war in neon.”85 And America had been, to use William Gibson’s verb, “Zaprudered.”86 (The term ‘Zaprudered’ is taken from William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition in which Gibson mutated a proper noun into a verb, without mentioning Kennedy or assassinations or a contextual explanation: “Zaprudered into surreal dimensions of purest speculation, ghost-narratives have emerged and taken on shadowy but determined lives of their own.”) Zaprudered via that which James Joyce had dubbed the “bairdboard bombardment screen” in Finnegans Wake in 1939. Jameson argues that in modern American history the assassination of John F. Kennedy was seminal: “not least because it was a unique collective (and media, communicational) experience, which trained people to read such events in a new way.” He continues: Suddenly, and for a brief moment (which lasted, however, several long days), television showed what it could really do and what it really meant — a prodigious new display of synchronicity and a communicational situation that amounted to a dialectical leap over anything hitherto suspected.87

The entire decade resonated with a sense of televised apocalypticism, beginning with January 20, 1961 when JFK appeared live on television to inform the American public that Soviet missiles had been installed on the island of Cuba. “He has the look of a man delivering a death sentence,” writes Charles Taylor. Then “comes the real chiller moment. Kennedy’s face fills the screen. ‘We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war,’ he says, ‘but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced’,” Nothing diminishes the terror of that moment: what Norman Mailer, writing a few months later, called ‘a bright mad psychic voice which leaps to give the order that presses a button.’ The grim determined stature of a man carrying out the worst burden of his office crumbles when you parse those words … Kennedy is saying that if necessary he’ll destroy the republic in order to save it.88

By 1967 America was still embroiled in the catastrophic and surreal epic of Vietnam. Both The Doors and Jimi Hendrix released their debut albums. Chrysler released their new model Imperial. Dr. James

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Bedford became the first person to be cryonically preserved with the intent of future resuscitation. The New York Times revealed that the US Army was conducting secret germ warfare experiments and tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington, DC, with Allen Ginsburg chanting in an attempt to levitate The Pentagon.89 It was what Robert Hughes, borrowing Auden’s line, dubbed ‘The Age of Anxiety,’90 a time “when the world of promise began to unravel,”91 or what Sigmund Freud similarly dubbed as Angst vor etwas92—anxious expectations arguably beginning with the assassination of JFK in 1963. It was a period when, as Greil Marcus puts it, “dread was the currency.”93 In 1968 dread was the currency. It was what kept you up all night, and not just the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, when before his death was finally announced Norman Mailer swore he’d give up an arm if Kennedy lived: dread was what made the promise believable when Mailer wrote about it. That was because people all over the country had lived through the same long night, thought the same thoughts, made the same promises, knowing they would all come up cold.

Coincidentally, 1967 was also the year that two American artists—Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney—were born and who went on to galvanize their particular fields of activity by reinjecting a degree of anxiety into the broader culture—“what causes anxiety is the elevation of transgression into the norm, the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire,”94 claims Žižek. This lack throws us into the suffocating proximity of the object-cause of desire: we lack the breathing space provided by the prohibition, since, even before we can assert our individuality through our resistance to the Norm, the Norm enjoins us in advance to resist, to violate, to go further and further.

Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney Religious Imaging in Millennialist America: Dark Gnosis explores a number of examples of millennial imaging, which share traits of disease, dystopia, ruin porn, anxiety, paranoia, apocalyptic visions and cultural schizophrenia. Even in the idealized suburbia of Blue Velvet it can hardly be said that the ‘straight’ characters behave with any degree of normalcy (these symptoms in contemporary America bear an uncanny resemblance

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to those described in the medieval world of Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium). However, Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney remain its core protagonists. Marcus published his first book, The Age of Wire and String in 1994, while Barney presented the first section of what would become The CREMASTER CYCLE, CREMASTER 4, in 1995 (numerical coincidences, although spurious, hold a powerful sway in American millennial thinking. That said, even the likes of Walter Benjamin (Doctrine of the Similar, 1933) and Theodor Adorno, saw fit to analyze American astrology columns—Adorno most notably in The Stars Down To Earth, 1975). Barney and Marcus both share a clear fascination with religious belief systems. Both share an interest in extremes of physicality. Their concepts of time are malleable and materiality, in both cases, is paramount. Language, or in some ways the lack of it, are central concerns. Marcus and Barney were born at the end of a decade of near-miss apocalypticism. They hail from a period where modernist and postmodernist concerns blur, yet both confound purist notions of the postmodern. As Jameson posits, “the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same… .”95 But both Barney and Marcus (and a number of their contemporaries) arguably do both. While they embrace breakage, they are also very much in the business of creating ‘new worlds.’ As religious theorist and cultural critic Margaret Wertheim points out, the power of language to ‘create worlds’ has been recognized across religions and cultures since stories were first told. She notes that in the Old Testament we find the irrefutable statement ‘In the beginning was the word.’ “With these words the ancient authors of the Hebrew scriptures acknowledge that before language there was, in effect, nothing.”96 Barney and Marcus are arguably ‘Rhizomatic Fictionalists’ (to stretch Deleuze and Guattari’s definition in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972). “America is a special case,” write Deleuze and Guattari: Of course it is not immune from domination by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American books are different

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from European books, even when the American sets off in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American ‘map’ in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. … The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal …97

The dentist, of course, spends life within the horrific realities of the orifice. Voids encouraged by overindulgence and gluttony. The dentist at times creates a camouflage, or mask, to conceal internal corruption, as may be seen in the case of America’s televangelists—the improbable perfection of Jimmy Swaggart’s incisors. We are reminded of Žižek’s description of Freud’s dream of his patient Irma who is suffering from an infection incurred from a dental injection. Freud gets closer to his patient and looks “deep into her mouth, confronting the horrible sight of the livid red flesh.”98 It is a moment of “unbearable horror,” Žižek writes. It is the inflamed orifice and, as it is the organ of verbal communication and oral tradition, its message must also be a site of infection. Deleuze and Guattari were far from the only ones interested in roots and canals. “I don’t know where it was I got so interested in teeth and dental instruments and drilling and the idea of drilling, and then nerves, and different dimensions of a tooth, the roots,” says David Lynch, referring to the opening of the script for Lost Highway (1997) which featured a photograph of a man suffering from facial disfigurement which Lynch says he sourced from a book called Dental Hygiene, Dental Applications and Oral Pathology. 99 This infection seeped further into the song titled Strange and Unproductive Thinking on Lynch’s debut album Crazy Clown Time (2011) which references “the hideous odors emitted from the oral cavity.”100 And, as discussed later, ‘dentistry’ drives one of the most compelling scenes in Barney’s CREMASTER 3. The impact of certain elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts filters down to the likes of Marcus especially, but also Barney and an entire generation that followed. Arguably, in America, this stemmed from ‘Schizo Culture,’ a three-day conference held at New York’s Columbia University in 1975 which acted as a potent introduction to the theories of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard to an American audience. It was the brainchild of the founder of the highly

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influential Semiotext(e), Sylvère Lotringer who concocted a cultural car crash between the French theorists and the avant-garde of American culture such as John Cage, John Giorno, Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs.101 The sense of language dislocation suited America well. Always looking for new religion/new language, the Americans were poised to grasp a new belief system, which, in effect, was what Deleuze and his fellow travelers represented. Their ‘new’ jargon was the new Latin Mass for the American intelligentsia. The fascination was mutual. Writing ten years later, Deleuze and Guattari asserted that such figures as Ginsberg and Henry Miller were writers: “who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier.”102 While Barney and Marcus were too young to have attended ‘Schizo Culture,’ its’ lasting impact on American discourse, and Deleuze and Guattari’s acknowledgment of that scrambling of codes and circulating of flows, further freed the constraints of modernist paradigms that previously dominated the culture. While Barney and Marcus hail from backgrounds infused with modernist discourse, is their methodology in fact contradictory? “Every great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style,” suggest Deleuze and Guattari. “In contrast to what is done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements crossing America.”103 Barney has cited such influences as Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys alongside the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Shining, such punk and metal bands as The Ramones, The Butthole Surfers, Slayer and Morbid Angel and the authors Ballard, DeLillo and Norman Mailer. Members of Slayer and Morbid Angel are in fact incorporated into the narrative of CREMASTER 2. Similarly, the hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law also appear in The Order segment of CREMASTER 3. Marcus follows a trajectory that also holds links, both stylistic and conceptual, to such immediate predecessors as Ballard and DeLillo. Marcus and Barney also owe a visual nod to filmmaker David Lynch (especially Lynch’s Blue Velvet which appeared in 1996 and Eraserhead in 1977). As Borges, writing on Kafka, noted: “Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”104 And while using coincidental dates may be dubious, one cannot help but note that it was in 1967—the year Barney

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and Marcus were born—that Lynch himself was ‘born’ as a filmmaker. That year, as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he was working at night on “a dark painting of a garden when it seemed to him that wind was rushing out of the painting and the plants were moving. ‘I’m looking at this and hearing this,’ he recalled years later, ‘and I say, ‘Oh, a moving painting.’ And that was it.’”105 Artists such as Marcus and Barney inevitably have their key precursors and influences: among others, for Barney the artwork and materiality of Joseph Beuys, and for Marcus, elements of the fictions, style and philosophy of Ballard (Nancy Spector also raises the importance of Ballard’s work for Barney106). Beuys (1921–1986) and Ballard (1930–2009) were powerfully influenced by their first-hand experiences of WWII. Ballard was interred as a youth in 1943 at the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre in Shanghai for two years (recounted, although heavily fictionalized, in his 1984 Empire of the Sun). From 1943 Beuys was deployed as rear-gunner in a Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber and on 16 March 1944, his plane was shot down on the Crimean Font. He claimed to have been rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen who wrapped him in animal fat. Marcus and Barney are of another generation, that theoretically of the ‘postmodern’ and the televisual. The term postmodern could be read as an expression of post-Cold War exhaustion. It garnered particular popularity in the 1980s in America, which was not only a period of post-Cold War paranoia, but a new source of the paranoid: the impending approach of the Millennium, promoted heavily by such Evangelical Fundamentalists as Billy Graham and via the technological, the ‘Y2 K bug.’ While the war of Beuys and Ballard was indisputably physical, the Cold War was, in many respects, a work of rabid imagination. Despite threats of the suitably abbreviated MAD—‘Mutually Assured Destruction’—few bombs were actually launched. Thus, the largely post-Cold War generation of Marcus and Barney was one of imagined Armageddon made real by the presence of rusting nuclear fallout shelter signs scattered throughout American cities and towns. Too young to be sent to Vietnam,107 theirs was a spectral, televised war, one most likely made ‘real’ via Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979) and Herr’s novel Dispatches (1977). Their sensibilities would also be shaped via the almost superstitious fascination of the impending millennial shift with the year 2000.

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The likes of Barney, Marcus and Lynch have even earlier precursors, as Erik Davis identifies via Peter Lamborn Wilson: “pre-revolutionary America was flush with wandering alchemists, neopagan backsliders, and antinomian ranters.”108 Like those ramshackle visionaries, our subjects express themselves in unruly abandon, adopting aspects of the languages of The American Religion and creating new dialects of Mormonism, Judaism and various Christian sects. Even when Barney veers into the realm of Egyptian mythology links can be easily found into The American Religion. As Katz and Popkin note, pyramidology was an inherent aspect of the British Israelite scheme at the time it was imported to the United States,109 its lasting impact witnessed to this day on the American dollar bill. The artists, writers and filmmakers discussed herein are what might be dubbed ‘experimental,’ ‘avant-garde’ or ‘alternative.’ They are far from ‘mainstream’ or Žižek’s ‘norm’ in terms of form, narrative or sensibility. In this American-centric discussion it is worth attempting a distinction between the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ (which to some extent parallels Jameson’s distinctions between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ and the arguments pursued in Ben Marcus’ infamous essay in Harper’s110 discussed in Chapter 5). Yet any such distinctions, in rigorously American style, are fraught with contradictions. Žižek phrases this as a period when Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal.111 Marcus is ‘experimental’ yet The Flame Alphabet is published by the mainstream Alfred A. Knopf. Barney is decidedly outré yet is hosted by the Guggenheim Museum, while Lynch’s virulent surrealistic extremes have still allowed him two Academy Award nominations and a firm position in the Hollywood pantheon. As Žižek points out: The very beginning of David Lynch’s The Straight Story, the words that introduce the credits, ‘Walt Disney Presents — A David Lynch Film,’ provides what is perhaps the best resume of the ethical paradox that marks the end of century: the overlapping of the transgression with the norm. Walt Disney, the brand of the conservative family values, takes under its umbrella David Lynch, the author who epitomizes transgression, bringing to the light the obscene underworld of perverted sex and violence that lurks beneath the respectable surface of our lives.112

This is like comparing Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to what lies beneath the lawn in Blue Velvet. Umberto Eco posits the notion that

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mass culture (such as Disney) is “anti-culture” and argues that “apocalypse is the preoccupation of the dissenter.”113 While Marcus and Barney may form a cortex, or perhaps fulcrum, to this discussion, certain themes and repetitions are apparent. Among these are various forms of annihilation, catastrophe, physical mutation and apocalyptic narrative. But so too is their sheer fascination with a particular type of materiality. Both make use of the visceral, in Barney’s case Vaseline stands in for Beuys’ fat as a form of ectoplasmic spermatozoa. Barney utilizes polycarbonate honeycomb, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, petroleum jelly, nylon, polyester, vinyl, carpet, chrome, prosthetic plastic, solar salt cast in epoxy resin, cloth, hair and of course flesh, his own and that of others. Marcus’ fictions utilize “listening grease,” “noise shirts,” “math guns,” “anti-comprehension pills,” “sound abatement fabrics,” “speech-enabling grease,” “knitted vegetable bones,” “thought rags,” a “throat box,” the “mouth harness,” and, of course, flesh: sex is reduced to a “parts consultation.” To a certain degree their acceptance into Hollywood, New York publishing houses and top tier galleries accords them ‘official’ placement within American culture. But clearly, they collide with the mainstream on two essential levels: adopting, but then mutating, religious languages (Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism) and maintaining a tentative grip on mainstream acceptance (Guggenheim, Knopf, Academy) while rejecting its normative practices. Their ‘otherness’ appears essentially in both textural and textual forms (Vaseline as medium, thesaurus/medical text book as literary structure). The aesthetics of those discussed herein owes a great deal to aspects of European Surrealism. But where the Europeans proclaimed that God was Dead (Nietzsche in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) in 1882, Lettrist Michel Mourre, April 9, 1950, Notre-Dame, Paris among others. For Sartre He never existed in the first place), the Americans discussed here have embraced the language and, to a degree, the aesthetics of the Old and New Testaments and The Book of Mormon, exploring the tonality of Revelations and related texts in the pre- and postmillennial period. That these artists create fictions overlays a notion that the very linguistic formation of contemporary America is itself a fiction, what Greil Marcus may term a ‘Secret History’ of America. For Jameson: “reference and reality disappear altogether, and even meaning — the signified — is problematized.” He argues that:

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We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call Postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage …114 (Italics mine)

The distinction with Jameson here is perhaps with exactly what is, and how it is, being quoted. The arguably clichéd notions of 1980s postmodernism rely upon, as Jameson says, bricolage and metabooks. These were, and, to an extent, remain the classic examples of Jameson’s description: Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger with their bricolage of advertising imagery, Kathy Acker with her joyous ransacking of Burroughs and Gibson. However, the likes of the slightly younger generation are, generally, leaning upon a far older generation: Marcus and Barney tend more toward the imagery of Moses than Marlboro. But if Barney’s work is ‘postmodern’ it breaks with one of Jameson’s key points here. There can be no doubting that Barney’s works tackle the “monumental” as both subject and object. as do the literary works of an author such as David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, which, weighing in at 1104 pages (and including 388 numbered endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own) could hardly be described as anything but. The “monumental” comes with its share of risks. At 398 minutes much of The CREMASTER Cycle becomes tedious. And Ben Marcus’ total annihilation of language as a theme is also decidedly “monumental.” To be fair to Jameson, he was writing in 1991, well before the advent of the full CREMASTER or the publication of Infinite Jest or The Flame Alphabet. Mailer’s Ancient Evenings (1983) and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) could also be described as “monumental.” But, on another level, could the seizure of archaic religious semiology, utilizing “the building blocks of older cultural and social production” such as the Torah or the Book of Mormon, be the ultimate postmodern tactic? Many elements link the key protagonists of this discussion, but the glue that binds them is the all-pervasive murmur of religious sacrament at their core, like the inescapable mechanistic rumbling of the soundtrack on Lynch’s Eraserhead. Religiosity is as common in the ‘mainstream’ output of filmmaker Steven Spielberg and author Jonathan Franzen, however their use of religious themes essentially offends no one. The works of Marcus, Barney and Lynch are at the other extreme: they divide everyone who encounters their works in one way or another. They

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essentially represent the opposite of Marx’s “opium of the people.” The radical creative breaks of the likes of Barney, Marcus, Lynch and other confrontational artists in contemporary America are at heart paradoxical, as Ballard suggests: “The United States is really a very conformist and bourgeois country, isn’t it? It’s a paradox. In fact in a real sense the US has presented the twentieth century with its greatest excitements, dreams and possibilities — but it’s done so within the format of extreme conservatism.”115 The works discussed here are drenched with death. “You don’t make literature out of warm and fuzzy feelings, they say. And they are probably right,” notes Paul Virillio. “But how far do we go in the opposite direction? SNUFF LITERATURE, in which the conformism of abjection innovates an academicism of horror, an official art of macabre entertainment?”116 Perhaps one not unlike the deadly video at the core of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or the television as orifice in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the answer to Virillio’s forceful question has surely come in the form of Barney’s River of Fundament, which fulfills all of Virillio’s requirements: death, abjection, horror and the macabre. Another reading of the ‘book’ is offered by Matthew Barney, that of the book as ‘orifice.’ Discussing the massive tome that accompanies the CREMASTER series, Barney stated: I think that the way that the book started to excite me was in the way that every spread has a gutter. It started through a line, through some of the sculptural notions of deviating from the male cleft of the body, that sort of line of the residual split between the initial cell division, and from that symmetry, asymmetry can be introduced. The book really lends itself to that, and the notion of the gatefold. In that way the book can start to really become an orifice in certain cases with the ability to cancel or close the orifice in the way that the slipcover or the band can do. It began to feel like notions of drawing and the framing of the drawing, various entrances and exits from the sculptural works. Those are devices already in place in bookmaking, but I think that they lend themselves to the interests that I have.117

Barney, positing the notion of the book as orifice, suggests a site/sight of consumption, ingestion and eventually expulsion. Potentially a feces of information, whether in propaganda, philosophy or phantasy. Orifice as cavity, hole or slit can suggest notions of insertion, insemination, propagation and inevitable withdrawal, the site for the transferal of the

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viral, the realm of transferal of macro-parasites, fungi, prions, bacteria and viroids. The mouth, for instance, is often home to Mononucleosis, the ‘kissing disease.’ But more importantly perhaps is the fact that most human orifices emit sounds. Žižek goes so far as to discuss Denis Diderot’s notion that women speak with “two voices”—one from the mouth, the other the “talking vagina.”118 There is also, of course, the vagina dentata. Once upon a time it was the voice, the mouth, which transmitted stories and, theoretically wisdom, rather than the physical contact of the book. Come Gutenberg a plague was cut loose, and it was a book that became a vessel or orifice that carried the virus. And carried it to America. But, as with any virus, it has mutated, often at the hands of its host. One can just consider the variations published as ‘The’ Bible: The King James Version (1611), The English Revised Edition (1881–1885), The American Standard Version (1901), The Revised Standard Version (1952). There is also The Message, The Wycliffe New Testament, The New Living Translation, The New Life Version, The Homan Christian Standard Bible, The Darby Translation, The Douay-Rheims 1899 American Version and others. Christianity and various (often mis-) readings of the Bible have led to a dizzying array of virulent faiths including Anglican, Catholic, Baptist, Orthodox, Lutheran, Fundamentalism, Pietism, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, to name but a few, and all with splinter groups of their own. As religious scholar Ellen M. Rosenberg has noted: The Bible fills the need: it becomes a protective test, a protean Rorschach. As the code words have become ‘Biblical inerrancy,’ the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services: the pastor announces a long passage text for his sermon, and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a Talisman.119

This notion of the Bible as talisman has a long history. One of the more unusual being the nonsensical apocalyptic science fiction film The Book of Eli (2010). A book as talisman suggests an object that is worn rather than consumed and The Bible as talisman is a common tool of the cult.

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Arguably many of the cults, sects and bizarre variations of belief systems in America have fallen prey to viral infections, or worse. Of the innumerable variations, as Bloom notes, only five have survived to become embedded articles in American culture and society: Mormonism, Christian Science, Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostalism (Bloom omits Reform Judaism). “Their strong survival, despite their startling doctrines, essentially stems from their self-concealed core of the American Religion,” Bloom notes. “Orphic, Gnostic, millenarian.”120 One could perhaps say much the same of the strange ‘doctrines’ of Lynch, Barney and Marcus among others. Žižek defines the Deleuzian Body without Organs as “the body not yet structured or determined as functional organs.”121 He then defines his own Organs without Body as the affect extracted from its “embeddedness in a body.”122 Was then Gutenberg’s invention of the bound, mass-produced book (The Bible) the Body and its words the Organs? And we must remember that it is the Organs within the Body that, via the orifice(s), invite and host the viral. We insert ourselves into the book—and then withdraw. Have we impregnated the book, or has it impregnated us? If the book (text/image) is powerful enough it has inserted alien seed into fertile mind (an idea womb). The orifice, or bodily opening, is a perpetual given taken to extremes by the act of flensing, enforcing the entire body to become an orifice. A wound, after all, is also an orifice of sorts. The flesh can then become the page in a form of brutal Eucharist. But for the purposes herein it is the mouth that is the key orifice, the site of language before the book. The Mouth Harness (Marcus), the cloth-stuffed mouth of the Apprentice (Barney), the diseased and scarred void of the mouths of Frank Booth and Bobby Peru (Lynch). The muffling, stuffing and scarring of the mouth is an attempt to disable language which is, for Žižek, a “mortifying ‘mechanism’ that colonizes the Organism.”123 The link between oral tradition and the written word: the book as mouth, the book as orifice. The artwork as mouth: points of insertion and immersion, rejection, expulsion and mutation. ‘Giving Head’ becomes ‘giving mind.’ Cunnilingus as cuneiform, ejaculation become evocation. It is with mutation that we concentrate: the abnormalities, like goiters, that result from contemporary creative evocations of (mis)readings of religious texts. The word is made flesh, but in its transmogrification, it is irretrievably deformed. The word is mad flesh, inflamed, bruised, scarred. Saint Augustine described Christ’s wound as the ‘gate

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of life’—again a form of orifice, a site of entry and exit. Like Doubting Thomas, in contemporary America we reach into the work (the orifice) of Marcus, Barney, Lynch et al. with degrees of confusion, doubt and repulsion, much like the gruesome and visceral scene depicted by Caravaggio in the Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1601–1602), Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1819–1823) and Francis Bacon’s Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). All of these images feature the mouth: the orifice or wound, with profound provocation. The depiction of gaping hole continues in contemporary cultural fabric in America via such works as those of Matthew Barney, Ben Marcus and David Lynch, which in turn attempt to fill this void. I will not go so far as to dub the likes of Barney, Marcus or Lynch as ‘religious’ artists that fall into any strict hereditary or hierarchical patterns when it comes to ‘spiritual’ expression. To an extent Greil Marcus attempted this in Lipstick Traces (1989), directly attempting to identify a lineage between the radical Anabaptist John of Leyden (aka Jan Bockelson) in the mid-1500s and the punk singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) in the 1970s with somewhat spurious results. However, there are ongoing themes throughout these cultural histories. As Katz and Popkin point out, “someone like David Koresh held beliefs that were strikingly familiar to those of Joachim of Fiore in twelfth-century Italy.”124 The influence of the American Religion is all-pervasive in one form or another, an off-shoot of Mark C. Taylor’s definition of religion as an “emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals” that combine a “schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose” alongside that ability to “disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure.”125 Žižek points to the distinctly global nature of religion today: “… the price to be paid is that religion is reduced to a secondary epiphenomenon with regard to the secular functioning of the social totality.” He suggests that in a “new global order,” religion acts either therapeutically or critically. “It either helps individuals to function better in the existing order, or it tries to assert itself as a critical agency articulating what is wrong with this order as such, a space for the voices of discontent — in this second case, religion as such tends toward assuming the role of a heresy.”126 Are Barney, Marcus, Lynch et al. representative of this new breed of heretics? Žižek describes the viral nature of the apocalyptic spirit as a “meme,” using the example of two missionaries in a stable country. One

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perpetrates the notion of simply living a happy life. The other proclaims that “The end is near — repent or you will suffer immensely.” Žižek suggests, accurately, that the second of these memes will succeed far more successfully than the first: “if you really believe that the end is near, you will exert a tremendous effort to convert as many people as possible, whereas the other belief does not require such an extreme engagement in proselytizing.”127 Žižek uses Aaron Lynch’s wonderful term, “thought contagion,”128 to articulate this process, capturing the essence of America’s ongoing love affair with apocalypticism, and Barney’s River of Fundament and Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet are nothing if not apocalyptic. They are the spawn of the maggots that feast off the rotting flesh of America’s wound, the orifice that the departure of gnosis has incurred. The Gospel of John describes Thomas’ doubting moment, his fulfilling of the void via the wound or orifice, thusly: 24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. 26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. 27 Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands: and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.129

Doubt and Belief reside side by side in contemporary America: On the one hand a deeply religious community (albeit of dramatically differing beliefs), on the other a determinately secular society which suffers from a distinctly cultural-schizophrenic divide between Church and State. These dual conditions create a psychological state of anxiety and cultural and moral/cultural schizophrenia alongside an ongoing sense of apocalypticism. In the next chapter I further explore how the lack of gnosis leads to a form of cultural-schizosis and sense of eschatological crisis—the American void filled with varying degrees of psychosis as expressed via the carnivalesque and the clown.

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Notes











1. Revelation 20:11–12, King James Bible. 2. Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era,’ Prepared for the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. Damien Broderick’s book The Spike (Tor Books, 1997) investigates technological singularity in detail. 3. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, New York, 2011), p. 337. For a concise and thorough history of the Fundamentalist evangelical movement in America see Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. 4. Richard Goswiller, Revelation (Pacific Study Series, Melbourne, 1987), p. 3. 5. Interzone is a reference to a setting in the 1959 novel Naked Lunch by William Burroughs based loosely on Tangiers suggestive of an anarchic space between authority and bacchanalia. 6. Steve Erickson, American Nomad: Pop Visions, Restless Politics and Apocalyptic Memories at the End of the Millennium (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1977), p. 6. 7. Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1883). In 1903 the poem was engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It continues: “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me …” This also invited a host of diseases with apocalyptic consequences for the indigenous peoples. 8. Mitchell Meltzer, ‘A Literature of Secular Revelations,’ in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors eds., A New Literary History of America (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2009), p. 109. 9. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (W. W. Norton, New York, 2005). 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987), p. 21. 11. Toby Lester, ‘A New Geography,’ in A New Literary History of America, p. 5. 12. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000), p. 21. 13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Routledge, Oxford, 1992) pp. 61–62. 14. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 21.

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15. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (Fourth Estate, New York, 1996), p. 3. Billy Graham, Approaching Hoofbeats (Avon, 1985). 16. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 22. 17. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique/On Democracy in America (Bantam Classics, New York, 1840), p. 57. 18. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, New York, 2007), p. 191. 19. Toby Lester, ‘A New Geography,’ A New Literary History of America, p. 2. 20. Deuteronomy 21:20, King James Bible: “And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice: he is a glutton, and a drunkard.” Gluttony is listed as 169 on the list of the 613 commandments implicit in Jewish faith— gluttony or excessive eating or drinking is prohibited. 21. Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso, New York, 1986), p. 31. 22. Jean Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal (Pluto Press, Sydney, 1990), p. 164. 23. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 31. 24. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 145. 25. Bernard-Henri Lévy. American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Random House, New York, 2006), p. 241. 26. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and The American Voice (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2006), p. 6. 27. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 389–390. “That possibility no longer exists for a nineteenth-century bourgeoisie within a life-world of factories and artificial street-lights, railroad trains and contracts, representative political institutions and telegraphs: what can stories about pastoral peoples dressed up in exotic costumes possibly mean for such modern Western men and women? A modernist hermeneutic then intervenes to save the day: the biblical narratives, including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally—that way Hollywood lies! They are to be taken figuratively or allegorically and thereby stripped of their archaic or exotic content and translated into existential or ontological experiences, whose essentially abstract language and figuration (anxiety, guilt, redemption, the ‘question of being’) can now, much like the ‘open works’ of aesthetic modernism, be offered to a differentiated public of Western city-dwellers to be recoded in terms of their own private situations”. 28. Robert Hughes. American Visions, p. 20. 29. Steve Erickson, American Nomad, p. 17. 30. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, p. 7. 31. Mathew 5:14, King James Bible. 32. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.jfklibrary.org/AssetViewer/BqXIEM9F4024ntFl7SVAjA.aspx?gclid=CLbe_LfSirgCFUFLp god2w8ATg.

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33. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, pp. 7–8. 34. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Penguin, London, 2007), pp. 156–157. 35. Elizabeth Winthrop, ‘The City Upon A Hill,’ in A New Literary History of America, p. 30. 36. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota 2012), p. 4. 37. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 1990), p. 35. 38. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 44. 39. Erik Davis, Techgnosis (Random House, New York, 1998), p. 107. 40. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 76. 41. Karen Armstrong, A History of God, From Abraham to the Present: The 4000-Year Quest for God (Mandarin, London, 1994), p. 371. 42. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Mariner Books: Reprint ed., New York, 2008), p. 31. 43. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 43. 44. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr. (Continuum, London, 2007), p. 24. 45. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, p. xix. 46. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, p. xix. 47. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 31. 48. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, 1999), p. 6. 49. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015), p. 9. 50. Harold Bloom, ‘Will This Election Be The Mormon Breakthrough?’ Opinion, The New York Times, November 31, 2011, http://www. nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-themormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=all. 51. John Gray, Black Mass, p. 150. 52. Peter Conrad, ‘Hell on Earth? Just Enjoy It…’ The Guardian, July 15, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jul/15/philosophy. politics. 53. John Gray, Black Mass, p. 47. 54. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse, p. 3. 55. Thessalonians 4:16–18, King James Bible. 56. Don DeLillo, Mao II (Viking Penguin, New York, 1991), p. 72, http://91.183.62.161:82/main/Film_DAIL_HISTORY_Download. html#. The narrative, which quotes DeLillo, is based on an imagined dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist where the writer contends that the terrorist has hijacked his role within society. Žižek wrote an

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essay on the film titled ‘A Holiday from History’, http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=75. 57. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, p. 75. 58. Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981), pp. 259–422. 59. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 214. 60. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (HarperCollins, London, 1996), p. 277. 61. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 31. 62. David Cronenberg, Consumed (2014), p. 3. 63. Greil Marcus, The Doors (Faber & Faber, London, 2011), p. 142. 64. One of the more bizarre variations of The American Religion. Blake Butler: “The Children of God movement was founded in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, by former pastor David Brandt Berg, known to his followers as Moses David, Mo, King David, Dad, and Grandpa. Essentially a communist cult founded around banding together to proselytize the word of Jesus in the streets, the group maintained an ‘old world’ idea of Christianity, which, at least in Berg’s view, centered largely around sex. By the time the organization changed its name to the Family of Love in 1978, Berg had introduced a process called ‘flirty fishing,’ which involved the women of the group recruiting new members by fucking them. The use of sex within the Family did not end at the recruiting stage. When the group changed its name again, for a second time, in 1987, to simply ‘the Family,’ numerous allegations of abduction, pedophilia, and various forms of sexual abuse were leveled at the group, which by this time had locations in countries all over the world. In 1993, more than 70 percent of the group’s 10,000 members were under the age of 18, operating under a strict and insane set of guidelines laid out by Berg and his wife, Karen Zerby, the latter of whom still heads the organization to this day, under their current moniker, the Family International.” The Bizarre and Terrifying Propaganda Art of the Children of God, Vice Magazine, August 7, 2014, http://www.vice.com/read/ the-bizarre-and-terrifying-propaganda-art-of-the-children-of-god-666. 65.  For a wonderfully scathing discussion of that creation, see Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, pp. 96–105, p. 103. 66. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes, Essays (Secker & Warburg, London, 1986), p. 90. 67. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes, p. 93. 68. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 33. 69. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things To Come, p. 163.

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70. Martin Amis, Thoroughly post-modern millennium, review of Mao II, by Don DeLillo, The Independent, September 8, 1991, p. 29. 71. H.P. Lovecraft (author), Leslie Klinger (editor), ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ in The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Liveright, 2014), p. 123. 72. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes, p. 95. 73. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press: Rev. Exp. ed., Oxford, 1970). 74. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes, pp. 97–99, p. 100. 75. Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1929), p. 89. 76. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 280. 77. Both the term, and the nature of ‘cults’ has inspired enormous debate, particularly in America. See Jamie Cresswell and Bryan Wilson, New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response (Routledge, Oxford, 1999). 78. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Henry Holt and Company, 1998), pp. 304–305. 79. Georges Bataille, Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Atlas Press, Paris, 1995), p. 40. 80. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, London, 1990), p. 59. 81. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down To Earth (Routledge, Oxford, 1994). 82. John Gray, Black Mass, p. 14. 83. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 1. Jameson continues: “Later events of this kind were then recontained by sheer mechanical technique (as with the instant playbacks of the Reagan shooting or the Challenger disaster, which, borrowed from commercial sports, expertly emptied these events of their content). Yet this inaugural event … gave what we call a Utopian glimpse into some collective communicational ‘festival’ whose ultimate logic and promise is incompatible with our mode of production. The sixties, often taken as the moment of a paradigm shift toward the linguistic and the communicational, can also be said to begin with this death, not because of its loss or the dynamics of collective grief, but because it was the occasion … for the shock of a communicational explosion, which could have no further consequences within this system but which scars the mind with the briefly glimpsed experience of radical difference, to which collective amnesia aimlessly returns in its later forgetfulness, imagining itself to be brooding over trauma where it is in fact seeking to produce a new idea of Utopia”. 84. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 607.

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85. Woody Haut, Neon Noir, Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Serpent’s Tale, London, 1999), p. 13. 86. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (Penguin Group US, 2003), p. 24. 87. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 355. 88.  Charles Taylor, ‘JFK’s Inaugural and Catch 22,’ in A New Literary History of America, p. 895. 89.  For an excellent re-telling of this rather remarkable event, see Chapter 17 of Peter Manseu’s excellent One Nation Under Gods, A New American History (Little, Brown, New York, 2015), p. 369. 90. W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Random House, New York, 1948). 91. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 543. 92. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994), p. 18. 93. Greil Marcus, The Doors, p. 95. 94. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003), p. 56. 95. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. ix. 96. Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (W. W. Norton, New York, 2000), p. 302. 97. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 19. 98. Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits) (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009), p. 53. 99. Craig McLean, ‘David Lynch: Mild at Heart,’ The Telegraph, October 23, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/8836073/DavidLynch-mild-at-heart.html. 100. David Lynch, Crazy Clown Time (Pias America, London, 2011). 101.  Deleuze and Guattari were also introduced to Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, amongst others. 102.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, Penguin Classics: 6th printing ed., London, 2009), pp. 132–133. 103. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 520. 104. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions (Washington Square Press, New York, 1966), p. 113. 105.  Ken Johnson, ‘Forever Wild at Heart: Exploring David Lynch’s Paintings and Drawings,’ The New York Times, September 18, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/arts/design/exploring-david-lynchs-paintings-and-drawings.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region®ion=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=0.

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106. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2002), p. 39. 107. The theoretical end of the Vietnam War is generally considered to coincide with the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. 108. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, p. 103. 109. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution, p. 182. 110.  Ben Marcus, ‘Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It A Correction,’ (Harper’s Magazine, October 2005). 111. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal,’ http://www.lacan.com/ripley.html. 112. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal.’ 113. Umberto Eco, Apocalypse Postponed, pp. 28–29. 114. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 96. 115. J.G. Ballard, interview with V. Vale, in Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara eds., Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967–2008 (Fourth Estate, London, 2012), p. 148. 116. Paul Virillio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (Continuum, New York, 2000), p. 56. 117.  Eizerner Vorhang, ‘Interview with Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler,’ Museum in Progress, 2000/2001, http://www.mip.at/ attachments/61. 118. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (Routledge, Oxford, 2003), p. 152. 119. Ellen M. Rosenberg, The Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1989), p. 134 quoted in Bloom, The American Religion, p. 220. 120. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 31. 121. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 26. 122. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 26. 123. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 107. 124. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution, p. xix. 125. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Religion and Postmodernism) (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009), p. 12. 126. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 3. 127. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 109. 128. Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (Basic Books, New York, 1996). 129. The Gospel of John, King James Bible (John 20:24–29).

CHAPTER 3

Dualism: An Exploration of Good and Evil via David Lynch’s Films

In order to understand the mysteries of America culture, Jean Baudrillard convincingly asserts that: “What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction.”1 One such example would be the semiology of the crucified American hero and its attendant mythos of masculinity, which continues as a Hollywood touchstone in the final scenes of such films as The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, Platoon (1986) with Willem Dafoe, Gran Torino (2008) with Clint Eastwood, alongside such performance artworks as Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed (1974). These are interpretations of, or allusions to, what Bloom describes as the “American Christ,” and, as Bloom contends, “the American Christ is more an American than he is Christ.”2 This is a similar psychic aesthetic as that explored by David Lynch. According to Wallace, Lynch is less interested in moral judgments than he is in the “psychic spaces” of evil. “He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. …” suggesting schizophrenia or psychotic depression. Wallace suggests that Lynch’s movies are “not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings.”3 The incursion of physical/mechanical/alien objects in the body is a powerful one, a kind of appendage porn—consider the birth of the alien in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) via William Hurt’s abdomen, the emergence of the baby’s head atop Henry (Jack Nance) in © The Author(s) 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6_3

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Eraserhead (1977) or the insertion of an information port via a vaginal slit in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). There is the oral insertion of the crushed automobile into Matthew Barney’s Apprentice in CREMASTER 2 (1999) and that of the prosthetic eye into an anus in River of Fundament. Similarly, the incursion of communications ports in the Wachowski’s Matrix (1999) and the more flagrantly sexualized version thereof in eXistenZ. It is likely that Cronenberg sourced his title from Existenz, the on-line academic journal covering research in philosophy and religion established in 2005 and the official journal of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America. The journal’s title, Existenz, derives from an essential feature of the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), the notion of mögliche existenz or ‘possible self-being’ for which Jaspers became famous. Jameson, discussing the insertion of imbedded jacks into the body of protagonist of Gibson’s Neuromancer, describes the process as a “quick and easy solution to the mind/body problem which has tormented philosophy for so many years,” as the hero leaves his ‘dead meat’ behind.4 One is tempted to consider the incursion of the nails in Christ’s wrists as he approaches ascendance or the incursion of Thomas’ finger in Christ’s wound in order to generate a consensual hallucination of belief. Frank Booth’s performances in Blue Velvet and Matthew Barney’s party in River of Fundament can be described in terms of the carnivalesque,5 a term coined by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of carnival in medieval culture. Bakhtin argued that folk celebrations, which allowed for rowdy humor and the parody of authority, offered the oppressed lower classes relief from the rigid feudal system and the domineering church. The late-medieval Feast of Fools was organized by young clergy, who would elect a Bishop of the Fools and adorn themselves with vestments backward, hold the missal upside down, dance and drink in the church, sing obscene songs and insult the congregation. Their ‘bishop,’ dressed in full regalia, would deliver nonsense prayers and sermons and march backward in procession. Not surprisingly such rowdy activities incurred increasing disapproval and were progressively purged from the festive calendar. The carnivalesque blatantly celebrated the grotesque elements of authority and encouraged the temporary “crossing of boundaries” where the town fool would be crowned, the higher classes were mocked, and societal differences were erased as their shared humanity—the body—became the subject of crude humor. Interestingly, the excesses

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of hippiedom in the 1960s and the firecracker-hot explosion of punk rock in the 1970s—cultural outcomes that occurred under essentially oppressive political regimes—could well be seen as part of this tradition. Jameson notes that: “The moment of the carnival itself — revolution, very much including cultural revolution — constitutes a break between a traditional oppressive social system — Roman Catholicism, standing for the Czarist ancient regime — and its more modern replacement in Baroque state power.”6 Even the front man for The Doors, Jim Morrison, called for a “week of national hilarity … a cessation of all work, all business, all discrimination, all authority.”7 For Frank Booth it is simply the power of boredom, of suburbia and ‘normality’ (represented by the white picket fence of Blue Velvet) that represent Oppression and the Oedipal. Bakhtin suggested that the carnivalesque represented a separate reality, independent of the ordinary hierarchical world, offering alternatives to it and bringing change, a process of liberation, destruction and renewal. Bakhtin also drew attention to its “grotesque realism” and association with the unruly ‘lower body,’ the ‘underworld,’ the site of dualistic orifices. Indeed, Bakhtin’s description could be applied to America as a whole—but while the Carnivalesque was a momentary celebration, the condition in millennial America has taken on permanent residence. As Ballard has it: “The United States has based itself on the proposition that everyone should be able to live out his furthest fantasies, wherever they may lead: explore every opportunity, however bizarre.”8 The asylum is the realm where the void between the secular and religious belief become absolute. Mention should also be made of Ken Kesey’s unsettling depiction of the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and the 1975 film adaption directed by Miloš Forman featuring Jack Nicholson in one of the strongest performances of his career. Indeed, the asylum/hospital is America itself. Greil Marcus, discussing Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) states this explicitly: “America is a field not for self-invention but for displacement, and the individual is not someone who can grow up to be president but merely a host for infectious disease.”9 A not dissimilar conclusion was enunciated by Manuel Dries who saw Lost Highway as a “cinematic critique of a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Western capitalist countries: on the one hand, the immaculate realm full of possibilities and, on the other hand, the ground for distorted existential nightmare and profound anxieties.”10

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For Lynch himself, the film had more to do with the realm of the psychogenic fugue, a state of mind related to unconsciously avoiding anxiety. Lynch states that while writing the script he was immersed in the drama of the O.J. Simpson trial: “What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. … I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term — ‘psychogenic fugue’ — describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, Lost Highway is about that. And also the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.”11 Writing for the British Film Institute, B. Kite brings Lynch firmly back to Bloom’s trajectory as a religious or spiritual artist in the same “loosely categoric” context as the artist William Blake (1757–1827) or filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986). The fact that this is rarely acknowledged by critics comes down to the fact that “the religion in question isn’t Christianity. It’s basically the Indian Vedanta, with an admixture of the somewhat cartooned Gnosticism that Harold Bloom once hypothesized underlay every example of ‘the American religion.’” The vision is essentially monist, but representations of superficial dualism — and of the corrupt gnostic demiurge — recur in a number of films. Fire is his sign and insects are his agents: in Eraserhead (1976) ‘Man in the Planet’ — the guy who yanks the gears that set the whole clanking machinery of creation in motion — sits by a window, brooding and badly burned. In Mulholland Dr. (2001) the clacking of mandibles grows louder as the camera approaches ‘the one who’s behind all this’ — the charbroiled hobo behind the dumpster. The opening of Lynch’s films are often encapsulated creation myths: Blue Velvet offers a geologic cross-section of this dualist tendency — here, the lawn and there, the bugs.

It is also worth noting that Jeffrey first enters the apartment presenting himself as a bug exterminator, thus theoretically exterminating, but failing to expunge the insect/evil corruption. This is also most likely a reference to William S. Burroughs’ central character in Naked Lunch (1959), also an exterminator. Barney’s River of Fundament is also riddled the larvae and pupae of insects. I disagree, however, when Kite refutes Christianity entirely. I believe Lynch mixes and matches religiosity according to his own creative whims in much the same way as Barney and, in the process, creates new mutated forms.

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Žižek notes the ‘shock’ encountered by David Lynch’s films: “… it occurs when we enter the ‘black hole,’ the crack in the texture of reality. What we encounter in this ‘black hole’ is simply the body stripped of its skin.”12 This renders the entire body to the status of orifice, a language of living meat. Like Lynch’s films, Charles Burns succeeds in illustrating, to quote Wallace, “the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown USA.”13 In Blue Velvet it is Frank rather than Jeffrey Beaumont who is the forceful presence. “One reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.”14 Wallace argues that: “… it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata,” it is far more that he has consciously transgressed “the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.”15 For Ballard there is an unnerving rationale to this: “The psychopath may not be well adjusted to a society such as existed, say, 30 or 40 years ago, but there are periods of history … where the psychopath is highly adjusted to whatever is going on around him.” Citing the Second World War and the former Yugoslavia, Ballard notes that: “Psychopaths roved both these sort of nightmare terrains and were probably the best adapted of all. … The sane and cautious and ‘well-adjusted’ were the people who sadly were unable to cope.”16 Or, as Norman O. Brown, author of Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, puts it: “Resisting madness can be the maddest way of being mad.”17

Connective Tissues in Blue Velvet Cultural schizophrenia as a psychological state is all too readily balanced by its bodily equivalent. Matthew Barney makes the distinction accordingly: “I’m less interested in skin than in fascia — connective tissue.”18 David Cronenberg notes that: “We’ve not devised an aesthetic for the inside of the body any more than we have developed an aesthetic of disease. Most people are disgusted … but if you develop an aesthetic for it, it ceases to be ugly. I’m trying to force the audience to change its aesthetic sense.”19 David Lynch is inclined to agree: “I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? … You get in close and the textures are wonderful.”20

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And in a comment that could apply to all of Lynch’s work, Deleuze and Guattrari: “Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.”21 Slavoj Žižek suggests we: recall the uncanniness, and even disgust, we experience when we endeavor to imagine what goes on just under the surface of a beautiful naked body — muscles, glands, veins, etc. In short, our relating to the body implies the suspension of what lies beneath the surface, and this suspension is an effect of the symbolic order — it can occur only insofar as bodily reality is structured by language.22

Žižek’s comment clearly recalls the notion of Puritan repression of the bodily, but also the theoretical repression of religion under a secular cloak. For Baudrillard the stability of American power is due to the “disappearance of resistances and antibodies. … This is the real crisis of American power, that of a potential stabilization by inertia … In many respects it resembles the loss of immune deficiencies in an overprotected organism.”23 From the earliest settling of the Puritans, America has always had its share of charismatic obsessives. This intensity is indeed reflected in the extreme performances by Hopper in Blue Velvet and, less manic, but still intense Matthew Barney’s Gary Gilmore in CREMASTER 2. As Foucault posits it: “Here is madness elevated to spectacle above the silence of the asylum, and becoming a public scandal for the general delight.”24 Ballard suggests that we will: “see people resorting to the extreme measure and the extreme metaphor much more quickly than they ever did in the past.” He goes on to argue that: Blue Velvet offers a much more accurate vision of the future than Blade Runner: You have this ordinary American suburb which is populated by people like the Dennis Hopper character, Frank, with motives of the most unpredictable and extreme kind shafting through people’s lives.25

A key point here is that the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner has a clear-cut and logical motivation for his activities, no matter how heinous: his own and his companions very survival,

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while Frank Booth employs psychotic mayhem for no discernible reason. It could also be claimed that Lynch’s Eraserhead is more alien than Scott’s Alien. The word ‘alien,’ now inextricably linked to science fiction, has a number of meanings, but essentially means ‘strange,’ ‘foreign’ or ‘odd.’ Amidst the various versions of Biblical texts, the term ‘alien’ appears in Acts 7:6 wherein God informs Moses that he and his people would be alien in the land of Midian. (New Revised Standard, Acts 7:6: “And God spoke in these terms, that his descendants would be resident aliens in a country belonging to others, who would enslave them and mistreat them during four hundred years.”) The French applied the term ‘Alienist,’ circa 1864, to psychiatrists or psychologists who specialized in estrangement and alienation.26 The term is used extensively in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) to describe the doctors who examine his protagonist. The out-of-use term regained life upon the publication of The Alienist by Caleb Carr (1994). For Baudrillard the “resort-style civilization” of American suburbia illustrated in Blue Velvet “evokes the end of the world.” The joggers in the streets “sleepwalking in the mist like shadows that have escaped from Plato’s cave, the very real mental defectives or mongols let out of the psychiatric hospitals (this letting loose of the mad into the city seems a sure sign of the end of the world, the loosing of the seals of the Apocalypse).”27 This is a world of the zombie, the golem and the clown. Indeed, Lynch seems fixated by the ‘clown’ and the carnivalesque.28 His 2011 debut audio recording was titled Crazy Clown Time and Roy Orbison’s 1987 song ‘In Dreams’ is featured heavily and poignantly in Blue Velvet as a prelude to acts of violence by Frank Booth. Its lyrics, at one point memorably mimed by a flamboyantly effeminate Dean Stockwell—“The Candy Colored Clown they call The Sandman” becomes a surreal mantra for murderous rage. Lynch is a master of the ‘clown-like’ visage painted onto the face of the psychopath. Stockwell, despite, or perhaps because of his heightened femininity, is a homophobe’s worst nightmare (yet bizarrely, or perhaps tellingly, given his macho posturing, adored by Frank). Similarly unnerving is Robert Blake as the ‘mystery man’ in 1997’s Lost Highway, whose bulging eyes and misapplied makeup, again hinting at the strangely ‘feminine’ and clown-like, is a nightmarish apparition. For Marina Warner: “He has a satyr’s pointed ears and eyebrows, and in whiteface and

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crimson lipstick looks Mephistophelean: he’s a trickster figure, gifted with divine ubiquity and omniscience …”29 Lost Highway also hosts the malevolent cowboy dwarf, a denizen of the circus run amok, a diminutive counterpoint, surely, to Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985). Coming close to Hopper’s Frank is Willem Dafoe— something of a master of the malevolent character to begin with—as Bobby Peru in Wild At Heart (1990). The penultimate scene in that film is a tightly cropped close-up of a snarling Bobby Peru threatening Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern). The camera zooms down into Peru’s rotting, blackened teeth, his angular face twisted into a saturnine grimace of rage tinged with sickening humor, Lula buckling to get away from the suggested sulfuric halitosis from hell. For Creed the mouth becomes vaginal, a vagina dentata. Discussing a range of horror films, she notes that: “What is common to all of these images of horror is the voracious maw. The mysterious black hole which signifies female genitalia as a monstrous sign which threatens to give birth to equally horrific offspring as well as threatening to incorporate everything in its path.”30 Indeed, with his garish makeup there is something grotesquely feminine about Bobby Peru, as there is with Frank Booth and his lipstick—they are what Creed may describe as the seriously Monstrous Feminine. Lynch’s, and Barney’s Apprentice in CREMASTER 2, focusing in on the mouth has the effect of disembodying the organ. The character becomes the mouth and the mouth becomes the character. It becomes, to use Žižek’s phrase, an “organ without body,” a “pathological distortion of a mouth to the mouth leaving the body and floating around as a spectral partial object.”31 The organ is the word of God, the body is the empty vessel of the Preacher. In the works of Lynch, Marcus and Barney there are attempts to ‘capture’ or ‘control’ this autonomous entity, this rogue orifice: Marcus’ Mouth Harness, the Apprentice’s bloodied rag, Frank Booth’s scrap of velvet, but to little or no avail. Žižek makes use of the autonomous smile of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat to make a similar point,32 like a Barthesian punctum, the mouth lives on in the minds’ eye. For Ben Marcus it is Dr. Seuss rather than Lewis Carroll who encapsulates this concept: “I don’t regard the eye as the ‘center of the storm,’ but rather the mouth, or the word hole, that carves language out of the wind. The eyes cheat and hide … The only thing eyes are good for is to look at the mouth,” claims Marcus. “Dr. Seuss is an artist of the mouth because a recitation of his work requires a first gymnastic of

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the face, a series of basic face codes … ”33 Greil Marcus, describing a scene in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) has Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) recognizing, as he stares at the audience that they are “simply mouths, a maw without a brain, it wants to eat, it doesn’t care what.”34 They are America’s all-consuming organ/orifice screaming for a nonexistent Eucharist, hungry for a gnosis that never comes. Through FreudianLacanian terminology, Žižek takes this autonomous divide even further in The Monstrosity of Christ noting that Christ is in fact a “partial object” of God: “an autotomized organ without a body, as if God picked his eye out of his head and turned it on himself from the outside. We can guess, now, why Hegel insisted on the monstrosity of Christ.”35 Žižek notes that in the tactic of utilizing the extreme close-up common to pornographic films, there is a similarity to the circus clown, in which “the clown perceives himself as a composite of partial organs that he fails to coordinate completely, so that some parts of his body seem to lead their own particular lives.”36

Clown Torture The concept of the evil clown stems from the irrational fear of clowns, known as Coulrophobia, that Mark Dery has theorized in ‘Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns.’ Tracking the image of the demented or deviant clown across the American cultural landscape, Dery analyzes the Pogo the Clown persona of serial killer John Wayne Gacy: the obscene clowns of the Cacophony Society, the Jack Nicholson Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Stephen King’s It (1986). “Clown repulsion is a manifestation of the creeping suspicion that the clown’s happy face is Jekyll to a darker Hyde…” writes Dery: “an embittered alcoholic with one foot in the grave, perhaps, or a sadistic sexual predator and remorseless killer.”37 Jason Horsley notes that: “It’s significant that the Joker is a clown-like figure, because the specter that haunts the Psychopath is the Clown.” Horsley takes this further by suggesting that: “While the Clown may know he is a psycho, however, the Psychopath does not realize he is a clown.”38 Deleuze and Guattari go a step further by juxtaposing the visage of the Clown with that of the Shroud of Turin, imparting the Clown with a demonic equivalence to Christ, but one without language: “A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole.”

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Cloud head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices. 39

Lynch’s Frank and Bobby Peru sit alongside Bruce Nauman’s 1987 Clown Torture, John Wayne Gacy’s paintings or the terrifying visage of Twisty the Clown in the television series American Horror Story: Freak Show.40 For Dery the clown is a perfect symbol for shambolic times: “In millennial culture, The Joker’s wild.” Increasingly, Dery suggests, the psycho clown is positioned “not as the object of our fear and loathing but as the crazy-funny mascot of our chaos culture, with its random acts of senseless violence, its tabloid feeding frenzies, its mad bombers and millenarian cults.”41 (Dery published this comment in 1999—nine years before the release of The Dark Knight in 2008—and was referring to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman featuring Jack Nicholson as The Joker.) As Lon Chaney suggested, there’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight,—“A clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?”42 Even Bart Simpson experiences a bout of clownphobia/Coulrophobia: “can’t sleep, clown will eat me.”43 Lynch himself defines “depression and anger” as “the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity.”44 David Lynch recounts the somewhat chilling story of casting Hopper as Frank. Warned that Hopper was drug-addled and unreliable, he recalled that: “Dennis called and said, ‘I have to play Frank, because I am Frank.’ That thrilled me and scared me.”45 Hopper blurred fiction and reality: they were one and the same. One must consider that alongside such real-life figures as Charles Manson and Gary Gilmore and the fictional characters such as Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980), Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) and Hopper’s Frank are among the most common American t-shirt embellishments one will see traversing the streets of New York’s Chinatown. Such faces, with their leering, murderous intensity, are the visage of an unsettling moment in history, a possible reenactment of prior times: “The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism,” writes Foucault. “As if that world, whose network of

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spiritual meanings was so close knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness.”46 There are a number of shared pathologies that indicate this American religious cultural schizophrenia. Among other unnerving attributes many of these characters have damaged mouths—the source of spoken language, what author Jack O’Connell dubs: “the repository of voice, the church of oral language,”47 or with Ben Marcus a “language cave.”48 In contrast, traditionally the circus clown is mute. Barney’s Apprentice has his teeth smashed in CREMASTER 3 and spends the rest of the performance gagged with a bloodied rag and is dressed, in The Order segment, in garb akin to that of an unruly clown, Frank Booth spends his most chilling moments with his mouth covered by a ventilator inhaling amyl nitrate49 or, alternatively, with his mouth stuffed with a corner of Dorothy’s blue dress or, again, smeared grotesquely with Dorothy’s red lipstick as he sadistically mauls Jeffrey. In the 1985 documentary about Blue Velvet Hopper describes his ‘use’ of amyl nitrate “as a sense memory.” That scene follows the chilling, albeit brief, interrogation of Jeffrey—FRANK: “Who’s this fuck?” DOROTHY: “He’s a friend… from the neighborhood… we were just talking.” FRANK: (to Jeffrey) “From the neighborhood?” One can only recall Žižek’s extrapolation of Kierkegaard’s argument, that “the only good neighbour is a dead neighbour.”50 This line was also co-opted and suitably mutated in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes in which the ape General Ursus states: “The only good human… is a dead human!” In The Age of Wire and String, Marcus describes the era his book is set within as having been developed during a period in which science had “devised a parlance system based on the flutter pattern of string and wire structures placed over the mouth during speech.”51 In Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh (1999) his protagonist, Gilrein has his lips sewn shut: Kroger steps forward, runs a thumb over Gilrein’s lips and then his eyelids, saying, “As you see nothing, it appears you have no use for the eyes. And as you have nothing to tell me, it seems to me, you have no use for the mouth.” Gilrein tries to scream but it’s as if his head is frozen in a block of ice. With one hand Kroger grabs the front of Gilrein’s face between the expanse of his thumb and forefinger, then, with his other hand, he takes the sewing needle and punctures the bottom lip at the right-hand corner and as blood

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begins to flow down the chin, the needle and its attendant thread are forced through the upper lip, which likewise begins to bleed. “The eyes will be much worse,” Kroger says, calmly. “There’s no comparison. The lips are supple, plenty of give. But the eyelid, acht, you need to be extremely careful.”52

Such images are the antithesis of the perfect teeth of the Fundamentalist Televangelists who, despite their meticulous dental work all too often preach sermons of rot, decay and devastation. Superheroes aside, the metal-masked mouth, perhaps in refutation of receipt of the Eucharist, is strangely plentiful in millennial culture, from Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs (1991), to Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Max in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) (both played by Tom Hardy).

Asylums and Amputations In Word Made Flesh Gilrein escapes and finds refuge and treatment in a largely abandoned and rat-infested hospital. In Civilization and Madness Foucault points to the evolution of the contemporary hospital is inextricably linked to that of the asylum and a general fear of incarceration. In 2012 the Frieze New York art fair commissioned Ben Marcus to author a text for the 2013 event at Randall’s Island Park, overlooking the East River, which in 1866 became home to what was then termed an ‘idiot asylum,’ as well as a rest home for Civil War Veterans, an unsettling mix indeed and where Christian religious studies were a requirement for the inmates. Marcus responded with a chilling and moving piece, treating a fictional hospital as an art installation, which becomes a kind of Ballardian atrocity exhibition, titled Notes From The Hospital.53 In the year of I Can’t Breathe, a hospital occurred on Randall’s Island. The building was fashioned, rather quaintly, of matter. Bricks, windows, smoke. The occasional human being stained the site, summoned from the holding pen. The hospital used flesh traditionally — draped over the anguished little need machines we call people. Space was pushed through rooms, to keep them from collapsing, or so it seemed. In truth, no one understood how such a spectacle could remain stable.54

Time is destabilized here—it is the year of “I Can’t Breathe”—a not uncommon response to visiting a hospital in any circumstances, whether

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as patient or visitor, difficult breathing can be the first symptom of a problematic response. The year of “I Can’t Breathe” recalls Marcus’ own referencing of a time-based scenario, the Age of Wire and String, alongside David Ohle’s The Age of Sinatra (2004), Wallace’s ‘Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ in Infinite Jest, Ryan Boudinot’s ‘Age of Fucked Up Shit’ in Blueprints of the Afterlife (2012) and others. In Marcus’ story humans “stain” the site like burnt shadows from Hiroshima or prisoner’s marring Goebbels’ ideal of the ovens. They are “summoned from the holding pen” but they are also, in theory, the ‘viewers’ of the ‘exhibit’—the “need machines” that require unthinking entertainment, for example the unthinking viewers of pretentious art. The hospital has not been ‘sculpted,’ ‘designed’ or ‘built.’ It has ‘occurred.’ One commends the level of detail in this realistic hospital. Even the most advanced scrutiny did not reveal rigging. Blood tended to be housed inside puppets, who, in a surprising touch, were represented by actual people, pulled into the space and dosed with purpose. Traces of bone were found in the air, a dust misting over the island. The use of bone in such a way felt far too obvious, almost embarrassing.55

Marcus’ level of detail here is another trait he shares with Barney, whose work he is well aware of.56 Sometimes when I work I’m incapable of using the stock footage or the basic materials that would let me get on with my story. The story ends up being the remaking of this basic stuff. In one of Matthew Barney’s films, the one about Gary Gilmore, there’s that scene at the gas station where he even rebuilt all of the pumps … everyone else would just pull into a gas station but he thought: someone made these once and now they’re iconic objects in our lives — why don’t I make my own? And I think that’s more fascinating to me than using all of the accepted objects in order to get somewhere better with a narrative.

Marcus’ “puppets” recall the more macabre moments of not just Hans Bellmer, Joel-Peter Witkin and Gunther Von Hagens, (who concocted the ongoing “Body Worlds” exhibitions of plasticized human corpses which premiered in Japan in 1995), but of writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), in which the actor Malkovich becomes a vessel for the machinations of puppeteer Craig

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Schwartz (John Cusack) after being invaded via a peculiar portal or orifice. Malkovich becomes a secular void to be fulfilled by the belief of his acolytes, a body without organs. In further descriptive mode, Marcus’ text recalls the world of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum or the works of Witkin: “Moving inside, the hospital featured people bent over each other in postures of carnage.”57 There is a sense of frozen agony, suffering as static art. Marcus’ fictional exhibition takes on the status of cult-like worship, suggestive of born-again ritual or apostasy in the discovery of new, mutated belief: “To join the exhibit was to recuse yourself from a rational state. This would explain the long lines, the carefully-constructed illness narratives, the displays of frailty.”58 His viewers, like those of Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (1969), are enveloped in a cult of illness and self-destruction. Subtitled ‘Apocalypse,’ Ballard’s vision is that of a painting exhibition by the inmates of a psychiatric hospital. Ballard imagines the results of art-as-therapy as a celebration of the End of Days: A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enameled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin … What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’59

Don DeLillo’s ‘hospital’ in his 2016 novel Zero K sits alongside Marcus’ and Ballard’s as a site of depraved art installation. Run by the cryogenics-obsessed followers of the ‘Convergence,’ DeLillo’s remote institution is a place to attend to die, even if physically hail. It is also predominantly and grotesquely a massive art gallery where haunting mannequin-like human forms are encountered at random in the sprawling hallways. During one such encounter with an accompanying guide, the protagonist is informed that: “This is not a silicone-and-fiberglass replica. Real flesh, human tissue, human being. Body preserved for a limited time by cryoprotectants applied to the skin.” The protagonist simply responds

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that: “He has no head.”60 One can only assume that DeLillo, who regularly refers to art exhibitions he has seen in his fiction, has attended Gunther Von Hagens’ ongoing “Body Worlds” exhibitions of plasticized human corpses, which have shown in New York City where DeLillo resides. In language that recalls Ben Marcus, American anthropologist Horace Miner (1912–1993) also features the hospital or, as he spells it latipso, as religious temple in his 1956 satirical essay ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema.’61 The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.

Despite the satirical content of the essay, the term Nacirema, (American spelt backward), was adopted by sociologists and anthropologists as a phrase that allowed them to consider American culture with a degree of objectivity. Miner continues: The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because ‘that is where you go to die.’ Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.

One may also recall the chilling installation State Hospital (1966) by Los Angeles artist Ed Keinholz (1927–1994) in which an emaciated patient dreams that he is an emaciated patient. Kienholz’s patient(s) appear exsanguinated, emaciated husks trapped in a hideous purgatory. Robert Hughes notes that Keinholz had worked in a “Californian madhouse” which he describes as “a charnel house of the soul.”62

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Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was another writer obsessed with themes interrogating sanity and religiosity. In Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) a mental hospital in a remote solar system has been abandoned by the authorities and the inmates create their own governance. “A clan of paranoids supplies the statesmen,” writes critic Adam Gopnik, “the Skitzes live in poverty but have wild poetic visions, the Deps provide a depressed realistic appraisal of the future, and the manics are the warriors.” In its own way it works and “in some ways resembles… the Johnson-Nixon years.”63 A period of paranoia fueled by evangelical proclamations of impending Armageddon.

Martyred Bodies And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.—Matthew 5:29–30

It is not just notions of sanity that pervade the fictions discussed here. Delusion, cultural schizophrenia and phantasy are met with bizarre correlations in the physical. The obsession with ‘celebratory skin’ so prevalent in American culture is turned upside down in such films such as Barney’s CREMASTER 2 (Aimee Mullins is a double amputee), Jennifer Lynch’s Boxing Helena (1993) (Sherilyn Fenn retains her sexuality after the amputations of both legs and arms) and David Lynch’s short 1973 film The Amputee in which a double amputee (played by Catherine Coulson), sits in a chair writing a letter about failed relationships (of herself and others), seemingly unaware of the male doctor (Lynch) who desperately tries to stop the flow of blood. There is the character Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange) in American Horror Story: Freak Show in which it is revealed that she is a double amputee at the end of the first episode of that series. Lange plays the role of Elsa Mars, the owner of Fräulein Elsa’s Cabinet of Curiosities, one of the last remaining freak shows in the United States. “In CREMASTER Mullins is ambiguously beautiful, but fragile: and like Gabrielle [Rosanna Arquette] in the film, Crash (Cronenberg), who must wear calipers on her damaged legs, she is a dangerous cyborg, both sexual and vulnerable,”64 notes Julie Joy Clarke. Gabrielle’s calipers represent what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods (2004), describes as “the double logic of the prosthesis”65: they represent both a loss and a ‘sexy’ addition—she wears them like stiletto shoes.

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Mullins also undertakes a self-amputation of her legs in the opening sequence of River of Fundament, cutting into her extremely realistic and bloodied thighs until her legs are totally removed. From the River of Fundament script: The NOVICE looks toward to the door, at the light leaking onto the hardwood floor, and sees a rivulet of mercury crossing the threshold into the bedroom. She reaches for the festooned bullfighter’s sword, and with a slow, graceful gesture, she makes a horizontal incision across each of her thighs. As bloods pours down from the two wounds, the NOVICE reaches down and removes her two lower leg prosthetics and holds up her legs toward the door in a devotional gesture. The prosthetic legs are made of silicone rubber, and have a remarkable realness. Wider views show that the NOVICE’s lower legs are now articulated with long, curved bullfighting swords. In close up view, blood drips down the length of the curved blades and pools on the hardwood floor beneath the bed.66

One is, perhaps reminded of the grotesqueries of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) and their religiously inspired hells. The polymorphous perversity at play here is taken to extremes in such films as Blue Velvet and Alien Resurrection (directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and written by Joss Whedon, 1997). In a ‘normal’ voyeuristic world seeing either Isabella Rosselini or Sigourney Weaver naked should, in theory, be an aesthetic pleasure. But when Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini) appears naked on Jeffrey Beaumont’s (MacLachlan) suburban front lawn, her body bruised and her poise one of extreme trauma, it is the antithesis of erotica. In Alien Resurrection Ellen Ripley (Weaver) discovers the blundered attempts of the cloning procedures ‘she’ has suffered.67 The only parts of the single surviving clone that are unscathed are her breasts, which the camera seems to linger upon perversely. According to Žižek, “Lynch perturbs our most elementary phenomenological relationship to the living body, which is based on the radical line of separation between the surface of the skin and what is beneath it.” The exception is provided here by the naked body of Isabella Rossellini towards the end of Blue Velvet when she leaves the house and approaches Jeffrey, it is as if a body belonging to another, dark, nightly, infernal realm all of a sudden found itself in our ‘normal’ daily universe, out of its own element, like a stranded octopus or some other creature from the deep sea — a wounded, exposed body whose material presence exerts an almost unbearable pressure on us.68

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Rossellini herself describes the scene as portraying an image of meat in the window of a butcher’s shop: “human meat,” she says in a 1985 interview accompanying the DVD release. “It was more a Francis Bacon painting I was trying to portray.”69 She goes on to make a further equivalence to the famous 1972 photograph by Associated Press’ Nick Ut’s photograph of the napalm-assailed young girl outside of Trang Bang village in South Vietnam. The human body as the embodiment of trauma. Ballard takes on this construct of the celebrity body as traumatized fiction and fantasy even further: Jayne Mansfield: the death of the erotic junction, the polite section of the lower mammary curvature by the glass guillotine of the windshield assembly: Marilyn Monroe: the death of her moist loins: the falling temperature of her rectum described by the first marriage of the cold perineum and the white rectilinear walls of the twentieth-century apartment: Jacqueline Kennedy: the notional death, defined by the exquisite eroticism of her mouth and the insane logic of her leg-stance …70

The remnants of Ripley’s other clones in Alien Resurrection are displayed in glass vitrines like one might expect in a freak show of old. The Ripley clones are displayed as ‘Pickled punks’—the arcane carny term for human fetuses preserved in jars of formaldehyde and used as sideshow attractions. Such ‘punks’ display a cornucopia of anatomical abnormalities: polycephaly, exposed brain tissue, missing limbs or conjoined twins. In his essay ‘Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque,’ Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as Closer (1994) and, most notably, the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mütter Museum. “If the Enlightenment ushered in the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder — and terror,” writes Dery. “Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there’s a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curios from the cabinet of wonder.”71 And there can be little doubt that Lynch’s is indeed a world of gods and monsters.

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Ruin Porn and Armageddon Which leads us back to Lynch. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Mütter Museum is based in Philadelphia and also the ‘home’ of Eraserhead. Lynch has waxed lyrical about the grittiness of the city: “Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me,” he says. “It’s the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time.” It all started for me in Philadelphia because it’s old enough, and it’s got enough things in the air to really work on itself. It’s decaying but it’s fantastically beautiful, filled with violence, hate and filth. The house I moved into was across the street from the morgue, next door to Pop’s Diner. The area had a great mood — factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters, the darkest nights. The people had stories etched in their faces, and I saw vivid images — plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows, walking through the morgue en-route to a hamburger joint.72

Arguably, alongside Henry and the ‘baby,’ it is Philadelphia that is the other great ‘character’ in the film, not unlike Barney’s Detroit in River of Fundament, Scott’s Los Angeles in Blade Runner, Jack O’Connell’s semi-fictional Quinsigamond in Word Made Flesh, Samuel R. Delaney’s Bellona in Dhalgren (1975) or Christopher Nolan’s Gotham. Jonathan Weidenbaum stringently refutes the oft made claims that Lynch’s city is ‘post-apocalyptic,’ going so far as to claim that the setting is “not really a world at all in this sense of ‘world,’ as some kind of place or era removed from our own. … It would perhaps be the most accurate to say that Eraserhead is simply a texture and nothing else.”73 These city locales also constitute what may be termed a Valentinian kenoma: a citified void. A concept explored by mid-second-century Gnostic Valentinius, a Christian philosopher who set out to align Christianity with Platonism. Valentinius combined concepts from Plato’s world of ideal forms, or fullness—pleroma—with the notion of emptiness: kenoma. But one must define ‘apocalyptic’ here. Lynch and Barney have had no need to ‘reinvent’ their cities for some form of futuristic or science fictional scenario: The Apocalypse is now.

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These cities, Detroit, Philadelphia, Gotham and Jack O’Connell’s Quinsigamond and Samuel R. Delaney’s Bellona in Dhalgren, fictional or not, are all symptomatic of an increasingly prevalent aesthetic dubbed Ruin Porn.74 This is the borderline ‘eroticisation’ of the contemporary derelict favored by Lynch in both Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and in his book The Factory Photographs (Prestel 2014) and throughout Jack O’Connell’s Quinsigamond books. Architectural ruination has been a common theme in art for centuries75 and was updated in such post-Cold War films as The Omega Man (1971) and Blade Runner, the causes of calamitous disarray due to age, fire and nuclear fallout. Contemporary Ruin Porn, the eviscerated city as a site of gaping holes, differs in its voyeuristic fascination with decay in millennial America due almost purely from neglect, suggestive of both economic and spiritual indifference to the lower strata of society. Like Snuff Porn, its subjects are terminal. Lynch’s ‘Philadelphia’ in Eraserhead or Barney’s Detroit in River of Fundament are hardly Winthrop’s idealized City on a Hill. Lynch could well have been describing Barney’s Detroit when he describes his Philadelphia: “when I was there it was a very sick, twisted, violent, fear-ridden, decadent, decaying place.”76 It was Augustine who introduced into Christianity “a categorical distinction between the City of Man and the City of God,” writes John Gray. “Because human life is marked by original sin, the two cities can never be one.”77 Philadelphia and Detroit here are very much Cities of Man. But it is not just the city, or the environ, that is the key source of threat. “Eraserhead, is essentially a disturbing visual orchestration of the fear of the chthonian, the enigma woman, the sexual other, and of course of fatherhood, the ultimate and, for the protagonist, deeply unsettling consequence of sexual activity,” writes Anna Katharina Schaffner. Schaffner continues: He is the helpless plaything of female agents (his wife, her mother and the woman across the hall). The only time he actively takes the initiative is when, driven by curiosity and the desire to know what lies beneath the surface, he kills his own prematurely born child by removing the bandages from its torso and sticking scissors into its pulsating and splurging organs. Not only does he kill his child, he also chooses the fantasy woman, the Lady in the Radiator, over the real woman who lives across the hall: privileging fantasy over the real, he abandons all hope of reconciliation in the actual world. Eraserhead is a cinematic exploration of the fear of castration,

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teeming with genital and womb symbolism, twitching and bleeding chickens, abject sperm-like liquids, unidentifiable organic matter, and mushrooming bodily organs. Ultimately Eraserhead amounts to neither a criticism nor a celebration of that fear but is simply a statement of it.78

When Ballard claims, as noted earlier, that Blue Velvet portrays the future more successfully than Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,79 it could, as mentioned, also be claimed that Eraserhead is more alien than Scott’s Alien. Visually, it would be difficult to dispute the similarities between the visage of Lynch’s creature and the newborn alien in Scott’s film, and Henry’s dream in which he is beheaded in a violent eruption to free the ‘child,’ a scene that goes beyond William Hurt’s ‘birthing’ in Alien. Both films are riddled with fears of reproduction and parenthood. Both are set in highly claustrophobic environs, suggestive of the fear of parental commitment. Both are resplendent with piping, suggesting the transferal of fluids and gases, the role of at least four of the human orifices. There are also strong hints of Eraserhead in Matthew Barney’s work, such as facial prosthetics and the use of the burlesque (especially The Order segment of CREMASTER 3) and, when Henry stabs the ‘child,’ it exudes a viscous ectoplasm that is aesthetically close to Barney’s use of Vaseline. Both Lynch and Barney (and the writers Marcus, O’Connell and others mentioned herein) are obsessed with texture. Lynch, somewhat famously, in researching the internal organs for Henry’s filicide, secured a dead cat from a vet and dissected it: “there are so many textures which may be pretty gross on one side, but when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they are totally beautiful. …” he says. “One time I used some hair remover to remove all fur from a mouse to see what it looked like — and it looked beautiful.”80 Beauty and transgressive deformity are close bedfellows in Lynch’s world, as seen in the visage of The Lady in The Radiator with her carcinomatous prosthetics. “From the unnerving sight of her swollen face to the cumbersome, even zombie-like nature of her movements, she is, like Henry, sculpted out of the same material as the rest of the Eraserhead world,” writes Weidenbaum. Like the emotionally and colorfully vivid presence of a robin at the end of Blue Velvet or the good fairy at the end of Wild at Heart, the entity from another place in David Lynch’s films is always fashioned out of the internal logic and texture of each place.81

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Let us take Ballard’s juxtaposition of Blade Runner and Blue Velvet a step further. Both are, in their own strange ways, noir crime dramas with trimmings of the ‘police procedural.’ Both feature gnarled cops—Blade Runner’s Harry Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) and Gaff (Edward James Olmos), Blue Velvet’s detectives John Williams (George Dickerson) and Tom Gordon aka The Yellow Man (Fred Pickler). Both are stories of discovery: Deckard questioning his own humanity, Jeffrey his attraction to the dark. Both feature a femme fatale: Dorothy and Rachel and in both films the protagonists physically attack the women—they are both attracted and repulsed by elements of the ‘other’ they represent. Both films make powerful use of Ruin Porn backdrops and both films’ soundtracks feature hefty doses of nostalgic retro-futurism (Don Percival’s ‘One More Kiss, Dear’ on Vangelis’ Blade Runner, Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ and Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ on Angelo Badalamenti’s Blue Velvet). Both received decidedly mixed reviews upon release, their neon-noir style dumfounding many critics. Influential author and essayist Tom McCarthy suggests that: “Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is instrumental.” In his films, what the continual, almost systematic replacement of body parts and faculties by instruments — crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms — produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature, but a fundamental term, an ontological condition.82

David Lynch: High Priest In his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch wrote that: “Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.” He describes the problems he was having making sense of the way the film was evolving and then discovered “the thing that just pulled it all together,” revealing that it was The Bible that provided the solution: “And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it: that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.”83 Although Lynch states in the book that he does not plan to reveal what the Biblical verse is, The Book of Job would be a likely candidate: Lynch states that it was a sentence, not a section of The Bible that consolidated his vision. If this is the case one could well elect: “May the day

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of my birth perish, and the night it was said, ‘A boy is born!’” despite the androgynous nature of the child in Lynch’s film:

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This,

“1 After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 He said: 3 “May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, ‘A boy is born!’ 4 That day — may it turn to darkness: may God above not care about it: may no light shine upon it. 5 May darkness and deep shadow [a] claim it once more: may a cloud settle over it: may blackness overwhelm its light. 6 That night — may thick darkness seize it: may it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months. 7 May that night be barren: may no shout of joy be heard in it. 8 May those who curse days [b] curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan. 9 May its morning stars become dark: may it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn, 10 for it did not shut the doors of the womb on me to hide trouble from my eyes. 11 Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?

The Book of Job is arguably among the harshest of the entries in the Old Testament, raising contentious issues, as Žižek notes: The key to Christ is provided by the figure of Job, whose suffering prefigures that of Christ. What makes the Book of Job so provocative is not simply the presence of multiple perspectives without a clear resolution of their tension (the fact that Job’s suffering involves a different perspective than that of religious reliance on God): Job’s perplexity stems from the fact that he experiences God as an impenetrable Thing: he is uncertain what He wants from him in inflicting the ordeals to which he is submitted (the Lacanian “Che vuoi?”), and, consequently, he — Job — is unable to ascertain how he fits into the overall divine order, unable to recognize his place in it.85

Žižek goes further: “What Job suddenly understood was that it was not him, but God Himself, who was actually on trial in Job’s calamities, and He failed the test miserably.”86 An alternative source for Lynch could also be Psalm 139:16. In the King James Version: “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect: and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” While in the New International Version: “Your eyes saw my unformed body: all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to

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be.” This could apply not only to Eraserhead, with the unformed body of the child, but to Lynch’s Elephant Man with the malformed body and, on an emotional level, even Blue Velvet with the damaged body of Dorothy—their fates preordained. Lynch’s overt referencing of The Bible indicates the artist’s keen awareness of Christian iconography and self-conscious acknowledgement of it as fundamental to American culture. Wilson makes the claim that Lynch cannot help but be ‘religious.’ “The appearance of his ‘religion’ in his films is indeed ‘innocent’: it is an accidental upsurge of the subconscious (Lynch doesn’t intend to make movies on religion): it is an organic expression of his inner life (Lynch can’t help but make religious films).”87 If this is indeed a religious, or even ‘Biblical,’ fable then the gnarled gear-meister at the beginning of Eraserhead takes on the role of a god, if not the God, the gears suggestive of a deus ex machina (an alternative reading could be the Great Architect of Freemasonry). Henry’s girlfriend is called Mary and, given the clearly asexual nature of their relationship one could conclude that this was, indeed, a virgin birth. In the one scene when the two share a bed, ‘foreplay’ seems to consist of Henry pulling multiple fetuses from Mary, this before a coitus which never actually occurs. Meanwhile Henry lusts after the Beautiful Girl Across The Hall who, in this reading, could be Mary from Magdalene who has, at times, been described as a harlot, which as it transpires is exactly what the girl across the hall is. As a segue this reminds us of a dubious joke Žižek recounts in Trouble in Paradise. The night before Christ’s crucifixion the Apostles worry over the fact that he has never had the pleasure of a woman. They ask Mary Magdalene to go to his tent and seduce him, but five minutes later she runs out “screaming, terrified and furious. The followers asked her what went wrong, and she explained: ‘I slowly undressed, spread my legs and showed Christ my pussy: he looked at it, said “What a terrible wound! It should be healed!” and gently put his palm on it.”88 Raised a Presbyterian, Lynch subscribes to an essentially pedestrian notion of God: The kingdom of heaven, God the almighty merciful father, is that totality. It’s that level. It’s the almighty merciful father, and the divine mother, the kingdom of heaven, the absolute, divine being, bliss consciousness, creative intelligence. These are all names, but it is that.89

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Isabella Rossellini also describes Lynch as ‘religious.’ Discussing Blue Velvet she states that: “A lot of people thought it was sick, but for me it always represented the research in David of the good and the bad. He’s quite a religious person. Quite spiritual. Any person who is religious is always trying to define these things, which are so elusive.”90

Flag and Fetus—Secular and Sacred Few issues seem to ignite the American religious imagination—and indignation—as that of abortion. Americans, Catholic or not, all too often take literally the Roman Catholic abjuration of the ‘undertaking’ regardless of circumstance. Abortions are a chilling nightmare thematic throughout Eraserhead. The girl in the radiator dances on fetuses scattered on her stage while Henry dispatches the fetal discharge from Mary’s womb by hurling them against the bedroom wall. Henry’s act of filicide also carries echoes of the Biblical Binding of Isaac, however Lynch as God in this scenario does not step into sway Abraham’s/ Henry’s hand. The film of course starts with a ‘birthing,’ or at least an ‘ejaculation,’ with Henry lying prone, staring into space, and finally, in a gentle moment, vomiting a massive spermatozoon, the gametes of the film itself. Rather than the usual genitalia involved, Lynch’s reproductive organ here is the mouth or verbal orifice. His ejaculate is then projected by the god-like and hideously scarred figure controlling the mechanical shafts who projects/ejects Lynch’s ‘dream’ into an amniotic fluid which segues to a white-on-black orifice which then cuts to Henry walking in a postindustrial landscape of what may well be mass graves or simply heaps of fractured gravel and toxic ponds of liquid. Thus, Henry is ‘born’ or at least impregnated into the film via his creator’s and/or his own mouth. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”91 Henry later finds a shriveled, but oversized, spermatozoa in his mailbox, another ‘orifice’ for the delivery of language, the delivery of the written word. Lynch’s scarred figure is no doubt the Demiurge, “a creator god whose name parodied the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus, where he is portrayed as an artisan, ‘world-maker’ who does the best he can at imitating the true Forms of Eternity,” notes Bloom. For the Gnostics, this was a spirit of malevolence identified with the Abyss, the void where the Demiurge “stole or displaced the stuff for his false creation.”92 Lynch’s use of the fetus runs as a certain blasphemy in the context of The American Religion. While this may be a dark chimera of America

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and no flags are apparent, Lynch here treads on one of the two sacred symbols of the United States of America, the “linked emblems of our national religion: the flag and the fetus, our Cross and our Divine Child,” suggests Bloom, the flag and the fetus together symbolizing the American Religion, which is a “partly concealed but scarcely repressed national faith.”93 Robert Hughes echoes Bloom’s observation, in which the flag is fetishized to the point where it becomes not just the national symbol, “but a kind of eucharist. … Hence, too, the bizarre politics and imagery of the new Sacrificed Body of American conservatism, the fetus.”94 Hughes goes on to cite the bizarre example of the American mascot for the 1996 Atlantic Olympics—an eight-foot-tall fetus.95 Wilson describes the initial image of Henry as an unborn “soul” and the demiurge’s levers a means of pulling that soul down to earth. After the levers are pulled, “the soul begins its fall and soon turns from a pellucid spirit into the opaque spermatozoon”96 which instantly materializes into the adult Henry. This is the basis, with which I disagree, upon which Wilson makes the claim that Henry is unaware of his surroundings and circumstances. Wilson claims that he “knows nothing” and yet Henry knows where his apartment is and when confronted soon after by Mary for his lack of communication admits that he didn’t think she wanted him around: hardly the actions of a vegetative or totally unaware individual. That said, it must also be kept in mind that Henry’s fate is to essentially become an eraser, a liquidator of the written mark or logos, an activator of the Gnostic spirit through the eradication language itself. Added to this is Henry admission that he is a printer by trade but currently on leave (perhaps a euphemism for retrenchment), i.e.: he prints words but is currently in stasis, unable to transfer (written) language to a communicable form. Eraserhead as a variable mutation of The Book of Job demonstrates the notion of dialects of religious language in contemporary America. Overall, Lynch’s work can be read as symptomatic of a sense of religious dread and apocalyptic, perhaps evangelistic, sensibility.97 “America was founded by Christians seeking freedom to follow their faith, and from the first, Lynch declares that he is a Christian,” writes David Imber. Though he notes that Lynch’s interpretation of Christianity may be considered “bizarre” at times, mixing as it does elements of Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Vedanta and contemporary spiritualism: “it is, in that way, very much an American interpretation. America is, after all, a land of some 200 denominations of Protestantism.”

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Imber notes the scene in Blue Velvet, when Sandy recounts her idyllic dream to Jeffrey, in which a Red-Breasted Robin defeats evil. As she speaks, beatific church music fills the soundtrack and it’s revealed that the two are parked outside a white church. Imber argues that: A standard 19th century depiction of Christ has his red heart exposed in front of his chest, like the robin’s red breast. Giving a sense of the traditional American conflict between personal responsibility and religious faith, Lynch lets us know that the film’s final representation of good and evil, and the American sense of justice as it is depicted again and again in our popular literature, is our cultural obsession and not a universal truth. This is intimated by the fact that the robin seen at the end is so clearly artificial — a mechanism controlled by a human, not a divine, director.98

Ritual Flaying and the Lynchian In effect Eraserhead concludes with the live flaying of the child. Flaying is also a trope of Barney’s, especially in Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) in which Barney and his then-partner Björk undertake mutual flensing. In O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh the narrative begins with a man being flayed alive. As the epidermis is delicately taken away, the body—not surprisingly—gives way and he dies. The most important thing is that the skin has not been damaged. There are further uses for the skin. That of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human flesh. But this takes pages of agonizing description that O’Connell warns against reading, almost insisting that you don’t read on. But of course, one must. In Word Made Flesh a former police detective, Wylie Brown, ceaselessly gathers information about Quinsigamond legend Edgar Carwin Brockden, a visionary book collector who killed his family and himself. Inspector Emil Lacazze, the Jesuit who founded the Dunot Precinct’s Eschatology Squad, lives to perfect ‘The Methodology’ by which he bores into the hearts of the criminals he hunts. All of them, as O’Connell makes clear, are trapped in the inability of language to truly communicate. O’Connell’s use of such terms as Eschatology and Methodology clearly reveal his interest in religiosity and he leans heavily on Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel The Golem, naming one of his central protagonists Meyrink and a character named Zwak (a ventriloquist’s puppet) after Meyrink’s Zwakh. According to novelist and critic James Sallis,

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O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh with its beginning with a graphic tour of a flaying: “and soon it becomes apparent that this is O’Connell’s method: to strip away flesh and muscle, all padding and shrouding: to expose each bone and hard edge, every soft organ decaying in its hood of darkness.”99 As Žižek notes: “… one of the definitions of the Lacanian real is … the flayed, skinned body, the palpitation of raw, skinless red flesh.”100 O’Connell’s pseudo-medical stylistic approach recalls Ballard’s ‘Invisible Literature’ described by Mark Dery as: “Intentionally or not, the invisible literature written by psychologists, pathologists, and others who specialize in the deviant mind or the monstrous body beckons us toward a psychogeography unimagined by most novelists.”101 O’Connell’s work also smacks of the ‘Lynchian,’102 a comparatively new term in cultural studies. For David Foster Wallace an academic definition of Lynchian could be that “the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’” But, he adds that, like ‘postmodern’ or ‘pornographic’ and to which I will add Ballardian, Lynchian is definable only ostensibly—essentially we know it when we see it. Wallace argues that: “Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughly Lynchian.”103 Theodore (Ted) Bundy (1946–1989) was an American serial killer, necrophile and rapist who assaulted and murdered numerous young women between 1974 and 1978, and possibly earlier. He confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states. The true victim count remains unknown and could be much higher. He was known to have revisited his crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping the severed heads in his apartment as mementos. Bundy was executed by electric chair in Florida on January 24, 1989. Jeffrey Dahmer (1960–1994) committed the rape, murder and dismemberment of 17 boys and men between 1978 and 1991, with many of his later murders also involving necrophilia, cannibalism and the preservation and storage of body parts. Dahmer was beaten to death in prison by a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution on November 28, 1994.

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Lynchian is visceral weirdness, while Ballardian is clinical strangeness. Such terms as ‘Ballardian’ or ‘Lynchian’ are fraught with perils. Writing on Ben Marcus for The Atlantic, Joe Fassler notes that: “Writers, when they affect us deeply, become adjectives.” He cites the shorthand terminologies of the “Proustian” reminiscence, the “Dickensian” slum, the “Orwellian” surveillance and the “Kafkaesque.” However, he notes that these tend to be far from precise. “Great literature tends to be complex and up for debate, and maybe that’s why these words — eponymous adjectives, they’re technically called — lend themselves so easily to abuse.” However, we know it when we see it: artists such as Matthew Barney, especially in River of Fundament, Bruce Nauman (Clown Torture, 1987), Mike Kelley (Pay for your Pleasure, 1988), Paul McCarthy (White Snow, 2014), Heath Ledger as The Joker (The Dark Knight 2008) are Lynchian. Authors such as O’Connell with his dwarf-throwing contests and meticulous human flaying and Brian Evenson with his amputations are Lynchian—indeed, David Lynch has inspired a surprising number of authors in their pursuit of the surreal.104 () The Joker in The Dark Knight is especially Lynchian. As Wallace points out, these unnerving works succeed precisely because we want to consume them. When Jeffrey in Blue Velvet is attracted to explore degrees of sadism and degeneracy as erotic we consider it ‘sick’—“nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the movies to try to forget about,”105 says Wallace. Wallace seems to see the impotent rape scene in Blue Velvet as a metafictional conceit. Dorothy and Frank are ‘performing’ for us—the audience. Žižek sees two other potential readings: “The crucial question to be asked here is: for whom is this scene staged?” Initially, Žižek asks whether it is an “exemplary case of a child witnessing parental coitus?”— Jeffrey “present at the act of his own conception …” Žižek suggests Frank’s muffled sounds as Dorothy stuffs velvet into his mouth and he inhales are in fact the “visual hallucinations” a child hears during parental coitus.106 But it is also significant that the mouth, a potential site of physical and verbal eroticism, the tool of what Baudrillard calls the “ecstasy of communication,”107 is muted. Like the Apprentice’s bloodied rag in CREMASTER 3 and Ben Marcus’ Mouth Harness, language and communication are stifled. When Frank slaps Dorothy in the rape scene it is the mouth that tells the story. As Barbara Creed points out: “It becomes clear that she enjoys the violence — a smile of satisfaction

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spreads across her lips.” Frank’s mouth on the other hand, is obscured by the mask. “All pleasure generated in the scene is recorded on the face of woman — it is as if man’s face cannot, is not ‘allowed’ to signify sexual pleasure, only power and aggression.”108 Regardless of Lynch’s narrative intentions here (and Wilson’s insistence that everything Lynch does is ‘ironic’), there is no sense of postmodern irony anywhere apparent. Wallace notes that: Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a ‘college boy’) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say anything like ‘Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene’ or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is — both symbolically and psychoanalytically — heavy as hell.109

For Wallace, Lynch manages to strip away the “psychic protections” we normally bring to the watching of films: “The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films … strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish (we’re defenseless in our dreams, too).”110 Žižek attributes this, accurately I think, to the sense of proximity Lynch creates—the picket fence is ‘near’, Frank’s mask is ‘far,’ although even this can be called into question—Frank’s mask presumably is the same as that which would be worn by Jeffrey’s father in hospital. In effect Frank becomes the evil doppelganger of Jeffrey’s ‘good’ father. (It is fair to speculate that this may have been the kernel for Blake Butler’s doppelganger family in There Is No Year (2011) and has a number of precursors, perhaps most notably Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing (1954) in which the child discovers, or at least thinks he does, that his father is a replicant. This is reflected in a real-life syndrome known as the ‘Capgas delusion.’) The ‘death’ of the father represents the death of the super-ego, a role rapidly adopted by Frank. This sense of cultural-schizophrenic division is strongly reflected in the US presidential system where the President, regardless of Party, is inevitably depicted, by both voters and the media, as the good/evil, powerful/impotent father figure. The assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy (and the attempt on Reagan) were the ultimate Anti-Oedipal act. They were also, most certainly in the case of Kennedy, the result of extreme forms of cultural schizophrenia. Oswald is the case par excellence of this phenomena. Oswald, not unlike

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Gilmore (Barney’s CREMASTER 2, Mailer’s Executioner’s Song) virulently captured America’s literary imagination, inspiring such epic novels as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand (2001) and Mailer’s nonfiction tome Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995) among others. It is not insignificant that Oswald murdered the first Catholic President, a fact that would have resonated strongly with Fundamentalist evangelicals. This aforementioned sense of proximity in Blue Velvet is central to all of Lynch’s work and is perhaps described most succinctly by Creed when she describes the opening mis en scene: travelling into an interior, secret place is alluded to in the opening sequence of the film when the camera discovers a hidden world of violence and cannibalism, death and decay beneath the neat suburban lawn — a place where insects and other forms of life are locked in a deadly, chaotic battle. The distortion and magnification involved in these two shots underline their surreality. They also suggest the emotional trajectory of Blue Velvet: a burrowing into secret, subterranean places — the earth, the interior of the body, the unconscious, the womb. Jeffrey’s journey into Dorothy’s world (her apartment is dark, secret, womb-like) is essentially a descent into the interior of woman, into her hidden places, ultimately into the womb of which the film presents two opposing images.111

Although the pristine white picket fence represents ‘normality,’ its very presence seems utterly surreal, suggestive, in its way, of the Freudian unheimlich and suggestive of Lynch’s methodology as a whole. Without question, it is the gritty world of Frank Booth that seems more ‘real.’ Indeed, it is Nature itself via the Arcadian notion of suburbia that allows “… the overall frame and inhuman, transhuman perspective in which to contemplate the events of Blue Velvet,” suggests Jameson.112 Lynch’s ‘ideal’ suburban environ could well be read as a Deleuzian ‘Body without Organs,’ a ‘machine’ disturbed by the presence of Frank Booth, the conflict or the disease: between desiring-machines and the body without organs. Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.113

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The ear, of course, is the organ without body (Žižek), the orifice through which we travel to hear the story. It is “the portal between outside and inside, light and dark, apparent and hidden.”114 The twin sites of communication: the ear in Blue Velvet and the mouth in Eraserhead are the orifices Lynch utilizes to give birth to each film, as is the labialike logo of Barney’s CREMASTER 2. When asked why he chose a severed ear Lynch replied that: “It had to be an ear because it’s an opening. An ear is wide and you can go down into it. It goes somewhere vast.”115 It is the ear, of course, that receives the word of the Preacher. Žižek argues that Lynch plays off the discord between reality perceived from a distance to a reality that is thrust in the viewers face: “which renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the crawling and twinkling of indestructible life — in short, the lamella.”116 The libido as an organ without body. There is the inevitable hormonal schizophrenia at play here. Sandy (Dern) is the ‘ideal,’ untouchable and kept at a safe distance, the heimlich, her genitalia hidden and ‘safe,’ while Dorothy is the unbridled lamella, the real. Sandy is ‘stable,’ while Dorothy is ‘flux,’ the unheimlich, her genitalia exposed and threatening.117 Works of a Lynchian sensibility are essentially apolitical. Wallace, however, suggests in terms of Lynch’s oeuvre, to a “primal politics of Self/ Exterior and Id/Object. It’s a politics all about religions, darknesses, but for Lynch these have nothing to do with testaments or skin.”118 Nevertheless ‘skin’ is a central signifier in Blue Velvet, specifically that of Dorothy’s—at turns pale and sensual, at others bruised and discolored and at all times a symbol of Jeffrey’s dark awakening, evidenced in the scene when he slaps her violently, and, given her ‘relationship’ with Frank, signifying his awareness of the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Covet.” She is in many respects the ultimate orifice. The rape Frank/ Dorothy scene evokes a sense of rabid worship at the hole. Indeed, Lynch himself describes the cinematic experience as almost one of orifice worship: one can read his description of going into the theater as a sexual encounter: “then the curtains start to open. Maybe they’re red.” The curtains can be seen here as the opening of the labia for intercourse, for insertion by the viewer. “And you go into a world,”119 a site of orgasmic pleasure. Creed takes this further, suggesting that the mouth stands in for the labia.

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The journey into Dorothy’s womb is first suggested by Frank’s bizarre attempt to re-enact his birth and later by the scene in which the camera holds Dorothy’s parted red lips in a tight close-up, while she and Jeffrey make love, suggesting not just her lips but also her labia. In this shot, held for a long time, we see the tips of her teeth protruding slightly from her parted lips. The position of the camera, held above her face, emphasizes the displacement from her facial to her genital lips. The overt fetishization of the female genitals is emphasized in a later scene in Jeffrey’s bedroom. Hanging on the wall is a fetish image, suggesting a primitive carving of the toothed vagina.120

For Ballard, noting the essential absence of ‘real’ parents, the film is “a full-blown” Oedipal drama. “… the gangster and the nightclub singer are the young couple’s ‘real’ parents. Like children hiding in their parents’ bedroom, they see more than they bargained for.” Frank’s ranting “Mummy” is “a pointer to David Lynch’s real intentions.”121 Symptoms of Frank’s schizophrenia are made abundantly apparent when he demands to be called Daddy and then reverses this notion by saying “Baby wants to fuck.” He is both father and son. Arguably this is symptomatic of broader issues at play in the American psyche present in the fictions of Christian innocence and Puritanical belief. For Wilson, in a rather fanciful account, by the end of the film Dorothy “recovers an identity as holy mother, the blessed virgin untouched by biology.”122 However, it is Laura Dern’s Sandy who is the literally virginal character in this scenario. Virginal or not, Dern’s characters in both Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart play a not dissimilar role as those of Maggie Gyllenhall in The Dark Knight and River of Fundament—while in Blue Velvet, Dern retains a distance from what may be defined as the carnivalesque via Frank Booth, in Wild At Heart she goes face-to-face with Bobby Peru in much the same way as Gyllenhall takes on The Joker and Usermare.

The Gothic and the Gnostic In a contradistinction to Wilson’s argument, for Dery Blue Velvet “may be the quintessential example of the American Gothic.” A crime-scene excavation of the crawl space in the American unconscious, as rendered by Norman Rockwell, Lynch’s movie reminds us that it’s the bedtime stories America likes to tell itself — the consoling fictions of JFK’s

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Camelot, of Reagan Country, of Disney’s Main Street U.S.A., of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, of Mark Twain’s boyhood idylls — that inevitably have the darkest undersides.123

But if it is ‘Gothic’ then it is also ‘Gnostic’ according to Wilson: “Lynch’s films are ‘Gnostic’ in spirit — lessons in how to escape the willful laws of society’s demiurges and in how to participate in seemingly infinite possibility.”124 Lynch encapsulates narratives that seem to be almost exclusively American in the twentieth century. That is not to say that they are exclusive to either America or this particular century, however certain creative themes clearly dominate. Murder, psychopathology and Armageddon are fraught throughout history, but the most recent examples seem to vomit forth from various parts of North America and they are downright unnerving. America’s ongoing cultural fascination with a sensibility of violence is articulated by the outsider—Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. His pistol made entirely of flesh and bone that fires human teeth (eXistenZ) or a gun holstered and hidden within the flesh of the sternum (Videodrome, arguably quoted by Nolan in The Dark Knight with a mobile phone) are only an extension of a psychological state of being particular to the United States. The right of gun ownership is specifically protected by the US Constitution. The phrase “right of the people to keep and bear arms” was first used in the text of the United States Bill of Rights (coming into law as the Second Amendment in 1791). It is a cultural obsession that many Americans have come to see the documents of the Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, as being cornerstones of a type of civil religion. This is suggested by the prominent display of such documents in massive, bronze-framed, bulletproof, moisture-controlled glass containers vacuum-sealed in a rotunda by day and in multi-ton bombproof vaults by night at the National Archives Building. According to Dery: “To be American is to feel that handgun ownership is your birthright: that you’re somehow incomplete, nagged by an itchy phantom limb, without a gun.” If you’re a boomer, growing up American meant growing up with the ricochet of gunshots — Dealey Plaza, the Audubon Ballroom, the Lorraine Motel, The Ambassador Hotel, My Lai, the Zodiac Killer, Kent State, the Freeway Killer, Son of Sam, the Dakota — as the soundtrack to your restless sleep.125

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Blue Velvet of course ends with a macabre shoot-out within a bizarre, if not byzantine, tableaux. Dorothy’s husband is tied to a chair, dead, and in much the same way as Frank and The Apprentice, is gagged, a mouth harness, presumably having been tortured to death. Where his ear once was there is a gaping hole, the initial orifice that led to his inevitable death and our veritable story. A hint of this entire narrative may lie in the image of the robin at the postscript of the film: it is deliberately portrayed as a mechanical creature, calling into question the ‘reality’ of the entire enterprise. Perhaps Rossellini and Hopper in their ‘rape’ scene are performing for Jeffrey, as Žižek suggests, but is Jeffrey in turn performing for us? The robin is a distinctly ‘Dickian’ moment, an artificial creature resembling those featured in his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and a motif utilized to powerful effect in Blade Runner. Frank’s incursion in an otherwise beatific environment is a rift in both time and space, at least for the films’ main protagonists. The others, parents, firemen et al. remain oblivious, the father’s heart attack aside, in a Truman Show (1988)-like notion of a ‘perfect,’ ‘Christian,’ America. But, as Wilson notes, there is an inherent paradox in contemplating Lynch’s work in a religious context or, indeed, as Wilson does, as “religion.” Wilson argues: “To claim that Lynch’s films are religion, however ironic, is to assume that violent, sexual films are expressions of sublime holiness.” This raises two paradoxical theories, he notes, the concept of ‘nonreligious’ religious experience and “a theory of a ‘sacred’ secular cinema.”126 But one must disagree with Wilson when he claims that: “The ironic religion of Lynch is aware of the original meaning of ‘religion,’ ‘to bind.’”127 If there is one thing, most likely deliberate, that Lynch’s films fail to do it is to ‘bind’ his audiences, intellectually or emotionally: interpretations of his intentions are multitudinous. Our final image of Henry in Eraserhead is one of rapture when, in a blinding white light, he embraces the Lady in the Radiator. He has achieved a sense of ‘heaven’ as literally prescribed by the soundtrack: “In Heaven everything is fine. You’ve got your good things and I’ve got mine.”128 This is Henry’s moment of gnosis, his rising above and beyond the mundane world. In comparison the final image in The Dark Knight sees The Joker dangling from a wire, upside down and arms akimbo in the pose of an inverted crucifixion, his crown of thorns the wires around his ankles. In Organs without Bodies, Žižek quotes Jonathan Spence’s juxtaposition of the carnivalesque “Lord of Misrule” with the actions of Chairman

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Mao.129 But in a footnote Žižek takes such juxtapositions several steps further: “Was not Christ himself such a ‘Lord of Misrule?’” … the abject beggar king, laughed at in the ceremony of crucifixion, which (as one tends to forget) was not only a tragic event but, for the sneering crowd of spectators, a true carnival in the course of which the false pretender to the throne … was mockingly crowned with a tiara of thorns. Did he also not preach the suspension or reversal of social hierarchies? Furthermore, is ‘the Lord of Misrule,’ also perhaps not one of the appropriate names for the psychoanalyst?130

Is not the potential for the carnivalesque embedded in the very first amendment of the US Bill of Rights? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: or abridging the freedom of speech …”? There may well be a reason that schizophrenics and psychotics are the stuff of t-shirt adornment. Ballard makes the claim that Schizophrenia is: “To the sane, always the most glamorous of mental diseases, since it seems to represent the insane’s idea of the normal.” For Ballard: Just as the agnostic world keeps alive its religious festivals in order to satisfy the vacation needs of its workforce, so when medical science has conquered all disease certain mental afflictions, schizophrenia chief among them, will be mimicked for social reasons.131

Hopper’s Booth and, yet to be discussed, Barney’s Gilmore and Ben Marcus’ LeBov, each represents the Luciferian malevolence that lies beneath the supposedly ‘Puritan’ notions of America, one side of a society that has been cultural-schizophrenic since the days of its founding. In the next chapter, I expand this exploration into the realm of Mormonism, of which Barney’s clear-cut referencing as inspiration indicates his own awareness of religious influences and his works certainly suggest eschatological crisis.



Notes



1. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 19. 2. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 25. 3.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 203–204.

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4. Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (Verso, 2015), p. 226. 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1965), p. 274. 6. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 197. 7. Jim Morrison quoted in Greil Marcus, The Doors, p. 91. 8. J.G. Ballard, Hello America, 1981, quoted in J.G. Ballard Quotes, ed. V. Vale (San Francisco, RE/Search Publications, 2004), p. 182. 9. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, p. 143. 10.  Manuel Dries, ‘David Lynch’s Lost Highway: Perpetual Mystery or Visual Philosophy,’ http://www.davidlynch.de/mdries.pdf. 11. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher, 2007), p. 109. 12. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton,’ http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1955. 13.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 205. 14.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 204. 15. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 54. 16.  J.G. Ballard. BBC Radio, 1998, quoted in J.G. Ballard Quotes, pp. 224–225. 17.  Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (University of California Press, 1992), p. 2. 18. Matthew Barney, in Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘Travels in Hypertrophia: An Interview with Matthew Barney,’ Artforum, May 1995, p. 69. 19.  David Cronenberg, quoted in, http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/ henry3/horror.html. 20. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 121. 21. Anti-Oedipus, p. 9. 22. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton,’ http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1955. 23. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 128. 24. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 69. 25. J.G. Ballard, quoted in Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 38. 26. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 [2003], p. 160. 27. Jean Baudrillard, America, pp. 30–31. 28. See Martha P. Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 1997). 29. Marina Warner, ‘Voodoo Road,’ Sight and Sound, No. 8 (1997), p. 7. 30. Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,’ p. 63, http://screen.oxfordjournals.org. 31. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p. 151.

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32. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p. 26. 33. Ben Marcus, Chemical Seuss, first published in Conjunctions, 29, 1997, http://benmarcus.com/writing/chemical-seuss/. 34. Greil Marcus, The Doors, p. 49. 35. Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Short Circuits) (The MIT Press, 2009), p. 82. 36. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p. 153. 37. Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 75. 38. Jason Horsley, The Secret Life of Movies: Schizophrenic and Shamanic Journeys in American Cinema (McFarland, Jefferson, 2009), p. 163. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 167. 40. Created and produced by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, American Horror Story: Freak Show was the fourth season of the FX horror anthology television series American Horror Story (2014–2015). Set in 1952 in Florida it recounts the story of one of the last remaining freak shows in the United States, and their struggle for survival. Twisty worked as a clown at a freak show, and after two dwarves convinced him the police were pursuing him for molesting children, he made a failed suicide attempt that left his jaw blown off, creating a malevolent perpetual grin (a similar scenario is played out in The Preacher graphic novel). 41. Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 79. 42. Lon Chaney, Sr., http://www.quoteid.com/Lon_Chaney,_Sr..html. 43. The Simpsons, Episode 69, 1992. The phrase was most likely inspired the Alice Cooper song “Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me” from the 2001 album Dragontown. 44. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 7. 45. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 70. 46. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 15. 47. Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh, p. 144. 48. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women (Vintage Contemporaries, 2002), pp. 188–189. 49.  Mysteries of Love, directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, 2002. 50.  Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 3. 51. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), p. 135. 52. Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh, p. 143. 53. The author was sent a PDF of this piece by Ben Marcus, May 4, 2013. 54. Ben Marcus, Notes from the Hospital, http://benmarcus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ben_Marcus_2013_final.pdf (commissioned by Frieze Projects New York for Frieze Projects 2013).

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55. Ben Marcus, Notes from the Hospital. 56. Interview with Ben Marcus by Duncan White. Transcript sent to the author by Prof. White, October 15, 2013. 57. Ben Marcus, Notes from the Hospital. 58. Ben Marcus, Notes from the Hospital. 59. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 9. 60. Don DeLillo, Zero K (Scribner, New York, 2016), p. 231. 61.  Horace Miner, ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema,’ American Anthropologist, Vol. 58, No. 3, June 1956, https://msu.edu/~jdowell/ miner.html. 62. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 608. 63.  Adam Gopnik, ‘Blows Against The Empire: The return of Philip K. Dick,’ The New Yorker, August 20, 2007. 64. Julie Joy Clarke, ‘Doubly Monstrous?: Female and Disabled,’ Essays in Philosophy A Biannual Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 2008, https:// commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1& article=1289&context=eip&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com.au%2Fscholar%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dmatthew%2BBarney%2B%252B%2Bdavid%2Bcronenberg%26btnG%3D%26as_ sdt%3D1%252C5%26as_sdtp%3D#search=%22matthew%20Barney%20 %2B%20david%20cronenberg%22. 65. Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (The MIT Press, 2006), p. 109. 66. Matthew Barney River of Fundament (Haus Der Kunst/Skira Rizzoli New York, 2014), p. 23. 67.  Alien Resurrection (1997) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, screenplay by Joss Whedon. 68. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton,’ http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1955. 69.  ‘Mysteries of Love,’ documentary, Blue Velvet, DVD, June 4, 2007, directed by Jeffrey Schwarz. Studio: Fox Searchlight. 70. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 74. 71. Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 63. 72. David Lynch, ‘The Icon,’ Chris Rodley (1997) in Richard A. Barney, David Lynch: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi Press, 2009), p. 186. 73.  Jonathan Weidenbaum, ‘Lady in the Radiator: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the World of Eraserhead,’ http://www.academia. edu/1423737/Lady_in_the_Radiator_Phenomenology_Embodiment_ and_the_World_of_Eraserhead. 74. Joann Greco, ‘The Psychology of Ruin Porn,’ The Atlantic, January 6, 2012, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-­ ruin-porn/886/.

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75. See, as but one example, The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–1810) by Caspar David Friedrich. 76. David Lynch, http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/ehabout.html. 77. John Gray, Black Mass, p. 11. 78.  Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Fantasmatic Splittings and Destructive Desires: Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 270–291, http://fmls.oxfordjournals.org/content/45/3/270.full?sid= d2b61661-bd00-4585-b96f-00ff5aff004e. 79. J.G. Ballard, quoted in Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 38. 80. David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, Chris Rodley, ed. (Faber & Faber, 2005), p. 78. 81.  Jonathan Weidenbaum, ‘Lady in the Radiator: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the World of Eraserhead,’ http://www.academia. edu/1423737/Lady_in_the_Radiator_Phenomenology_Embodiment_ and_the_World_of_Eraserhead. 82. Tom McCarthy, ‘His Dark Materials,’ The New Statesman, January 8, 2010, http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/01/lynch-prostheticgod-world. 83. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 33. 84. The Book of Job, King James Bible. 85. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 125 “The almost unbearable impact of the Book of Job derives not so much from its narrative frame (the Devil appears as a conversational partner of God, and the two engage in a rather cruel experiment in order to test Job’s faith), but in its final outcome. Far from providing some kind of satisfactory account of Job’s undeserved suffering, God’s appearance at the end ultimately amounts to pure boasting, a horror show with elements of farcical spectacle — a pure argument of authority grounded in a breathtaking display of power: ‘You see all that I can do? Can you do this? Who are you, then, to complain?’ So what we get is neither the good God letting Job know that his suffering was just an ordeal destined to test his faith, nor a dark God beyond Law, the God of pure caprice, but, rather, a God who acts like someone caught in a moment of impotence — or, at the very least, weakness — and tries to escape His predicament by empty boasting. What we get at the end is a kind of cheap Hollywood horror show with lots of special effects — no wonder many commentators tend to dismiss Job’s story as a remainder of the previous pagan mythology, which should have been excluded from the Bible.” 86. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 127. 87. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 21. 88. Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise, p. 170.

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89.  Cathleen Falsani, ‘Lynch: ‘Bliss is Our Nature’,’ Chicago SunTimes, http://www.lynchnet.com/articles/suntimes.html. 90. Isabella Rossellini, quoted in Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 126. 91. John 1:14, King James Bible. 92. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 51. 93. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 45. 94. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint—The Fraying of America (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 49. 95. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint, pp. 50–51. 96. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 35. 97. David G. Imber, The Kinema Junpo Filmmakers Series: David Lynch, ed. Takimoto Makoto (Kinema Junpo Publishing, Tokyo Japan, September, 1999). 98. David G. Imber, The Kinema Junpo Filmmakers Series: David Lynch. “Lynch’s personal theology reflects the Christian belief in power of salvation. Evidence of this appears again and again in his work. Though he is not named Satan, but ‘Bob’ — the most prosaic name in the English language — the evildoer of the Twin Peaks series is most certainly Lynch’s evocation of the devil. As a combination one-armed man and dwarf (who has previously announced himself as ‘the arm,’ and thus signifies evil’s grasp on the world) in Fire Walk With Me, the spirit of evil announces ‘I want all of my pain and suffering,’ whereupon ‘Bob’ wrenches a red mass from the suspended body of ‘Leland Palmer’ (Ray Wise), whom we have just seen committing an act of unspeakable horror upon his own daughter, and tosses it on the floor in the form of spilled blood. We then see a close-up of the dwarf ingesting a repulsive spoonful of gruel. Christians easily see this as a perversion of transubstantiation, the act by which the body and blood of Christ the Savior become present in the substance of the sacramental wine and wafer of the Catholic mass, when the priest, acting on Jesus’ behalf, speaks the words ‘this is my blood, this is my body’ over them. Leland Palmer hangs suspended in the air as Jesus did on the cross. And his ‘sin’ appears as a red mass before his body, just as Jesus is depicted with his heart exposed (and thus often symbolized by the robin, as in Blue Velvet). Just as Jesus died for the sins of mankind, this Dark Lord exacts his measure of pain and suffering through the sinful acts of men. On the other hand, angels abound in Lynch’s work as well. In Eraserhead, the ‘Lady in the Radiator’ sings a song that goes ‘In heaven, everything is fine…’. Literal angels ascend in the scenes of salvation that end both Fire Walk With Me and Wild at Heart (in the latter it is the ‘Good Witch of The Wizard of Oz (1939) substituting for a Christian angel).” 99. James Sallis, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. 98, No. 4, p. 36, April 2000.

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100. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton’ Žižek continues: “… . it occurs when we enter the ‘black hole,’ the crack in the texture of reality. What we encounter in this ‘black hole’ is simply the body stripped of its skin. That is to say, Lynch perturbs our most elementary phenomenological relationship to the living body, which is based on the radical line of separation between the surface of the skin and what is beneath it. Let us recall the uncanniness, and even disgust, we experience when we endeavor to imagine what goes on just under the surface of a beautiful naked body — muscles, glands, veins, etc. In short, our relating to the body implies the suspension of what lies beneath the surface, and this suspension is an effect of the symbolic order — it can occur only insofar as bodily reality is structured by language. In the symbolic order, we are not really naked even when we are without clothes, since skin itself functions as the ‘dress of the flesh.’ [The exception is provided here by the naked body of Isabella Rossellini towards the end of Blue Velvet: when, after the endured nightmare, she leaves the house and approaches Jeffrey, it is as if a body belonging to another, dark, nightly, infernal realm all of a sudden found itself in our ‘normal’ daily universe, out of its own element, like a stranded octopus or some other creature from the deep sea — a wounded, exposed body whose material presence exerts an almost unbearable pressure on us.] This suspension excludes the real of the life-substance, its palpitation: one of the definitions of the Lacanian real is that it is the flayed, skinned body, the palpitation of raw, skinless red flesh.” 101. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 218. 102. Joe Fassler, What It Really Means to Be “Kafkaesque,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2014/01/what-it-really-means-to-be-kafkaesque/283096/. 103.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, pp. 161–162. 104. As but one example, over 30 contemporary writers contributed to the 2013 Eraserhead Press title, In Heaven Everything is Fine, including Blake Butler, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Gabriel Blackwell and Cody Goodfellow. 105.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 167. 106. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton’ Žižek continues: “When eaves-dropping on parental coitus, the child hears hollow speaking and heavy, gasping breathing: he or she imagines that there must be something in the father’s mouth (perhaps part of the sheet, since he is in bed), or that he is breathing through a mask. Yet what this reading leaves out is the crucial fact that

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the sadomasochistic game is thoroughly staged and theatrical. Both of them — not only Dorothy who knows that Jeffrey is watching since she put him in the closet — act (or even overact) as if they knew they were being observed. Jeffrey is not an unobserved, accidental witness to a secret ritual: the ritual is, from the outset staged for his gaze. From this perspective, the true organizer of the game seems to be Frank. His noisy, theatrical manner, bordering on the comical and recalling the movie-image of a villain, bears witness to the fact that he is desperately trying to fascinate and impress the third gaze. In order to prove what? The key is perhaps offered by Frank’s obsessive repeating to Dorothy: ‘Don’t you look at me!’ Why shouldn’t she? There is only one answer possible: since there is nothing to see. There is no erection to see, since Frank is impotent… . Read this way, the scene acquires quite a different meaning: Frank and Dorothy feign a wild sexual act in order to conceal from the child the fact that his father is impotent: all Frank’s shouting and swearing, his comical-spectacular imitation of coital gestures, is designed to mask its opposite. In traditional terms, the accent shifts from voyeurism: Jeffrey’s gaze is but an element in the exhibitionist’s scenario. Instead of a son witnessing parental coitus, the father desperately attempts to convince his son of his potency.” 107. Jean Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, p. 195. 108. Barbara Creed, ‘A Journey Through Blue Velvet,’ p. 108. 109.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 171. 110.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 171. 111. Barbara Creed, ‘A Journey Through Blue Velvet,’ p. 112. 112. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 294. “The father’s stroke, which opens the film like an incomprehensible catastrophe — an act of God which is peculiarly an act of scandalous violence within this peaceful American small town — is itself positioned by David Lynch … within the more science fictional horizon of the Darwinian violence of all nature. From the shot of the father lying paralyzed, the camera withdraws into the bushes surrounding the house, enlarging its microscopic focus as it does so, until we confront a horrible churning which we take first and generically, in good horror-film format, to be the hidden presence of the maniac, until it proves to be the mandibles of an insatiable insect. The later insistence on robins with worms twisting desperately in their beaks also reinforces this cosmic sense of the dizzying and nauseating violence of all nature — as though within this ferocity without boundaries, this ceaseless bloodshed of the universe as far as the eye can see or thought can reach, a single peaceful oasis had been conquered

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by the progress of humanity and whatever divine providence guided it: namely — unique in the animal kingdom as well as in the horrors of human history as well — the North American small town. Into this precious and fragile conquest of civilized decorum wrenched from a menacing outside world, then, comes violence — in the form of a severed ear: in the form of an underground drug culture and of a sadomasochism about which it is finally not yet really clear whether it is a pleasure or a duty, a matter of sexual gratification or just another way of expressing yourself.” 113. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 9. 114. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 64. 115.  David Lynch in Laurent Bouzereau, ‘Interview with David Lynch,’ Cineaste, Vol. xv, No. 3, p. 39, 1987. 116. Slavoj Žižek, ‘In recognition of David Lynch’s spring 2012 show at Jack Tilton.’ Žižek here refers to Lacan’s concept of the ‘lamella’: the libido as an organ without body. 117. For an excellent analysis of this zone see: Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005), p. 28. 118.  David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 190. 119. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 15. 120. Barbara Creed, ‘A Journey Through Blue Velvet,’ p. 108. 121. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 30 “The young man longs to take the gangster’s place in the singer’s bed and, when he does, soon finds himself playing the same shocking games, a crisis that can only be resolved by killing his ‘father’ in the approved Oedipal fashion.” 122. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 22. 123. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 7. 124. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. viii. 125. Mark Dery, ‘Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts,’ Thought Catalogue, January 19, 2011, http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/gunplay-an-american-tragedy-in-three-acts/2/ “Paradoxically, it also meant growing up in a country that embraces a perverse faith in ‘regeneration through violence’ (Slotkin). In American myth, the act of pulling the trigger is reimagined as an exuberant, youthful nation’s verdict on the dead weight of the past, reinventing yourself and remaking the world in a split second. On the big screen of the American unconscious, guilt-free sociopaths like Charlie Starkweather merge with perpetual adolescents like Huckleberry Finn and Dean Moriarty, yielding the devil-may-care thrill killers of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers. Lighting out for the territories, they’re fired

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by a kind of joie de tuer that is a gunfighter nation’s idea of joie de vivre. ‘Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer,’ writes J.G. Ballard, in the endless, lunatic genealogy of his ‘Generations of America,’ a Swiftian satire of our pathological faith in the promise of violence to Make It New.” 126. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 3. 127. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 3. 128.  In Heaven was written and performed for the film by Peter Ivers, 1977. 129.  Žižek quotes here from Jonathan Spence, Mao (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), pp. xii–xiv. 130. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p. 206. 131.  J.G. Ballard, ‘Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century,’ in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter eds., Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992), p. 275.

CHAPTER 4

Delusion: On Mormon and Masonic Symbolism in Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER Films

While remarkably high profile on a day-to-day basis, complete with traveling salesmen with uniform clothing and hairstyle, the Mormons, aka The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is essentially a religion of secrecy even more-so than most. It is also one that has inspired a number of particularly mutated cultural permutations, most especially via Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER 2. When Jean Baudrillard visited America for his 1986 book of that title, it was, it seems, the Mormons that gave him the greatest pause for thought, even beyond the neon of Las Vegas. On the second page of America he delves straight into the surreal realm of Salt Lake City with its “Pompous Mormon symmetry,” a city of flawless marble carrying an air of the funereal: Yet a Los-Angelic modernity, too — all the requisite gadgetry for a minimalist, extraterrestrial comfort. The Christ-topped dome (all the Christs here are copied from Thorwaldesn’s and look like Björn Borg) straight out of Close Encounters: religion as special effects. In fact the whole city has the transparency and supernatural, otherworldly cleanness of a thing from outer space. It is the capitalist, transsexual pride of a people of mutants that gives the city its magic, equal and opposite to that of Los Angeles, that great whore on the other side of the desert.1

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6_4

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Not unlike Baudrillard, American cultural critic Erik Davis seemed similarly mesmerized by the unreality of the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that is central to Salt Lake City: There’s an air of Disneyland to the place: the immaculately crafted grounds, the fake-oak woodwork of the famous Tabernacle (actually pine painted with microscopic detail), the comic-book paintings, the titanic statue of Jesus set beneath a painted dome awash with solar systems and purple planets. Just outside the square stands a statue of a gesticulating Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet who first led the ‘saints’ across the blazing desert to the Salt Lake Valley in the 1840s. Now he’s pointing at a bank.2

Indeed, Davis’ reference to comic-book paintings is all-too-apt—the opening pages of The Book of Mormon sport illustrations that could well have been executed by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta (1928–2010) and his 1970s cover illustrations for Robert E. Howard’s (1906–1936) ‘Conan the Barbarian’ series of paperbacks, without the busty maidens. Driving toward Salt Lake City, author Steve Erickson encounters a massive billboard featuring an image of a rattlesnake and a message that read, ‘PORNOGRAPHY… is just as deadly,’ “so incongruous in its Mormon fury, so juxtaposed against the serenity and terror of the land, as to nearly be pornographic itself.”3 Approximately 22 miles southeast of Temple Square is a monument of similar importance to the Mormon vision: the Granite Mountain Record Vault where, behind a series of doors designed to withstand a nuclear attack, is compiled the largest genealogical collection in the world. Dubbed ‘The Mountain of Names’ by journalist Alex Shoumatoff,4 there are estimates that a billion and a half names—a database of the dead—await posthumous baptism into the Mormon faith. The Mormons are intent on converting “the nation and the world: to go from some ten million souls to six billion.”5 Even Bloom, the greatest apologist for the Mormons and especially their founder, admits that this “is sublimely insane, not merely because of the stunning numbers, but primarily because it means going up against such worldwide antagonists as the Roman Catholic Church and Islam.”6 The genesis of this ‘new’ faith hails back to 1823 when teenage farmhand Joseph Smith received a visitation from a being named Moroni who instructed Smith to pry up a large rock on the nearby

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Hill of Cumorah where he supposedly discovered a set of golden plates inscribed with glyphs that Smith, using a set of ‘interpreters’ he found handily nearby, would eventually translate into the Book of Mormon— which Mark Twain famously called “chloroform in print.” All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the ‘elect’ have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so ‘slow,’ so sleepy: such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.7

Briefly, the Book of Mormon tells of Lehi and his sons, who, at the behest of the Lord, fled a doomed Jerusalem around 600 BC. The family broke into two warring tribes, the Nephites and the Lamanites. According to the Book of Lehi, upon sailing to the New World, the first commandment the Nephites received from God was to make plates of ore to record the genealogy of the tribe and its adventures in the New World. “The Book of Mormon may well be the most controversial text in the history of American literature,” claims Terry L. Givens. “No consensus is likely to emerge on the details of its production, the authenticity of the history it narrates, or even its inherent value as sacred text or quality as religious literature.”8 In 1835, well after establishing his church, Smith updated his story when a traveling showman sold the Mormons an Egyptian scroll. As Erik Davis describes it, under Smith the scroll “became the Book of Abraham, ‘a translation of some ancient records, that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt.’ In it, we learn that God is not an old man in the sky, but a man in space. His throne lies near a star called Kolob, which governs a whole system of planets and stars.”9 Sounding eerily like a story line from the sci-fi gnostic visions of Philip K. Dick or something akin to Scientology: “the text implies that a number of gods ‘organized’—rather than created—the Earth: that humans existed as ‘intelligences’ before becoming mortal bodies: and that Earth was first populated by people from another world,” Davis writes.

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With this strikingly original practice, the Mormons established the kind of dynamic and mutually fulfilling relationship with the ancestors found in many non-Western or traditional cultures. No messy disinterment is necessary. The Mormons baptize, endow and seal their dead by proxy, which means that a living saint gets dunked in the temple waters in their stead. But to perform this ‘temple work’ you need a name — preferably a host of names.10

As with all of the belief systems discussed here, the Mormons have had their share of apocalyptic visions. In 1835, Joseph Smith called a meeting of the church leaders to inform them that he had recently spoken to God and learned that Jesus would return within the next 56 years, after which the End Times would begin. Mitt Romney, running for president in 2013, was not the first Mormon to aspire for the position. Smith ran for president in 1844 as an independent commander-in-chief of an “army of God,” advocating the overthrow of the US government in favor of a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Smith prophesied that if Congress did not accede to his demands “they shall be broken up as a government and God shall damn them.”11 Smith’s candidacy was cut short when he was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob that same year. Out of Smith’s national political ambitions grew what would become known in Mormon circles as the White Horse Prophecy—a belief ingrained in Mormon culture and passed down through generations by church leaders. According to the prophecy the day would come when the US Constitution would “hang like a thread as fine as a silk fibre”12 and that only the Mormons could save it. At least publicly, high profile Mormons are wary of the myth. “I don’t think the White Horse Prophecy is fair to bring up at all,” Mitt Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune when he was asked about it during his presidential bid. “It’s been rejected by every church leader that has talked about it.”13 As an aside, David Lynch and Mark Frost make use of the White Horse symbology in their television series Twin Peaks where the horse appears to Sarah Palmer before Maddy’s death in Episode 14: Lonely Souls (1990) and in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) where the horse appears the night before Laura Palmer’s death.

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Polygamy and Charisma For all the potential flakery that one is tempted to read into Smith’s scenario, there can be no doubt that he was a charismatic figure. Bloom, without irony, describes Smith as the “greatest and most authentic of American prophets, seers, and revelators.”14 Bloom’s reading of Smith is difficult to balance. At one moment he is “authentic,” the next a “trickster”: “A superb trickster and protean personality, Smith was a religious genius, uniquely able to craft a story capable of turning a self-invented faith into a people now as numerous as Jews, in America and abroad.”15 Bloom notes that according to the church, about six million American citizens are Mormons, and there are more than eight million converts in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Indeed, I shall go further here as to say that Bloom, unfortunately, does himself something of a disservice in the extremes he goes to praise Joseph Smith. Bloom is, as he oft proclaims, a religious ‘critic’ and, by their nature, critics will choose those they wish to praise and/or critique. However, his excessive acclaim for Smith makes him a decidedly dubious and/or biased commentator (nonetheless his factual material appears to be invariably scrupulous). This lack of objective language extends to his praise of the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart whom he describes as “marvelous,” and of whose presentation Bloom remains a “sincere and ardent fan.”16 Nowhere in The American Religion or elsewhere in his writings can I find a moment when this critic ‘critiques’ the beliefs or, arguably, dubious influence of Smith or Swaggart on American society and culture. He acknowledges Swaggart’s visiting a prostitute and Smith’s polygamy,17 but in both cases these are clearly forgiven. A more balanced view can arguably be found in Laurence R. Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, in which he introduces his discussion of the Mormon faith by quoting Robert Baird’s Religion in America from 1844: “the annals of modern times furnish few more remarkable examples of cunning in the leaders, and delusion in their dupes, than are presented by what is called Mormonism.”18 Moore, unlike Bloom, goes to considerable lengths to present a balanced discussion that describes Smith’s secrecy, charges of murdering Mormon enemies and the controversies surrounding plural marriage. Moore’s coverage is, simply more brutally honest. A case in point would be the apparent Band of Danites, a group of Mormon men who undertook terrorist attacks on enemies of

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the Mormon faith and whom Smith denied the existence of. “But these disavowals gained little credibility from his conduct of Mormon business in Nauvoo,” writes Moore. His secrecy not only from ‘Gentiles’ but also from “many Mormons whom Smith did not fully trust.”19 The official line, stated on their website, is that the practice of polygamy was banned in 1890. However not all Mormons accepted the ban. A splinter group emerged in the early twentieth century calling themselves The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church) who, with an estimated 6000–10,000 members, reportedly practice polygamy to this day.20 In an 1880 address by the third president of the LDS Church, John Taylor defended the practice of polygamy accordingly: “God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under the banner of heaven against the Government. The United States says we cannot marry more than one wife. God says different.”21 As Simon Critchley has noted, referring to the musical by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, The Book of Mormon: “There is just something weird about Mormonism, and the very mention of the Book of Mormon invites smirks and giggles, which is why choosing it as the name for Broadway’s most hard-to-get-into show was a smart move. As a scholar of Mormonism once remarked, one does not need to read the Book of Mormon in order to have an opinion about it.”22 While there may be smirks and giggles aplenty in Parker and Stone’s work, there is no such brevity in the work of author Robert Kloss. In his first novel, The Alligators of Abraham (2012) he portrayed the grotesqueries of the Civil War and an ‘alternate’ Abraham Lincoln. In The Revelator (2015) he unflinchingly hands us ‘a’ life of Joseph Smith in its full-blown insanity. Kloss unashamedly feeds off the ghosts of Faulkner and Melville and aspires to the gory levels of McCarthy. In what is now a classic postmodern sleight of hand, Kloss shares with Barney the chutzpa of recreating real-life figures to suit his purposes. Barney’s Gilmore is killed by rodeo riding rather than being shot by a firing squad, Kloss’ Smith undergoes apt persecution, but The Revelator clearly suggests that the Golden Plates never existed. Smith here is clearly delusional and is forever followed by a grotesque doppelganger: “And the creature wandered with you always, whispering in your ear, lingering in the shadows, and dripping oil from your ceiling.”23 The second-person narration throughout, alongside the King James-style language, adds to the general sense of disorientation the book exudes.

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For the purposes of this discussion two other contemporary figures that have made potent use of the Mormon faith in their work— with utterly surreal results—are the writer Brian Evenson and the artist Matthew Barney.

Mormon Apocalypse There is an inevitability to the Mormon influence on both Brian Evenson’s fiction and his life. Raised in the faith, Evenson conjoins the pseudo-Biblical language of The Book of Mormon with powerful hints of its sacred and hidden rituals, often in the guise of an evolved genre or even pulp fiction, particularly those of the detective novel, science fiction and surreal horror. Evenson’s Immobility (2012) is set in a distinctly post-apocalyptic locale around Salt Lake City. The book begins with the central character, Josef Horkai, being awoken after 30 years of being stored in stasis. He has no memory of his life before what Evenson terms the ‘Kollaps’—a clear reference to nuclear annihilation but also, no doubt, to Kolob, the planet described in Mormon scripture as being closest to the Throne of God.24 Horkai discovers that he is paralyzed from the hips down. He then meets Rasmus, the leader of the small, dying community referred to as the Hive. Tellingly, Matthew Barney also makes use of Hive imagery and the Borg of Star Trek refer to the Hive—among former members of the Church of Latter Day Saints followers are often referred to as ‘The Morg.’ Horkai is then forcibly carried to the nearby mountains to retrieve a ‘cylinder’ desperately needed by the Hived. When they arrive, he is met by Mahonri, a man named after a prophet in the Book of Mormon. Rasmus makes use of Horkai’s first name, Josef, a name which recalls Kafka’s Josef K in The Trial.25 It is not hard to imagine Immobility as a sequel to McCarthy’s The Road set several decades into the future. The landscape is certainly as blasted, the noxious dust is almost as pervasive. Evenson isn’t as subtle as McCarthy—the flashing explosion and the bizarre human mutations make it apparent that this was nuclear Armageddon. This is not Evenson’s first foray into the post-apocalyptic wasteland—in his 2002 Dark Property a woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, in a devastatingly bleak book that pre-dates The Road by five years.

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In a quest to redefine himself, the main character of another of Evenson’s books, The Open Curtain (2006), latches onto the identity of a fellow LDS member who was accused of performing a violent ritual which resulted in a murder some 100 years prior. The book explores how sectarian violence masquerades in a culture where secrets and religious-based rituals can take a psychological toll on those who are emotionally vulnerable. The main character in The Open Curtain is Rudd Theurer, a high school student in Utah who becomes obsessed with the murder that involves the ritual of Blood Atonement. He chooses to write a school paper about the crime and the research he undertakes refers to or implies that the murder had something to do with the Blood Atonement Doctrine—the literal and ritualistic spilling of a sinner’s blood on the earth. Evenson was living in Oklahoma at the time, just having left a teaching position at Brigham Young University after controversy surrounding his first book, when he stumbled onto a brief mention that William Hooper Young (1871–1928) a grandson of Brigham Young (1801–1877) who attained leadership of the LDS following the death of Joseph Smith, had ritually murdered a woman in New York in 1903. Evenson shares with Ben Marcus a fascination for language and the hazards of structured belief systems. Both question the delusions of religiosity and notions of self-perception. In the grainy noir world of Evenson’s Last Days (2008) his protagonist, after having his hand severed by an assailant, cauterizes the stump via a nearby stove and then coolly shoots said assailant in the head—only to go on to tackle a cult obsessed with dismemberment as a holy creed. But that is just the tip of the ice pick for Evenson, who seems unafraid to tackle any phobia, any dread, in his pursuit of the extreme. That is not to say that Evenson is out to shock for shock’s sake. He is an immensely ‘literary’ writer. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze commented that Evenson’s Altmann’s Tongue (1994): “strikes me as powerful, by reason of the mode of the language and the unusual style, by reason of the violence and force of the words.”26 But the New York Press arguably captured Evenson more accurately with the statement: “Like Garcia Márquez on really, really bad acid.”27 Evenson’s recurrent exploration into ‘sensation’ is influenced to a degree by Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and Altmann’s Tongue features an introduction from the philosopher Alphonso Lingis. But there are also hints of Chandler, Poe and Ballard throughout and it comes as no surprise that Evenson penned an

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introduction to a volume of selected writings of the Swiss crime writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, who once began a tale by stating that: “A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn,”28 a statement that could well apply to Evenson’s own writings. Born in 1966, in Ames, Iowa, Evenson left both the Church and his teaching position following the release of the short-story collection Altmann’s Tongue. Perhaps not surprisingly the Mormon powers that be were horrified by certain elements of Evenson’s distinctly transgressive content. Perhaps it had something to do with the beginning of the story that garnered the books’ title: After I had killed Altmann, I stood near Altmann’s corpse watching the steam of the mud rising around it, obscuring what had once been Altmann. Horst was whispering to me, “You must eat his tongue. If you eat his tongue, it will make you speak the language of birds!” I knocked Horst down and pointed the rifle, and then, as if by accident, squeezed the trigger. One moment I was listening to Horst’s voice, his eyes brilliant — ‘the language of birds’ — and the next I had killed him.29

The eating of the tongue symbolizes a transferal of language, a cannibalistic form of transubstantiation (there are also hints of this when actor Paul Giamatti slices into a pig’s tongue and muses on Norman Mailer’s love of the Word in River of Fundament). The removal of the tongue would also create a vaster orifice in the face of the victim. The murder has the air of a casual—‘as if by accident’—ritual. Cannibalism, alongside Apotemnophilia, is also core to David Cronenberg’s Consumed (2014) in which his protagonists carry out the following dialogue: “They roam the earth looking for a doctor who will cut off a perfectly good arm or leg.” “Or else they do it themselves with a chainsaw or a shotgun. Yeah, what’s it called?” “Apotemnophilia.” “Yeah, body dysmorphic disorder on the street.” “Psychotherepeutic amputation.” “Amputee identity disorder, with a twist of bioethics. It sounds juicy.”30 Cronenberg also makes reference to Issei Sagawa, Japan’s famous cannibal. Sagawa also appears in Adam Parfrey’s (1957– 2018) non-fiction compendium Apocalypse Culture II (2000), a somewhat perverse collection of writings on American Underground cultures. Evenson’s Dark Property and McCarthy’s The Road share a number of themes, key among them the single parent traversing a ravaged world in the hope of saving their child. Evenson’s world is a Ballardian (Hello

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America, 1981) wilderness. This was slightly before the acknowledged threat of global warming and post the cold-war threat of nuclear annihilation, but as Evenson suggests, the end of the world is a constant. “When I was young there was also a sense of threat,” he says: I remember the gas lines and the serious concerns about shortages, as well as books by J. G. Ballard and Samuel Delany and movies like Damnation Alley and Soylent Green and The Day of the Animals which created an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic space. Add into that Mormon talk of having to have a year’s supply of food just in case something went wrong, and I grew up with the impression of our existence being pretty fragile, with the sense that things could go desperately wrong at any moment.31

The influence of McCarthy is discernable in Evenson’s prose and he cites McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968) as a direct influence on Dark Property. “But then there’s a symbolic and religious (or maybe anti-religious) element that came from a very weird personal space.” The genesis of the book coincided with Evenson undertaking a degree in the eighteenth-century British fiction during which he began collecting “weird and forgotten words. Many of the thematic ideas of the piece come directly from my desire to resurrect some of these wonderful, forgotten words.”32 While inevitably Dark Property draws some immediate comparison with The Road, Evenson’s 2009, Baby Leg,33 a bloody, gothic novel, one that could be directed into film by Lynch or Cronenberg (or perhaps Barney), has some whiff of McCarthy’s Child of God (1993). Published by Tyrant Books as a limited-edition tome with dark illustrations by Erik Blair, Baby Leg is a truly bizarre, hallucinatory trip into a world that is part Unabomber, part Twin Peaks and part pure horror. The book came replete with hand-smeared ‘blood’ on the cover. Even when not explicitly dealing with religious subject matter or imagery, American culture often evokes its language, including the influence of the linguistic style of the King James Bible and Evenson readily agrees that biblical tonality has had an impact. Inevitably he also cites the language of the Book of Mormon, while noting that the language lacks the power of that experienced in the King James Bible: At least as important to me are things going on with language in the 18th century with people like William Godwin (who wrote Caleb Williams which I did my dissertation on), William Blake (very influenced by Biblical

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language himself …), and Charles Brockden Brown34 (who wrote Wieland [1798]). Many of these people were steeped in the language of the Bible itself, but process it in a little bit of a different way and often in terms that stand outside of belief, and that’s what I like. I also think Herman Melville’s Pierre: or the Ambiguities is in there somewhere as well.35

One aspect of Biblical language that infuses Evenson’s entire oeuvre is that of violence. In an interview with Evenson, Ben Marcus pointed out that: “When writing is called ‘violent,’ a fundamental semantical mistake is being made, unless the claim is that the writing is itself a violent agent.”36 In response Evenson noted that to render a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act.37

Cult Behavior The notion of ‘the cult’, perhaps inevitably given his Mormon past, plays a strong role in a number of Evenson’s books. “There does seem to be a particular North American interest in cults,” Evenson says.38 They also appear central in a number of Ballard’s final novels, including his extraordinarily blasted landscape in Hello America, although, unlike Evenson or McCarthy he was more literal with nuclear references (as was Philip K. Dick in Dr. Bloodmoney [1965] and other works). Jameson describes Ballard’s work as the “immense eschatological jouissance of the greatest of modern apocalyptic writers.”39 In correspondence with this author, Evenson had mentioned that Ballard had been an influence.40 Evenson has noted that there seems to have been a shift from the coolly cerebral style of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo (both of whom have suggested their share of the apocalyptic or dystopian) into a far more visceral, descriptive approach seen in the recent work of such authors as Ben Marcus, Matthew Derby and Blake Butler, as well as himself and such visual artists as Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy (especially his 2012 White Snow), the late Mike Kelley (1954–2012) and Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw, the creator of the O-ism, an American religion he claims originated at the same time as Mormonism in the nineteenth century. Its ‘theology’ centers on a goddess who may not be named and who is referred to only as O. O-ism was inspired by the messianic cults active in America’s Bible belt, Christian extremists and apocalyptic conspiracy theories and has been expressed via drawing, painting, manipulated photography and videos.

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“I think that in general there’s been a move away from postmodernist usage of language in which, even if something very physical is being described, it still feels ironic and theoretical,” Evenson says.41 Similarly, there is a strong tendency for these writers and artists to hark back to elements of ritual. In what might be described as a secular, Godless age, this may well reflect a certain yearning for some form of gnostic, ritualistic structure. “For me, as someone who grew up in an intense religion with very specific rituals, I think it’s pretty directly a response to that,” Evenson says, and notes that writing has in fact replaced religion in his day-to-day life. “Even though it’s ritual, it’s less a religion than an anti-religion.”42 Another artist who grew up in Mormon environs and now deals with transgressive language(s) is the Los Angeles-based Paul McCarthy, however unlike Evenson, McCarthy has often insisted that his upbringing has had no implicit impact upon his art. “My mother’s relatives were Mormon pioneers,” McCarthy has said. “My fathers were Irish Catholic and Mormon. A lot of people focus on that, but I lived in a suburban, rural area. I decided to be an artist quite early. My parents encouraged me … When I went to the University of Utah, there were very progressive artists in Salt Lake, and the university had an experimental film department.”43 Salt Lake City “can be super repressive,” McCarthy admits. “It’s an issue, but what part it plays in my work, I don’t know. My work has always been about repression to some degree. It can be seen as a reaction to Salt Lake conservatism. But it’s hard for me to pin that down.”44 Elsewhere he makes essentially the same claim: “I kept the issue of the Mormon Church out of my art because it was too much a way of pinpointing (my background) as opposed to what I think about issues of conditioning and consumerism in America.”45 That said, like Evenson, Paul McCarthy, evinces an unusually extreme fascination with the bodily. Evenson’s work also inevitably segues with that of Matthew Barney’s in major aspects of CREMASTER 2, not only in its potent and literal referencing of Mormonism, but in a shared fascination with mutation and amputation, which features powerfully in The Order segment of CREMASTER 3. Barney made chilling use of Aimee Mullins (a double amputee Paralympian who has also modeled for L’Oréal Paris), while forms of amputation are all-too commonplace in Evenson’s work.

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Mullins, who also stars in River of Fundament, was born without fibular bones, and had her legs amputated below the knee when she was an infant (thus, in Barney’s world once again crossing between reality and the artists’ fantasies). In the opening scenes of Fundament, she is seen severing her (prosthetic, but life-like) legs in what may be a nod to David Lynch’s short film The Amputee (1974). Similarly, as mentioned in Chapter 2, Rosanna Arquette in Cronenberg’s Crash, her legs in calipers, is all but amputated. Boxing Helena, the 1993 debut feature film by Jennifer Chambers Lynch, (daughter of David Lynch), sees Nick Cavanaugh (Julian Sands), a lonely Atlanta surgeon obsessed with a woman named Helena (Sherilyn Fenn) who is injured in a hit-and-run accident in front of his home. Cavanaugh kidnaps and treats her in his house, amputating both of her legs and, as the film proceeds, amputating her (undamaged) arms as well. The final image of the film sees Helena entirely intact in a hospital bed, either re-limbed by Cavanaugh in an act of forgiveness or, alternately, the entire episode may be a fantasy of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID, also referred to as amputee identity disorder), a psychological disorder where the subject feels they would be happier living as an amputee. The disorder is related to xenomelia: “the oppressive feeling that one or more limbs of one’s body do not belong to one’s self.”46 Amputation carries a distinctly Biblical connection via Mark 9:43: “And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.”47 Amputation also has a strange literary history that encompasses the Marquis de Sade, Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil (1928), Beckett’s Endgame (1957), Bernhard’s Die Billigesser (1980), Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), various examples of Brian Evenson’s work and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, among others. One of Wallace’s key plot-lines in Infinite Jest revolves around the rumored existence of James Incandenza’s last film, titled ‘Infinite Jest,’ a film so entertaining that the viewer loses any desire to do anything other than watch it. The film, or samizdat, as it is described in Infinite Jest, is sought after by a Quebecois separatist group known as Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (Wheelchair Assassins), for use as a weapon of terrorism against the newly formed Organization of North American Nations (ONAN). Why this cult-like group are in wheelchairs is never clearly stated, but there are substantive hints that this is a ritualistic removal of legs, a prerequisite for entre

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to an elite service/cult. Brian Evenson has contributed to this semigenre with Brotherhood of Mutilation (2003), its novel-length expansion Last Days (2009), and Baby Leg (2009) while pursuing similar themes in Immobility (2012). There are correlations in the visual arts ranging from Hieronymus Bosch to Hans Bellmer to such contemporaneous Americans as Joel Peter-Witkin and Paul McCarthy, perhaps especially his Caribbean Pirates (2001–2005). With Mullins’s amputations and Arquette’s calipers, we are reminded of Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck’s descriptions in 1918 of art trying to “collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”48 Combining art and amputation is indeed an apt Dada moment, however Huelsenbeck’s crash was one of global significance, while Barney’s, Lynch’s and Cronenberg’s are partially the result of being Zaprudered, a localized, gnostic numbing expressed through psychic self-flagellation. “Yesterday’s crash” in this context is Kennedy, it is King, it is Vietnam and Watergate and George Bush in both incarnations. Unlike Huelsenbeck and his ilk, who saw WWI as touching everyone in one form or another, North Americans take their disasters more intimately, as a personal affront regardless of global impact. Personal, like a car crash. Vietnam, despite the plethora of international deployment involved, remained for Americans an American war, an American tragedy. An American car crash and in that way a personal affront. As Matthew Avery Sutton points out: “The American catastrophe in Vietnam forced all Americans to question the future of their country. Was the United States truly a chosen nation to lead the world or was it just one corrupt nation-state among many?”49 The Americans would continue to deploy God’s name, but under a growing fog of self-doubt. Was God dead? It was, of course, not that simple: what Nietzsche in fact said was that it was the moral god that had been overcome.50

Matthew Barney’s Mormon Noir For Barney, Mullins’ remarkable achievements no doubt encapsulate the notion that: “Will is the character in action,”51 in her ability to not only overcome her condition on a day-to-day basis, but to go on to become a famous athlete and model. This notion of “Will” was espoused by the famous football coach Vince Lombardi (1913–1970) via the Jesuit priest Father Ignatius Cox (1883–1965), who taught ethics in the 1930s at Fordham University when Lombardi was in attendance. Barney begins

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CREMASTER 3 with a quote he attributes to both men, but which is almost undoubtedly sourced directly from Cox: “Character is an integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament. It is the will exercised on disposition, thought, emotion and action. Will is the character in action.”52 Barney’s use of death metal in The Order segment of the film harks back to a very strange preemption from as long ago as August 1801, during what Bloom describes as the “first Woodstock,” a religious camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. A Presbyterian minister, Barton Stone (1772–1844), sought the ‘Primitive Church’ at the event, preempting all punk/metal definitions of dance (as well as that of Carl Reiner’s 1979 comedic classic, The Jerk, or those of the various syncretism’s of AfroCaribbean religions): Sometimes the subject of the jerks would be affected in some one member of the body, and sometimes in the whole system. When the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.53

Stone here was describing any typical audience reaction to Barney’s preferred performers, which include Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law who featured in CREMASTER 3 and Morbid Angel and Slayer whose members have cameos in River of Fundament. Notably, Morbid Angel’s and Slayer’s lyrics are infused with religiosity, the occult and anti-Christian themes, and a similar phenomenon was articulated brilliantly by Dan Graham who utilized the Shakers to contextualize his argument in his pseudo-documentary video montage Rock My Religion.54 Punk, Heavy Metal and Death Metal all inspire this propensity in their audiences. Theodor Adorno similarly dismisses the “jitterbugs” of the American jazz scene who, he states, “behave as if they were electrified by syncopation.” They have embraced the name jitterbugs, like the drones in Matthew Barney’s “Hive”: “as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles

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whirring around in fascination… Their ecstasy is without content… It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus’ dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals.”55 In his retelling of the crimes of Gary Gilmore, Barney places himself firmly in the tradition of noir. As with other retellings of historical characters that arise in recent fictions,56 Barney twists Gilmore’s biography to suit his own arcane tastes. Barney is, first and foremost, a storyteller, a fictionalist of grandiose and bewildering narratives. This approach to his art began circa 1991, he told Hans Ulrich Obrist: “I started to become interested in telling stories rather than telling the truth of documenting real-time action.”57 Based (very) loosely on Norman Mailer’s 1979 epic The Executioner’s Song, in Barney’s CREMASTER 2 Gilmore dies in a ritualistic rodeo performance at an arena formed from salt in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah (in reality he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain). Barney discombobulated fact and fiction still further by securing Mailer himself to play Harry Houdini. “There is a constellation drawn in my understanding of Executioner’s Song, between Mailer, Gary Gilmore and Harry Houdini,” Barney told Obrist. This made the inclusion of Mailer seem obvious, Barney added, describing Mailer as becoming paternal to Gilmore as the books’ author. “Gilmore’s grandmother allegedly had an affair with Harry Houdini at the World’s Fair in 1893. This would make Gilmore Houdini’s illegitimate grandson.”58 The Executioner’s Song was representative of The New Journalism,59 a fresh twist in America’s literary history that blurred fictional narrative structure with detailed reportage and encapsulated in such books as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Tom Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test (1968), and of course the more fantastical ‘reporting’ of Hunter S. Thompson. The New Journalism segued powerfully with the conflict in Vietnam, which Jameson describes as “the space of postmodern warfare, in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in Dispatches (1977), his great book on the experience of Vietnam.”60 Comparable to Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983), Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried (1990) and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007) in capturing the surreal mayhem of Vietnam, Herr does indeed play remarkable magic with language. But whereas Wright’s, O’Brien’s and Johnson’s are essentially works of metafiction, Herr’s Dispatches is a work of New

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Journalism.61 Regardless of stylistic approach they all capture a sense of an American purgatory, if not an American Hell. While books such as The Executioner’s Song suggested a radically fresh approach to journalese, it didn’t take long for the rot to set in. As Lewis Lapham has noted, it essentially ground to a halt with the utopic, almost Disney-style rendering of America as unstoppable force in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979).62 Mailer’s prose, as opposed to Wolfe’s florid exaggerations, is lean and hard-edged, utilizing what became known as ‘saturation reporting’ based on police reports, trial transcripts and tape-recorded interviews.63 Reviewing The Executioner’s Song for The Guardian newspaper in 1979, J. G. Ballard asked: “How far does our fascination with Oswald and Charles Manson, Gary Gilmore and James Earl Ray play on the edgy dreams of other lonely psychopaths, encourage them to gamble their trigger fingers on a very special kind of late twentieth century celebrity?”64 A specifically American kind of celebrity, one that evokes Luciferian imaginings—precisely the kinds of evocations of evil utilized by fundamentalists and evangelicals. Ballard, citing the “immense glare of publicity, a virtual deification by the world’s press and television, and the remarkable talents these rootless and half-educated men can show for manipulating the media …”65 could have almost been describing the response Barney received upon the unveiling of the CREMASTER epic. In his way Barney adds to this veneer and hand-delivers it back to an audience—the art world—that is already brimming with borderline psychotics dabbling at art in a form of self-therapy. But, given not only the nature of his material, but the ways he has chosen to show it in terms of the moving image works, his audience demographic is nigh impossible to identify, as the artist himself admits.66 On another level, Gilmore as the ‘void’ suited Barney’s vision ideally. He was a figure seemingly (self) made for others to imprint their mythos upon, an oddly blank canvas. As Ballard noted: “In a strange but impressive way, Gilmore expanded to fill the roles assigned him.” Possibly displaying symptoms of dissociative identity disorder, Gilmore would morph depending on the role expected of him. “One journalist noted that there was racist Gary, Country and Western Gary, artist manqué Gary, self-destructive Gary, Karma Gary and Gary the movie star. He quoted Shelley and Hermann Hesse, and would ask visitors ‘Are you familiar with Nietzsche?’”67

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When asked by Jonathan Jones of Untitled magazine whether it was Mailer who made Gilmore a mythic figure, Barney replied: It was a huge story in America: it was in the news every day and it was on the cover of Newsweek and Time. This was the first execution in ten years, happening at a time when it looked like execution would be no more. It happened in Utah and it probably happened because the Mormons controlled the government there. And because they believed in Blood Atonement, they were happy to kill him. He wanted to die — they were very happy to help him. Somehow it got past the federal stage and it happened, and then there was a landslide of executions after that. His mother was Mormon. He never practiced Mormonism, but I think that he probably had some residual guilt or … I think, somewhere in him, a part of his desire to die that way was to do with his relationship to the religion. On the other hand, it gave him power to do what he did.68

Gilmore was far from the only Mormon to commit a high-profile heinous crime. In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty murdered their sister-in-law and their 15-month-old niece. The brothers were formerly members of a splinter group called the School of Prophets, led by Robert C. Crossfield who went by his ‘prophet name’ Onias. The Lafferty brothers claimed that they were following direct orders from God.69

The Cruciform and the Desert The opening for CREMASTER 2 begins with a tightly rendered sequence of shots over a desert of a sequined saddle that at times resembles an alien spacecraft, a surreal coliseum or, potentially, a bizarre reproductive system. One could draw parallels with the H. R. Giger-designed spacecraft in Alien that Barbara Creed describes accordingly: “when three of the crew enter the body of the unknown space-ship through a ‘vaginal’ opening: the ship is shaped like a horseshoe, its curved sides like two long legs spread apart at the entrance.”70 The imagery is, at least initially, pure Sergio Leone. One almost expects Barney aka Gilmour aka Eastwood’s Preacher in Pale Rider (1985) to emerge on horseback from the shimmering mirage of the salt flats to a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Instead a jagged, Death Metal-inspired symbol—the CREMASTER ‘logo’—appears unfurling its labia-like wings, it begins to bleed and in effect gives birth to the drone bee, an all too apt portent of things to come. The logo itself is a floating vaginal orifice, an ‘entrance’

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for the viewer. But the logo, or logos, also has the cruciform structure that is utilized throughout Gothic/Christian church architecture and epitomized by the floor plan of the Chartres Cathedral in Paris, which is based on the Latin cross. Barney has acknowledged the importance of the Pentagonal in his iconography: “the relationship between the armature and the body, the crucifix and the crucified body.”71 This is a massive, and perhaps intentional, irony. The Mormon Church essentially disavows the Cross in terms of public display in their places of worship. Further, ironically for that church, without Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection he would never have traveled to the Americas, a tenet central to Mormon belief. Barney juxtaposes a number of landscape shots filmed on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, west of Salt Lake City, and the Columbia Ice Fields in Canada. In prehistoric times the Salt Flats were covered by a lake, the source of which lay in the present-day Columbia Ice Fields. The glacier that formed during the ice age is now performing a Texan “two-step” and melting backward toward Canada. In the case of the opening credits of CREMASTER 2 the vaginal slit suggests that this landscape becomes orifice for the conception/insemination of the film itself and also an entry point for our own insertion. It hovers over the salt plains, the site of land speed records, a site where the automobile is unbridled. It is simultaneously the bleached topography from whence prophets emerge. Barney’s setting broadens to encompass the immense Salt Lake. Paul Virillio describes the vast vista of salt of Bonneville accordingly: “a skin of salt and sand for trial runs where, for nearly half a century, precarious victories of horizontal acceleration succeed each other. In fact, the deserts are projection screens for the light of speed and the progressive desertification of surfaces (territory, body, objects).”72 For Ballard: “Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.”73 They are a blank canvas upon which the sacred can be imposed, a conclusion shared by Jameson, who takes this further by also suggesting that the sacred represents a realm of excess and abundance, while the desert may represent the profane, not only the “chthonic garbage heaps of the im-monde (Lefebvre)” that all civilizations generate, “but also the empty spaces of waste and desert, the sterile voids that punctuate so many naturally expressive landscapes.”74 As such Bonneville becomes a perfect site for Barney’s phantasy and Gilmore’s imagined end.

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The desert, and/or the Wilderness, is a powerful motif in the Old and New Testaments75 and The Book of Mormon, as it is for the American mythos itself. Clearly well aware of its various religious incarnations, Barney makes it a blank canvas for the ritualized performance in this work. Nancy Spector argues that: “The environment depicted is the barren frontier of the early Mormon settlers, religious separatists carving out their own Zion on American soil, where the ten lost tribes of Israel were one day to reunite.” She continues: An avenging people with occultist tendencies, the original Mormons taught that redemption could only be obtained through ‘blood atonement,’ the actual spilling of a sinner’s blood on the earth. Such was the legacy that Gilmore, himself a Mormon, inherited.76

Barney’s narrative begins with a séance held between Gilmore’s grandmother Baby Fay La Foe, and his parents, Frank and Bessie, who are attempting to raise the spirit of Houdini. The trio are adorned in severely constricting corsets creating insectoid waists reminiscent of the performance artist Fakir Musafar77 and the severity of fashion that reached their zenith during the Victorian era. Sounding as though she were channeling Aleister Crowley, Baby Faye, in one of the few extended spoken language sequences in the cycle, paraphrases Isaiah 58:6. In a notation in the catalogue for Barney’s 2013 show, Subliming Vessel, referring directly to CREMASTER 2 and headed: “ACT II: ECTOPLASM” he writes: “let every bond be loosed, every force flail, let all iron be broken, every rope or every strap, let every knot, every chain be opened, and let no one compel me — for I am Baby Faye …” This is clearly a reference to Isaiah: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”78 The séance is intercut with close-ups of Frank copulating with Bessie, who wears an even more painfully tight and transparent corset. At the moment of climax, Frank withdraws from Bessie’s vaginal orifice and we see that the head of his penis is shown transmogrified into a beehive, his ejaculate a drone bee symbolizing the conception of Gary Gilmore as part of the next generation of drones and the death of Frank (drones die after mating). This may suggest that Baby Faye’s séance, integral as it is to the act of copulation, is potentially some form of reincarnation which would segue into Barney’s seeming obsession with rejuvenation.

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The Distension of the Flesh Barney’s insertion of a frame of swarming bees briefly recalls the insect mayhem of the opening of Blue Velvet and the transmogrification of Seth Brundle in Cronenberg’s The Fly. It suggests that Frank Gilmore’s body is undertaking a metamorphosis into the physicality of the drone. Writing on notions of metamorphosis in Film International, Alexander Kirschenbaum notes that metamorphosis cinema explores: “the nature of the body and the flesh as self-actualizing entities,” man-machine fusions, “lycanthropic or undead transmutations.”79 Kirschenbaum’s references the Cold War being the period in which the metamorphosis of film could also reference certain shifts in literature such as those in the Cyberpunk genre. Jameson points out that the Cold War “immensely complicated the problems of Utopian representation by foregrounding the ideological ambiguity of the modern state as such, in ways that reshuffled the dialectic of Identity (or uniformity) and Difference,”80 a shift which, he suggests, lives on in the postmodern age (and, he hints, helped to shape that age) and, given their generation, would have held a lingering psychological impact on the likes of Barney and Marcus, especially given the zeal with which evangelicals and fundamentalists publicly decried Communism. This distension of the flesh has leaked into the pages of recent literature as well. Larvae and pupae in River of Fundament are preempted in the kitchen of Mailer’s brownstone when one of the chefs moves a box clearly labeled LIVE INSECTS PERISHABLE. Maggots and scarabs invade every other scene. The Kafkaesque human/insect fusion seen in the fictions of Seth Brundell and Frank Gilmore is also evident in Jeremy Robert Johnson’s novel Extinction Journals (2006)81 and insects are also put to powerful symbolic usage by Blake Butler in There Is No Year (2011) and, of course, Lynch in the opening scenes of Blue Velvet which Greil Marcus as: The rumble grows stronger, and the camera goes down to the ground, to the grass, beneath the grass, to reveal a charnel house, the secret world, where armies of hideous beetles, symbols of human depravity, of men and women as creatures of absolute appetite, banishing all conscience, appear to rise up and march out of the ground to take over the world …82

Insects of all manner infest The Bible, almost inevitably to destructive ends. In a powerful moment in Exodus 10:12–14 they take the very form of Apocalypse:

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Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up on the land of Egypt and eat every plant of the land, even all that the hail has left.’ So Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt, and the LORD directed an east wind on the land all that day and all that night: and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. The locusts came up over all the land of Egypt and settled in all the territory of Egypt: they were very numerous. There had never been so many locusts, nor would there be so many again.83

Mormon legend claims that early settlers encountered a similar disaster. In 1848 their first crop in Utah was assailed by a plague of crickets. When it appeared all was lost, in answer to a prayer, a white cloud of seagulls flew in and devoured the crickets. This supposed ‘miracle’ became a faith-inducing story often utilized to convert unbelievers and encourage church members. But it is bees, not locusts or crickets, that preoccupy Barney, especially the Mormon symbol of the beehive, a lasting symbol for the Church, who emphasize community over individuality.84 Following Gilmore’s conception, CREMASTER 2 cuts to a recording studio where Dave Lombardo, drummer for the speed-metal band Slayer, plays a frenetic drum solo accompanied by the buzzing sound of a swarm of bees. A beehive in the shape of the CREMASTER field emblem is built into one wall of the studio. Such a cacophony in traditional cinema would be background to a frenzied action shot: In Barney’s world it is the action shot. Bees appear again in Barney’s OTTOshaft where a man wearing a Raiders football jersey, the team for which Jim Otto played, with the voice from Steve Tucker, lead vocalist of the metal band Morbid Angel, here playing the role of singer/songwriter Johnny Cash, covered in bees, growls into a telephone. The dark tone of this scene foretells the violence about to occur and the buzz of the bees serves to identify Gilmore’s role as a drone and alludes to Gilmore’s wish (evidently granted) to speak with Cash on the telephone on the eve of his execution. Given the distinctly selective historical memory at play here, Cash (1932–2003) is an interesting inclusion. As Cash grew older his own vision as a songwriter and performer grew increasingly apocalyptic. One of the last songs Cash wrote before his death was The Man Comes Around, the title track from American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002),

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which makes numerous Biblical references. Cash chillingly introduces this song with a spoken version of a portion from Revelation 6:1–2. “And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beasts saying, ‘Come and see.’ and I saw, and behold a white horse.”85 The song concludes with a more vigorous quotation from Revelations: “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts. And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him.” (The same quotation is utilized powerfully in the opening scenes of the aforementioned semi-Biblical Eastwood Western, Pale Rider). The buildup to the murder scene begins with an image of the two Mustangs conjoined by a fallopian-like tube. Gilmore reclines painfully within the orifice of the left-side vehicle, tearing listlessly at the upholstery and uncovering a Vaseline stuffing that he attempts to sculpt into a mountain that repeatedly becomes flaccid, suggesting impotence, an implication that is reiterated when Gilmore despairs of sculpting and struggles out of his prison uniform and into jeans. In the process he reveals a tiny, malformed and under-developed penis. There is a strange moment of voyeurism here when Gilmore’s penis is revealed to the gas station attendant, Max Jensen, as he pulls his squeegee over the driver’s side window. Could this be a motivation for Gilmore’s next action or is it later, when Jensen inserts the gas pump— the suggestion of male potency—being enough to enrage Gilmore with jealousy? Vaseline is a by-product of petroleum thus the potent symbol of automobile compulsion/copulation—an energizing, fluid unlike Gilmore’s more flaccid Vaseline/sperm. One flows, suggesting virility, the other oozes sluggishly, hinting at the impotency illustrated by Gilmore’s failed sculpture. Gilmore reaches into the glove compartment for a pistol and forces Jensen into the gas station. He robs the register and then forces the attendant into the bathroom where he fires twice, point-blank, into Jensen’s head, thus desperately reaffirming his potency via the gun as phallus. Jensen collapses in a pool of blood on the tiled floor. “He commits his crime seeking some form of consummation or release,” writes Nancy Spector. “… approaching this catastrophic act as if, in Ballard’s words, it will be a ‘fertilizing rather than a destructive event.’”86

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Recreating Ritual The next scene occurs in a fabricated hall based on the Mormon Tabernacle. As Eric Doeringer notes, this resembles a beehive and is also: “a symbol of the body for Mormons. The gigantic organ that dominates the hall is significant as both an ‘organ’ (a vital part of the body) and as an instrument that produces a ‘drone’ (a long-sustained tone).”87 This is the site of Gilmore’s judgment, which he accepts without appeal. The fulfillment of the blood atonement of his death sentence will allow Gilmore into Paradise and guarantee his immortality. Gilmore’s execution is set in the aforementioned prison rodeo arena sculpted out of salt in the flooded Bonneville Salt Flats. Ben Marcus also makes use of salt in The Flame Alphabet where it represents dead and toxic language drifting across the land. “Victims were dried out and saltless. Salt played a role. Of course it did. Streaking dunes of salt collecting first in the Midwest, sweeping to the south. Drifts and ridges and swells. Attractive in the landscape, if you didn’t know what it meant.”88 For Marcus the salt represented dead words, dead language. Both Barney and Marcus utilize salt as a silencing mineral, a symbol of death (of Gilmore, of language itself). One may recall the fate of Lot’s Wife in Genesis. Two angels encourage Lot’s family to flee Sodom, ordering them not to look behind them. But as they leave she pauses. “But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.”89 She is silenced from repeating whatever it was she had witnessed. Four massive beehives mark the boundaries of the rodeo arena. Gilmore’s execution is initiated with a formal parade of mounted troopers carrying the ten flags that represent the lost tribes of Israel (there were originally twelve tribes—the tribes of Judah and Joseph were never ‘lost’—the descendants of Judah became Jews and the descendants of Joseph became the Mormons. Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss, was Jewish, Gilmore a Mormon). The execution scene reveals Barney’s obsession with detail. Gilmore, wearing a Stetson and chaps, is handed a baroque belt buckle inscribed with the dates 1893 and 1977, the years of the Columbian Exposition and Gilmore’s execution. He is then mounted onto a Brahma bull in a narrow enclosure decorated in a honeycomb design. As the bull is released it bucks violently, Gilmore hanging on strenuously until finally both bull and rider collapse in death. Barney may well have had in mind Exodus 29:36: “And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement.”90

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In the following scene Mailer/Houdini is being enclosed in a hexagonal trunk by Canadian Mounties at the Columbian Exposition, who then smear Vaseline onto the beehive-shaped locks that secure the chest. Back on the Salt Flats, Bison circle Gilmore’s fallen body in something of a pagan or pre-Christian ceremony, suggesting his salvation within the Mormon faith. Critic Mark Cousins makes grand, but justifiable, claims for the film: “By the time he made Cremaster 2 on digital Beta, Barney had become a master film-maker.”91 Suggesting that Barney reaches the heights of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Cousins describes Barney’s Gilmore as lolling “in a Cronenbergian organic tract connecting two cars,” which represent Gilmore’s and his girlfriends’ vehicles. Cousins accurately notes that Barney’s editing: “is slower here, his camerawork more dreamlike, his soundtrack more brooding and the film more engaging and associative.”92 The enclosed space becomes womb-like, ready for Gilmore’s violent rebirth. Writing in Harper’s magazine, Roger D. Hodge commented that Barney suggests that the Mormon Church acts like a beehive. “The metaphor soon extends to encompass American society,” he suggests. “Gilmore the drone seeks to become a real man, and the hive destroys him for his hubris. Ecce homo. Such is the tragedy of Man.”93 (italics mine)

Invisible Literature The Ballardian crossover and confluence of medical texts, and the sense of the language of the Ten Commandments, filters into Barney’s written accompaniments as well. On his Drawing Restraint website94 the series is separated into four distinct categories: Hypertrophy, Situation, Condition and Production. Like Ben Marcus in The Age of Wire and String, he stretches the ‘reality’ of language to suit his own ‘biological’ ‘reality.’ Situation: Situation is raw drive. It is a sexual energy without discipline of direction. It is described by a diagram of the male and female reproductive system in the six week old developing fetus. The sex of the fetus remains undifferentiated for the first seven weeks. Situation is undifferentiated sexual energy, and is characterized by hunger and indiscriminate consumption.

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Or: Condition: Condition is the visceral funnel. Condition disciplines the oral intake of Situation. In Condition, the undifferentiated field of sexual energy begins to take form. Condition functions like the stomach, systematically breaking down the bolus ingested by Situation, nourishing it and encouraging growth.95

These approaches recall the way in which Taylor describes the writing of DeLillo: “it would not be too much to suggest he is actually a systems theorist writing in the guise of a novelist.”96 Such clinical language is suggestive of a dry orifice, stripped of both poetics and sexuality. It is this deliberate mis-contextualization that causes the visceral shock: the work simmers with sensuality, the words undercut that affect with a conscious jolt. Marcus does something almost identical in The Age of Wire and String in sections he dubs ‘terms’: SADNESS The first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving.97

Indeed, writing on the CREMASTER series, Nancy Spector could well be describing the narrative agenda of The Age of Wire and String: “terms like ‘human’, ‘architecture’, ‘landscape’, ‘vehicle’ and ‘animal’ designate not separate entities but zones of interpretation… Characters transmogrify into multiple versions of themselves, cars perform ritual sacrifice, islands have digestive tracts, buildings have diaphragms, bees pollinate people and playing fields have reproductive systems.”98 “I used to think about a three-phase diagram: Situation, Condition, Production,” Barney told Thyrza Nichols Goodeve: Situation was a zone of pure drive, useless desire that needed direction, needed to be passed through a visceral disciplinary funnel, which was the second zone — Condition. The third zone, Production, was a kind of anal/oral production of form. It gets more interesting if Production is bypassed: at that point the head goes into the ass, and the cycle flickers between Situation and Condition, between discipline and desire. If it goes back and forth enough times something that’s really elusive can slip out — a form that has form, but isn’t overdetermined.99

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Taking Ballard’s notion of technical manuals as ‘invisible literature’ further, Barney describes his own elaborate catalogues in similar terms: “The books function as manuals, and bring clues to the narrative.”100 “All of that language depends upon accepting the body as perforated,” Barney states. “The body has primary entry points and primary exit points, but there are also a number of secondary valves: it’s full of holes.”101 Here the book becomes body, the pages become flesh, a notion that retains discomfiting historical touchstones. The term for binding books in human flesh is Anthropodermic bibliopegy and is historically documented since at least the seventeenth century. Its known history in America is comparatively sparse, although copies of the 1932 biography Lincoln the Unknown were bound featuring African American skin and one copy resides at the Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Collection. Several anatomical volumes, including at least one belonging to and apparently prepared by the renowned anatomist Joseph Leidy, reside in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. As of August 2012, these volumes and samples of humanskin leather were on public display. The binding of books in human skin is also a common element within horror films and works of fiction: Both Chuck Palahniuk and Sam Raimi with his Necronomicon Ex Mortis in The Evil Dead series have dabbled with the image. In H. P. Lovecraft’s, ‘The Hound’ his protagonists have collected “A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.”102 And, as mentioned earlier, such an object is central to Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh. While Barney may have utilized the florid excesses of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings as source material for River of Fundament, his own literary tastes fall closer to the drier approach of Ballard or DeLillo, and indeed he has suggested the latter as a potential contributor to his own books. “I read End Zone, this book about football that [DeLillo} wrote … I’ve read essays and shorter things by him and, in certain cases, things that had a stylistic similarity to Ballard with a kind of technocratic language that I respond to. I think that this book could function that way, with these descriptions of approaching synthesis and what is actually happening within the body: the body’s own resistance.”103 If Ian Buchanan’s definition is accepted, in which Deleuze and Guattari’s “whole thought on the body is best understood as an attempt to replace aetiology (cause and effect) with ethology (action and affect), Freud

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with Spinoza.” The very nature of Barney’s Drawing Restraint project is decidedly Deleuzian: the text itself is restraint: medical/formal as opposed to fluid/romantic. “‘Restraint’ is what Foucault called ‘discipline’: the organization of bodies in practices producing a proliferation of counter-practices and narrative inversions,” suggests Stephen Tumino.104 But Barney’s use of restraint can also be read in semi-religious terms, seen in Pentecostalism—as expressed in “stances of possession, or of the willto-be-possessed.”105 Barney’s willingness, even desire, to draw within restraints can thus be read as a form of glossolalia, an ecstatic expression or communication under possession. Unlike the other films in the CREMASTER Cycle, CREMASTER 2 and 3 are linked via a more literal or traditional narrative structure.106 The bulk of CREMASTER 3 is set in New York in 1930 during the construction of the Chrysler Building. At the time, the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan Building were competing to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, taking the place of the cathedral as the highest symbol of ‘belief’: the site of Chrysler outgrowing Christ. The Bank of Manhattan Building was designed to be 927 feet high—two feet taller than the Chrysler Building. Shortly before its completion, a secret 18-foot Nirosta steel spire was raised atop the Chrysler Building, making it the taller building. This phallic macho-architectura bordered on the obsessive. For Ballard: “The ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.”107 For Georges Bataille in his entry for ‘Skyscraper’ in the Encyclopaedia Acephalica, it is far more: “One of the innumerable versions of the story of the struggle between father and son is the Biblical narrative concerning the erection of the Tower of Babel” (italics mine). … we find here the attempt to climb up to the sky — that is to say, to dethrone the father, to possess oneself of his virility — followed by the destruction of the rebels: castration of the son by his father, whose rival he is. Furthermore, the coupling, rash though it may be, of these two words, the verb ‘scrape’ on the one hand and, on the other, the substantive ‘sky,’ immediately evokes an erotic image in which the building, which scrapes, is a phallus even more explicit that the Tower of Babel, and the sky which is scraped — the object of the desire of the said phallus — is the incestuously desired mother …108

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Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, compared Barney directly to Lynch, stating that CREMASTER 3 was the most powerful American film since Mulholland Drive (2001): Its star is New York’s Chrysler Building, a skyscraper with hauteur, a true capitalist temple that, unlike the Empire State Building, does not welcome visitors. … As reimagined and rebuilt by Barney—its secret interiors lovingly recreated with strange alterations — it is a temple of verticality, a masonic power centre, a constellation of evil forces. In Barney’s fantasy, it is the masterpiece of sinister architect and Freemason, Hiram Abiff, played by the American sculptor Richard Serra. Barney’s Chrysler Building is also the final resting place of the executed murderer Gary Gilmore.109

Masonic Law and the novus ordo seclorum Barney intertwines the story of the (phallic) erection of the Chrysler Building with Masonic lore and rituals. Masonic initiates must pass through three degrees: Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason. At the culmination of initiation, Masons reenact the murder, burial and resurrection of Hiram Abiff, the Biblical architect of the Temple of Solomon. As Nancy Spector recounts the story behind the initiation, Abiff constructed two massive brass pillars at the entrance of the temple and was believed to be the keeper of cosmic secrets. The Masonic legend maintains that Abiff was killed by three apprentice stonemasons who were attempting to force him to divulge the secret name of God— when he refused they slayed him with a blow to the forehead from a maul. When his body was discovered, King Solomon embraced him with the grip of the Master Mason, bringing him back to life, revived, Abiff whispered the words ‘Maha byn’ in King Solomon’s ear, a phrase now used by the Masons to symbolize the divine knowledge lost with Abiff’s death, “much as the Hebrew word ‘Jahweh’ is a surrogate for the name of God.”110 Barney deliberately evokes the more ‘mysterious’ aspects of Freemasonry favored by American conspiracy theorists, the “secret architecture of power tucked beneath the bright and shiny pragmatism of the United States’ young federal government.”111 The ‘evidence’ of this ‘secrecy’ in plain sight is seen via the American dollar bill with its mysterious pyramid and all-seeing eye symbolic of the novus ordo

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seclorum—the New Order of Things (not the New World Order as it is often mistranslated by conspiracy buffs). Lending some weight to theories of the power of the organization is that fact that almost all of the contributors to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were Masons. The Masons often carve the maxim ‘audi, vide, tace’ on their buildings—hear, see and be silent—thus perhaps in part explaining Barney’s muffled apprentice—the mouth orifice rendered mute. CREMASTER 3 then moves deep beneath the construction site of the Chrysler Building where the external structure is the phallus and the internal structure (the basement where the narrative begins) is the bulbourethral or Cowper’s glands. A female corpse (shot in the heart four times like Gary Gilmore) slowly digs her way upward through a goat burial ground. The corpse is, in fact, the reincarnation of Gilmore, decay having converted his body into that of a decomposed and rotting female. Its presence suggests that Gilmore successfully entered the sphere of Houdini at the end of CREMASTER 2 and transformed into a woman or vessel. The ‘living corpse’—or zombie (or, as Mark C. Taylor has it: “corpse/fetus”112), emerged from the chthonic, is then taken up a series of stairs by five young undertakers, eventually emerging in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. As Spector points out, “While Gilmore may have escaped the status of drone, his death evidently brought no peace, for it is the curse of the zombie to wander the earth forever, without release from terrestrial bonds.”113 In discussion of Julia Kristeva’s work, Creed notes that: “Within the biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of pollution—the body without a soul. As a form of waste it represents the opposite of the spiritual, the religious symbolic.” In relation to the horror film, it is relevant to note that several of the most popular horrific figures are ‘bodies without souls’ (the vampire), the ‘living corpse’ (the zombie) and corpse-eater (the ghoul). Here, the horror film constructs and confronts us with the fascinating, seductive aspect of abjection.114

(S)he is deposited in the back seat of a 1938 Chrysler Imperial New Yorker parked in the lobby (the Imperial New Yorker was introduced in 1930—the same year as the launch of the Chrysler building.) “This bloodied, putrefying incarnation of Gilmore is a portent of evil to come,”115 says Spector. With its arguable resemblance to a petrified

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(albeit moist) Egyptian Mummy, Barney’s zombie is also a portent of things to come in River of Fundament. This sense of escape via transformation, via both Gilmore and Houdini, is eerily echoed in Lynch’s Lost Highway when the incarcerated Bill Pullman is ‘transformed’ into a youthful, and innocent car mechanic. It is also pursued in what may be now termed the Chapter 3 of this thematic in Barney’s River of Fundament. “On a visceral level there was a big difference for me between ‘wet’ characters and ‘dry’ characters,” Barney has said. “Zombie films never appealed to me because they were too ‘dry.’ I was repulsed by the lack of moisture in those characters.”116 “The creatures that attract me are wet, sensual, and more unseen than the undead on view in most contemporary horror films,” he told Henry Jenkins, who succinctly captures the contradictions at heart in Barney’s interest in the zombie: Barney finds ways to focus on the sensuality of the zombie figure, the wet earth that clings to her nakedness, the ways that decay resculpts her body, the stiffened grace of her movements, and the saturated colors of her thinning hair and decaying flesh. Here, Barney would seem to be drawing inspiration from other horror filmmakers. Mario Bava or Dario Argenta come most immediately to mind who wanted us to celebrate the transformations which the human body undergoes after death as a thing of intense, otherworldly beauty, who wanted to blur together eros and thantos so that we could confront the natural human fascination with death not as morbidity but as desire.117

It is impossible to avoid post-millennial America’s fascination with the zombie. While dominated by schlock, the genre has inspired intriguing creative interpretations in such novels as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) and Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2007). “The zombie is a polyvalent revenant,” writes Mark Dery: … a bloating signifier that has given shape, alternately, to repressed memories of slavery’s horrors: white alienation from the darker Other: Cold War nightmares of mushroom clouds and megadeaths: the posttraumatic fallout of the AIDs pandemic … free-floating anxieties about viral plagues and bioengineered outbreaks. These days, visions of zombie apocalypse look a lot like the troubled dreams of an age of terrorism, avian flu, and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight. …118

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After the ritual crushing of the Imperial, what remains of the automobile/Gilmore/zombie—a metallic lump—is placed into one of four jars carried by a female assistant. Given Barney’s arcane lingua these could reference Ancient Egyptian Canopic jars, used in the mummification process to preserve the organs of mummies and prepare them for the afterlife—traditionally, one each for the stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver. If this were the case, Barney was referencing Egyptian ritual 15 years before releasing River of Fundament. He was also using such symbols to point toward reincarnation, particularly apt given the resurrection of the Apprentice in Fundament and Barney’s bronze sculpture Canopic Chest (2009–2011). As CREMASTER 3 proceeds, the Apprentice is intercepted by three hit men from the Syndicate (referencing the three masons who killed Hiram Abiff). They smash his mouth into a railing, destroying his teeth and violating the orifice of language. The three Master Masons escort the Apprentice into a dental office on the 71st floor, where he is stripped down to his undergarments, those of a First-Degree Masonic initiate. He also has a small fleshy apron hanging from his abdomen. Placed in a dental chair, which also resembles a gynecological table, one of the hit men raises the apron of flesh for the Apprentice does indeed give ‘birth,’ and, revealing that the Apprentice has genitalia resembling an anemone or a gruesome scar incurred by traumatic castration that recalls the miniscule, mutilated penis of Gilmore in CREMASTER 2. For Spector this is, within Barney’s semiology, “part of an organism struggling with its internal formulation.”119 The Chief Architect (Richard Serra) descends to the dental office carrying the crushed remains of the 1930 Chrysler Imperial New Yorker, which has been compressed by the Crown Imperials into a fistsized lump. The Architect forces the remains of the crushed car into the Apprentice’s mouth. In effect, if there are organic remains left of the reincarnated female Gilmore/zombie remaining within the mangled guts of the New Yorker then the Apprentice/Barney is in fact performing an act of cannibalism: eating the remains of the reincarnated Gilmore in an act of bizarre transubstantiation. Simultaneously this refers to the Ballard/Cronenberg notion of reshaping the body via technology (which has been pursued by the performance artists Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) and Stelarc, among others). At the moment the jagged lump is inserted, the Apprentice’s intestines prolapse through his rectum as a thick goo that drips out of the Apprentice’s

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distended rectum and down a trough molded into the dental chair. The fluid, in which one can see shards of the Apprentice’s teeth, falls into a tray beneath the chair and solidifies into a porcelain rod which Barney describes as the “internalization and idealization of the paternal phallus.”120 The scene is an ultimate opera of orifice. For Fundamentalist Televangelists (as well as politicians and movie stars) pearly white teeth are a talismanic necessity: a sign of purity regardless of that of which they speak. The teeth dazzle and blind, allowing the Word of God to be filtered and reinterpreted in any way the Preacher desires. For Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams,121 the destruction and/or removal of teeth can symbolize the fear of castration: perhaps a form of the vagina dentata. Teeth are, “by definition uncanny,” writes Mark Dery: “the point at which the skull beneath the skin erupts through the body’s surface. … A bony reminder that mortality is the subtext lurking just beneath the human comedy …”122 We are reminded, too, of the horrific dental torture featured in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976) and the Nine Inch Nails video for the song Happiness in Slavery (1992) featuring the late S&M performance artist Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) tied down in a dentist’s chair and attacked by self-guided drills hard-wired for maximum pain infliction (Flanagan suffered from cystic fibrosis and made the suffering of extreme pain central to his performance work). Nancy Spector describes the dental office on the 71st floor in CREMASTER 3 as “reminiscent of the penal dental surgery in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).”123 It is perhaps Cronenberg’s eXistenZ that has the stronger correlation with its visceral weapons that fire human teeth as ammunition. As David Kunzle notes: “The tooth is the only part of the sentient body we fear and consider it normal to lose.”124 With his teeth smashed and the remnants of the Chrysler ingested, the Apprentice’s apron of flesh lengthens, symbolizing his passage from Entered Apprentice to the final degree of Masonic initiation: Master Mason. (Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was inducted into the Masonic fraternity on March 15, 1842). Writing on this moment, Neville Wakefield notes of the Architect that: “Isolated in his cerebral foundry, his sacrament of concrete and steel is at once secret and corrupt. By destroying the mouth he closes the first orifice of betrayal.”125 In further cinematic references, the deco aesthetic is similar to that mastered by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner and the Coen Brothers in such films as Barton Fink (1991) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), down

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to the dress style of the Architect’s thugs. The corridor also recalls the architectural aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). As they escort the Apprentice to the dentist’s office they pass a cabinet replete with human skulls, a memento mori. In yet another cinematic reference, that of the horror film Friday the 13th (1980), the Apprentice’s face is masked in a plastic/Vaseline mask, a white frame which accentuates the pond of blood that the mouth will soon become. In what may also be a nod to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) the orifice, somewhat gratuitously given what is to ensue, is inspected with a gleaming speculum. Even the mobsters look appalled as a section of bowel emerges and begins to ejaculate teeth, recalling Salvador Dalí’s comment that: “Nothing can convince me that this foul putrefaction of the ass is other than the hard and binding flash of new gems.”126 However the ‘operation’ is deemed a success, concluding with an overt Masonic handshake.

The Automobile Cathedral The CREMASTER 3 narrative shifts to the Entered Apprentice (Barney) troweling cement over Nirosta steel gas caps mounted on the rear ends of five 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperials,127 which will go up against one 1930 New Yorker. “The ambiguous role of the car crash needs no elaboration,”128 writes Ballard. In a sub-section of The Atrocity Exhibition titled “Celebrations of his wife’s death,” Ballard took his fascination to visceral and surreal extremes: Pudenda of auto crash victims. Using assembly kits constructed from photographs of (a) unidentified bodies of accident victims, (b) Cadillac exhaust assemblies, (c) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, volunteers were asked to devise the optimum auto crash victim. The notional pudenda of crash victims exercised a particular fascination. Choice of subject was as follows: 75 percent J.F. Kennedy, 15 percent James Dean, 9 percent Jayne Mansfield, 1 percent Albert Camus.129

In 1989, the same year that Barney graduated from Yale and moved to New York, David Lynch presented the short avant-garde musical collaboration Industrial Symphony #1 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (with composer Angelo Badalamenti and featuring Julee Cruize). Among the key motifs is a topless dancer who crawls suggestively through the back

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window of a classic late-’40s coupe in an act of auto-dentata, an auto orifice. During that same period Barney was also consuming the bizarre hardcore punk visuals of The Butthole Surfers: “Some of the first shows I saw when I moved to New York were the Butthole Surfers,” Barney has said, implying a strong influence. “They were using found medical films, projecting them behind the band — things that were really difficult to watch, like a vasectomy. The way they mixed media I found really compelling.”130 In August 2008, Barney held a house party and pig roast which he dubbed Black Metal Pig featuring live performances by such bands as Copremeis, Inquisition, Dagon, Krallice and S. M. E. S. Barney, wielding sharpened knives, kept his guests satiated by roasting and carving up several suckling pigs, something of a rehearsal for at least one scene in River of Fundament. The Black Metal pigs were consumed, the one in his film left to rot and crawl with maggots, its skeletal remains on display at museums amidst the traveling Fundament sculptures. Very Death Metal. In 2004, Barney released Hoist, a 14-minute, 36-second work commissioned by Neville Wakefield as part of the Destricted Festival which suggested something of a homage to Lynch and a clear dosage of the Ballardian. Hoist begins with a scene that could have come from an X-rated version of Eraserhead, that of a penis that ranges from flaccid to erect and back as it grinds against a mechanical wheel amidst an aural soundtrack of industrial sounds and dripping water. “Neither should the film be read as a direct reification of some mythology, even if mythological themes inform the imagery,” noted critic Todd Satter of Hoist. His non-representational imagery, he suggests, leads to residual confusion, particularly in the way Barney seems to refute any polarization between organic and inorganic. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, he notes that: “in contrast to a Turing machine — the mind as computer — machines are diagrams of assemblages, with real relations to bodies and brains. Within machinic constructs, the dichotomy between real and synthetic tears down.”131 With Hoist, the truck becomes a bizarre erotic prosthesis which is suggestive of Freud’s comment in Civilisation and its Discontents: “With all his tools, man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning.”132 If elements of CREMASTER 2 recall bodily transformation in Cronenberg’s works, then a major section of CREMASTER 3 can be linked to another Cronenberg film, his 1996 adaptation of Ballard’s

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infamous 1973 novel Crash. In an interview for Film Comment, Cronenberg explains that he questions, at least in Hollywood terminology, “the immutable” of film narrative—that it must go in a certain direction and must be neatly concluded. “But when you’re not doing it and your audience’s expectations are formed by that, they don’t know what to do.”133 Replacing “book” for “film” in this instance, Cronenberg’s comments recall what Deleuze was seeking: “What we look for in a book is the way it transmits something that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding …” (italics mine).134 In a similar fashion, discussing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), Greil Marcus notes that “There’s a vision in these movies: a vision of an America where all boundaries — of familiarity, belief, place, body, and identity — can and will be used against you, where they will be torn up and plowed under.”135 Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String acts similarly, as does Ballard who extends this questioning into the realm of written narrative: I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the of the technological landscape.136

For Greil Marcus, the notion of narrative, of America’s ‘story’, “once public and part of common discourse, something to fight over in flights of glorious rhetoric and blunt plain speech, has long since become spectral: it is now cryptic.”137

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The entire filmic structure of the CREMASTER Cycle breaks from traditional linear narrative, with each ‘chapter’ filmed out of order: “I enjoyed the fact that the narratives would not fall together in a linear fashion,” Barney told Obrist. “I felt pretty certain that ending in the middle would be the right way to finish.”138 Indeed, as illustrations of such breaks with tradition, both Barney and Cronenberg subvert the narrative of the high-speed Hollywood car chase cliché. In CREMASTER 3 the Crown Imperials perform a slow-motion dance, while in Crash Vaughan recreates the scene of James Dean’s death by accelerating a Silver Porsche Spyder (the model that Dean died in) over a compressed distance. Both are highly choreographed scenes that deny the anticipated fast-tracking cinematography and accompanying explosions that have become the cinematic norm. They more resemble a liturgical rite, ponderous and ritualistic. Speaking with Barney in 2015 he cited Crash as one of his all-time preferred books. Somewhat closer to tradition, in River of Fundament Barney sends a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am crashing through a bridge railing. David Lynch is also not averse to the car crash. Mulholland Drive opens with a dramatic automobile accident. Taking this further, Paul Virilio questions the impact of the car on the future of culture: “In a decidedly fin de siècle world, where the automobile questions its driver about the functioning of the handbrake or whether the seatbelt is buckled … surely we have to ask ourselves whether the silence of art can be sustained for much longer.”139 A strong sense of religiosity continues in CREMASTER 3. The Chrysler building is nothing if not a phallic cathedral to the automobile, and in its competition to be the highest building in the land, emulated the Catholic priority of acquiring hilltop real estate and erecting towering cathedrals. The sense of ritual in the sacrifice of The New Yorker in CREMASTER 3 emulates both the use of insect/bee ‘dance’ movements and Masonic and Mormon rituals. Roland Barthes had a similar notion. “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals,” he wrote in 1957 in Mythologies. “I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”140 The automobile was also the cornerstone of a specifically dark, apocalyptic form of narrative writing during the Great Depression. In The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932), The New Republic literary

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editor Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) captured the process of recycling iron for Henry Ford’s new car manufacturing in language that recalls the fire and brimstone tonality of Revelations—or a set from Barney: The home of the open-hearth furnaces is a vast loud abode of giants: groans, a continual ringing, the falling of remote loads. The old automobiles sent in on little cars are like disemboweled horses at the bull-ring whose legs are buckling under them. A fiend in blue glasses who sits in a high throne on an enormous blue chariot or float causes it to move horizontally back and forth before the white-glowing mouths of the furnaces, feeding them the flattened cars like so many metallic soft-shell crabs — ramming each one in with a sudden charge, dropping it quickly with a twist.141

Also, in common, CREMASTER 2 and Crash share idealized classic car wipeouts—an erasure of the past and in its way a microcosm of contemporary American economic (and spiritual) apocalypse: the cars destroyed. Barney’s New Yorker and Cronenberg/Ballard’s Spyder were machines that were representative of the future: speed and style. Speaking of the 1950s, David Lynch said that: “Cars were made by the right kind of people. Designers were really out there with fins and chrome and really amazing stuff. … Old cars would weather a crash but the people inside them would just, you know, be mutilated! But I’m telling you now, the thrill is gone.”142 Thus, the future is symbolically bruised, crushed and decimated and, if one takes the automobile as phallus, castrated.143 The car here represents the ‘old,’ ‘good’ America of Fundamentalist values—solid and trustworthy, like the wagons that took the Puritans West or the plethora of chariots in The Bible which resembles a Los Angeles traffic report: Psalm 68:17: “The chariots of God are myriads, thousands upon thousands.” Some examples: Psalm 20:7: “Some boast in chariots and some in horses.” Isaiah 31/1: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots.” Isaiah 66:15: “See, the LORD is coming with fire, and his chariots are like a whirlwind: he will bring down his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.” Judges 1:19: “The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.” Chariots also appear in The Book of Mormon, although far less often, see: 2 Nephi 12:7: “Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures: their land is also

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full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots.” They are today accommodated to the point of regular drive-in religious services.144 They remain the symbolic vehicle of the American Super-Ego. This almost cyborgian coupling of man and machine was preempted by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening chapter of Anti-Oedipus, aptly titled ‘The Desiring Machines’ with shadows of both Ballard and Ben Marcus. Machines that eat, breath, shit and fuck. A breast becomes a machine for the production of milk while the mouth is the machine that consumes that milk, if, indeed, that mouth is in working order. “The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine …”145 In the anorexic the mouth is a failed orifice. In Marcus’ Notable American Women and The Flame Alphabet it is not just language that is eschewed, rejected from the mouth, but also food. The mouth is barely a ‘machine’ at all. It is mute. Similarly, both CREMASTER 2 and Crash strongly suggest the reshaping of the human body via technology in a crude version of cyborgian/posthuman transformation: the Architect forcing the remains of the New Yorker into the Apprentices’ mouth in an act of ultimate oral/orifice transaction, a perverse Eucharist as the machine is inserted in an act of silencing and potential rebirth. In Crash, both book and film, the protagonist James Ballard asks his nemesis Vaughan whether JFK’s assassination could be considered “a special kind of car crash” to which he replies: “a case could be made.”146 That murder, with its attendant and iconic Zapruder Footage, retains an uneasy potency in American culture. For Baudrillard: “It is the energy of Kennedy’s murder which radiates out over present-day America. I say this to illustrate not only the indulgence, but the self-publicizing, self-justificatory violence of this society.”147 There is also the shared morphing of historical and fictional narratives. Barney evokes Gilmour, Houdini and the ritual of Blood Atonement while Ballard/Cronenberg utilize James Dean, the assassination of JFK (“a special kind of car crash”) and Jayne Mansfield.148 (Mansfield also plays a powerful cameo in David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System [2010] where a township has been designed so as to resemble Mansfield’s profile when viewed from the air). Ballard is also fascinated with the orifice via the wound and it is not difficult to see why Spector cites Ballard as a powerful influence on Barney.

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Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts — by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, ban above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and the fuel levels of the engine.149

There is yet another Barney/Cronenberg correlation. The destruction of The New Yorker is essentially an erotic ballet that illustrates Barney’s interest in the Mormon obsession with bees. The cars shunt and manipulate their ‘mate’ with careful calculation, sharing as it were in the seeding of the new Queen. Cronenberg played not dissimilar games with his 2012 reinterpretation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. But the sense of claustrophobic eroticism is borne out via Cronenberg’s internalized eroticism, with the car as a neutral ‘safe’ environ, the car’s interior becomes an orifice of desire. Just as Barney’s Gilmore displays a mutilated penile erection within the space of the car before he murders his victim in CREMASTER 2, so too does Cronenberg suggest a secure, albeit transitory and far more potent, zone of erotica before deathly inevitability. Cronenberg’s choice of novels to interpret is telling indeed: Ballard’s Crash, Burrough’s Naked Lunch and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. In Cosmopolis (both book and film) a 28-year-old billionaire currency speculator/ asset manager Eric Packer (played in the film by Robert Pattinson), rides slowly across Manhattan through traffic jams, in his luxury stretch limousine, on his way to his preferred barber (Obrist notes the fact that Barney had in fact read Cosmopolis150). The traffic jams are caused by a visit of the US President. In a limousine entering Manhattan in Barney’s DRAWING RESTRAINT 7 (1993) a hairless kid/satyr chases his tail in the front seat, while in the back seat, two developed satyrs, a ram and a ewe—wrestle. Using the tip of the ram’s horn, the ewe attempts to draw a ram horn (or mutilated phallus) in the condensation that has formed over the surface of the moon roof. DRAWING RESTRAINT 7 ends with the satyrs flaying one another, and with the flaying of the upholstery beneath the tail of the kid. Both the satyrs and the vehicle are punished for an act of hubris: their attempt to produce a finished drawing in their

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own likeness. Neville Wakefield notes that: “As the limousine that is both their transport and confinement hurtles across the arcing bridges and tunnels of Manhattan, the satyrs enact the myth of Marsyas, the ancient satyr who was punished by the gods for his hubris by being flayed alive and his skin nailed to the trunk of a tree.”151 The flaying of Marsyas was the subject of numerous paintings during the Renaissance. See especially The Punishment of Marsyas by Titian, painted circa 1570–1576.

Ritual as Narrative The flaying of flesh also appears in Occidental Restraint (2005/2009), the finale of Drawing Restraint 9, recounted through the mysterious relationship between the Guests (played by Barney and Björk). Wakefield argues that: In the dénouement, where the Guests strip themselves of submerged flesh in order to achieve communion with the hunted cetacean, Barney’s persistent interest in extreme corporeality comes closest to the narratives of penitence and transubstantiation that underpin the Christian Passion. Flesh, it seems to say, is vital witness to this mortality. Our nourishment is itself an autophagic act and our cultures create rituals of mortification in order to describe what may be variously understood as the font of resistive creativity, the blank void of existence, and the indestructible energy of the soul … the two protagonists become fully identified with the object of their fascination by flensing and eating the flesh of the other. But while their act of cannibalistic self-mutilation may signal the possibility of transfiguration and rebirth, it also heralds the end of the body as vital force.152

In a 2006 interview Barney told Arthur Danto that a “liberating departure came after Field Dressing, with the Otto/Houdini works from 1991 to 1992, where I employed actors and established a narrative.” Barney describes developing ‘protagonistic’ or ‘antagonistic’ characters, visualized as existing within a larger conceptual body which began to satisfy an interest he had developed in being “present in the work, within my body, yet being multiple.”153 At the time he was developing Field Dressing (1989) and was reading Creativity and Perversion (1985), a reexamination of Freud’s concept of perversion by French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel.

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Barney’s interpretation of Chasseguet-Smirgel’s theory is that perversion is natural to the human psyche and has a direct relationship to creativity, citing such artists as the Marquis de Sade and Hans Bellmer. Barney describes perversion as an impulse that was trying to overcome its condition in the world, avoiding the constraints of paternal law by “eroding the difference between gender and generation … internalizing the world as a way of breaking it down to an undifferentiated, primordial, or excremental state. This language was useful for me, and helped organize some of the thoughts I was having at the time.”154 Barney also references the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé as being another influence on his work of this time, Barney: For practitioners of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, the deity Ogun is the god of both iron and war. As the creator of iron, he makes the blade to cut away the primordial forest and create civilization. With this same knife, he has the ability, too, to take the life of another. In the way that Candomblé uses nature as a lens for understanding the world, Ogun is particularly attractive to me as a creation myth whose function is to describe a balance between creative and destructive energy. On some level, The Cremaster Cycle was designed to figuratively destroy itself in the process of its making. As a model of the creative process, it felt necessary to allow for that to happen so that the system could be visualized as potentially regenerative. It also felt necessary to describe a conflict similar to the one proposed by Chasseguet-Smirgel, of an entity that is trying to defeat its destiny as a predetermined, differentiated form, though not necessarily succeeding in this case.155

This may recall the unusual utilization of the religion by William Gibson in his follow-up to Neuromancer, Count Zero (1986).156 Gibson has often segued into the realm of religiosity. In Spook Country he speculates on the nature of religious communication and heresy: As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. […] And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those were most in touch with Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn’t yet gotten the Free Spirit message. […] Someone like Manson,

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for instance, simply wouldn’t have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would’ve hated it. What good it would be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists… ? […] But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ration, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

Writing in Wired magazine Erik Davis notes that: “Magic and Pagan gods fill the literature of cyberspace.” “Count Zero … follows the fragmentation of Neuromancer’s sentient artificial intelligence into the polytheistic pantheon of the Afro-Haitian loa—gods that Gibson said entered his own text with a certain serendipitous panache. ‘The African religious impulse lends itself to a computer world much more than anything in the West. You cut deals with your favorite deity—it’s like those religions already are dealing with artificial intelligences.’ One book Gibson read reproduced many Haitian veves, complex magical glyphs drawn with white flour on the ritual floor. ‘Those things look just like printed circuits,’ he mused. The West African trickster Legba was carried across the Atlantic by Yoruban slaves, and along with the rest of his spiritual kin, was fused with Catholic saints and other African spirits to create the pantheons of New World religions like Cuba’s Santería, Brazil’s Candomblé and Haiti’s Vodun (Voodoo). Like the Greek god Hermes, Legba rules messages, gateways and tricks, and as the lord of the crossroads, he is invoked at the onset of countless rituals that continue to be performed from São Paulo to Montreal.”157 And as Bloom points out, cyberspace, once equated by many on the Religious Right as a tool of the Antichrist, is now the fecund realm of home-cooked apocalyptic prophesising. As Bloom points out, this is the realm of the “future-shock cyberspace apocalypticism” of Newt Gingrich. “It may be that Gingrich’s principal effect upon his prophecy-inspired supporters is that he has reversed their

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attitude toward computers, since many of them began with the somewhat mad equation that the computer equals Antichrist. Under the sway of the ingenious Speaker, most of them have reversed that early identification, and some now program their prophesies directly upon their laptops.”158 Barney’s reading of Candomblé clearly led directly to his referencing of the zombie in CREMASTER 3. According to the Haitian tenets of Vodou, a dead person may be revived by a bokor, or sorcerer. Thus we have the Mormon (Gilmore) resuscitated as a zombie via ancient sorcery, the Haitian veves replacing the Mounties on horseback. This miasmatic palimpsest of religious contusions also embraces more ‘mainstream’ sensibilities. Barney was raised in a family of lapsed Catholics. He told Wakefield that he realized he had “inherited a fear of both — Protestants and Catholics — while being equally ignorant of either belief system. And I think that in some ways CREMASTER 3’s effort to mine a model for an undifferentiated conflict is informed by just that.”159 In the Gospel according to Barney in CREMASTER 3, it is not Christ who appears and then reappears after death, but the Anti-Christ, Gilmore, who is returned to ‘life’, as are Mailer, Houdini, James Lee Byars and the Apprentice in River of Fundament. Despite being renowned during his incarceration for his compelling charisma, Gilmore’s effective suicide, or act of Blood Redemption, failed to win him followers, but has garnered him a degree of immortality courtesy of Mailer, and then Barney. But Gilmore was a martyr to one cause: Gilmore. “A religion becomes a people, as it has for the Jews and the Mormons, partly out of human tenacity inspired by the promise of the blessing of more life, but also through charismatic leadership,” notes Bloom. What we now call Judaism was essentially created by Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph to meet the needs of a Jewish people mired under Roman occupation in Palestine and elsewhere in the empire. A great sage, Akiva was also a leader of extraordinary charisma, an old man when martyred by the Emperor Hadrian, presumably for inspiring the insurrection of Bar Kokhba that ended at the siege of Bethar. Joseph Smith, killed by a mob before he turned 39, is hardly comparable to the magnificent Akiva, except that he invented Mormonism even more single-handedly than Akiva gave us Judaism, or Muhammad, Islam.160

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But is it also Barney himself who wishes to rise from the dead post the tsunami-like attention raised by the CREMASTER Cycle via River of Fundament? In the process he has resurrected Mailer’s tome. Barney has noted that: “Harold Bloom’s review of Ancient Evenings suggested that Mailer is the protagonist, and that it’s basically about his relationship to the American literary canon. So I developed the story from there, placing Mailer at the center of the film as three spirits who transform through the body of an animal.”161 “Bloom definitely gave me a vantage point, a way in,” Barney confirmed with me. “His other writings on Egyptian mythology were also an influence.”162 But Evenings was critically derided, as were aspects of CREMASTER, both suffering forms of flagellation and crucifixion. Is Barney, with Fundament, attempting his own bid at immortality? It is unlikely that either Barney’s CREMASTER 2 or Brian Evenson’s works (or those of Matt Stone and Trey Parker) will help convert more Americans to Mormonism. However, the indefatigable fan of the Mormon Church, Bloom, writing in 1992 predicted that by 2020 the Mormons would represent “at least ten percent”163 of the American population. He had predicted something similar in The Western Canon in 1994. “Perhaps one day, well onto the twenty-first century, when Mormonism has become the dominant religion of at least the American West, those who come after us will experience a fourth such shock when they encounter the daring of the authentic American prophet Joseph Smith in his definitive visions, The Pearl of Great Price and Doctrines and Covenants.”164 In 2014 Bloom’s prophetic ambitions resemble those who have predicted the specific date of the End Times. In 2014 the official Church of Latter Day Saints website claims 6,398,889 members in the United States, “comprising about 2% of the nation’s population.”165 However, the landmark Trinity College American Religious Identification Survey found that “self identified adult Mormons make up not 2% but rather 1.4% of the adult US population — that’s about 4.4 million LDS adults.”166 With only a few years to go to fulfill Bloom’s target, the end times for the Mormon faith may be closer that he thought. Barney’s religious fixations and fascination with arcane semiology, presented through a clearly distorted and mutated lens, is a perfect example of my central argument. His use of Mormonism and other religious symbols is a clear-cut ‘symptom’ of expressions of cultural-schizophrenic belief systems in contemporary America. But if Barney makes use of Mormonism in expressing eschatological crisis, something not dissimilar

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occurs when his contemporary, author Ben Marcus, turns his lens onto the realm of Judaism.

Notes

1. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 2. 2.  Erik Davis, ‘Necromancer: The Database of the Dead,’ http:// www.21cmagazine.com/filter/Erik-Davis/Necromancer-The-Databaseof-the-Dead, first published in 21•C magazine, 1997. 3. Steve Erickson, American Nomad, pp. 179–180. 4. Alex Shoumatoff, ‘The Mountain of Names,’ The New Yorker, May 13, 1985, p. 51. 5. Alex Shoumatoff, ‘The Mountain of Names,’ p. 52. 6. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 94. 7. Mark Twain, Roughing It (American Publishing Company, Chicago, 1872), pp. 58–59. 8. Terry L. Givens, ‘Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon,’ A New Literary History of America, p. 193. 9. Erik Davis, ‘Necromancer: The Database of the Dead.’ 10. Erik Davis, ‘Necromancer: The Database of the Dead.’ 11.  Institute for Religious Research, https://irr.org/failed-propheciesof-joseph-smith. 12.  Institute for Religious Research, https://irr.org/ failed-prophecies-of-joseph-smith. 13.  Sally Denton, ‘Romney and the White Horse Prophecy,’ Salon.com, January 30, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/01/29/mitt_and_the_ white_horse_prophecy/. 14. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 224. 15. Harold Bloom, ‘Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?’ The New York Times, November 12, 2011. 16. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 177. 17. The Church’s history of polygamy is a complex one that has plagued the LDS since its inception. The official line, stated on their website, is that the practice was banned in 1890: “In 1890, President Wilford Woodruff received a revelation that the leaders of the Church should cease teaching the practice of plural marriage (Official Declaration 1).” http:// www.mormon.org.au/faq/practice-of-polygamy. 18. Robert Baird, Religion in America (1844) quoted in Laurence R. Moore’s Religious Outsiders, p. 5. 19. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 36. 20. Due to the highly secretive nature of the FLDS facts and figures are hard to verify. These figures are taken from Sons of Perdition, a 2010

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documentary directed by Tyler Measom, Jennilynn Merten, and Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (quoting John Taylor, address, January 4, 1880, Great Salt Lake City) (Doubleday, 2003), p. 250. 21. Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, quoting John Taylor, address, January 4, 1880, Great Salt Lake City (Doubleday, 2003), p. 250. 22.  Simon Critchley, ‘Why I Love Mormonism,’ The New York Times, September 16, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/ simon-critchley/. 23. Robert Kloss, The Revelator, p. 135. 24. Reference to Kolob is found in the Book of Abraham, a work that is traditionally held by Mormon followers as having been translated from an Egyptian papyrus scroll by Joseph Smith. 25.  Paul Tremblay, ‘Broken on the Wheel of Apocalypse,’ Los Angeles Review of Books, August 16, 2012, http://lareviewofbooks.org/article. php?id=842&fulltext=1 “Horkai also resembles Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, waking to a terrible physical transformation: in addition to his waistdown paralysis, Horkai’s skin is hairless, smooth, and eerily pink. Oleg calls Horkai a monster that shouldn’t have been awoken, while others insist that Horkai has been transformed into something no longer human. Horkai, like the cockroach, the only other wildlife spotted in Immobility’s poisoned environment, can now withstand prolonged exposure to radiation. It’s why Rasmus and the Hive need him to find the cylinder. Only Horkai can survive the trek to the mountain to retrieve it.” 26.  Gilles Deleuze and Brian Evenson, Altmann’s Tongue (University of Nebraska Press, 1994) back cover. 27.  New York Press, quoted on cover of Brian Evenson, Altmann’s Tongue (University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 28.  Friedrich Durrenmatt and Elyse Sommer, CurtainUp Reviews, Williamstown Theatre Festival (Summer 2007). 29. Brian Evenson, Altmann’s Tongue, p. 13. 30. David Cronenberg, Consumed (2014), p. 70. 31. Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ interview with Ashley Crawford, 21•C magazine, March 2010, http://www.21cmagazine.com/BrianEvenson-Evenson-s-Tongue “It’s also made me incredibly suspicious of moments when things seem to be going well. I think in the ’70s a lot of people felt that way, and then in the ’80s (with Reaganomics) and ’90s there was a kind of willful forgetting of all that. Now, we’re starting to be aware again of things that we deliberately tried not to see for years.” 32. Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, March 2010.

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33. Brian Evenson, Baby Leg (Tyrant Books, 2009). 34. Interestingly, Jack O’Connell also makes reference to Charles Brockden Brown in Word Made Flesh. 35. Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, March 2010. 36.  Ben Marcus, ‘Brian Evenson’ (first published in Storyquarterly 31) http://webdelsol.com/evenson/beven.htm. 37. Evenson continues: “The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise, measured, controlled, in the grip of certain arbitrary but self-consistent rules. Only rarely does real violence become endowed with aesthetic qualities. Like religion, language does violence to the immanent world by forcing the objects of that world to be understood in terms of generalities, by stripping them of their specificities and categorizing them. And this sort of violence is in everything. Nietzsche talks very convincingly about how ethics are founded on murder and how the Christian notion of good is perhaps the most insidious form of violence available. But this isn’t the sort of violence that people are talking about when they say the book is violent. To call a piece of writing violent because it renders violence is ludicrous — it shows an inability to separate representation from reality, an inability to acknowledge frame, a refusal to admit the ways in which actions become transformed in being translated into words. If you’ve ever been involved in real acts of violence, you can see how profound the difference is.” 38.  Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, 2010, “Much more so than in Europe, say — though writers in those countries often have an interest in politics and engagement that is pretty uncommon in American literature, at least in the same way. For someone who is Mormon, I think it’s even more intense, but it’s already there in larger American culture. Manson’s a big part of it, as is Jim Jones, as are various psychoanalytic cults (which you have in England and Germany as well, though the writers in those countries don’t seem to write as aggressively about them) and non-religious popular pseudo-cults revolving around people like Dr. Phil. As is the fact that we live in a country in which a good many members of the population don’t take religion casually, but instead are incredibly aggressive about it. There’s something particularly American about this obsession—we really do feel that if we can understand something about cult behavior that we’ll understand something about ourselves.” 39. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 199. 40.  Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, 2010, “I read Ballard’s stories when I was in college on the recommendation of a professor and then forgot about them. Only last year, reading through the collected stories that just came out, did I realise how big of an influence

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he’d been. The stories much more than the novels — he does things with perception and consciousness in the stories that I think are remarkable and which helped me to mentally set the stage for what I do in my own discussions of trauma. His world view, his mood and even (in something like ‘The Drowned Giant’) his sense of tone are all things that have had an impact on me.” 41. Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, 2010. 42. Brian Evenson, ‘Evenson’s Tongue,’ 21•C magazine, 2010. 43.  Paul McCarthy in Suzanne Muchnic, ‘This is how he grew to be unclean,’ Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2008, http://articles.latimes. com/2008/feb/24/entertainment/ca-mccarthy24. 44.  Paul McCarthy in Suzanne Muchnic, ‘This is how he grew to be unclean,’ Los Angeles Times. 45.  Philp Hunter Drohojowska, ‘The Mechanical Id,’ Artnet, http:// www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp11-14-00.asp. 46.  R.C. Smith, ‘Amputee Identity Disorder and Related Paraphilias,’ Psychiatry 3 (2004), pp. 27–30. https://doi.org/10.1383/ psyt.3.8.27.43394. L.M. Hilti, J. Hanggi, D.A. Vitacco, B. Kraemer, A. Palla, R. Luechinger, L. Jancke, and P. Brugger, ‘The Desire for Healthy Limb Amputation: Structural Brain Correlates and Clinical Features of Xenomelia,’ Brain (2012), https://doi.org/10.1093/ brain/aws316. 47. Mark 9:43, King James Bible. 48.  Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dada Manifesto,’ Berlin, 1918 (Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951). 49. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse, p. 332. 50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Random House, New York, 1968), p. 36. 51. Vince Lombardi, quoted in the opening passage of CREMASTER 3 (2002). 52. Attributed to Father Ignatius Cox and Vince Lombardi, quoted in the opening passage of CREMASTER 3 (2002). 53. Barton Stone, quoted in Bloom, The American Religion, p. 61. 54. Dan Graham, Rock My Religion (1982–84), Electronic Arts Intermix. 55. Theodor Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (The Continuum Publishing Company, New York, 1982), p. 292. 56.  Examples of this include Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986); Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand (2001); DeLillo’s Underworld (1997); and Libra (1998).

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57.  Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, The Conversation Series #27 (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2013) p. 7. 58. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 21. 59. A term coined by Tom Wolfe and the title of his collected works of various New Journalism writers in The New Journalism (Picador, 1973). 60. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 45. “The extraordinary linguistic innovations of this work may still be considered postmodern, in the eclectic way in which its language impersonally fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language and black language: but the fusion is dictated by problems of content. This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie — indeed, that breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principle subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.” 61. Michael Herr, Dispatches (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 20: “As long as we could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we’d still be running around inside our skins like something was after us, ha ha, La Vida Loca. In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going: saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human: hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.” 62.  Lewis Lapham, ‘Kingdom Come,’ Lapham’s Quarterly, July 27, 2013, http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/preamble/kingdom-come. php?page=4 “The Right Stuff forged the American hero as titanium tubing impervious to reentry speeds and the heat of the sun, American power likened to a Promethean pillar of fire lifting its disciples out of the well of death. By way of balancing the market, the next decade produced multiple narratives of American decline, furnished abundant premonitions of doom in the form of popular books (The End of Science, The Death of Meaning, The End of Nature, The Death of Economics, and The End of History) drifting across the American sky well before the arrivals in New York of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston.” 63. An approach that would be later appropriated by fiction writers such as Moore in Watchmen, Jeremy Robert Johnson in We Live Inside You

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(2011) and James Ellroy’s works in general and arguably has its genesis via Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). 64. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 41. 65. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 41. 66. Amy Jean Porter, ‘Fluid Talk: A Conversation with Matthew Barney,’ Stunned.org, undated, http://www.stunned.org/barney.htm “I think it changes. It’s different from place to place, it’s really hard to say — that’s exciting. A lot of it came from having done these like this, as films shown in a cinema. The audience isn’t particularly a fine arts audience… I think the best way to show these pieces is in a cinema, in an environment where it looks right and sounds right and it’s seen from beginning to end. As a result of that some really nice things have happened — like a new audience, and a younger one. And with that, our little conversation was restrained from development--it seeped back into the woodwork of the residents’ lounge of the Clarence Hotel. All that remained to be imagined were a few dollops of Vaseline oozing out from architectural orifices and a lone light bulb dripping with psychology.” 67. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 42. 68. Matthew Barney, interview by Jonathan Jones, Untitled, London, #21/ Spring 2000, http://www.postmedia.net/999/barney.htm. 69. Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Doubleday, 2003), p. 1. 70.  Barbara Creed, Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine http://urania-josegalisifilho.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/alien-and-monstrous-feminineby-barbara.html. 71. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 106. 72.  Paul Virilio, ‘Negative Horizons,’ Semiotext[e] USA (Autonomedia, 1987), p. 163. 73. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 82. “Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.” 74. Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 22. 75. A random selection would include: Matthew 4:1: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Isaiah 48:21: “They did not thirst when He led them through the deserts He made the water flow out of the rock for them: He split the rock and the water gushed forth.” Psalms 106:14: “But craved intensely in the wilderness, And tempted God in the desert.” Jeremiah 2:6: “They did not say, ‘Where is the LORD Who brought us up out of the land of Egypt,

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Who led us through the wilderness, Through a land of deserts and of pits, Through a land of drought and of deep darkness, Through a land that no one crossed And where no man dwelt?’” 76. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 36. 77. Musafar is considered the father of the Modern Primitive movement, which involves body modification in ritualistic forms. Barney rather literally quotes from Musafar in his use of agonizingly tight corsets in CREMASTER 2. Musafar infamously created and wore a corset that reduced his waist to 48.26 cm. Barney would most likely be aware of Musafar’s works via his interest in the RE/Search publications. Matthew Barney, interview with the author, Hobart, November 19, 2014, for The Saturday Paper, February 14, 2015. 78. Isaiah 58:6–8, King James Bible. 79. Alexander Kirschenbaum, ‘The New Flesh: A Critical Analysis of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema,’ Film International, July 4, 2011, http://filmint.nu/?p=2656 “Stylistically, these films showcased their bodily change elements through the lenses of disease and hyper-violence, grotesqueries newly possible in the decade that bred AIDS and the pinnacle of Cold War-induced nuclear paranoia. Metamorphosis cinema was only possible over a brief window of time. Politically, it was a reaction to the lax restrictions on filmed violence and sexuality imposed by the MPAA in the 1980s: technologically, it was the result of a breakthrough in the arena of special animatronic creature effects, specifically in terms of creative hydraulic rigging and the ascent of realistic sculpture as the dominant methodologies of the time.” 80. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 197. 81.  Extinction Journals (Swallowdown Press, 2006) tells the story of a hapless loser who survives nuclear Armageddon by sowing live cockroaches onto a business suit. In the process of surviving he accidentally kills the President of the United States who is wearing a suit of Twinkies for protection—put cockroaches and Twinkies in close proximity and the result isn’t pretty. “I was a bug wrangler as a kid,” Johnson said in an interview with this author. “Grew up in the high desert eight miles outside of Bend, Oregon, and our property was at the border of nothing else, this huge expanse of dust and rocks and scraggly juniper trees. The scrub brush would become infested with great clusters of weaver caterpillars, swarms of dying gypsy moths would fill our truck bed, every rock and woodpile was crawling with scorpions. Ants ruled everything. Coyotes mauled the free range cattle and left them to become maggot farms. And there I was in my overalls, crouched over all of it, filling hole-punched two liter soda bottles with sticks, dirt, rocks, leaves,

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and any wiggling thing too slow to escape my hands. I fed ants to ant lions, june bugs to spiders, and tried to avoid the more serious snakes. It was a very tyrannical nature boy childhood, at least until the Nintendo Entertainment System came along.” www.21cmagazine.com/JeremyRobert-Johnson-He-Will-Live-Inside-You‎, November, 2012. 82. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, p. 117. 83. Exodus 10:12–14, King James Bible. 84. The origin of this symbol most likely relates to a statement in the Book of Mormon. In Ether 2:3 it states: “And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee: and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind.” The Deseret News (October 11, 1881) described the symbol of the beehive as: “The hive and honey bees form our communal coat of arms…. It is a significant representation of the industry, harmony, order and frugality of the people, and of the sweet results of their toil, union and intelligent cooperation.” The beehive appears on public and private Mormon buildings including temples and tabernacles, It also appears on the seals of the state of Utah. 85. Revelation 6:1–2, King James Bible: “6 Now I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, ‘Come!’ And I looked, and behold, a white horse! And its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer.” 86. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 39, quoting Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 23. 87. Eric Doeringer, http://CREMASTERfanatic.com/Synopsis2.html. 88. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (Granta, 2012), p. 16. 89. Genesis 19, King James Bible. 90. Exodus 29:36, King James Bible. 91.  Mark Cousins, ‘The White Stuff,’ Sight and Sound, June 6, 2012, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/103. 92. Mark Cousins, ‘The White Stuff,’ Sight and Sound, June 6, 2012. 93. Roger D. Hodge, ‘Onan the Magnificent, The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art,’ Harper’s Magazine, March 2000, Vol. 300, No. 1798, p. 77. 94. Matthew Barney, http://www.drawingrestraint.net/. 95. Matthew Barney, http://www.drawingrestraint.net/. 96.  Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo (Religion, Culture, and Public Life) (Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 184. 97. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 13.

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98. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 19. 99. Matthew Barney, in Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘Travels in Hypertrophia: An Interview with Matthew Barney,’ Artforum, May 1995, p. 69. 100. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 31. On p. 51 Barney expands upon this notion: “I think the manual thing was always part of the program: that it wasn’t a catalogue or any kind of explication that was necessary, but rather it was about organizing the ideas into a manual, and that they weren’t exhibitions that were being made but rather facilities. And a facility needs a binder, a manual.” 101. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 40. 102.  H.P. Lovecraft (author), Leslie Klinger (editor), ‘The Hound,’ in The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Liveright, 2014), p. 96. First published February 1924 in Weird Tales, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 50–52. Anthropodermic bibliopegy is also central to Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh. 103. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 40. 104.  Stephen Tumino ‘‘Barneyworld’: the cultural imaginary of the global factory,’ Textual Practice 26(3) (Routledge, 2012), pp. 502–503, https://content-ebscohost-com.ezp.lib.unimelb. edu.au/pdf27_28/pdf/2012/05H/01May12/75910538. pdf?T=P&P=AN&K=75910538&S=R&D=lfh&EbscoContent=dGJyMMTo50SeqLM4v%2BbwOLCmr0yep7ZSsae4SrWWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJyMPGotU%2BzqrRIuePfgeyx43zx “The ‘way of seeing’ produced by Barney’s work, however, is not the product of restraint, whether understood as immanent and local as in Foucault or, as in Jameson, the end result of the rationalization demanded by the market. Rather, ‘restraint’ is a mode of sense-making with which to contain awareness of the social production of culture and the senses. In other words, the need for a ‘total work of art’ and the multiplex way of seeing it inaugurate in The CREMASTER Cycle is not necessitated by the technology of production fetishized in Barney’s films (such as whaling or constructing the Chrysler building, e.g.), nor is it the necessary product of the destruction of metanarratives of the contemporary caused by the triumph of the market over social life.” 105. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 175. 106. For the sake of levity here I shall eschew discussion of the ‘Celtic bookends.’ The film begins and ends with a recounting of the Celtic legend of Fionn and Fingal set on the two coasts flanking the Irish Sea — Fingal’s Scottish cave and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. 107. J.G. Ballard, High Rise (Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 10.

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108. Georges Bataille, Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Atlas Press, 1995), p. 69. 109. Jonathan Jones, ‘The Myth Maker,’ The Guardian, October 17, 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/oct/16/artsfeatures. 110. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 44. 111. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, p. 103. 112. Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, p. 79. 113. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 45, note 60. 114. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993), p. 1. 115. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 45. 116. Karen Rosenberg, ‘Influences: Matthew Barney,’ New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/16523/. 117. Henry Jenkins, ‘Monstrous Beauty and Mutant Aesthetics: Rethinking Matthew Barney’s Relationship to the Horror Genre,’ http://web.mit. edu/cms/People/henry3/horror.html. 118. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 11. 119. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 49. 120. Matthew Barney, in correspondence with Nancy Spector, quoted in footnote, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 81. 121. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1889, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf. 122. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 206. 123. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ Matthew Barney: THE CREMASTER CYCLE, p. 51. 124.  David Kunzle, ‘The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political Struggle,’ Zone Part 3 (Zone Books, 1989), p. 29. “While fear of tooth loss, toothache and the pain of dental treatment should have diminished radically, the dentist himself retains the aura of torturer — witness the scene in the recent film Brazil, by Terry Gilliam, where the torture chamber in the modern terror state is accoutered like the dentist’s … toothache and tooth loss remain with us as a nightmare, an atavism, a psychic archetype of pain, a metaphor of impotence and fear of death.” 125. Neville Wakefield, ‘The Passenger,’ frieze #67, May 2002, http://www. frieze.com/issue/article/the_passenger/.

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126.  Salvador Dalí, ‘The Stinking Ass,’ This Quarter 5, September 1932, reprinted in Lucy Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970). 127.  The cars refer to Barney’s own biography: both the 1967 cars and the Imperial New Yorker holding the corpse were part of Chrysler’s Imperial line: 1938 is the year of Matthew Barney’s father’s birth and Barney was born in 1967. 128.  J.G. Ballard in V. Vale and Mike Ryan, eds., J.G. Ballard, Quotes (RE/Search Publications, 2004), p. 239 “… apart from our own deaths, the car crash is probably the most dramatic event in our lives, and in many cases the two will coincide. Aside from the fact that we generally own or are at the controls of the crashing vehicle, the car crash differs from other disasters in that it involves the most powerfully advertised commercial product of this century, an iconic entity that combines the elements of speed, power, dream and freedom within a highly stylized format that defuses any fears we may have of the inherent dangers of these violent and unstable machines.” 129. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 98. 130. Karen Rosenberg, ‘Influences: Matthew Barney,’ New York Magazine. 131. Todd Satter, ‘Matthew Barney’s “Hoist” and the Desiring-Production of Space,’ http://www.anyspacewhatever.com/matthew-barneys-hoistand-the-desiring-production-of-space/. 132. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud), p. 43. 133. Gavin Smith, ‘Cronenberg: Mind Over Matter,’ Film Comment, Vol. 33, No. 2, March/April 1997, p. 20. 134. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990 (Columbia University Press, New York, 1995), p. 22. 135. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, p. 107. 136.  J.G. Ballard, introduction to the French Edition of Crash, 1995, reprinted in Vale and A. Juno eds., RE/Search 8/9, p. 96. 137. Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, p. 8. 138. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 7. 139. Paul Virillio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (Continuum, 2000), p. 76. 140. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Vintage, 1957), p. 88. 141. Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932) quoted in George Packer, Don’t Look Down, The New Yorker, April 29, 2013, p. 70. 142. David Lynch in Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 3. 143. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (1891–1995), is credited as creating many of the contemporary corporate manipulation techniques in advertising via his uncle’s techniques, advising car companies that

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they could sell cars as symbols of male sexuality. Bernays Typescript on Publicizing the New Dodge Cars, 1927–1928, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ mss/amrlm/lme/me06/me06.html. This unbound, corrected, typescript carbon copy presents material on Bernays’s radio campaigns publicizing the new Victory 6-cylinder cars made by Dodge Brothers, Inc. The material was used in condensed form in The Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965). The typescript begins with a portrait of what automobile tycoons’ money did for Detroit and its suburbs. 144.  See, as but one example: ‘Roadside Service: Drive-In Church Brings God To Your Car,’ March 3, 2014, http://www.npr. org/2014/03/03/285278319/roadside-service-drive-in-churchbrings-god-to-your-car. 145. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 1. 146. J.G. Ballard, Crash (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 102. 147. Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 95. 148. This is a trope that also occurs in the writings of Steve Erickson (Hitler, Jefferson), Alan Moore (JFK’s murder, Richard Nixon), Don DeLillo (J. Edgar Hoover) and others who fall into the purview of this book. 149. J.G. Ballard, Crash, p. 11. 150. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 47. 151. Neville Wakefield, ‘Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail,’ http://nevillewakefield.com/matthew-barney-prayer-sheetwith-the-wound-and-the-nail-2/. 152. Neville Wakefield, ‘Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail.’ 153. Matthew Barney in Arthur C. Danto, ‘A Dialogue on Blood and Iron: Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto on Joseph Beuys,’ Modern Painters, September 2006, pp. 62–69. 154. Matthew Barney in Arthur C. Danto, ‘A Dialogue on Blood and Iron,’ pp. 62–69. 155. Matthew Barney in Arthur C. Danto, ‘A Dialogue on Blood and Iron,’ pp. 62–69. 156. William Gibson, Count Zero (Victor Gollanz, 1986). William Gibson, Spook Country (Putnam, 2007), pp. 116–117. 157. Erik Davis, ‘Technopagans: May the Astral Plane Be Reborn in CyberSpace,’ Wired magazine, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/ technopagans_pr.html. 158. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 220. 159. Neville Wakefield, ‘The Passenger,’ frieze #67, May 2002, http://www. frieze.com/issue/article/the_passenger/.

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160. Harold Bloom, ‘Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?’ The New York Times, November 12, 2011. 161.  Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters | Sexy Beast,’ The New York Times, February 7, 2014, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/ art-matters-sexy-beast/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. 162.  Matthew Barney, interview with the author, Hobart, November 19, 2014, for The Saturday Paper, February 14, 2015. 163. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 113. 164. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 6. 165. Newsroom, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-stats. 166. Joanna Brooks, ‘Mormonism Is No Longer One of America’s FastestGrowing Faiths. What Happened?’ Religion Dispatches, University of Southern California, June 5, 2014, http://www.religiondispatches.org/ archive/culture/5611/mormon_numbers_not_adding_up/.

CHAPTER 5

Deconstruction: On Judaic Law and the Apocalypse of Language in Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree: but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it: and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.—Rev. 9:4–61

If anything could have spurred the American apocalyptic imagination more than the actual turn of the millennium and its attendant would-be Y2K bug it was the dark advent of September 11, 2001. Inevitably 9/11 spurred a grim tsunami of creativity, much of it, such as Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man (2007) and Art Spiegelman’s In The Shadow of No Towers (2004), floundering to find ways to depict the impact of the event. Thomas Pynchon waited 12 years to attempt his own reckoning in a powerful moment in Bleeding Edge (2013). This is the closest to contemporaneity that Pynchon has come in his novels. Set in the wake of the dot.com boom, Bleeding Edge reads like a chronological precursor to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) and Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (2015), a sprawl of paranoid linkages, which in Pynchon’s case leads up to, and goes beyond, 9/11. Pynchon captures the post dot.com period succinctly when his protagonist, Maxine, attends a party where “everybody’s pretending for tonight that they’re

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still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year’s dreaded Y2K,” a period where it was strongly believed that the “world’s computers will fail to increment the year correctly and bring down the Apocalypse.”2 Inevitably paranoia runs rampant post-9/11 and, perhaps equally inevitably, Pynchon’s (Jewish) characters believe they are being blamed: “Every Jew hater in this town,” Ari making with the aggrieved tone, “is blaming 9/11 on Mossad. Even a story going around about Jews who worked down at the Trade Centre all calling in sick that day, warned away by Mossad through their” — air quotes — “secret network”.3

Unsurprisingly, 9/11 refuses to fall from memory. Matthew Barney makes reference to it in River of Fundament, with the slogan “Remember the Heroes”—a Manhattan catch-cry for lost firefighters— displayed prominently at one point in the proceedings. During the film, images of the Twin Towers briefly appear three times—one for each act—on a doormat, on a firefighter’s hat, and on a t-shirt. Žižek notes that 9/11 only briefly disrupted the notion that Americans are, overall, distinctly ‘happy’ and envied accordingly. Post the trauma of Vietnam, and other crises in the ’60s and ’70s, notions of American innocence were perpetually in question and considered fraudulent until the events of 9/11, when America became a victim, which allowed the reassertion of: “the innocence of its mission. In short, far from awakening us, September 11 served to put us to sleep again, to continue our dream after the nightmare of the last decades.”4 A return, in other words, to what Žižek has articulated as “the Norm.” While divisions have always existed in American society—Puritans versus Shakers, The Civil War and Slavery, Vietnam and Watergate— divided the nation only to see a sense of debridement and eventual healing (at least on the surface). 9/11, for a horribly and all too brief moment, united the entire nation, if not much of the world. What followed, however, were the combined travesties of a broken Middle Eastern war (few if any lessons had been learnt from Vietnam or Korea), the faltering’s of President George Bush who failed to consolidate the support that flowed in from around the world, the emergence of the Tea Party and the grotesqueries of the Clinton versus Trump election of 2016.

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Depending on your source, the United States is home to either the largest or second largest, after Israel, Jewish population in the world, with a history that hails back to the time of Columbus. According to the Pew Research Centre in 2013: “There are about 4.2 million American adults who say they are Jewish by religion, representing 1.8% of the U.S. adult population. But there are roughly 5.3 million Jews (2.2% of the adult population) if the total also includes ‘Jews of no religion,’ a group of people who say they are atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religion but who were raised Jewish or have a Jewish parent and who still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion.”5 Associated with Columbus on the voyage were at least five Jews: interpreter Luis de Torres, surgeon Marco, physician Bernal, Alonzo de la Calle, and Gabriel Sanchez. de Torres was the first man ashore. Inarguably that component has helped shaped a substantial element of American culture. From humor (Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen et al.), science (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Einstein et al.), art (Warhol, Rauschenberg et al.), cinema (Spielberg, Aronofsky, Katzenberg et al.), comics (Siegel, Shuster, Kane, Lee, Kirby), through to the novel which found its most mature expression in the twentieth century ‘Jewish American novels’ by Pynchon, Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Salinger, Malamud and Potok. Although present on the continent since settlement in the seventeenth century, Jewish populations boomed in the early to mid-nineteenth century due to persecution in Eastern Europe and, of course, German racial policies (brilliantly represented by, among others, Art Spiegelman in his 1973 graphic novel Maus). Over 2,000,000 Jews, many of them Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, arrived between the late nineteenth century until the Immigration Act of 1924 and the National Origins Quota of 1924, restricted immigration. Most settled in New York and Philadelphia, in part to avoid the more Calvinistic Puritans in the outreaches, and establishing one of the world’s major concentrations of Jewish population and culture. Their move was inspired, in large part, by an escape from annihilation. As Norman Cohn describes it, “the drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition”6 that has recurred over centuries. As Cohn so brilliantly documents in Pursuit of the Millennium racism against Jewish people has a long and varied history. Countless generations of apocalyptic Christians, however, have easily found a stark reason for this in Revelation. In a colossal, but not untypical, misreading of Biblical texts, they have labeled “the Jews” unclean, members of

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a “synagogue of Satan.” The original text in Revelations suggests the radical opposite: “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie: behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.”7 One can almost hear a threatening film score to cue the subsequent millennia of prejudice. But Elaine Pagels points out that the scripture from which these terms stem clearly states that the enemy are those “who say they are Jews, but are not” (Rev. 2:9 and 3:9), thus returning Revelation to its historical origin, as authored by John of Patmos who took aim at the Roman Empire after what became known as ‘the Jewish War’ in 66 CE. In an ironic and convincing reading, Pagels clarifies that the enemy in Revelation, “the synagogue of Satan,” is actually referring to the “Christians” of its day. (The word was not in use at the time, she notes— Christianity was simply a new form of Judaism.) She reminds us that Revelation is a Jewish document written by a Greek-speaking Jew about Jewish life under the increasingly threatening influence of Roman culture and “Christians.”8 In Postmodern Belief, Hungerford cites some intriguing statistics with regard to what ‘being’ ‘Jewish’ means in contemporary America. She cites a survey of Jews in Los Angeles from 1988, which found that 59% of the respondents “identified ‘a commitment to social equality’ as a quality ‘most important to your Jewish identity.’” Of those surveyed only 17 percent chose religious observance as the major quality in being Jewish.9 However, Bloom makes a strong distinction between being Jewish and being Jewish/American. As with almost all faiths, it often seems, Bloom takes us back to the American religion, a derivation, or even deformity, of the original faith. “Normative Judaism is the religion of the Oral Law, the strong interpretation of the Bible set forth by the great rabbis of the second century of the Common Era,” he writes: Christianity is the religion of the Church Fathers and the Protestant theologians who broke with the Church, and Catholics and Protestants alike joined the rabbinical sages in offering definitive interpretations that displaced Scripture. The American Religion, unlike Judaism and Christianity, is actually biblical, even when it offers and exalts alternative texts as well.10 (italics mine)

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Perhaps nothing sums up American cultural schizophrenia as well as the divisions that Jews inspire in the US—on the one hand mightily pro-Israel, on the other, often utterly anti-Semitic. As Mathew Avery Sutton notes, the response of fundamentalists and evangelicals to anti-Semitic writings in the 1920s “illustrated their schizophrenic views and demonstrated how their prejudices related to the apocalyptic convictions.”11 The appearance, he notes, of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion12 in America in 1920 consolidated the beliefs of many evangelical American fundamentalists that Jews were set to take over the world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fictionalized account of a late nineteenth-century meeting during which Jewish leaders plotted plans for global Jewish hegemony. It was first published in Russia in 1903 and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century. It was exposed as fraudulent by the London Times in 1921. As John Gray points out: “The view of the world expressed in the Protocols is entirely delusional, and no doubt for that reason has proved vastly influential.”13

The Judaic Apocalypse Few Jewish writers could be as “alternative” as Joshua Cohen and Ben Marcus, or, for that matter, as apocalyptic. In some respects, they hark back to the Book of Daniel, the historical end of Jewish Scripture. But they are also distinctly American Jewish writers. They reflect something pinpointed by Laurence Moore when he writes: “Well before the Holocaust increased transcendentally the value of what had been achieved through immigration, American Jews were among the strongest subscribers to the view that America was different.”14 (italics mine) Different, but not without its own virulent strains of anti-Semitism.15 One thing seems to have stayed the same. As Moore points out: “Jewish identification survived through successive generations of American Jews, some of them many times removed from the immigrant generation: and it never lost an important religious component.”16 Žižek strikes a somewhat different tone: “ … one is allowed either to praise the wealth of polytheistic pre-modern religions oppressed by the Judeo-Christian patriarchal legacy: or to stick to the uniqueness of the Jewish legacy, to its fidelity to the encounter with radical Otherness, in contrast to Christianity.”

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I do not think that the present vague spiritualism, the focus on the openness to Otherness and its unconditional Call, this mode in which Judaism has become almost the hegemonic ethico-spiritual attitude of today’s intellectuals, is in itself the ‘natural’ form of what one can designate, in traditional terms, as Jewish spirituality. I am almost tempted to claim that we are dealing here with something that is homologous to the Gnostic heresy of Christianity, and that the ultimate victim of this Pyrrhic ‘victory’ of Judaism will be the most precious elements of Jewish spirituality itself, with their focus on a unique collective experience.17

In twentieth-century American ‘Jewish’ literature, Jewish religion (and to a large extent religion of any form) has, in some ways, theoretically taken a back seat for a particular generation. As Moore notes: “The secular trend, already apparent in the first generation of Eastern European immigrants, was irreversible. Jews, who no longer could believe that God set them apart, had to find historical reasons to feel Jewish.”18 Philip Roth, for one, describes himself as: “Exactly the opposite of religious … I’m anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It’s all a big lie.”19 This vehement anti-religiosity is amplified further in his fictions such as Everyman (2006): “Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive … [t]here was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.”20 Ironically Roth’s subject has largely been his own Jewishness. Another take on this is explored by David Cronenberg whose short film, At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007) addressed the issue specifically.21 While Roth dismisses religion, including Judaism, authors such as Mailer and Pynchon are less vehement, but neither they, nor their fellows, explore the Judaic or being Jewish, beyond a largely secular interest. Two of the younger generation dive straight into the field—Joshua Cohen and Ben Marcus—going so far, in both cases, to do their best to obliterate the Jewish race—and its religion—in total. Norman Cohn’s “quasi-demonological superstition” is brilliantly reinterpreted by Cohen in his 2010, 800-page epic Witz. The book focuses on the occasion of the plague-death of all the world’s Jews, save one, Benjamin Israelien, who is somehow born fully grown, replete with beard and glasses (Cohen spares us the birthing scene) and who, in his newfound cultural superstardom, becomes an object of adoration, then one of extreme resentment and loathing.

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What has happened to the Jews? Cohen perhaps reinterprets Paul’s belief in Corinthians, and in turn Reagan’s ‘rapture’: We shall not all die [before the return of Christ], but we shall all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet call. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise immortal, and we shall be changed. This perishable being must be clothed with the imperishable, and what is mortal must be clothed with immortality.22

Unfortunately for Israelien, he has been left behind as the last of the perishable beings. Israelien is, in essence, a freak, and this freakishness fits into a long tradition of cruel racial stereotypes: “A belief in the diabolical powers of Jews was a major feature in the millenarian mass movements of the late Middle Ages,” writes John Gray. “Jews were shown in pictures as devils with the horns of a goat, while attempts were made by the Church to force Jews to wear horns on their hats.”23 Cohen creates a vast canvas that embraces everything from surrealism to science fiction, from heart-wrenching heartbreak to heartwarming hilarity. Despite the sheer weirdness of structure, there is a clear-cut narrative here, replete with a moment of cunnilingus that might make Matthew Barney blanch. Cohen’s inspiration from the Old Testament is made explicit: The opening is written in seven sections, each corresponding to a day of Creation. But he also makes overt his own use of the orifices of mouth and ear in the creation of his narratives. Aggadah, or haggadah—that which is told—is the generic description for rabbinic tradition that falls outside the perimeters of the halakhah—the legal teachings of the rabbis. The term aggadah is more suggestive of the manner of its transmission— perhaps that of the oral—than about the content of what is transmitted. “I write everything by saying it aloud,” Cohen said of his methodology in an interview with Harper’s magazine. “I believe in the ear.” Cohen makes the argument that our narrative history has been predominantly oral/aural, the art of listening to stories and myths before the advent of writing: “a transition to the visual/manual, or the graphic/ manual. We became more eye-and-hand-oriented, creatures crouching alone, reading off the page.” Cohen notes that the Internet has extended this, while it also reaches back “in the other direction to reincorporate the older sensorium — the mouths and ears coming out of retirement so

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that everything’s engaged now but, perhaps, the olfactory. I don’t expect my readers to read aloud — but I do hope to remind them of the literary primacy of their mouths and ears.”24 However, as Witz nears its end it would be virtually unreadable aloud. On page 784 Cohen launches into a form of glossolalia, utilizing a form of language-apocalypse that in some ways has its precursor in Joycean wordplay in Finnegan’s Wake (which Joyce scholar Darren Tofts suggests is only truly understandable by being spoken aloud after a decent ingestion of Guinness).25 Eschewing any and all grammatical laws for 33 pages Cohen rants in almost incompressible language as if overtaken with a word-fever. Cohen’s comment that he believes “in the ear,” (which, of course, reminds us of the opening of Blue Velvet) reflects a long-held tradition. As Hungerford notes, in a contemporaneous context: “The oral aspects of Jewish tradition — such as the recitation of Kaddish, in Ginsberg’s work, or the cadence of Hebrew syntax for McCarthy — become avenues to a sacralized literature.”26 As Elizabeth Grosz points out, the Torah does not distinguish the written from the spoken. Rather than a physical manifestation per se, God is “heard as a voice. God speaks.” The phrase “And God Said” is a cornerstone of this belief. Thus, she states, the Jew understands that “it is the ear which must always remain open: there is not choice in listening, and thus no misunderstanding of God’s word.”27

Marcus’ Challenge to Language One could imagine Cohen’s comments also being expressed by his contemporary, Ben Marcus, the master of östranenie.28 Marcus appeared on the literary stage with the odd and powerful The Age of Wire and String in 199529 and followed up with Notable American Women and the slim The Father Costume, both in 2002 (the same year as the release of CREMASTER 3). Like Barney and Lynch, Marcus’ output had critics divided, bewildered, entranced and repulsed. Both Marcus and Barney were unafraid to take risks. The Age of Wire and String was, for many, almost indigestible and, again like Barney, Marcus was often derided as ‘pretentious’ and indecipherable. But for others Marcus had found a compelling bridge between narrative and experimentation.

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“The language has an almost biblical sonority, and these brief ‘stories’ might seem to offer a set of rules, or a guide to living,” critic Rick Poynor wrote of The Age of Wire and String. Poynor suggests the text as comparable to a report on a “field trip” to another planet, which is in fact our own. Large parts of the book sound like a report on a field trip written by an extraterrestrial anthropologist about a planet where life has evolved in ways that resemble our human existence in key particulars while being utterly unlike it. Or it could be that we are the subject and a visiting alien ethnographic entity cannot make sense — at least not a sense we can fully grasp — of what it has found.”30 For Duncan White it was, rather than a novel as such, “more a kind of ethnographic study, a form of social observation.”31 The opening line of The Age of Wire and String proposes that it is a “catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String …” The very use of the word “prosecuted”—meaning to indict or to be accused—throws the reader off-kilter. The who, how, when and why of this prosecution is Marcus’ mission. Marcus’ ‘odd’ use of descriptive language may also remind of Marcel Duchamp’s texts in his ‘Green Box,’ his abstract ‘instruction manual’ for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915– 1923). For Robert Hughes, Duchamp talked about “the machine in the Glass running on a mythical fuel of his own invention called ‘Love Gasoline,’ which passed through ‘filters’ into feeble cylinders’ and activated a ‘love motor’ – none of which would have made sense to Henry Ford.” But then nor would Ford have understood Marcus’ odd descriptions of his automobiles. Poynor’s description of The Age of Wire and String as a potential “guide to living” reflects one of Marcus’ underlying preoccupations: his Jewish heritage. And as Davis points out, the “exegetical literature of the Talmud developed an immense hypertextual literature that allowed people to both relegate and debate every facet of their lives.”32 In an approach that recalls Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, Marcus structures the book with almost clinical authority. In much the same way as Barney, on his Drawing Restraint website,33 breaks his series into distinct categories: HYPERTROPHY, SITUATION, CONDITION and PRODUCTION, Marcus is also stringently categorical, using SLEEP, GOD, ARGUMENT, WEATHER and other broad terms to summarize his sections. These are interrupted via a series of glossaries, explaining

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the use of Choke Powder, Drowning Wires, Air Tattoos and the Mouth Harness. That the book is set in America is clear. Marcus references such locales as Ohio, Montana, Buffalo and Denver throughout and he mentions dates such as 1989, but the locales and dates have no literal reference to the ones we take for granted. There are hints of this being a futuristic viewpoint: “what was then Utah.”34 But his use of dates and tense are deliberately illogical. “The Age of Wire and String thrusts into the forms of reasonable thought a great deal of passion, revivifying dead ways of speaking by short-circuiting them,” Brian Evenson noted,35 suggesting that the book is “a non-system masquerading as a system.”36 Evenson continues: “Where Marcus differs from less successful experimenters is that rather than merely allowing science to turn inward, revealing the subjectivity innate to any apparently objective process, he forces the subjective pressure to deflect again outward — thus revealing an objectivity that can only be reached through the subjective. In pursuing a line of flight that cleaves through a progression of selves and then flees outward, Marcus offers an array of voices to lay bare the whole of contemporary culture.” The Age of Wire and String begins with a section titled ‘Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife,’ (which recalls Ballard’s “Celebrations of his wife’s death”), a bizarre and essentially melancholy act of necrophilia that requires penetrating the dead wife in order to bring heat and electricity back into the house. He then moves onto a detailed description of snoring as a form of glossolalia. Again, like Barney, Marcus is fascinated by adornments, the more bizarre the better: “In the morning in Montana the leg was bound from the ankle to the knee with bacon or hair and then cross-gartered with thongs or strips of uncut rice.”37 This binding is perhaps a deliberately mutated reference to the Tefillin, a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah worn by observant Jews during weekday morning prayers. The arm-tefillin, or shel yad, is placed on the upper arm, and the strap wrapped around the arm, hand and fingers: while the head-tefillin, or shel rosh, is strapped above the forehead. In describing his MOUTH HARNESS: “Device for trapping and containing the head. Mouths are often stuffed with items — the only objects legally defined as suspicious or worthy of silent paranoid regard.”38

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Marcus seems to share an obsession with the mouth, as does Barney. In fact, he recognizes some linkages with Barney’s work. “Earlier on there was some overlap,” he says. “A mythological world, object-obsessed, defamiliarized, driven by strangeness with a bit of an instinct towards beauty.”39 There are strong reflections here of the work of the aforementioned American anthropologist Horace Miner and his 1956 satirical essay ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema.’ Arguably Miner’s approach, with its subtlety twisted versions of American reality and its commentary on ‘dentistry,’ is a precursor to Marcus. Miner writes of the Nacirema: In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as “holymouth-men.” The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber. The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.40

Marcus’ items are often in the form of cloth, again reminiscent of Barney’s Apprentice in both CREMASTER 3 and River of Fundament and Lynch’s use of cloth in Blue Velvet. “His harness will be a great cloth fixture bound unto his head, to protect his mouth from the destroying conflicts.”41 Or there is the “directional cloth” which “for success … the mouth must be crammed with it. It must be gnashed, chewed, bitten, or gnawed.” And, as when The Apprentice is forced to swallow the crushed car with the zombie-remnants of Gilmore, Marcus has “I have a dead one inside my body. The cloth in my mouth keeps it there.” Or in his second book, Notable American Women, the cult leader, Jane Dark

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“stuffed the cloth between her lips as she listened: and for a moment it sounded as though she were sobbing. … But when the cloth finally revealed her face … Dark’s mouth was dry and bloodless, rimmed with a powdery saliva …”42 For Duncan White: “Barney’s cloth is reminiscent of Kafka’s, ‘In the Penal Colony’: and while Marcus’ cloth is probably closer to the ‘sacks’ of Beckett’s mimes, both tell of the violence of language and both demand new forms of communication.” He also notes: “Cloths are spoken into, ‘messages’ are ‘scratched’, before being passed around. This tactile (mouthy) nature of communication demonstrates a preoccupation with new feelings requiring new words, new names, new space.”43 The legend of the Shroud of Turin aside, there are numerous references to cloth and binding in The Bible, such as John 19:23: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part,” Matthew 26:65: “Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy” and Deuteronomy 22:11: “Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together.” Then, in the Mormon faith there is the temple garment, or Mormon underwear, a type of underclothing adorned with Masonic religious symbols worn by adherents of the Latter-Day Saints after they have taken part in their endowment ceremony. In a statement to the Church, the First Presidency said: “Church members who have been clothed with the garment in the temple have made a covenant to wear it throughout their lives. This has been interpreted to mean that it is worn as underclothing both day and night… The fundamental principle ought to be to wear the garment and not to find occasions to remove it.… When the garment must be removed, it should be restored as soon as possible.”44 The mouth and the word become weapons in Marcus’ arsenal: “Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth …” The appearance of blood would indicate success. Spelling puts a corset on words, takes the knives out of them. Spelling a person’s name is the first step towards killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.45

Issues relating to the non-spelling of God’s name hark back to the ancient and ongoing discussions within Judaism as to the Name of God,

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which is most often referred to by the four-letter name ‫( הוהי‬YHWH or Yahweh), also known as the Tetragrammaton, but also encompassing a number of other ‘names.’ And in a distinctly non-traditionalist religious reference, Marcus also depicts the first documentation of a “Female Jesus.”46 Further on Marcus describes the monthly process of casting a “hot mold of my inner mouth …”47 in order to divine the next move he is to make in the world. The mouth orifice is taken to the extremes of a specific diet for optimal reading conditions: “an eating program to best dispose the reader’s body toward a story …”48 The mouth in Notable American Women is also a cave: “My family believes that the inside of the mouth is equivalent to a cave.” This orifice has the ability of “inevitably launching speech wind” which can act as a weapon. Elsewhere it is the “soul.” “The first plaster casting is taken of the inside of Bob Riddle’s mouth, including the cavity that extends down his windpipe. When the casting is removed and hardens, it resembles a roughly shaped sphere (the inside of the mouth) with a ridged handle attached. … Riddle calls it, incorrectly and rather pretentiously, his ‘soul,’ given that it represents his ‘language cave’.”49 Intriguingly, Matthew Barney would create similar objects for his River of Fundament installation in 2015. Leo Robson in The New Statesman notes that Marcus’ early works eschew conventional chapter and paragraph structure while retaining the integrity of a well-crafted individual sentence. He suggests that Marcus’s thematic is “the arbitrariness of reference, his aim to find verbal formulations that reveal the proximity of nonsense to what we take for lucid expression.”50 Although Marcus described his tome as “stories,” The Age of Wire and String has a novelistic consistency that portrays a singular realm and, although it shifts from utter abstraction to a bizarre form of ‘realism,’ and we are witness to a specific, tightly structured, world. In a section titled ‘The Weather Killer,’ he describes a scenario that is as powerful as that of McCarthy’s The Road. However, this is not an apocalypse we can recognize. It is precise in its language and vision, reminiscent of the precision of Revelations: “A funeral was held for the elders who had not died.”51 A funeral for the undead is not untypical of Marcus’ new world. “The text is a kind of ‘Book of Instructions’ for life,” writes Peter Vernon, again suggestive of Rabbinic teaching. “The title leads us to ideas of connections, including nerve connections (wires), and tying,

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measuring, holding together (string), in short a sort of bricolage of life.”52 In structure The Age of Wire and String somewhat resembles Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. Both authors effectively reinvent the American cultural landscape through their sheer visceral weirdness. But where Ballard used the glossary approach to simply break ‘normal’ narrative flow, Marcus gives us a User’s Guide to a parallel universe, one that is decidedly ‘slippery’ and, like Barney’s use of Vaseline, suggestive of a lack of solidity, an America without gnostic rigidity. As The Age of Wire and String is subtitled ‘stories,’ the book could be read as a string of bizarre vignettes, a list of sacred commandments or religious rituals. But it can also be read as a strange narrative of a unique world, one that is fleshed out in Marcus’ second book, Notable American Women.

New Ritual Notable American Women veers closer to traditional narrative in structure: the truly bizarre, but strangely moving, story of a meta-fictional Ben Marcus’ upbringing. Hunkered down on a remote farm in an alternate Ohio, the delusional Jane Dark leads a group of American women to practice “behavior modification” to attain complete stillness and silence (which often leads to death). Marcus’ father is buried alive in the back yard and assailed with “language” attacks from a (male) farmhand. His mother encourages the use of young Ben for rigorous, but distinctly un-erotic, breeding purposes for the cults’ younger female followers. Notable American Women reveals a strong debt to both Italo Calvino and Jorge Louis Borges in both its complexity and, despite its comparatively short length, its encyclopedic approach. Marcus achieves something similar to what Darren Tofts claims for Calvino: “continuity was to be disrupted at all costs and the most powerful mechanism for doing so was to sustain the beginning, to put off extension and yet retain a powerful sense of restrained encyclopedic complexity.”53 (italics mine). It is no coincidence that Calvino was a part of the Oulipo group. Founded in Paris in 1960, the Oulipo group viewed imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by notions of ‘constraints.’ Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentiale) embraced such writers as Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Raymond Queneau. Marcus clearly utilizes certain of the ‘constraints’ envisaged by Oulipo while Barney uses the equivalent in his drawing ‘restraints.’54

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Duncan White also raises the relationship to the Oulipo project when he cites the practices of Marcus and Barney as creating locales where there is “active intervention — where a motif and its given term do not correlate or, better still, correlate in unexpected ways — where a system openly breaks down, there would appear to be great (transcendent) ‘potential’ — a space for some new production of meaning.” A zone where the surd takes over, he suggests, and leads one into a world that cannot be expressed by number or rationality.55 In juxtaposing Lynch with the work of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, film critic Adrian Martin notes that both are “fond of hidden keys, cryptic legends or anagrams that seem to generate everything we see unfolding, as in the works of those writers (such as Harry Mathews of the Oulipo school) devoted to theories and methods of ‘literary constraint’.”56 As in The Age of Wire and String, mouth cloths are a constant in Notable American Women, with Marcus going so far as to rewrite scripture to emphasize the importance of material: Did God not ask Jesus to … move his hands in front of his enemies’ mouths so their language would be rendered babble? Did Jesus not stitch his own mouth after filling it with cloth, rendering his sermon muffled and anguished? Did not this cloth, and others like it, soaked in the oldest language, become holy, so we could swab ourselves with his word, wash our heads in sermon?57

Is this the cloth we see being pulled from Mary by her mother during a fit of histrionics in the beginning of Eraserhead, the cloth that Frank sucks on as he fists Dorothy, the cloth stuffed in the Apprentice’s mouth? Cloth has a powerful historical function in many religions, from the Shroud of Turin to the Jewish talith (prayer shawl) through to the sacred undergarments of the Mormons. In Acts 19 cloth takes on miraculous qualities: “And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: So that from his body were brought unto the sick, handkerchiefs or aprons and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them.”58 Marcus’ works are full of silence, or at least references thereto. Barney’s characters in the CREMASTER series are also predominantly mute. Indeed, as in most of Barney’s work, Notable American Women utilizes few quotes. This mutism leads to articulation via forms of pantomime. To avoid language, the women practice a grotesque version of pantomime, the complexity of which requires the crushing and removal

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of certain bones resulting in a “near-boneless approach, when the flesh can ‘rubber-dog’ various facial and postural styles.”59 Language here is a virus. Ben’s father is buried beneath the ground and assailed by Larry the Punisher, whose task it is to blast Michael Marcus with words, while sex has been reduced to a “parts consultation.” One of the final chapters is in the form of a contract that is signed by all converts to Silentism when they become novices: “I admit that even by speaking or shouting or murmuring or babbling or humming, I crowd my personal airspace, and thus someone’s potential personal airspace, with code and thus limit the insertion of codes by others, deny their entry, hoard the airways, create a blockade.”60 Marcus’ Silentists with their extreme (fictional) bodily activities fall into line with a long history of female physicality attached to religious phenomena harking back to the Middle Ages. As Caroline Walker Bynum notes: Trances, levitations, catatonic seizures or other forms of bodily rigidity, miraculous elongation or enlargement of parts of the body, swellings of sweet mucus in the throat (sometimes known as the ‘globus hystericus’) and ecstatic nosebleeds are seldom if at all reported of male saints but are quite common in the vitae of thirteenth-and fourteenth century women. The inability to eat anything except the Eucharistic host (which Rudolph Bell calls ‘holy anorexia’) is reported only of women for most of the middle ages. … These reports often include claims to other forms of miraculous bodily closure as well: women who do not eat are reputed neither to excrete nor to menstruate.61

Marcus’ silence is balanced with the import of naming, which becomes decidedly visceral: “Each time we changed my sister’s name, she shed a brittle layer of skin. The skins accrued at first in the firewood bin and were meant to indicate something final of the name that had been shed — a print, an echo, a husk, although we knew not what.”62 Then the young Ben begins to wear his sister’s discarded skins or opts to bathe with them. Again, this fascination with flensing recurs in Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh and McCarthy’s Child of God in which his practitioner dons the scalps of his victims as adornment. His mother, Jane Marcus reflects that: “… it is on Ben’s language apparatus that we are pinning most of our hope, looking for unprecedented utterances. New words, old words said newly, nonwords, sounds.

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Maybe something else. It’s a big hole there. Anything could come out of it.”63 The mouth of the character Ben Marcus becomes suggestive of Plato’s Cave, a world of shadows and suggestions, a source of glossolalia. The mouth is a recurring motif throughout the story: “Her mouth is void of teeth and likewise charred. When a microphone is held to her skin during a routine exam by a Listener, muted voices and noise can be heard. Suggesting her body has been crushed or otherwise altered with sound.”64 Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s memorable phrase, “moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud”65 seems all too apt here. Jane Dark’s choreographed pantomimes lead to seizures, vomiting and often death. An equivalent to Barney’s use of Vaseline is seen via Marcus’ “Behavior Putty,” otherwise known as “action butter.” Butter here “lubricates a woman’s body to maneuver through American weather with a minimum of friction.”66 Thematically Marcus shares moments reminiscent of O’Connell’s writing in such books as The Resurrectionist and Word Made Flesh—the obsession with language as a visceral, physical weapon. But at the end of the day Marcus’ voice, in both The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, is very much his own. However, that voice would be better described as voices: Ben Marcus the author, as opposed to character, suffers from a delicious form of multi-personality disorder. One moment he is a bureaucrat, listing facts in a soulless and listless liturgy, at others he is the outraged father or the condescending mother. At his most poignant, he is simply a young boy staring wide-eyed at the strange world around him. Multiple-voice narrative is not new, but Marcus achieves it with such weird subtlety the reader is thrown seriously off balance. It is ‘experimental’ but not in the more obvious ways employed by Danielewski in House of Leaves or Wallace in Infinite Jest, or even by Marcus himself in The Age of Wire and String. Notable American Women is experimental in its serious attempt to recreate the world. Marcus’ Ohio is in some ways the same locale as Wallace’s Ohio in The Broom of the System, a place similar to, but then so radically dissimilar, to our own. Despite the strong whiff of the post-apocalyptic in Marcus’ writing, especially in The Father Costume with its drowned planet and unexplained threat from which the father and sons flee, he doesn’t buy into the ‘post-apocalyptic.’ “Not really, no, but maybe that’s because I always

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picture Mad Max when I think of the post-apocalyptic. It’s a kind of blown-out imaginative field. And I’m never working with the premise that an apocalypse has preceded the period of time I’ve set my fiction in.”67 The notion of ‘the cult’ plays a strong role in Notable American Women and appears with a number of contemporary North American authors, Brian Evenson’s works, Stephen Wright in M31: A Family Romance (1998), Steve Erickson in The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest among others. “What interests me about ‘the cult’ is how self-contained, isolated groups or cultures write their own rules, invent their own belief systems, and mythologize the world in some unique way,” Marcus says. “This is what I like to try to do in fiction.” In keeping with the overall themes of this discussion, Marcus describes the linguistic style of the King James Bible as: “an intense, relentless piece of writing.”68 Throughout his work Marcus harks back to notions of ritual that can be read as ‘religious’ and decidedly ceremonial, noting that this is a commonplace in theistic cultures. Marcus expresses his attachment to the way religious and ‘mystical’ texts attempt to illuminate “the most complex questions, release us into an honestly depicted uncertainty, create a spectacle that is somehow in accordance with what we privately think and feel.”69

Recreating Judaism In 2012, Marcus reemerged with his largest, and strongest, work to date: The Flame Alphabet. Many elements of his preexisting stylistic and visual elements remained, but the narrative was far more linear than his previous works. At a time when zombies were the publishing plague of choice (both literary: Whitehead’s Zone One, and populist: Brooks’ World War Z) Marcus opted for a virus closer to his heart: Language. The alphabet as we knew it was too complex, soaked in meaning, stimulating the brain to produce a chemical that was obviously fatal. In its parts, in combination, our lettering system triggered a nasty reaction. If the alphabet could be thinned out, shaved down, to trick the brain somehow, perhaps we could still deploy this new set of symbols, or even a single symbol, the kind you hold in your hand and reshape for different meanings, for modest, emergency-only communications.”70

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“Marcus has managed to craft a story so disturbing that it’s best told with absolute clarity,” claims David Winters. He notes that the story occurs in a parallel world whose place names include New York and Wisconsin, yet they become places where social reality “quickly, queasily slips outside of any recognizable frame of reference.” Marcus’ setting is an “eerily serene suburban setting straight out of The Twilight Zone. This is B-movie blank canvas suburbia: the sort of place whose existence dictates that something is about to go wrong. And go wrong it does.”71 The result is a depiction of a suburbia not dissimilar to that portrayed by Lynch in Blue Velvet. Inevitably there has been some attempt at ‘branding’ Marcus’ work, with hapless critics resorting to the generic terminology of ‘science fiction.’ There is a clear comparison with Ballard in this somewhat simplistic branding. Ballard, to be certain, veered upon occasions into what may be described as ‘pure’ Sci-Fi, but overall his work may be described more as ‘Psych-Fi.’ Comparisons to Ballard were validated with the appearance of The Flame Alphabet. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Mark Ford noted that the disturbing scenarios of Ballard lurk in the hinterland of Marcus’ books and, like Ballard’s, Marcus’s prose: “aims at the clinical, the coolly outrageous, and there is much technical exposition, although Marcus is drawn not to minute descriptions of car crashes or high-rises, but to inventing outlandish uses for low-tech materials such as cloth, wire, grease, rubber, and string.”72 Author Paul Di Filippo, reviewing The Flame Alphabet in Locus magazine, made an apt juxtaposition with Ballard’s short story, The Sound Sweep. “Michael Chabon’s early blurb for The Flame Alphabet compares this book to Ballard, and the comparisons are deserved. Looking at a book like Ballard’s The Drowned World, with its hypnotic surface plot draping a meditation on existential challenges and the role of man in nature, one sees the model for what Marcus has attempted and brought off. And in fact, given the conceit of Marcus’s book — language, human-vocalized sounds and writing, as instruments of death — one wonders if the initial seed of his novel was not a very specific Ballard story, ‘The Sound-Sweep,’ which posits a tangibility to noise much in line with Marcus’s novel.”73 The other author that is relevant here is William S. Burroughs (19141997), whose character Dr. Benway claimed that language was a virus “from outer space.”74 This theme is explored further in The Ticket That Exploded: “The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence.

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Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word,”75 In The Flame Alphabet our protagonist is Sam, a “Forest Jew” as they are known colloquially in the book: who refers to himself as a Reconstructionist Jew, a movement which is in reality a progressive offshoot of American Conservative Judaism, opposed to historical religious orthodoxy, while maintaining traditionalist practices. Via Marcus’ malformed dialect, this becomes something new and extreme. He states that although the Forest Jews’ religious practice is invented, its essential content is tied closely to Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. It is, he says, “not strikingly fictional,” noting that they “see religious wisdom as essentially nonverbal, enigmatic, and elusive. The cautions against language, against understanding itself, to me come from not just Kabbalah but from Christian mysticism as well.” In the process of ‘creating’ the Forest Jews, Marcus declared that if he had given a name for this ‘new’ religion it would amputate it of its vital core. “I wanted the religious activities in the book, for all of their strangeness, to feel believable, to feel true.” To me, Judaism, with its deep respect for intellectual interrogation, for the slippery vicissitudes of Torah interpretation, could accommodate a sect like the forest Jews in this book. As this sect started to take shape, and I explored the isolated nature of such anti-communal worship, the intense loneliness of true religious commitment, this produced a lot of dramatic material, and the potential for sorrow. Connected to this, I have always wanted to invent a religion in fiction, and to me this was a chance to do so in a way that felt bound to my own personal religious experience.76

This sense of secrecy that the Forest Jews maintain in the novel is little more than an exaggerated version of reality. Žižek asks the obvious question for us: Does … the split between the ‘official’ texts of the Law, with their abstract legal asexual character (Torah — the Old Testament: Mishna — the formulation of the Laws: and Talmud — the commentary on the Laws, all of them supposed to be part of the divine Revelation on Mount Sinai), and Kabbalah (that set of deeply sexualized obscure insights, to be kept secret — take for instance, the notorious passages about the vaginal juices), reproduces within Judaism the tension between the pure symbolic Law and its superego supplement, the secret initiatory knowledge?77

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Marcus’ overt referencing of the Torah indicates the writer’s keen awareness of Judeo-Christian iconography and self-conscious acknowledgement of it as fundamental to American (apocalyptic) culture. The biomechanics the Forest Jews use in their worship are akin to those seen in the films of Cronenberg, particularly the organic virtual reality game consoles known as ‘game pods’ that are seen in eXistenZ. Fleshy and oozing, the ‘Moses Mouth’ is a conduit to the voices that emanate from the Jew Hole—an ultimate linguistic orifice. The device they use to listen to the broadcasts is generally referred to as a “listener”: The technology of the hut was a glowbug setup. The hut covered a hole and the hole was stuffed with wire. From our own hole came bright orange ropes of cabling, the whole mess of it reeking of sewage, of something dead beneath the earth. This wiring was grappled to the listener, and the listener, called a Moses Mouth by Bauman, even while we were instructed to never refer to it, was draped over the radio module. I’m understating the complexity of this. But on a good day, it just worked. Sitting there as the day grew dark, the listener perspired on me, and one part of it, a fine canting from its rear that seemed encased by a soft wood, was so hot that I felt sick when I touched it.78

The “listener,” perspires. It is a living thing, as fleshy and waxy as any device created by Matthew Barney, from which the Word of God, or at least those of his rabbis, is transmitted. Word Made Flesh, but via a machine that reeks of sewage, something half-dead. Marcus makes this ritual decidedly sexual: “Claire scooped grease from the tub in the bin, then lubed the orifice in the floor by plunging her entire hand inside.”79 This is similar to the lubing of the orifices in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ for the sake of game-communication. The listener, it transpires, cannot endure sunlight and is buried in an “unmarked grave” while not being used, suggestive of a burial of language that can be resurrected. Similarly, Sam pushes his hand “into the softness until I felt resistance, as if deep inside the listener, if you gouged enough jelly from it, was a long, flat bone.”80 One cannot help but recall the goo from Barney’s Apprentice’s anus forming a solid phallic ‘bone.’ Somewhat later in the book Sam’s nemesis LeBov scolds him for his treatment of the device: “You didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged.”81

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Marcus goes to elaborate lengths to explain the practices of the Forest Jews. In some ways his fictional movement is no less strange in its deformations than the original Reform Jews in America compared to Middle Eastern and European traditionalists. The first Jewish Reform society was founded in Charlestown in 1825, writes Moore, and without specific guidelines for transferring Judaism from a European context to an American environ, and “without assurance that remaining Jewish was uppermost in the minds of Jews who crossed the Atlantic, and with only a handful of well-trained religious leaders, American Jews settled affirmatively the question of whether a Jewish identification could survive in the American environment.”82 Some take this survival to extremes. Like the Amish, the Hasidic ultra-orthodox Satmar sect staunchly turn their backs on assimilation into American culture. Founded in 1905 by Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum (1759–1841), Rabbi of Sátoraljaújhely in Hungary, who migrated to America in the 1940s, where he established the foundations of a Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the 1970’s, he bought land in upstate New York and founded a Satmar Hasidic community named Kiryas Joel. It is now considered one of the fastest growing Judaic sects in New York. The Satmar are vehement anti-Zionists, believing that the location of the Jewish state will be decided upon by the Messiah on his arrival. They have also, at various times, tried to ban the use of television, the Internet and even bicycles for fear of their beliefs being diluted by outside influences. In some ways Marcus’ ‘new’ Judaism steps back to pre-Reform Jewry wherein the Rabbi was the “feared and authoritative teacher.”83 “To me Judaism felt highly adaptable and pretty ripe for fictionalization,” Marcus says. “It’s sort of in the DNA of the religion, as I see it. There’s an appetite for the unknowable, and this, to me, is suggestive of alternative methods or practices.”84

Judaic Armageddon Something has happened to the children. Sam and Claire have a fourteen-year-old daughter, Esther, and whenever Esther talks she makes her parents physically ill. At first, for reasons unexplained, this ‘virus’ affects only Jewish families but eventually it mutates until all adults are assailed. “That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.”85 The real apocalypse is the

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one of loss. Not the loss of luxury items and creature comforts, but the loss of communication, of Language itself. It is intriguing how strongly family (especially children) feature in the recent wave of apocalyptic and sub-apocalyptic North American fiction. Brian Evenson’s Dark Property (1995), Steve Erickson’s Our Ecstatic Days, Jack O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Blake Butler’s There is No Year all feature the shattered remnants of family and, in each, notions of communication are central. As Esther’s parents flee, Sam packs a “raw stash of anti-comprehension pills, a child’s radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Dräger Aerotest breathing kit, and my symptom charts …. I did not bring LeBov’s needle. I had tried the needle and the needle did not work.” He also packs “a personal noise dosimeter, hacked to measure children’s speech. I wanted to be able to hear them coming.”86 LeBov’s needle recalls the temporary treatment of the Gripe—the language-affiliated disease in Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh, in which a syringe is inserted into the tongue. O’Connell’s visceral language parallels Marcus’ with regard to ‘the needle’: The inspector feels the needle penetrating the tongue, piercing the mucous membrane, exploding through the sea of epithelial cells and forcing, cutting its way into the networks of striated muscles, ripping through fat and nicking its way past salivary glands, inexorably rooting toward a place just short of the hyoid bone.87

Under verbal attack from Esther, Sam makes use of LeBov’s needle described in similarly visceral language: I jammed it into an ear, but missed the hole, piercing the cartilage on the outer ear. I tried again, slower, letting the tip of the needle fill the ear hole, then, when I was sure of my aim, jamming in the needle until it passed through the thinnest part of the inner ear, which presented no more resistance than a tissue.88

David Winters astutely notes that the grotesque physicality of Marcus’ novel is juxtaposed with an unrelenting sense of unreality: “among several stomach-churning scenes, one involving a surgical needle cries out for adaptation by Cronenberg.”

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On a more metaphysical level, we can note that this is a world which goes on getting worse — which is, like a nightmare, both believably realistic and, as Sam puts it at one point, ‘impossible.’ Think of the revelation of the world’s unreality at the end of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Think, too, of the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s uneasy feeling that ‘the real world cannot be true.’ This unreal realism, a background hum of incredulous horror, is what fans the flames of The Flame Alphabet.89

As deadly as the children’s language might be, it can be as intoxicatingly addictive (and potent) as Jack O’Connell’s fictional drug Lingo in Box Nine (1992), the effects of which are described as the rapture. In a review for the Centre for Medical Humanities website, Nagihan Haliloğlu notes that Plato had suggested words were a poison for the faculty of memory. “Marcus takes this metaphor further and suggests that it is poison for the whole body,” that the physical connections between words and bodies are far greater than one would normally expect. Haliloğlu notes that literature, and the arts in general, oft apply medical metaphors which Marcus turns: “on their heads to explore what the medical consequences would be if these metaphors did come to life. In that sense, the book asks us to reflect on the language that the humanities and medicine share.”90 “Marcus loves to tell stories that are cloaked in a matrix of hermeneutic-post-modern conceits,” writes J. P. O’Malley, citing two specific conceptual frameworks Marcus employs—the belief that “Judaic tradition contains a weapon in the form of divine words. And secondly, that there is a constant vulnerability always bubbling towards the surface when one examines Jewish culture and history.”91 Murphy, aka LeBov (a name no doubt inspired by William Labov, the founder of sociolinguistics) muscles his way into the narrative as he does into Sam’s life. Sam meets Murphy via what seems to be an accident, he just appears to be another man out for a walk to escape his children, but LeBov/Murphy has an agenda: he had already been “canvassing” Jewish families, “Canvassing might not be the word for what he was doing. Cornering, manipulating, extracting. There is no precise word for this work. There can’t be. In the end our language is no match for what this man did.”92 He tells Sam that he believes the speech-delivered illness is related to “the flame alphabet,” which is “the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold.”93

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Murphy first appears as an orange-haired imp of the perverse, a trickster. However, as he morphs into LeBov he becomes a Dr. Mengele, happily obliterating his subjects for ‘testing.’ By the end of the novel he is a deformed monster (like The Joker or Usermare in River of Fundament), physically ruined yet still grinning manically. LeBov could sit at the same depraved table as Frank, Bobby Peru and Heath Ledger’s The Joker: “even though he had blackened teeth and a festering wound on his neck and his cough seemed like the worst, scariest cough I’ve ever heard, he beamed with pleasure.”94 LeBov describes his ‘interrogation’ of a listener. “Have you ever punched one? It’s amazing. It’s like punching a baby. You know? I mean it’s just like that,”95 inferring that he has, in fact, some experience of punching babies. The sense of barely veiled anti-Semitism is, at first, deliberately understated. As announcements filter over the radio: “The word carrier was used. The word Jew was not.”96 But it is rapidly made explicit when the huts are raided: “seized, burned, for fear that the Jew was drinking something too important out of these holes, drinking directly from God’s mind, eating a pure alphabet …”97 Once Sam’s wife has collapsed under the weight of Esther’s words and is incarcerated by the authorities, LeBov manipulates him to work in a language research center which is attempting to create an ‘alternative’ form of language itself. Sam undertakes experiments on men and women he thinks of as “Volunteer, test subject, language martyr … I would never learn what they called them, since naming of this sort had no application anymore, and anyway could not be shared.” Sounding as though he were reviewing Barney’s River of Fundament, Lee Konstantinou, reviewing The Flame Alphabet in the Los Angeles Review of Books, described it as: a pointedly disgusting book that will tickle your gag reflex with its bony, sore-covered finger. Reading Marcus’ fetid prose will clog your nostrils, enflame your throat, jam your every orifice with a thick and soupy, cold and gloppy, not to mention barbed and burning, meal of unpalatable, oddly shaped sentences.98

But in Marcus’ world having one’s orifices jammed may be a blessing. Ditto ones’ wounds. “A small wound on my leg failed to bleed,” Sam reports at one juncture. “It opened like the mouth of a baby. From the

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gash came the faintest wheeze of sound.” Speaking wounds, or wounds that raise the potential of a semi-sexual insertion hail back to the Biblical Doubting Thomas. In contemporaneous terms this can be seen in Charles Burns’ Black Hole and Will Self’s Cock & Bull (1992), in which an athlete awakes with a fully formed vagina on his leg. This is also a favoured trope of Cronenberg’s in eXistenZ and Videodrome. Sam takes the fictional drug Semantiril to muffle the impact of any stray speech: “It brought foam into the holes, filling in whatever silence was left inside a word.”99 Even writing is corrupted and gangrenous: “There was something blackening to the act of writing words, like carving into flesh.”100

The Kabbalah and Fiction Judaism was certainly pivotal to Marcus when he set about writing The Flame Alphabet, utilizing elements from it to concoct the religion that is central to the story. “There is a great tradition of the Jewish trickster and the subservient comedic mode …” Marcus has said, adding that he finds the Kabbalah both “gleefully strange” and “profoundly nuts.” “You return to this idea that if you feel you are starting to gain a sense of how things work in the world, you are almost certainly wrong. In those ways, I feel very Jewish.101 “Please stress to your readers that I’m the most irresponsible reader on the planet,” Marcus told The Tablet, describing his own “weird” reading of the Kabbalah as of value to his research. But he also admitted that there would be periods during his reading that he began questioning how much he was in fact making up: “even the Jew hut and the broken radio and the difficulty of actually receiving God’s word.”102 “The central crisis of the book was already on the table, and I remember thinking that things had to escalate,” Marcus told The TKReview.103 Like David Lynch turning to the Bible as he faced a creative crisis during the making of Eraserhead, Marcus turned to the Kabballah. Aspects of the Old Testament were clearly also up for grabs as a source for Marcus’ fiction. In the age of ‘postmodern appropriation,’ this is secular fair play, falling into associated discussions and surmising that, as Hungerford notes “Jewish leaders chose texts for their literary qualities as well as for—or despite—their doctrinal ones.” An approach that suggests that the Jewish elite held: “not a more complex theology, which would be one way of accounting for ‘problem-texts,’ but a more modernist literary sensibility.”104

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The Flame Alphabet is a commentary on the Elisha text, argues Witz author Joshua Cohen, but also one that fulfills the core obligation of flame itself: “the text’s illumination is also its destruction.” The speech wielded by the children is just as dangerous, he notes: “not just to Samaritan delinquents and itinerant seers but also to religion and the life of the mind.”105 For Cohen, Marcus’ targets include prayer and philosophy (to which I would add science), all of which Marcus plays continuously via an ongoing trope in The Flame Alphabet—misattribution: he misquotes Thoreau as having called the alphabet ‘the saddest song’ (shades of Psalm 137): he has Schopenhauer impossibly plagiarize Wittgenstein (‘if it can be said, then I am not interested’): while the Nietzsche citation is not only false but a reversal of Nietzschean Sprache: ‘if I could take something from the world … it would be the language that sits rotting inside my mouth.’106

Cohen notes that when Marcus’ protagonist claims that the title itself is Judaic, part of Kabbalistic tradition, he, or they, are misplacing its origin by at least ten centuries. The ‘Flame Alphabet’ first appears in the Oral Law, “sparked not by divine contemplation but by a lexical problem involving the Written Law (the Torah).” In an etymological context, Cohen notes, Moses’ twin tablets are inscribed by the forefinger of God, the lettering burning into the stone (Exodus 32). “The Talmud, the written compilation of the Oral Law, claims that the souls of all the Children of Israel, past and future, were gathered together to receive the Torah.” After addressing the question of this metafiction, the rabbis wonder about that graphological feat. How is it possible, they ask, that the two tablets were readable by everyone, and by everyone in the correct way, which in Hebrew is from right to left?107

The Jerusalem Talmud answers with mysticism, Cohen says. “Rabbi Pinchas says in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish that the commandments were written with white fire on black fire, and leaves it at that. The later Babylonian Talmud attempts to clarify this mystical interpretation.” In historical terms, the ‘Talmud’ refers to the Babylonian Talmud, which encompasses an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem

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Talmud. The Talmud is broken into two parts—the Mishnah which are the written instructions of Rabbinic Judaism’s Oral Torah and the Gemara, which expands upon the Mishnah and includes elucidation on the Hebrew Bible. Cohen describes the attempt of the Mishnah to elucidate on the Flame Alphabet: Rabbi Hisda says that the words could be read from both sides in two word orders and that both forward and backward readings were correct (suggesting that the retrograde letters contained even more arcane meanings). Kabbalistic writings of the 14th and 15th centuries — according to the religious, the age of Kabbala’s codification: according to historians, the age of its creation — proposed the Talmud’s alphabet of fire as an ur-alphabet. Before glyphs and the innovations of Cadmus (or Kadmus?), before Babel, this was the language we spoke, the language we will speak again after the coming of the Messiah and the disconfusion of tongues. All the languages around us, Indo-European and Altaic, Sino-Tibetan and Afro-Asiatic, are mere representations of this tongue: their sounds and letterforms portals into a semi-comprehensible, apocalypse-grade inferno.108

Marcus expressed his fascination with the fact that in Hebrew Biblical tradition whatever level of language utilized, it inevitably represented the calling out of God’s name. “Even though at the same time it’s not allowed. This set of rules about how to manage our language, feels like this terrible catch 22. So, it felt very natural for me to take this one step further and talk about language as a kind of poison that we are not meant to use. And if we use it, we will damage ourselves.”109 Marcus’ referencing of The Hebrew Bible indicates his keen awareness of JudeoChristian symbolism and self-aware acknowledgement of its fundamental importance to American culture. Marcus states that his connection to Jewish mysticism is in its embracement of uncertainty and the understanding that whatever is “important” remains ineffable and allusive: “that if we feel that we are starting to understand God, or the design of the universe, then we are most certainly on the wrong track.”110 As protagonist, Sam’s quest to ‘rewrite’ or ‘remake’ the traditional language of the Jews segues with aspects of the Kabbalah. As Katz and Popkin point out, not ironically, certain aspects of Cabalistic studies worked for the Christians to great effect. “… the Cabalistic techniques of gematria (whereby each Hebrew letter stands for a significant numerical value) and notarikon (whereby words are seen as abbreviations)

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efficiently served Christian needs.” They cite the first three words of the Hebrew Bible—beth—resh—aleph—as being easily translatable into ‘son-spirit-father’. As the unspeakable word for God becomes pronounceable, so too is the ineffable made tangible, the spirit made flesh.”111 LeBov, orange-haired and decidedly non-Jewish, is attempting to use the potent etymology of gematria and notarikon to secure information from the Jew Hole broadcasts. Marcus’ warping of the ‘real’ world and ‘real’ history in his narrative is deliberately jarring: In our reading of Galen we had not yet connected several mentions of disease originating in the child’s mouth. Herschel’s cone, termed by Vesalius, describes the spray radius of speech, a contact perimeter for exposure, and this we did not know. Nor did we know that an acoustical rupture is observed in Herschel’s cone by Paracelsus. Or that 1954 saw a medical exhibit in Philadelphia featuring the child-free detoxification hut, a prototype only, never adopted. Or that in the end Pliny had shielding nailed to his walls and sought immortality by banning children from his presence, dying just days later.112

Here his utilization of such historical figures as Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Paracelsus (1493–1541) is a classic postmodern trope or methodology. Such famous linguists as Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) and Edward Sapir (1884–1939) are mentioned in passing as simply Sapir and Whorf, thereby rendering them semi-fictional. Thus, in this context his deliberate misreading of the Torah suggests a fictitious Torah, a mutated dialect of the Torah (not unlike his earlier ‘misreading’ of the histories of such geographical sites as Ohio) and can be read as illustrating a sense of eschatological crisis.

Viral Infection and The Torah As Erik Davis notes, the Torah was, and is, “treated as a fetishistic object of cultic reverence.” Following the demolition of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e., the Talmud essentially replaced the Temple, Davis suggests.113 In doing so it went viral. For Mark Dery outbreaks of actual viral infection—from AIDS to Avian Flu, Ebola and mad-cow disease—are emblematic of a broader issue. Mad-cow disease becomes: “a screen for the projection of popular

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anxieties about the free-floating, indeterminate nature of things in postmodern culture, where quotation, hybridization, and mutation are the order of the day.”114 And indeed, Esther’s condition does trigger a ‘chemical’ response. After a brief sojourn from their daughter early in the novel they are reunited, however it transpires that: “the toxicity was perceptively worse after you’ve broken exposure from it, the reaction far more visceral. From Esther’s mouth came something that was causing a chemical disruption, like a mist born on the climate.”115 The racist overtones are clear—the crisis, it is reported early on, appears to be “genetic in nature” and a problem only for “certain people.”116 The popular culture fascination with zombies exemplifies this anxiety. Marcus’ parents in The Flame Alphabet effectively become muted zombies, as does Barney’s Gilmore’s living corpse in the opening scenes of CREMASTER 3. The fact that the written word, the Torah, took precedence over oral tradition effectively meant that traditional communication via the spoken word was muted, the mouth as religious orifice was replaced by the book (although this, in turn, as Bloom and others have noted, has turned full circle in the era of television and the televangalists117). Marcus also plays fast and furious with the Old and New Testaments, creating non-existent, although plausible-sounding quotes from Psalms: “And they were killed with their own names,” and Revelation: “Beware your name, for it is the first venom,”118 and Lamentations: “And not one child fell to the plague.”119 The toxicity of comprehension itself, which renders harmful nearly any communication between people, is an elegant lateralization of some of the more figurative consequences of meaning-making,”120 argues Eric Lindley. Marcus’ adaptation and mutation of Reconstructionist Judaism involves dialect upon dialect, a palimpsest of creativity that runs from the theological to the fantastical. Reconstructionist Judaism was a specifically North American dialect, an American Religion, which followed variations of Orthodox, Conservative and Reformist Judaism. Its cornerstone shift from traditional beliefs was the notion that God was not an anthropomorphic deity. Marcus refers to the actual founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Ira Eizenstein (1906–2001), and his teacher Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983) by name. He also makes mention of the real-life American Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014) (who became renowned for his experiments in ‘sacramental’ lysergic acid in the 1960s). Like Barney’s ‘remodeling’ of Mormonism and

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history to suit his own arcane tastes, Marcus ‘shifts’ Eizenstein, Kaplan and Schachter-Shalomi into his own dimension and attributes them with a strange new belief system. In this alternate world it is Kaplan and Eizenstein who conceived “an entirely covert method of devotion,” via radio transmissions through underground cabling, while it is SchachterShalomi’s who conceived of “basements linked between homes, passageways connecting entire neighborhoods.” The prayer holes are covered by huts that can only two members of the Forest Jews—the smallest possible chavurah—“worship without the pollutions of comprehension of a community …” The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything. Bauman was firm on this, said our access would be revoked if we breached. You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise. Children were not allowed access to the hut. Their relation to you alone did not automatically qualify them. They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates.121

To his references to Eizenstein, Kaplan and Schachter-Shalomi, Marcus adds such historical medical figures as Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), Leopold Auenbrugger (1722–1809), René Laennec (1781–1826) and Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1826), figures that Marcus’ Sam assumes are made up to suit LeBov’s fantasies.122 Thoreau, Montaigne, Blake, Pasteur, Shelley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Teresa of Ávila are also appropriated.123 David Cronenberg does something similar in his novel Consumed when he makes reference to Louis Wolfson. Born 1931, Wolfson is an American writer who suffers from a particular form of schizophrenia in which he is essentially terrified of the English language and set out to formulate new means of oral communication. After escaping an asylum in the 1950s Wolfson attempted to eradicate his connections with English (despite the fact that he lives in New York City). He wrote a book in French about his linguistic battles titled Le Schizo et les langues (1970). Marcus plays a deliberate game with the archaic here. His reference to “radio transmissions” through “underground cabling” in itself suggests an aged and no doubt malfunctioning physical system pre-wireless

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networks. It recalls the literary sub-genre of cyberpunk: ‘Steampunk’— see William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995) or Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic (2015)—in which steam power and Victorian-era accouterments supply the technology of the day. Marcus takes this pre-Internet era further by disclosing that: “Rabbi Ira no doubt envisioned a hut-free world, where anyone could stop at a hole, crouch down, and avail himself of a sermon flowing up from the earth. The religion would be on all the time …”124 It would be perpetually ‘on-line.’ One could be forgiven for imagining this as a Steampunk novel from the beginning as Marcus lists escape equipment that sounds as though it were formulated by an alchemist Barney via Beuys with his medical salts, portable burner, copper powder and “bootful of felt.”125 Barney’s transferal of ‘soft’ materials such as Vaseline or molten iron into permanent structures is similarly utilized by Marcus who uses “medical gelatin” which he dries to make “batons” for serum transferal and he uses lead “— quivering, gangly worms of it —”126 to coat his homemade pills. Even language takes on an element of physicality—their daughter’s writing is itself poisonous, viral homunculi: “Each piece of the alphabet she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst.”127

Fiction and Friction In a widely discussed article in the October 2005 edition of Harper’s, ‘Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it, A correction,’ Marcus defended experimental fiction thus: “What I find difficult, when I read, is to encounter other people’s achievements passed off as one’s own.” He continues: I find it difficult to discover literary tradition so warmly embraced and coddled, as if artists existed merely to have flagrant intercourse with the past, guaranteed to draw a crowd but also certain to cover that crowd in an old, heavy breading. I find it difficult when a narrative veers toward soap opera, when characters are explained by their childhoods, when setting is used as spackle to hold together chicken-wire characters who couldn’t even stand up to an artificial wind, when depictions of landscape are intermissions while the author catches his breath and gets another scene ready. I find writing difficult that too readily subscribes to the artistic ideas of other writers, that willingly accepts language as a tool that must be seen

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and not heard, that believes in happy endings, easy revelations, and bittersweet moments of self-understanding. I find writing difficult that could have been written by anyone. That’s difficult to me, horribly so. Mr. Difficult? It’s not Gaddis. Mr. Difficult is the writer willing to sell short the aims of literature, to serve as its fuming, unwanted ambassador, to apologize for its excesses or near misses, its blind alleys, to insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality and experience and inner sensations, scenes flying jauntily by under the banner of realism, which lately grants it full critical immunity.128

Marcus’ ‘problem’ with Franzen is essentially one that has arisen with experimental fiction at least since the appearance of Finnegan’s Wake. Many fear an excess of language. As Bloom points out, many American Fundamentalist Baptists: “never even seem to realize that the Bible is in the first place language.”129 He goes on to quote James Barr who notes that: “For the church and theology as a whole, fundamentalism constitutes an ecumenical problem rather than an intellectual problem.”130 In this context both Experimental Literature and God As Word or text are relegated into the same basket: simply too much hard work. Even before the age of text-messaging, the actual reading of the Bible was in decline, notes Bloom. “The general decline in the ability to read nearly anything in the age of television has made the Bible almost impossible to read for all except an elite.”131 Marcus’ use of the term ‘machine’ is a particularly intriguing one. As Erik Davis notes, writing itself is a “machine,” “Over eons, human beings have invented widely different systems of visually encoding language and thought, and these various pictograms, ideograms, and alphabets have been inscribed and reproduced using a wide variety of secondary inventions — ink, papyrus, parchment, bound codexes, woodblocks, mechanical printing ogresses, billboards, photocopying machines, and electronic computer screens. The material history of writing is an utterly technological tale.”132 Deleuze and Guattari also ‘read’ their readers as “machines,” indeed, an “organ-machine,” each and every one/thing creating disruptions in the intended narrative. Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones: flowing hair: a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects. Every ‘object’ presupposes the continuity of a flow: every flow, the fragmentation of the

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object. Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything — speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking — in terms of seeing. But a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or ‘sees’ its own current interrupted.133

Via French structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure, David Winters, reviewing The Flame Alphabet, comes to a not dissimilar conclusion, suggesting that Marcus’ language itself is “like a machine for making meaning.”134 Marcus’ epic battle with Franzen takes us back full circle to Žižek’s phrase, when ‘Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal’135 via the almost cultural-schizo pairing of Lynch and Disney. Franzen and Disney are cut from the same cloth: romantics of the American ‘ideal’ suburbia. In contrast, the suburbia of The Flame Alphabet and Blue Velvet hide monsters (LeBov, Frank). In Žižek’s ‘straight’ world, despite everyday malfunctions (and in Marcus’ case, extreme malfunctions), institutions such as Marriage, the Church and Law and Order still hold essential sway thus psychosis is held at bay, or at the least suitably medicated or concealed. Characters in Franzen’s novels and Disney’s films may be troubled, even at times ‘evil,’ but they do not cross the line into being full-blown psychotics. While on the surface the ending of Blue Velvet suggests that there is hope for suburban ‘normality,’ the mechanized bird in the final scene belies such hopes, suggesting that this is no more than a simulacrum of the ‘normal.’ And the family in The Flame Alphabet is inevitably doomed despite, and, or perhaps because of, Samuel’s delusion that normality will be retained. Again, this distinction between Žižek’s ‘weird’ versus ‘normal’ arises in each example. In his Harper’s text, juxtaposing specific regions of the brain such as the Broca’s area and Heschl’s gyri, Marcus points to what is known as Wernicke’s area, utilized for language comprehension,136 which Marcus describes as the “reader’s muscle” without which language is indecipherable, an abstraction. Marcus, writing in a tone of barely suppressed annoyance, suggests that it is “not politic” to say that a reader should be encouraged to make an effort with language, believing that his readers should work for the pay-off: “My ideal reader would cough up a thimble of fine grey powder at the end of the reading session, and she could use this mineral-rich substance to compost her garden.”137

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Marcus describes his readers as donning jumpsuits and pirouetting around ‘barn-size’ spaces, suggestive of Barney’s Guggenheim antics. As a writer of sometimes abstract, so-called experimental [poetry] that can take a more active attention to read, I would say that my ideal reader’s Wernicke’s area is staffed by an army of jumpsuited code-breakers, working a barn-size space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions.138

In other words, we should not expect to see a mainstream narrative romance penned by Ben Marcus (what he dismisses as “the drama of the kitchen,”)139 just as we are unlikely to see a Julia Roberts comedy-romance from Matthew Barney or David Lynch. Marcus’ battle with Franzen remained an unhealed scar, fodder for journalists even nine years on. In 2014, Salon asked him to respond to Franzen’s concerns about the degradation of language via such technologies as Twitter. Perhaps surprisingly, for an author who is insistent on the exercising of the Wernicke muscle, Marcus expressed little concern. “I don’t use Twitter, so I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t worry about it, though,” he told David Burr Gerrard.140 Writing in The New Inquiry, critic Jack Friedman suggests that the entirety of The Flame Alphabet can be read as a kind of exegesis on Marcus’ position vis a vis the potentials of language, but also the paucity of such. Sam unwittingly becomes a scientist of experimental language: “reviving ancient scripts, and inventing new ones, ranging from pictograms and runes to fantastic letters made from smoke and air and light, to see if any speech is safe.”141 Page after page Sam concocts ever more fanciful ways and means of ‘recreating’ forms of communication that are not immediately toxic. By making his protagonist a scientist of language Marcus had bluntly placed the “experiment into the term experimental literature,” Friedman claims. “It turns this genre’s label into the genre’s essential subject: What does it mean to be an experimental writer, to do tests? What propositions are experimental writers trying to falsify? What linguistic ailments do their methods seek to cure?”142 In order to answer this query, this quarrel, one must forsake objectivity. The pleasure derived from stretching the ‘brain-muscle’ via experimentation with language, written, visual or aural is exponential.

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The ailments such methods seek to cure are those of Freud’s aforementioned ‘psychopathology of everyday life:’ Lynch’s White Picket Fence in Blue Velvet, Ballard’s statement that one must arise each morning to make “a resolution to perform some sort of deviant or antisocial act, some perverse act, even if it’s just sort of kicking the dog, in order to establish one’s own freedom …. Suburbs are very sinister places, contrary to what most people imagine.”143 The long history of both religious and ‘experimental’ writings and artworks stand their case. To not necessarily understand something in its entirety is the human condition. Recalling Ballard’s ‘Invisible Literature,’ Friedman points to the stifling effect of bureaucratic language—a lingua made physical by the White Picket Fence, the senseless enclosure of space both psychological and physical. This in turn recalls the structure of Marcus’ first book as a “catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String …” The word “prosecuted” is most certainly conjured by what Friedman describes as “bureaucratic dialects of authority.” A longstanding goal of call-it-experimental literature is the revitalization of language. Everyday speech has its own toxicity, this view holds — it has become stale and oppressive, an impediment to understanding. Certain forms of discourse — realist novels and poems, the bureaucratic dialects of authority and business — have been eroded and rendered meaningless, or they are obstacles put in place by power to preserve itself.144

In an article for the New Statesman, Marcus felt the need to justify another of his themes that he dubbed ‘end times porn.’ Referring to a panel he co-presented alongside Joshua Cohen, he noted that they were asked, “with some impatience,” why their futures were so dour. “Why write about the future at all when the present was, you know, so interesting? Doesn’t the real trump the unreal? And maybe most importantly: what was this attraction to dark visions of the last days, a burgeoning literary genre that might as well be called ‘end times porn’?”145 In the same article Marcus notes that American fiction, “the end times has graduated into de rigueur subject matter.” Post McCarthy’s The Road, the apocalypse has become a “rite of passage” for writers of literary fiction,146 but Marcus points out that: “The last days no longer seem like a harmless fantasy. If this is a new development, it is worth considering why the end of the world is poised to join the suburbs and bad marriages as a distinctly American literary fascination.”147 Indeed,

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Armageddon in one form or another does seem almost as ubiquitous as pornography on the contemporary American literary stage from Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet and Cohen’s Witz (2010) to Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps (2010), Brian Evenson’s Immobility, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times (2003), and Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season (2010) to name but a few and to omit the plethora of zombie texts. Marcus’ “end times porn” sits all too comfortably with Barney’s Ruin Porn in River of Fundament, whose desolate rendering of Detroit is an apt visual correlation to end times porn.

Barney’s Judaism Among the plethora of religious references to be found in Barney’s work, from Mormon to Shinto, Christian to Pagan, Judaism also plays a critical role in CREMASTER 3 and River of Fundament via his inclusion of Harry Houdini and Norman Mailer, both of whom hailed from Jewish roots. While neither practiced Judaism, both were strongly influenced by Jewish culture and each suffered degrees of anti-Semitism, Mailer as a youth and Houdini later in life when he utilized his celebrity to tackle the ultra-conservatives involved in the Spiritualist movement. Houdini’s escape acts took on a symbolic flavor for many Jewish people in his ability to survive apparently impossible odds. However his Jewishness was rarely, if ever, an issue during most of his career. His attack on the ultra-conservatives who were involved with the Spiritualists changed that status rapidly. According to Rachel Shteir: “The more ferociously Houdini pursued the Spiritualists, the uglier the anti-Semitic jibes became. Conan Doyle called Houdini ‘our Disraeli.’ When Houdini testified in front of Congress to promote a bill requiring fortune tellers to have licenses, one Spiritualist referred to him as Judas.”148 Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007) explored the Devil’s machinations in the birth of Hitler. “This final novel probed the world almost the way a medieval mystic might,” noted Mashey Bernstein, suggesting that the novel returned Mailer to his Jewish roots.149 Judaism is referenced in River of Fundament via Barney’s potentially blasphemous use of a pig as the centerpiece of Mailer’s wake, seemingly endless dinner party which progresses through the three acts: being

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roasted on a spit in Act 1, its trotters gilded, becomes a decomposing carcass in the second act and a pile of fly-ridden bones in the third, and finally presented in a vitrine as a sculptural work for exhibition. Although Mailer was not a practicing Jew, this clearly clashes with Kashrut prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible in Leviticus 11:7-8: “and the swine, though it divides the hoof, having cloven hooves, yet does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. Their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch. They are unclean to you.”

Messianic Promise As Moore points out, for Jews in America, “citizenship … forced changes,”150 but none as outlandish as those created for Marcus’ Forest Jews. The synagogue remained a cornerstone as American Jewish practice evolved. Via Marcus the synagogue becomes a hole, an orifice from which comes the voice. The mouth, and its gagging, is a recurring motif, alongside salt in both Marcus’ and Barney’s works. One recalls the dentist chair scene in CREMASTER 3 in The Flame Alphabet: “A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face … I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt … A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.”151 As in CREMASTER 3 salt is an all-important medium: “pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics … salt as the residue of an ancient language.”152 Žižek argues that Judaism: “reduces the promise of Another Life to a pure Otherness, a messianic promise which will never become fully present and actualized (the Messiah is always ‘to come’).” However Christianity, he suggests, succeeds in something “far more uncanny”— the Messiah has already arrived—“the final Event has already taken place, yet the gap (the gap which sustained the messianic promise) remains …”153 The gap here becomes the orifice, the hole, the gnostic void, which must be gagged, filled, with salt (dead language), cloth or even the crushed remnants of an automobile or, in River of Fundament, feces. The one thing the hole or gap cannot be filled with is Language. Words are the toxin: A disease born straight from the mouth. But it is not just language that expires in the gagged world Marcus has created: “This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.”154 It had also grown to be an

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environmental language in the form of salt. “Is there salt where you are, too? Just so much of it everywhere? Can you reckon that it is really the residue of everything we ever said, piled now in soft white mounds?”155 Perhaps, with The Flame Alphabet, Marcus has achieved what he preempted in 2002: “… a final history of the American mouth. The American mouth would never need to be discussed again.”156 Marcus’ religious fixations are articulated via linguistic mutations of existing belief systems. The authoritative tone expressed in the myth-making of Age of Wire and String, the surreal rituals within Notable American Women and the literal rewriting and warping of Judaism in The Flame Alphabet all suggest an epistemological re-reading and reinterpretation of scripture. Marcus’ referencing of the Torah as inspiration clearly indicates the influence of religion on his work. But it is not just religion that Marcus rewrites, it is the very ontology of America’s lack of cultural self-understanding and hence the inherent mutated offspring of the cultural-schizoid divide between church and state. The following chapter considers the recurring religious symbolism in what I will call Barney and Marcus’ ‘small work’—drawings and short stories in The Subliming Vessel and Leaving the Sea, respectively: the automobile as chariot and sarcophagus, the skyscraper as phallus and cathedral, and the inevitable potency of The Flood. I then interrogate Barney’s 2014 epic River of Fundament to argue that it is, in fact, a sequel of sorts to CREMASTER 2 and 3 creating what is effectively Barney’s ‘American Underworld’ trilogy.157 I essentially contend that River of Fundament is the most ambitious artistic expression of schizophrenic cultural belief systems and eschatological crisis in contemporary America to date.

Notes









1. Revelations 9:4–6, King James Bible. 2. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (Penguin Press, 2013), p. 302. 3. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, p. 325. 4. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 165. 5. h ttp://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/02/how-manyjews-are-there-in-the-united-states/. 6. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Serif, 1996), p. xii. 7. Revelation 3:9, King James Bible. 8. Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking, 2012).

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9. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, pp. 21–23. 10. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 81. 11. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse, p. 125. 12. See: Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Serif, London, 1996). 13. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette, p. 133. 14. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 73. 15.  For a succinct account of the history of American anti-Semitism see Chapter 7 in David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution. 16. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 74. 17. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 8. 18. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 96. 19. Martin Krasnik, ‘It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I Have to Die,’ The Guardian, December 14, 2005, http://www.theguardian. com/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth. 20. Philip Roth, Everyman (Vintage: Reprint edition, 2007), p. 51. 21.  Eric Kohn, ‘David Cronenberg: Secret Jew or Sell-out? (Actually, He’s Neither.)’ New York Press, October 10, 2007, http://nypress. com/david-cronenberg-secret-jew-or-sell-out-actually-hes-neither/. Cronenberg continues: “There’s a whole generation of Jewish novelist who I’ve read, but their experiences as Jews in America was always very present, very upfront. … I wasn’t denying it or evading it. It just wasn’t what came up when I started to write. I wasn’t censoring myself. I wasn’t hiding my Jewishness. It just never seemed to be an issue. But when I started to make this little short, suddenly, it was. It was provoked by what’s going on in the world right now. The pronouncements of various Islamic leaders about how nice it would be to kill all the Jews in the world … I thought, ‘Well, what if that would happen? How would that happen?’ I used my sense of humor and irony to produce this short, which is also quite passionate. The connection with Jewishness and cinema just fell into place really easily. As I say, I’ve never felt that I’ve censored myself in an avoidance of the subject. It’s never popped up at me until that moment. … I am who I am. I’m certainly aware that, as a Jew, you grow up knowing that in a regime, under certain circumstances, during certain times in history, you would be annihilated. And that’s still possible. Of course, Islamic extremists want to kill everybody at this moment that’s not into their idea of Islam, so we’re not alone. But the focus always ends up being on Jewishness: The Jewish conspiracy, the Jewish this, the Jewish that. I’ve never even been to Israel. It’s not because I haven’t wanted to go. It just never happened. But, once again, it’s happenstance. I never felt compelled to go. The Jewishness I felt closest to was European Jewishness transplanted

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to North America. Those guys — Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jewish American writers — were the ones I felt closest to. I prefer Yiddish to Hebrew, in a way, just because I feel closer to it. I do know some Yiddish: my mother speaks in Yiddish to me. I feel quite distant from the Israeli experience. When I meet Israelis, they’re quite alien to me — quite different, even though we’re technically connected.” “So, I’m always aware of [being Jewish]. It’s always on my mind, but not obsessively. When you’re threatened because of one aspect of your nature, whether it’s your sexuality or your gender or your ethnic background, you become acutely sensitive to it for that moment. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what defines you as a person.” 22. Corinthians 15:51–53, King James Bible. 23. John Gray, Black Mass, p. 90. 24. Joshua Cohen in Ramona Demme, ‘Four New Messages: Six Questions for Joshua Cohen,’ Harper’s Magazine, August 31, 2012, http://harpers.org/blog/2012/08/_four-new-messages_-six-questions-for-joshuacohen/. 25. Darren Tofts, conversation with the author circa 2001. 26. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, p. 25. 27. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘People of the Book’, Art & Text #26, September/ November 1987, p. 39. 28. Viktor Shklovsky’s [1893–1984] ideal literary estrangement, a literary parallel to Freud’s unheimlich. 29. The book was republished by Granta, London, in 2013 with illustrations by Catrin Morgan. 30. Rick Poynor, The Age of Wire and String, Review, http://observatory. designobserver.com/rickpoynor/feature/the-age-of-wire-and-stringrebooted/37875/. 31.  Duncan White, ‘The American Areas: Place, Language and the Construction of Everyday Life in the Novels of Ben Marcus,’ Jacket 37, 2009. 32. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, p. 30. 33.  http://www.drawingrestraint.net. 34. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 51. 35.  Brian Evenson, ‘Rewiring the Culture,’ http://muse.jhu.edu/ login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/postmodern_culture/ v006/6.2r_evenson.html. 36. Brian Evenson, ‘Rewiring the Culture,’ “The formal genres of both the hard and social sciences are manipulated by eccentric but nearly invisible narrators who, having emptied objective forms of their original content, fill them with highly original visions of the world. By applying extreme subjective pressure to the objective world, Marcus warps and splays the forms of capture we have come to expect.”

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37. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 31. 38. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 43. 39. Ben Marcus, interview with the author for 21•C magazine, October 22, 2014, unpublished. 40.  Horace Miner, ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,’ American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956, https://msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html. 41. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 56. 42. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 28. 43. Duncan White, ‘Placelessness: A New System of Space in the Work of Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney.’ 44. First Presidency Letter, October 10, 1988, https://www.lds.org/manual/ endowed-from-on-high-temple-preparation-seminar-teachers-manual/ lesson-6-preparing-to-enter-the-holy-temple?lang=eng 45. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, pp. 55–56. 46. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 81. 47. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 66. 48. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 71. 49. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, pp. 188–189. 50. Leo Robson, ‘Renata Adler, Ben Marcus, and David Shields: Pushing the Limits of the American Novel,’ The New Statesman, August 22, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/formal-letters. 51. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 85. 52. Peter Vernon, ‘Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String,’ The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 31, North American Short Stories and Short Fictions Modern Humanities Research Association Stable (2001), pp. 118–124, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509378. 53. Darren Tofts, Alephbet—Essays on Ghost Writing, Nutshells & Infinite Space (Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2013), p. 36. 54. See: Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (1986), Warren F. Motte Jr. Ed. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). 55. Duncan White, ‘Placelessness: A New System of Space in the Work of Ben Marcus and Matthew Barney.’ 56. Adrian Martin, Three Lives and Only One Death (Trois vies et une seule mort), France, 1996, http://www.rouge.com.au/2/three.html. 57. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 231. 58. Acts 19:11:11–12, King James Bible. 59. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 126. 60. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 176. 61. Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice,’ Zone # 3, Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Zone Books, 1989) p. 165. 62. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 94. 63. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 232.

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64. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 84. 65. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 167. 66. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 125. 67. Ben Marcus, e-mail interview with the author for 21•C magazine. 68. Ben Marcus, e-mail interview with the author for 21•C magazine. 69. Ben Marcus, e-mail interview with the author for 21•C magazine. 70. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 169. 71.  David Winters, ‘Word Flu: Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet,’ The Millions, January 17, 2012, http://www.themillions.com/2012/01/ word-flu-ben-marcus-the-flame-alphabet.html. 72. Mark Ford, ‘Cool, Clinical, and Outrageous,’ New York Review of Books, February 6, 2014. 73. Paul Di Filippo, review, Locus Magazine, January 25, 2012, http:// www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2012/01/paul-di-filippo-reviewsben-marcus/. 74. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (Grove Press, 1959), p. 112. 75. William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 1962 (Grove Press, 1968), p. 49. 76. Ben Marcus in Ad am Boretz, ‘Lethal Language: Ben Marcus Urges Writers to March on the Enemy.’ 77. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, pp. 128–129. 78. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 43. 79. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 44. 80. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 50. 81. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 128. 82. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 78. 83. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 78. 84. Ben Marcus, interview with the author, October 22, 2014. 85. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 13. 86. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 3. 87. Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh (HarperCollins, 1999), p. 86. 88. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 132. 89.  David Winters, ‘Word Flu: Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet,’ The Millions, January 17, 2012. 90. Nagihan Haliloğlu, ‘The Flame Alphabet: A Novel—Review,’ http:// centreformedicalhumanities.org/the-flame-alphabet-a-novel-reviewby-dr-nagihan-haliloglu/. 91. J.P. O’Malley, ‘Author Ben Marcus and the Subversion of Jewish mysticism,’ The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014, http://www.timesofisrael. com/author-ben-marcus-and-the-subversion-of-jewish-mysticism/#ixzz31dT5upTC. 92. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 32.

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93. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 65. 94. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 217. 95. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 221. 96. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 30. 97. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 47. 98.  Lee Konstantinou, ‘Anti-comprehension Pills,’ Los Angeles Review of Books, March 28, 2012, http://lareviewofbooks.org/article. php?type=&id=433&fulltext=1&media=. 99. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 134. 100. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 135. 101.  Keith Duggan, ‘Ben Marcus—A Bright Spark in the World of Letters,’ The Irish Times, September 6, 2013, http://www.irishtimes. com/culture/books/ben-marcus-a-bright-spark-in-the-world-ofletters-1.1369847. 102. David Samuels, ‘Keeper of the Flame,’ Tablet, http://www.tabletmag. com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/94010/keeper-of-the-flame-2/2. 103. “Whatever isolation the narrator and has wife were experiencing had to intensify. I invented a Jewish cult, and I enrolled the narrator and his wife, and then it was a kind of problem, or circumstance, I had to support and put pressure on. There wasn’t a lot of planning for this. But I did endless drafts of the Jewish stuff, since it felt inert for a long while, without any real impact. I knew that if I was going to keep it, it had to press down hard on the characters and the world they inhabited. It couldn’t just be an invention for its own sake. Narrative utility, I guess I was thinking. Which is sort of why any religion is invented, maybe. Along the way, though, I found resonant material in my research. Kabbalah, as I understand it, both chases after and tries to protect what can’t be known, what can’t be thought, what can’t be understood. It’s not hard to see language itself as a kind of folly, in this light. At times I didn’t feel that the language plague was much of a stretch. Judaism, at least in terms of its mystical side and Kabbalah, seemed to accommodate, or at least not forbid, some of the crises that arise in the book. It seemed that we could persuasively devise a mythology in which we are punished for our use of language, for presuming to know anything, and there are days when I think that all I’ve done is illustrate and dramatize some of the warnings I’ve read.” http://www. thetkreview.com/2012/01/19/ben-marcus/. 104. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, p. 85. 105. Joshua Cohen, ‘How So Very Dear,’ London Review of Books, Vol. 34, No. 12, June 21, 2012, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n12/joshua-cohen/ how-so-very-dear. 106. Joshua Cohen, ‘How So Very Dear,’ London Review of Books.

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107. Joshua Cohen, ‘How So Very Dear,’ London Review of Books. 108. Joshua Cohen, ‘How So Very Dear,’ London Review of Books. 109. Ben Marcus in J.P. O’Malley, ‘Author Ben Marcus and the Subversion of Jewish Mysticism,’ The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014, http:// www.timesofisrael.com/author-ben-marcus-and-the-subversion-ofjewish-mysticism/. 110.  J.P. O’Malley, ‘Author Ben Marcus and the Subversion of Jewish Mysticism.’ 111. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution, p. 6. 112. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 16. 113. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, pp. 29–30. 114. Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p.1 35. 115. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 38. 116. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 30. 117. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 177. 118. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, pp. 12–13 119. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 16. 120. Eric Lindley, ‘Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, Review,’ January 2012, http://www.21cmagazine.com/Ben-Marcus-The-Flame-Alphabet. “I refer to the perennial anxieties of the establishment and reproduction of meaning that have filled philosophers and critics with excitement and dread as distantly as human history has surviving records — at least for those of us who like to interpret ancient artifacts in this way. This reification guts words and phrases of their communicative power and integrates them into systems of exchange that rely on a currency of socio-political control. The consequence is that language, with all its potential to build understanding and cooperation, becomes a weapon, used and abused by those at all levels of more directly observable stations of power, as well as those who are not empowered in any other way.” 121. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, pp. 41–42 122. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 83. 123. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 187. 124. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 43. 125. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 3. 126. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 71. 127. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 11. 128.  Ben Marcus, ‘Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It a correction,’ Harper’s Magazine, October 2005, p. 52. 129. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 222.

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130. James Barr, Fundamentalism (SCM Press, 1977), p. 338, quoted in Bloom, The American Religion, p. 224. 131. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 229. 132. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, p. 23. 133. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-oedipus, pp. 5–6. 134.  David Winters, ‘Word Flu: Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet,’ The Millions, January 17, 2012. “Thus, a bit like Lipsyte’s books, and perhaps even more like the gnomic late works of Beckett, The Flame Alphabet can be read as a self-contained structure of signs, which only make sense when they’re seen from inside that structure. If we follow Ferdinand de Saussure, we could even claim that the book itself is a language: not an innately ‘meaningful’ thing, more like a machine for making meaning.” 135. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird.’ 136. This zone is named after Carl Wernicke, the German neurologist who discovered in 1874 that damage to this region could cause an impairment of language comprehension. 137. Ben Marcus, ‘Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it A correction,’ p. 41. 138. Ben Marcus, ‘Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it A correction,’ p. 41 Marcus continues: “The conduits of language that flow past it in liquid-cooled bone-hollows could trigger unique vibrations that resonate into an original symphony when my ideal reader scanned a new sentence. This would be a scheme so elaborate that every portion of language would be treated as unique, and its infinite parts would be sent through such an exhaustive decoding process that not even a carcass of a word would remain. My ideal reader would cough up a thimble of fine gray powder at the end of the reading session, and she could use this mineral-rich substance to compost her garden. “Whether or not this intense kind of reading makes us freaks is another matter, but the muscle grows and strengthens every time we use it, leaving us hungrier to encounter sentences we’ve never seen before. And there are certain books that do require us to be readers, that ask us to have spent some time with sentences of all sorts and presume an intense desire for new language that might render notions of ‘effort’ in reading meaningless. But now, in the literary world, writers are being warned off this ambitious approach, and everywhere are signs that if you happen to be interested in the possibilities of language, if you appreciate the artistic achievements of others but still dream for yourself, however foolishly, that new arrangements are possible, new styles, new concoctions of language that might set off a series of delicious mental explosions — if you

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believe any of this, and worse, if you try to practice it, you are an elitist. You hate your audience, you hate the literary industry, you probably even hate yourself. You stand not with the people but in a quiet dark hole, shouting to no one.” “No matter my interest in reality, in the way it feels to be alive, and the way language can be shaped into contours that surround and illuminate that feeling: because I don’t write the conventional narrative language, and because I haven’t often foregrounded the consciousness of characters in my fiction, and livestocked those characters in a recognizable setting, I will never be considered a realist.” 139.  Ben Marcus, ‘Living in the End Times, Why American Writers Are Obsessed with Apocalypse,’ The New Statesman, April 18, 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/04/livingend-times. 140.  David Burr Gerrard, ‘Ben Marcus: Jonathan Franzen’s Cultural Commentary Is Really Embarrassing,’ Salon, February 10, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/02/10/ben_marcus_jonathan_franzens_ cultural_commentary_is_really_embarrassing_partner/. 141. Jack Friedman, ‘Trouble at the Language Lab,’ The New Inquiry, March 8, 2012, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/trouble-at-the-language-lab/. 142. Jack Friedman, ‘Trouble at the Language Lab,’ The New Inquiry. 143. J.G. Ballard, RE/Search #8/9, 1989, p. 15. 144. Jack Friedman, ‘Trouble at the Language Lab,’ The New Inquiry. 145.  Ben Marcus, ‘Living in the End Times, Why American Writers Are Obsessed with Apocalypse,’ The New Statesman. 146. See Whitehead’s Zone One as a successful example of this. Colson Whitehead, Zone One (Doubleday, 2011). However there are innumerable Disney-lite failures over the last decade in both literature and cinema in such as excruciating texts as Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery (2012) and The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2012). It has also become a “rite of passage” for filmmakers seen with decidedly mixed results in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), I Am Legend (2007), The Book of Eli (2010), The Road (2009), Wall-E (2008), World War Z (2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Snowpiercer (2014) and other mainstream Armageddon-porn works. 147.  Ben Marcus, ‘Living in the End Times, Why American Writers Are Obsessed with Apocalypse,’ The New Statesman. 148.  Rachel Shteir, ‘Bound for Glory,’ Tablet Magazine, November 5, 2010, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/48940/ bound-for-glory-2.

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149.  Mashey Bernstein, ‘The Mitzvot of Norman Mailer,’ The Jerusalem Post, November 14, 2007, http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/ Jewish-Features/The-mitzvot-of-Norman-Mailer. 150. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 79. 151. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 151. 152. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 83. 153. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, pp. 140–141. 154. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 196. 155. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 260. 156. Ben Marcus, Notable American Women, p. 47. 157. I have adapted this phrase from American crime author James Ellroy. ‘The Underworld USA Trilogy’ is the collective name given to three novels by Ellroy: American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood’s a Rover (2009).

CHAPTER 6

Dereliction and Defecation: On the Religious Underpinnings in Matthew Barney’s Subliming Vessel and Ben Marcus’ Leaving the Sea and the Apocalyptic Imaging of Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament Given the Puritanical beginnings of America, I would argue that its ensuing repression (Freud stated that: “there was some force that prevented them from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious… pushed the pathogenetic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of repression to this hypothetical process.” An example of Freud’s “force” would be the religious language of the Puritans, Fundamentalist Evangelicals and others.1) has manifested in another form. The madly multivalent, perverse and excessive so resonant in Barney’s and others’ works are symptomatic of a fundamental religiosity gone feral or partially the result of rampant American ‘late’ Capitalism. The Puritanical religious beginnings outlined at the start of this book have ended up in a series of distinctly weird cultural amalgams. The religious leaders discussed in previous chapters are masters of inducing Freud’s notion of Repression, while Barney, Marcus, et al. are masters at the breakage of such subjugation. By embracing ‘mystical’ imagery and regurgitating it in mutated forms they become circuit-breakers in the litany of repression. Georges Bataille once suggested that: “Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to the use of its excess resources, or rather to their destruction.”2 This inherent tie between religious belief and ultimate destruction, turning pristine resources into choked flows of excrement,

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has been an underlying theme in this text. It is nigh impossible to avoid the environmental warnings present in both Marcus’ and Barney’s work, albeit wrapped heavily in symbolism. In at least one of Marcus’ worlds The Flood has indeed subsumed the planet: “Beneath us, the waves slapped at the hull in a plain, repetitive code. If I tried, I could just make out small, sharp words in the code, English words as if formed by a man with a beak for a mouth, singing through a cotton screen.”3 Marcus’ “man with a beak for a mouth” could well be identified as the Ancient Egyptian deity Thoth, The Lord of Divine Books or Scribe of the Company of the Gods, who was depicted with the body of a man and the head of an ibis. Thoth, it was believed, invented writing and authored The Book of the Dead. This deity appears in Barney’s drawing Guardian of the Veil: Thoth (2007) which, alongside numerous other references to belief systems, were prevalent when he undertook the survey of his works on paper in 2013. Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney4 featured Barney’s earliest drawings from the late 1980s, drawings which were created in conjunction with the CREMASTER film cycle, and those related to River of Fundament of which Guardian of the Veil: Thoth was one. Barney also made selections from the host institutions’ collections to include in the show, underscoring the importance that literature and mythology play in the elaboration of his narratives. This included a copy of a more than 2000-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead and original drawings by Michelangelo and Francisco de Goya, which were placed alongside Barney’s own sketched upon and notated copies of novels by Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. Mormonism, Masonic ritual, Celtic mythology, the whaling industry, 1930s architecture, death, the automobile, Richard Serra, sexual reproduction, Houdini, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and images of ecstatic religions abounded. The use of texts is all-important, but by no means the end-all. As Bloom accurately notes, texts cannot allow the full essence of the American Religion: “So creedless is the American Religion that it needs to be tracked by particles rather than by principles.”5 This is also an apt way to describe Marcus’ first book, The Age of Wire and String, as well as Barney’s works on paper. Barney’s bowerbird approach links him to a distinct tendency among Millennialist thinkers. As Katz and Popkin note of this evolution: “Joachim of Fiore in twelfth-century Italy bequeathed the significance of looking for God’s grand design, and the effective use of visual media, especially the prophetic timeline, complete with arrows and exploding

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trumpets.”6 Indeed there are trumpets and bugles aplenty in Barney’s River of Fundament. If anyone manifests a form of cultural schizophrenia in America inspired, at least in part, by the divide between Church and State, it is Barney. On the surface a ‘Secular’ artist (he rarely discusses his own beliefs publicly, and if he does they are on the broadest of terms) he simultaneously and obsessively pursues religious belief as a subject. Indeed, Barney’s art is perhaps not so much schizophrenic as expressing a religiously inspired form of multiple personalities. In the case of Barney this would be Barney the Mormon, Barney the Satyr, Barney the Egyptian Ka of Norman et al. Reviewing the Subliming Vessel exhibition for the New York Times, Holland Cotter suggested that Barney’s drawings had “the look of precious pages from sacred books.” He also implies a relationship to The Shroud of Turin, claiming that Barney’s: “images, with their reduction of the body to smears and stains, and emphasis on redemption through fleshly mortification, suggest sources in penitential religion, filtered through Duchamp, Sade and extreme sports … What he had going for him was an expansively hermetic sensibility. His actions and stories were deeply abstruse, but epic, apocalyptic.”7 It is not difficult to see how Cotter arrived at this conclusion: with their decidedly end-of-days aesthetic including Biblical floods and a collapsing Chrysler Building, Barney could well have been executing illuminations for a Modern Day Revelations. “In Barney’s ink and sulfur drawings — which have the grandeur and beauty of romantic landscapes a la Victor Hugo — the pouring of molten iron in a River Rouge steel mill resembles a vast alchemical transformation,”8 Isabelle Dervaux suggested in her catalogue introduction. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve claimed that the works called to mind “the great psychoanalytic surrealism of Hans Bellmer and his lover Unica Zürn or Salvador Dalí, George Grosz, and even Max Ernst,”9 to which I would add Ballard and Lynch. References to pages and books—especially ‘sacred’ books—were a constant in critical responses to Barney’s work. The Morgan Library, “with its Gospels, missals and reliquaries,” was ideal for a survey of the graphic works by an artist who Cotter described as the “most medievalizing of American contemporary artists.” While not always positive in his review, Cotter concluded that once immersed in Barney’s visual narratives, in “their fanatically detailed, alchemical Dark Ages world, it’s hard to get back out.”10 Critic Ann McCoy remained unconvinced,

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suggesting that the exhibition leant too heavily on displays, storyboard clippings and the Morgan’s manuscripts as support for the drawings. “Overpowering plastic frames, some ‘self-lubricating,’ form heavy buttresses for the fragile, rather tentative drawings. Barney’s argument (however sexy) that making frames of prosthetic material allowed the orifice ‘to open wider so one could see deeper into this internal space’ is not convincing.”11 Notions of narrative, and ‘the sentence,’ are evoked continually, by both commentators and in comments from the artist. In a statement that would slip well into any discourse on experimental literature, Barney told Adam Phillips: “I never feel that any of my works are finished: they are just aspects of an ongoing sentence.”12 Writing on the works in Subliming Vessel, Phillips suggests that an equivalent could be that of a “writer writing a book of one unending sentence,” and they are like, “excerpts from a narrative they evoke but never disclose.”13 Narrative comes first, Barney told Dervaux: “I think in order to build the narrative, drawing becomes instrumental on the front end. The narrative comes out of drawing in a certain way, not only in terms of storyboarding the narrative but also in terms of mapping the narrative structure.”14 Barney is consistent in referring to his work as being narrative-based. “What I do, like any other artist, is a language,” he says. “I exhibit it publicly, so I do want it to be read. I am a storyteller.” Referring to River of Fundament he stated: “at least I have a text to blame it on.” The novel is just as sick as the film … one of the things that attracted me to the novel is that all of the visceral imagery and iconography in the story belongs just as much to the landscape. It’s described both through the body and through the environment. … The landscape is hemorrhaging sulfur just as the body is incontinent.15

In the same interview Barney states that there is a distinct “naturalism” to River of Fundament that lies in stark contrast to the “artificiality” of the CREMASTER works. For Barney the drawings’ frames act as “prosthetic orifices” rendering access into his imagined interior spaces. Almost simulating a moment from Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), Barney notes that: “Many of them had this sort of speculum, like these blades that would hold open the orifice so the hidden interior space could be seen … like an

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abstraction of an internal labia and an external labia.”16 He suggests the body is simultaneously a landscape: “a kind of volcanic landscape with its residual sulfur deposits, and the bowels of one’s body and the gases that come from it.”17 Dead Ringers is a gruesome 1988 thriller starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists, one of whom begins performing unnecessary operations with custom-made gynecological tools on women who he believes have ‘mutant genitalia.’ The alien-like objects carry many similar hallmarks to Barney’s own sculptural objects. Barney’s use of the term ‘speculum,’ a device created for the search of such cavities as the mouth, vagina and anus, is immediately suggestive of disease, especially STDs, and dentistry, a method of searching an orifice, a gap or cave. The speculum here is perhaps also a tool for the search of language and narrative as well as disease and mutation. It is also the tool of the American dentist: “Don’t go for the root, follow the canal …”18 The body was paramount, as illustrated by the books chosen to exhibit. Recalling both Ballard’s ‘Invisible Literature’ and Bataille’s Story of the Eye (L’histoire de l’oeil) (1928), among the items Barney chose to exhibit was an 1871 volume on eye surgery and Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body), first published in 1543, formulated a bizarre and eccentric personalized library.

The Death of the American Spirit Holding Subliming Vessel at the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris held an extra fascination for Barney: he was particularly engaged by speculations that it had been built to the program of Solomon’s Temple. Barney was quick to admit that this may well be a conspiracy theory, à la Dan Brown,19 but of greater import was the library’s substantive hoard of Masonic materials, which he inevitably decided to utilize.20 There is a powerful sense of the apocalyptic running through Barney’s preparatory drawings for River of Fundament. Barney seems to have been set on destroying the American mythos of symbolic potency represented by the automobile, starting with Henry Ford’s Rouge Industrial Complex founded in 1928 in Detroit through to New York’s Chrysler Building. GUARDIAN OF THE VEIL: The Bonds that Gag My Mouth Have Been Loosened by My City-God (2007) depicts the Chrysler Building cascading down amidst a sea of carnage against a

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churning, blackened sky reminiscent of a William Blake plate, a castration of the skyline. In REN: Headgasket (2008) the automobile ‘heart’ is presented as a sarcophagus or coffin: the death of the car representing the death of the American spirit, while in the REN: Pentastar Suite (2008) the Chrysler star is seen awash amidst a sea of debris, marked by acidic burns or decayed by intestinal juices before being finally inserted into, or shat out of, a female anus (recalling, of course, the dental scene in CREMASTER 3). Similarly, in RIVER ROUGE: New Disease (2011) a female figure is inserted with a mechanistic device injecting and/or draining a viscous, sperm-like fluid that may stand in for a form of language transferal (a lá the technique witnessed in The Flame Alphabet and its ‘Child’s Play’) or a form of deus ex machina. But for an artist who, on the one hand, extols physicality as a virtue, there is a delicate, tentative touch to his drawing, an almost ‘feathery’ technique at hand which is the inverse of his apocalyptic imaging. He destroys the Rouge and the Chrysler but, with his lightness of touch, it appears to be with regret and trepidation. For Goodeve, the “abstract hellish landscapes on red paper” in the RIVER ROUGE series suggest “putrid ocean horizons, heaving with oil spills, and smoldering clouds of sulfur dioxide made with brush and ink and the very sulfur and iron that constitute the very materiality of industrial culture.”21 Barney’s obsession with the macho or Oedipal Father-Figure is evinced throughout Subliming Vessel, using images (photographs, drawings and selected books and magazines) by and on Mailer, Hemingway, Oakland Raider Jim Otto and others. Barney’s own hubris in hanging his work alongside the likes of Goya is lubricated by the tendency of his more ardent supporters to likening his work to historically sanctioned figures ranging from Buñuel to Beuys, through to the more contemporary Lynch. Dervaux takes this to extremes when comparing Barney to the symbolist Paul Signac and even Vincent van Gogh. In the Subliming Vessel catalogue she juxtaposes Barney’s KHU: Detroit Sewage Treatment with van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889). Dervaux suggests that the swirling line work depicting “engulfing clouds and water” endow “the natural elements (or not so natural in the case of the sewage treatment) with a spiritual dimension.”22 While there may be a hint of truth in Dervaux’s observation, it remains a long bow to be drawn and lends credence to Schjeldahl’s dismissal of the artist as a “star for attaining stardom.”23

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Marcus’ Millennial Scratching The same year that Barney unveiled River of Fundament, Ben Marcus resurfaced with his major collection of short stories, Leaving the Sea.24 Jim Krusoe’s review of Leaving the Sea in the New York Times, hinted at similar tactics found in Subliming Vessel, noting that Marcus’ collection of stories can be read as overlapping photographs that: “taken together, form a single panoramic landscape. The photos in this collection might have been taken from the Mars Rover: the landscape they piece together is so strange and bleak that the book is a wonder and a cautionary tale all in one.”25 Barney’s show literally included “overlapping photographs” and the links between his alone. As a group they do indeed form a singular “landscape,” and, in his focusing on the environment, could also be construed as a “cautionary tale.” Examining Krusoe’s review of Marcus’ book, one continues to recognize parallels with Barney, including their use of metaphor in the case of the use of whales: … the Three D’s of much contemporary fiction: Defamiliarization, Dystopia and Dysfunction, all of which pull us into the narration even as they reject our own lives. None of this is so new: the first, the defamiliarization of language, has its roots in the Anglo-Saxon metaphorical habit of kenning, in which (for instance) the sea becomes ‘the whale road.’ But instead of this formerly benign and pleasure-enhancing twist of words, Marcus gives us: ‘Shadows were blind spots that everyone shared. Graves were called homes, and apologies known as writing were carved in their surface. Rotten bags were called people.’ Adulthood is, not surprisingly, ‘an exhaustion farm.’26

Leaving the Sea is a bewildering affair, a blend of clashing styles, one moment bordering on pedestrian, the next searing experimentalism, one moment channeling the spirit of David Foster Wallace’s short stories, the next throwing his readers into surreal and dystopian worlds. Having bluntly assailed the stylistic hegemony of mainstream American fiction in his Harper’s essay, he was now attempting to prove that he could take on that style with ease. The tactic didn’t work. Marcus’ mainstream prose is dull. Indeed, it ironically suffers from precisely the very symptoms he attacked: the lack of challenge presented by writers such as Franzen and Wolfe.

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However, when Marcus unleashes his own Imp of the Perverse and lets loose with Joycean wordplay and dark, apocalyptic imaginings he transports the reader back into his now-established world of twisted psychology, malformed physicality and “the hardship” described in the story My Views on the Darkness.27 In The Father Costume, first published by Artspace Books in 2002 as a collaboration with artist Matthew Ritchie and reproduced in Leaving the Sea sans Ritchie’s work, a father and his two sons flee out to sea to avoid an unnamed threat, leaving their mother’s “kill hole” behind. The father speaks a language called “Forecast” via swathes of cloth (one thinks of the ultimate weather forecast, that of Noah and the Flood). A variety of ‘languages’ are inferred with various potencies. “If I learn a new language, my father might come true,” muses the protagonist. “If I reach deep into my mouth and scoop out a larger cave.”28 Even the water upon which they float is a language: “I saw only the wake behind us, a trail of foam that produced a language of bubbles so intimate I was ashamed to decipher it.”29 The father stores away vials of fluid: “A fluid filled with writing.”30 And, as in The Flame Alphabet and Notable American Women, the Oedipal figure of the father is beleaguered as one of the brothers plans his murder.31 The religious implications of Marcus’ language in The Father Costume are impossible to ignore, and conjure notions of traditional prayer and its attendant doubts. Why does God not answer, or certainly for most, directly? Is this perhaps due to a need for a “new language” so that one’s “father might come true”? The original publication of The Father Costume was very much conceived as a collaboration between the author and artist Ritchie. In an interview conducted at the time, Marcus made explicit the symbolism contained in the use of cloth: “there was our mutual interest in cloth, some kind of garment that would serve as a structural design of god.”32 (italics mine) The Father Costume maintains Marcus’ strange obsession with cloth, here allowing clothing almost supernatural powers that change the individual wearing them and alter language itself: “There are so many words I won’t say again,” the protagonist states near the end of The Father Costume. “I will not say ‘brother.’ I will not say ‘house,’ or ‘kill hole.’ Many of the statements I could make could be smothered by the proper combination of cloths. Silence is simply a condition of clothing. My father has seen to a final deaf costume.”

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Marcus, Ritchie and Barney all share a fascination with the cellular and the diagrammatic and happily meld retro imagery (such as grainy photographs of 1950s military figures) with esoteric notations and illustrations of arcane, mutated structures that seem to hail from an otherworldly physics laboratory assembling a scientific guide-book to Armageddon. Writing on the book in Parkett, Caroline Jones and Peter Galison described it thusly: “Artist Matthew Ritchie’s striking images blend scientific diagramming with vivid, colorful renderings of the apocalypse, while writer Ben Marcus’ cold prose plumbs the inner workings of two boys caught out at sea with a father whose costumes grow increasingly menacing. In this collaborative work, Ritchie’s and Marcus’ shared obsessions of mythology, physics, and ancient texts have produced a conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them. Looking at [Matthew Ritchie’s] paintings is like being in Dorothy’s cyclone — one minute a one-celled organism wheels by, the next minute a sequence of skulls streams along from a school chart on evolution.”33 Indeed, with its watery apocalyptic elements The Father Costume is reminiscent of Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) but, when Marcus wrote his short story, he told me that he was a Ballard novice. “When I wrote The Father Costume I had read Concrete Island and Crash by Ballard. In other words, not much. I’ve since read some of the stories in the recent, pretty amazing Collected Stories. And actually, Jonathan Lethem pressed The Drowned World on me this summer. I appreciate Ballard’s matter-of-fact approach to the disturbed future in his books. He’s pretty instructive in how he closes out disbelief in his books. To me, The Father Costume is not really related to Ballard on the level of prose. Ballard wrote more clearly and concisely. His narratives are fairly journalistic in style. FC is more self-consciously stylized, maybe more overtly literary, or poetic, for better or worse. If there’s an influence I know of it’s from Matthew Ritchie’s paintings and ideas.” What Marcus and Ritchie, Barney and Ballard share, without doubt, is the roots of a sodden annihilation found in Genesis: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven: and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”34 Both The Father Costume and River of Fundament have their Arks: in the latter it is the small vessel in which the father and his sons attempt to escape, in the former the recreation of Mailer’s house as floating vessel.

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The mouth reappears as a fulcrum in Leaving The Sea. In ‘First Love’ the mouth is “a mistake tunnel, which was still the main opening in the face … The tunnel often became wet, but it had dry sticks in front known as teeth …”35 It is the past tense that renders the reader off-balance, the suggestion that the protagonist has in some way evolved beyond the current physiognomy of the human. The mouth “was still” the main facial orifice, perversely leaving the reader to wonder just what it has been replaced with. The cool, quasi-scientific language Marcus employs is a further destabilizing device. A human skull is: “a bone that grows in time with the body and achieves a round shape to best support the face. Some cultures call it a ‘head’ and decorate it with paint and stones, or cover it with veils, gels, masks, and helmets.”36 In ‘Origins of the Family’ the mouth is “a bone hollow”37 and the story revolves around a ‘cult’ of the human bone. While effectively ‘remaking’ the human body via language, Marcus is at his most potent when he questions his own tools: Words and language and the potential disruption in the fabric of the universe they can wield. Striking a similar tone to that of Krusoe, Jeff Turrentine’s review of Leaving The Sea for The Washington Post, suggests that it inspires a sense of: “moving gradually through a dark chronology of America’s imminent social and political unraveling … it’s hard not to register them as creepy snapshots from some pre-apocalyptic Instagram feed.”38 Turrentine contextualized the collection as essentially works of Surrealism. “The adjective ‘surreal’ has, over time, come to mean ‘unfathomable’ or ‘not of this world’ or just ‘really, really freaky,’” he says. “But it’s worth noting that the early surrealist writers weren’t interested in summoning strangeness for strangeness’s sake. Their goal was rather to discomfit readers in the way that our most vivid dreams do, through the juxtaposition of realistic yet unrelated images: ‘two realities, more or less distant, brought together,’ in the words of poet Pierre Reverdy. … The best stories in … Leaving the Sea, are surreal in this original sense of the word. They seem powered by the electrostatic charge that results whenever the texture of the familiar is abraded by some alien, highly resistant material.” The themes that both reviewers strike on when writing on Marcus hold much in common with Barney’s work. The notion of moving through an “imminent,” “unraveling” can equally be applied to Barney’s works. Both share an atmosphere that inures a distinct aesthetic of apocalypticism.

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Catholic Symbolism and Barney Catholicism, Foucault notes, is: “A source of strong emotions and terrifying images which it arouses through fears of the Beyond.” Catholicism, he suggests, “provokes madness: it generates delirious beliefs, entertains hallucinations, leads men to despair and to melancholia.”39 Catholicism, according to Bloom, remains a religious creed that for many ‘mainstream’ American Christians is as alien as Mormonism or Judaism, despite their having elected a President of that persuasion—J. F. Kennedy. “Catholicism inherits its Gothic tendencies from its parent religion,” writes Mark Dery. “Catholicism is just Christianity with its graven images showing. Christianity with one foot in the chthonic.” He continues: In stark contrast to the extruded, suet-y Christianity retailed in megamall megachurches … Catholicism offers the uncanny consolations of mummified Capuchin monks, the preserved head of Catharine of Sienna, the Stations of the Cross … the homoerotic agonies of Saint Sebastian, and the dewy-browed ecstasies of Saint Theresa.40

This cornucopia of macabre imagery is no doubt what inspired Neville Wakefield to curate Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail, a survey of the ‘Drawing Restraint’ series held at the Schaulager Museum in Basel, Switzerland in 2010. The exhibition featured forty Northern Renaissance works, including those by Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497–1543), Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Lucas Cranach (c.1472–1553). Reviewing the exhibition in frieze magazine, Quinn Latimer fluctuated between enthrallment and lingering doubt as to Wakefield’s conceptual positioning: Albrecht Dürer’s 16th-century woodcuts detailing the Passion, and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s illumined oil paintings of a dusky Christ crowned with thorns, his eyes cerulean and searching, and the marble-like volumes of Lucretia wielding a knife, attend Barney’s dissembling petroleum sculptures. Nearby, Martin Schongauer’s engravings of a thin, pacific Christ share space with Barney’s drawings in their waxy, self-lubricating frames and a spate of small, hovering monitors playing videos of the artist variously scaling museum walls [and] drawing with fish blood on a turbulent boat.41

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The exhibition also featured J. P. Steudner’s 17th-century print titled Prayer Sheet with the Wounds of Christ, from whence Wakefield sourced his title. Latimer notes the fact that the work suggests Christ’s wounds as orifice, offering “enlarged, eroticized images of Christ’s wounds and a crucifixion nail hovering in a stylized field.”42 Such melding of erotic images and death was common fare during the Renaissance, and indeed it is well documented that asphyxiation leads to expansion of the genitalia in both males and females. One of the causes of Christ’s death was asphyxiation, and as art historian Leo Steinberg has noted, Christ was often portrayed with a post-mortem erection.43 Latimer notes, however, that the “surreally medical” portrayal of Christ’s wounds also bears an eerie resemblance to “female genitalia,” while the nail is “more phallus than relic.” Latimer notes that this “weird twinning of wound and procreation” was common at the time, citing Saint Augustine calling Christ’s wound the ‘gate of life’, and suggests that such a tendency is “presaging the ‘Drawing Restraint’ relationship between desire and discipline.”44 For Barney, almost without question, the ultimate phallus/erection symbol remains the Chrysler Building— its collapse in GUARDIAN OF THE VEIL: The Bonds that Gag My Mouth Have Been Loosened by My City-God (2007) is the ultimate emasculation of both American macho potency, and of the American spirit itself. Latimer would perhaps agree, noting that Wakefield’s attempts to juxtapose Christ with Barney remain somewhat overwrought. When Wakefield suggests that: “Barney offers the spectacle of the imperiled body struggling compulsively with its own vulnerability,” much like Christ, Latimer goes on the attack, noting that Barney’s penchant for barbells, rock climbing and so forth suggests the extreme opposite.45 To that one can add an obsession with such ‘masculine’ figures as Otto, Mailer, Hemingway and the image of the football jock. On the adverse of that argument can be noted Barney’s willingness to appear to be sodomized in River of Fundament and to portray Gilmore as essentially lacking a penis. That said, Wakefield’s “imperiled body” is not entirely incorrect: there are distinct moments of self-flagellation throughout Barney’s oeuvre. Is this, then, Barney’s Age of Anxiety? A kind of sexual schizophrenia? One moment cars, barbells and skyscrapers, the other the artist as castrati—Gilmore and the Apprentice sans phallus, The Chrysler Building neutered, America itself rendered as impotent vessel?

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Wakefield attempted valiantly to defend his juxtapositions, while simultaneously confessing that Christ per se does not literally appear in Barney’s work: But, in much the same way as the art of the Middle Ages drew a landscape of spiritual inference from the body of the Savior, so Barney has used his own body, as well as others … to draw out a secular theology of artistic creation. … And just as the religious iconography of the medieval period — from Eucharist images of the winepress to Erasmus’s evisceration at the hands of his persecutors — often illustrated a literal drawing out of the Holy Spirit from the anointed body, so do Barney’s extractions draw creative energy out of the visceral conditions that his actions describe. Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail brings together these two traditions, separated as they are by the iconography and belief systems of half a millennium.46

While Barney’s interest in pagan imagery is explicit, for Wakefield the logos of Christ is implicit.47 Similar links are claimed by Mark C. Taylor, the author of Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, who claims that Barney “is the most spiritual and perhaps even most religious artist working today.” “The roots of his artistic vision can be traced to ancient Greek philosophy — especially the pre-Socratics and Neoplatonists — as well as ancient pagan and Christian myths and rituals. This philosophia perennis rests on five fundamental principles: 1. Divine reality is not merely transcendent but is also immanent in the world. 2. The self is inseparably related to or even identical with divine reality. 3. This primal unity is lost when human beings fall into a condition of division and conflict. 4. The goal of human life, as well as the cosmos as a whole, is to return to this original unity. 5. The only way to achieve this goal is through the enlightenment brought by spiritual practice. Without in any way denying its layers of complexity, The CREMASTER Cycle can be interpreted as an updated version of this tradition staged in terms of modern theories of biology and sexuality dressed up in postmodern gender-bending fashion.”48

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Fundamental America If any contemporary cultural artifact sums up the cultural-schizophrenic symptoms of Church/State division it would be River of Fundament: a monster of over five-and-a-half hours of intense, fecund and fetid imagery. Ostensibly born via a ‘secular’ source: Mailer’s immense 1983 tome Ancient Evenings, with its themes of reincarnation and rebirth, alongside Barney’s powerful use of Christian, specifically Catholic imagery, suggests a work of obsessive religiosity. Both film and book take as their inspiration the notion and even attainment of reincarnation. While Mailer retreated to ancient Egypt for his fantasy, Barney’s is resettled in contemporary America—Detroit, Los Angeles and New York—and is arguably less about reincarnation and metempsychosis as it is the deterioration and damnation of the American spirit. The Greek term metempsychosis, used to explain the transmigration of the soul, has a strange modernist and postmodernist literary lineage. It appears in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) where Molly Bloom mispronounces the term as “met him pike hoses” While Leopold Bloom defines the term thusly: “Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body after death, that we have lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember past lives.”49 There is reference to metempsychosis in Thomas Pynchon’s inaugural novel V (1963) and it is fair to assume that the name of the character Madame Psychosis in Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is a pun that alludes to metempsychosis. River of Fundament is a multi-part project structured as a site-specific ‘opera’ in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler. The narrative traverses the seven stages of the soul’s progression through death and rebirth based loosely interpretation of Egyptian mythology. Barney creates a contemporary allegory of these recurring cycles of reincarnation through the use of an automobile—its leading protagonist, the Chrysler Imperial—within the American industrial landscape. The Chrysler Imperial both embodies the narrative of the project and drives it forward, weaving together the genealogies of material and myth into sculptural form. The centerpiece became DJED (2011), a monumental and phallic cast iron sculpture poured during a live performance of the opera’s third act in 2010.

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The result resembles the undercarriage of the Chrysler Imperial, molded to evoke the hieroglyph of the Egyptian god Osiris’ power, but resulting in what Okwui Enwezor describes as an “atrophied figuration of exhausted potency.”50 For the scene twenty-five tons of molten iron were poured from five custom-built furnaces into an open, molded pit in the earth at the site of a derelict steel mill along the Detroit River (a setting which recalls numerous post-apocalyptic settings discussed herein, most especially Nolan’s Gotham and Lynch’s ‘Philadelphia’ in Eraserhead). This was evidently the largest non-industrial pour ever undertaken and cinematically it is arguably the high point of the film as flaming metal appears to pour over the screen. DJED’s resulting cast iron and graphite block recalls the jagged alien metallic-organic architecture captured so brilliantly by H. R. Giger for Ridley Scott’s Alien. Discussing Serra in the context of CREMASTER 3, Mark C. Taylor describes the forge as the womb and the artist as the “attending obstetrician.”51 Here, Barney is the obstetrician. Žižek, in 2003, pre-empted many obvious criticisms that could pertain to River of Fundament and indeed Barney’s entire oeuvre, arguing that most ‘transgressive’ performance is dull and opportunistic: the superego injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and provocations (the performance artist masturbating on stage, or masochistically cutting himself: the sculptor displaying decaying animal corpses or human excrement), or to the parallel injunction to engage in more and more ‘daring’ forms of sexuality.52

Barney most certainly ticks all of these boxes, but where he transcends the clichés of both performance and video art is by placing these tropes into epic filmic narratives. Cutting, masturbating and utilizing faeces they are indeed now old transgressions, once necessarily undertaken historically to shock the mainstream. For Barney they are undertaken to advance a narrative—to flesh out a story. Older purveyors of ‘perversion,’ from medieval acts of the carnivalesque to Hermann Nitsch’s ongoing gore fests since the 1970s, acted as rapid-fire terrorist incursions. Žižek’s fundamental point is inarguable, and in Barney’s case is partly postmodern homage to his ‘transgressive’ forebears. But it is foremost a textural element placed within a textual context.

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“Something that eludes naming is automatically relegated … to the status of shit,” writes Don DeLillo.53 In light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory via Žižek, shit is the inarguable Real, which “cannot be positively signified: it can only be shown, in a negative gesture.”54The Real cannot be signified not because it is outside, external to the symbolic order, but precisely because it is inherent to it, its internal limit: the Real is the internal stumbling block on account of which the symbolic system can never ‘become itself,’ achieve its self-identity. Because of its absolute immanence to the symbolic, the Real cannot be positively signified: it can only be shown, in a negative gesture, as the inherent failure of symbolization.

Shit, which arouses both immediate fascination and disgust, irrefutable in both tangible repulsion and ongoing intrigue, is the core symbol in River of Fundament. While the scatological is inherent in contemporary American culture—from South Park to Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy— it is symptomatic of a broader disease, the epidemic of waste. Indeed, what becomes of the Eucharist once it is consumed? Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), a dialectic narrative that spans from the 1950s to the 1990s, is linked via waste: derelict ammunitions, urban slums, generic garbage, abandoned industrial infrastructure and toxic and nuclear wastes. It is shit that links the traumas of the novel’s protagonist, Nick Shay, a waste manager for a global corporation. Aspects of DeLillo’s Underworld are arguably a perfect elaboration of Žižek’s description of the Lacanian Real, something fully immanent to the symbolic order but that eludes naming. Blurring the lines between excess and waste, DeLillo’s sprawling epic fulfills a number of the requirements of what is termed the Great American Novel. (The term Great American Novel derives from the title of an 1868 essay by John William De Forest in The Nation, January 9, 1868.) It is both physically and psychologically ‘heavy,’ a broad term suggesting a work of literature that encompasses the unruly ‘spirit’ of America and embraces the Grand Themes of the ‘American Experience.’ Like the works of David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon [1997]) and Sergio de la Pava (A Naked Singularity [2008]) and, of course, Ancient Evenings, it is epic. The Great American Novel is a title that has been fought over by numerous (white, male) authors, from Gore Vidal to Tom Wolfe, but it was most especially cherished and lusted after by Norman Mailer. By its very nature it is an implausible concept, an abstraction, but also symbolic of the inherent macho American male ego. Similarly epic, River of Fundament is very much a homage to American masculinity embodied in the personas of the supposed Big

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Men of American Letters: Mailer and his idol ‘Papa’ Hemingway. Equally symbolic are the workers of the Detroit automotive industry and their phallic products. Barney eschews subtlety in his depiction of that city’s decline, poetically overseeing Detroit’s urban decay. The surface of the city is flayed to its ribs, its flesh long since desiccated, a victim of a virus, not just economically incurred, but indicative of spiritual decay. This is Barney’s ode to Ruin Porn.55 This is also an aesthetic favored by David Lynch in both Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and in his book The Factory Photographs, (Prestel, 2014), J. G. Ballard’s High Rise (Flamingo, 1975), Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren, (Bantam Books, 1975) and Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh. Referring to Mailer, Hemingway and Serra and the city itself, Enwezor notes that the film is “an exploration of the exhaustion of that archetypal figure and the exhaustion of the landscape of Detroit, these weary territories.”56 While Detroit is central, we are led into the film via Manhattan as a witness to Mailer’s wake in his Brooklyn Heights home after the author’s death, featuring a grouping of New York literati. The party starts with a sober, if surreal, air that gradually crumbles into hysteria, excess and the carnivalesque. Amidst the initial scenes we witness Barney (playing Norman Mailer’s fictional Ka or ‘spirit:’ ‘Norman I’ in the first of his three incarnations) wading through bubbling faeces to ascend to Mailer’s bathroom where he discovers a solid-looking turd in the bowl which he picks up and wraps delicately in gold leaf before placing it back in the bowl which in turn allows Usermare (Stephen Paynes) to appear and promptly sodomize Barney, Usermare’s ejaculate appearing as mercury which trickles under the bathroom door (symbolically either impregnating or infecting the entire proceedings). One cannot help but be reminded of the flowing metallic form of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Given both Usermare and Norman’s Ka are ‘dead’ this perhaps gives new meaning to the title of Leo Bersani’s influential essay on sex and death (AIDS), ‘Is The Rectum A Grave.’57 This is particularly apt if one accepts Žižek’s suggestion of all of humanity being read as shit. He claims that: “Martin Luther proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus.” It is within this Protestant “logic of man’s excremental identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated.”58 This could also apply to the gear master in Eraserhead who can be seen as suffering an extremely painful bowel movement just before Henry’s appearance.

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Barney may have set River of Fundament in Detroit (the physical birthplace of the American car) and Manhattan (the physical home of Norman Mailer, and replete with perpetual vehicular gridlock) but, of his three chosen cities, it is arguably Los Angeles that is the ‘spiritual’ home of the automobile. Both OTTOshaft and River of Fundament clearly reference Los Angeles artist Ed Keinholz whose burial was his final work. Reflecting upon this macabre piece of performance art, Robert Hughes notes that: … his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes the Packard, steered by his widow … rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West.59

Keinholz’s obsession with the automobile is shared by the likes of Lynch, Cronenberg and Barney. For Mike Davis, in City of Quartz, Keinholz’s Back Seat Dodge (1964): … summarized the Southern California Dream in a single noir tableau. Literally hotrodding, Keinholz ‘chopped’ a ’38 coupé and set it in a ‘Lovers’ Lane’ complete with discarded beer bottles on the grass and ‘mushy’ music. Dead lovers, locked in a grim missionary embrace on the front seat, seemed to symbolize an adolescence gone to seed in eternity.60

Continuing his cultural analysis of the car in California, Davis also raises Thomas Pynchon (a clear inspiration for Ben Marcus) and describes his The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as providing the “ultimate freeway-map ontology of Southern California,” and notes that a young Pynchon was “forced” to create “eroticized descriptions of Bomark missiles and the like.”61 Barney also (unforced) eroticizes the automobile, while also making clear its role as a vessel, a chalice, a coffin or an orifice. Like Keinholz’s coupe, it was a chariot, not only for transport, but for transformation and transcendence. In destroying the Rouge industrial complex and the Chrysler Building (the auto-cathedral, thus suggesting the death of the American spirit), Barney calls this potency and transformation into question. Arguably, in the new millennium, the automobile has in fact become the destination rather than the means to the destination, the locale rather

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than the device. Comfort designed, it no longer functions as a vehicle of destiny. It is the destiny. It is, in effect, entrapment. It no longer represents the freedom or anarchistic impulse of James Dean or Jack Kerouac. It is a temperature-controlled means to visit the drive-in takeaway, or even drive-in church services, never having to leave the plasticized womb/coffin. In 1971, J. G. Ballard asked a compelling question: “What is the real significance in our lives of this huge metallized dream? Is the car, in more senses than one, taking us for a ride?” Ballard also notes that the contemporary landscape is being created by and for the car, a concept, he claims, that people are beginning to rebel against. “They look with horror at Los Angeles … a city ruthlessly ruled by the automobile, with its air clouded by exhaust gases and its man-made horizons formed by the embankments of gigantic freeway systems.”62 Revolving around three generations of American automobile design, the River of Fundament narrative is rooted in the reincarnation of its leading protagonist, the Chrysler Imperial, and much of it is, inevitably, set in Los Angeles. The automobile and the road are inextricably and inevitably linked to the American mythos. “The road that leads towards a ‘telos’ is fundamental to the Western tradition at least since the Jews left Egypt to reach their ‘Promised Land’: Israel,” notes Manual Dries.63 In keeping with this theme in River of Fundament we witness a ritualized performance in a Chrysler dealership in Los Angeles where ‘Norman’ is interred in the form of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial. This is Barney’s ‘Pentecostal moment’ replete with the tradition of ‘Jericho marching’ in which Pentecostals shout out prayers and hymns with militant swagger. Barney’s ‘pastor’ is an overweight car room salesman, as flamboyant as any Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart. Returning to Mailer’s wake where, after ‘Norman I’ has crossed the River of Fundament, he finds he is unable to communicate with his wife. Instead he speaks to the reigning Pharaoh in this Brooklyn brownstone, Ptah-nem-hotep, played to great effect by Paul Giamatti. It is fair to surmise that Ptah-nem-hotep is a reference to Ptah-hotep, a minister during the reign of Djedkare Izesi in the fifth dynasty and the author of The Instruction of Ptahhotep, an extremely early piece of what is often described as Egyptian ‘wisdom literature.’ The film flashes back to the bizarre events occurring on the lot of the Chrysler dealership in Los Angeles, where the mangled 1967 Chrysler Imperial holds center place, complete with a large ball of dung protuberance, converting the vehicle into an automotive scarab beetle. While

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this is meant to represent Norman I, 1967 is also the year of Barney’s birth and could thus also be read as a self-portrait of sorts. After the Chrysler has been ‘sodomized’ by a backhoe in a performance reminiscent of the work of Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories, (SRL, a shifting group of industrial artisans based in California was established by Mark Pauline in 1979. Their first performance was Machine Sex on February 25, 1979. In conversation, Barney mentions that he had in fact met Pauline and was aware of their work.) it is interred at the dealership amidst a militaristic cacophony of drums and bugles: the sheer surrealism of the scene—the mundanity of a used car lot as setting for sacred rite, the role of used-car salesman as Pastor—is decidedly Lynchian. The salesman addresses the crown with the vacant emotion of a sales pitch: “Welcome to the Ren Chrysler. Each season at Ren, we release a new generation of fuel-efficient, compact cars into the Greater Los Angeles Region. Ren Chrysler is a descendant of the fuel shortage of the late ’70s, and earned its five-star status in 1979. Ren has been committed to the compact ever since.” Once again returning to Mailer’s wake, Norman I and Ptah-nemhotep move into a ‘throne room’ (an elaborate, giant golden toilet) next to the banquet where Ptah-nem-hotep states that he is envious of Norman’s earlier acquaintance of the Pharaoh Usermare and reveals his use of eating faeces in his acts of sorcery: he eats others’ shit to consume their knowledge. “I think I’m at my best when I can set up a situation where the action is largely dictated by the environment,” Barney told The New York Times. In the throne room scene with Paul Giamatti, for example, he explains to ‘Norman’ that he’s been using his feces to cultivate crops that people eat. It was easy for him to get his head around that character because of our conversations and the rehearsals, but also because of the environment. Bobbi Starr was really easy to direct. She’s a classical oboist. And one of the most famous anal actresses in the adult film business. There’s a claustrophobia in my films, an interiority that’s relentless. The peaks of violence, of humor and explicit sexual imagery are like little valves that relieve pressure.64

Barney’s favored environment is clearly industrial Detroit. The camera lingers on the ruined buildings, the once potent vessels of America’s automotive industry, now gutted husks with roofing timbers jutting like decaying teeth or broken ribs. These are among Barney’s most riveting

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images in the film: the poetry of gradual decimation. Detroit also plays a major Ruin Porn role in Jim Jarmusch’s stylish vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) in which its two key protagonists, named appropriately enough Adam and Eve, visit Detroit’s Michigan Theater, the now-gutted but once-grand movie palace. Like Barney’s, Jarmusch’s camera lingers and caresses the scars of decay. Barney’s camera loiters on Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals (1932–1933). Even before the murals were completed the Detroit Institute for the Arts invited various clergymen to comment on the murals, with both Catholic and Episcopalian clergy condemning the murals for blasphemy. The murals were also seen as political blasphemy given the anti-communist, Fundamentalist evangelical, tenor of the day. There is a brief nod to Blade Runner in the opening scenes of Detroit, with gas flames emitting from industrial chimneys and more than a few hints of Cronenberg’s influence: Barney’s puckering arseholes are surely not-so-distant cousins of those in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Maggots and beetles invade every other scene and of course Burroughs’ typewriter in Cronenberg’s film takes on the form of a giant scarab. In Detroit, an FBI investigation led by Isis and her sister Nephthys (Jennie Knaggs) recover the automotive body of Osiris from the River Rouge (now the Chrysler Imperial from CREMASTER 3: “To take that body back to its birthplace seemed nearly obvious,” Barney has said65). This is very much Barney’s The X-Files moment, combining the gritty crime-scene sensibility with the supernatural, Mullins and Knaggs standing in for Mulder and Scully. The sisters resurrect Osiris’ sexual organ via the engine block from which Isis becomes pregnant. Osiris’ brother Set is enraged and feeds the Chrysler into a massive furnace as Isis, imprisoned in the back of a Crown Victoria, watches helplessly. The gates of the furnace open and the molten body of Osiris is resurrected as the massive iron Djed pillar, discussed earlier in its sculptural form DJED, in an alchemical birth, the furnace as vaginal canal, its womb afire ejecting a massive metal phallus. A 1979 golden Pontiac Firebird Trans Am—Norman II—resurfaces in Newtown Creek, an industrial canal in New York City.66 In a highly graphic scene in the back seat, a close up of Isis’ vulva delivers Osiris’ son Horus in the form of a falcon while the front seat nurses a slumbering alligator, a reference, no doubt, to the Egyptian god of crocodiles, the squamous Sobek.

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At this juncture Barney lingers upon a singular image that articulates the very spirit, of River of Fundament. A massive bird of prey is poised atop the pulsating lights of a Detroit Police Department cruiser set against the deep reds and blues of a sunset. It is a melancholic moment that, for all of its surrealist aftertaste, captures the clichéd icon of the Old West: the Bird of Prey atop its victim: the symbol of authority, of Law and Order, its flashing dome lights now essentially impotent. It is an image that suggests that the ‘Old’ rules remain in place, that ‘Nature’ remains dominant in the form of the majestic bird. This is the West of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005), the Law—the police cruiser—subsumed by the talons of the raptor. An alternative reading would be that this is the death of the Old West, of the masculine in the form of the likes of Hemingway and Mailer, the Oedipal demi-gods of this epic. As stunning as the image is, Barney’s use of the raptor here remains ambiguous. The bald eagle is both a sacred totem of many Native American peoples and the national bird of the United States of America. The Continental Congress adopted it as the symbol for the Great Seal of the United States on June 20, 1782, and it remains a symbol of American courage and honor. Is Barney here alluding to the notion of America as World Policeman or, given the more apocalyptic thematic at play is it, once again, symbolic of the collapse of law and order? Is the bird about to take flight, taking the ‘soul’ of the Detroit Police, symbolized by the cruiser, with it? Such necrophagous birds will feed on road-kill and rotting carrion as soon as hunt their prey, thus potentially marking the police cruiser as offal. The molten operatic act undertaken on the banks of the Detroit River in 2010 was titled Khu. “It’s the level of the soul in Egyptian mythology that corresponds to the sight,” says Barney. He notes that when someone dies, “first their name leaves, then the vision leaves, then the power and mobility leaves. The Khu is visualized as a glowing bird that the deceased would see leaving.”67 Thus again suggesting the departure of the American spirit. The mythos of the old masculine frontier is Barney-world. We have seen it alluded to before in the opening scenes of CREMASTER 2, as the camera pans across the Utah salt lakes in imagery reminiscent of the aforementioned Pale Rider, another American film imbued with spiritual portent. Eastwood’s character, a Preacher, his torso a matrix of shotgun scars, has clearly been reincarnated or has risen from the dead in order

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to serve out justice, a not dissimilar quasi-mystical theme that also runs through Eastwood’s 1973 High Plains Drifter. Among Barney’s opening scenes in River of Fundament, there is Hemingway’s rifle blasting through the tranquility, a distinctly phallic and ‘masculine’ moment, but one that also recalls Hemingway’s suicide by shotgun. Clearly Barney, like Mailer before him, aspires to this macho pantheon alongside the likes of Hemingway, McCarthy and Eastwood. As the narrative moves on, a rotting, pustulating Usermare returns to a nearly empty wake at the Mailer brownstone where he meets Hathfertiti, who reveals that she is his daughter. The Pharaoh is enraged that Hathfertiti has spent her life enabling Norman, a mortal, in his quest for immortality. Hathfertiti rejects her father, defending her dedication to the writer. Meanwhile Norman II has retired to the River of Faeces in preparation for his transformation into a new body and his return to Hathfertiti. At a nearby taxi garage in Queens the spirit of Norman III is embodied as a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, which is being gilded in preparation for the coronation of a new king/Pharaoh. In a flashback to a ritual at a dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Horus (Brennan Hall) and Set (Eugene Perry and Herbert Perry) vie for the crown. The dry-dock is filled with chanting youths and the arena is set for an epic battle. Simultaneously a violent fistfight ensues at the garage between two mechanics, stand-ins for Horus and Set. In its extreme and gory physicality, it is also likely to be a further homage to Mailer, who was fascinated by boxing and penned a classic piece of reportage on the sport, with his account of the famous Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier battle in Zaïre titled The Fight (1975).68 A cover of Sports Illustrated featuring Ali in action was also on prominent display as part of Subliming Vessel and River of Fundament exhibitions, as was a photograph of Mailer hamming an arm wrestle with Ali. In Barney’s apocalyptic clash one fighter loses an eye while the other has his penis torn off. As that battle rages, the heavily pregnant garage manager is enjoying anilingus from her equally pregnant lover who then removes an eye and gently forces it into her anus. Barney is clearly paying homage to Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye in which Bataille’s protagonist, Simone, inserts a dead priests eye into both her vagina and her anus but, given his oft expressed admiration for the artist, Barney could also be referencing Hans Bellmer’s Study for Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil (1946), gently pornographic photographs which, surprisingly

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given both their source inspiration and Bellmer’s overall oeuvre, are only mildly transgressive. Barney’s and Bataille’s image is the other extreme of William S. Burroughs’ talking asshole in Naked Lunch (1959), an anal dentata which can talk, eat and shit but, as it oft bemoans, cannot see.69 Mark Dery notes that: “Burroughs’s heroin gothic is partly about the triumph of matter over mind, the body conceived of as dead meat or alien Other, as in the ‘Talking Asshole’ routine from Naked Lunch, a kind of Wittgensteinian horror story — language, which is usually in the service of the mind, overmastered by the ravening orality of the anus, itself a kind of inverted mouth.”70 Both the eye and the asshole are Žižekian Organs Without Bodies, but together they may suggest “the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth.”71 The recipient of the eye spins on the desk to remove sticky notes on a window, allowing her anal eye to look into the torn-out eye of one of the fighters in the next room. However, one quickly becomes inured to Barney’s more ‘gratuitous’ moments. They seem to flow into the narrative in much the same way as the river of faeces flows. Much the same can be said of his fairly clear cinematic references: David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mario Bava or Dario Argenta and the zombie genre, along with the design work of H. R. Giger for Alien, are all pronounced influences (as is, arguably, the scatological humour of South Park). Meanwhile the Mailer House continues downriver, perhaps in a reference to Huck Finn, all the way to Cairo, the town at the mouth of the Ohio River that led to the free states. However, while both the Mississippi and the Nile reach alternate versions of Cairo, the Hudson has no such destination. As Angus Cook suggests, this may be the “river as means of escape.”72 This can also be read as yet another example of the hapless task of Mailer’s, and in a broader sense, America’s hope of reinvention. For Barney it is, perhaps, the cultural-schizophrenia of Huckleberry Finn meeting Georges Bataille. An aged and bed-ridden Hathfertiti (Ellen Burstyn), having sent Norman II through the portal towards his resurrection, is nearing the end of her life. Usermare pleads with her to abandon Norman and embrace her royal inheritance before she passes, thus ensuring her immortality. Hathfertiti again rejects Usermare, declaring her allegiance to the energy of the earth and the pursuit of magic. She returns to the bedroom and falls into a final sleep. Usermare, in sullen and melancholic mode at

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the end of the film, laments that now, in place of a king, and quoting Mailer’s book verbatim: “there are only weak princes,”73 and that “the present moment is only the excrement which the past has left behind.”74 Destroyed by his daughter’s rejection, Usermare “commits a spiritual suicide,”75 severing his ties to his family and to his past. In the upper floors of the Mailer House, Norman III (Chief Dave Beautiful Bald Eagle) has emerged. After a brief term, he attempts to reenter the portal, where he becomes trapped, ending the lineage of Norman. As David Harvey notes: “The only irreducible in Foucault’s scheme of things is the human body, for that is the ‘site’ at which all forms of repression are ultimately registered.”76

Feminine and Oral Narrative in River of Fundament Barney has woven several CREMASTER 3 elements into River of Fundament, among them the Imperial, his own Apprentice character and Mullins, whose character Isis is at one point an F.B.I. forensic investigator who reconstitutes the drowned Imperial (her brother Osiris), first as a 1979 Pontiac Firebird, and then as a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (the same model as that used in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Mad Max: The Road Warrior in 1981). Isis resurrects Osiris’ sexuality by placing snakes into the cylinders of the engine block organ, then partially disrobes and copulates with the engine, thus becoming pregnant. Once again, we are reminded of the flesh/metal intercourse of Cronenberg’s Crash and Rosanna Arquette’s callipered legs,77 as well as Barney’s own short film Hoist (2006), where a man copulates with a truck. The narratives running throughout River of Fundament are segmented and fractured via shifts in time and the very embodiment of the characters. The key stars here are Barney and Mullins who act as the theurgical ‘stars,’ Norman’s Ka spirits (the tonal alliteration of Ka and car would surely not have been lost on Barney), but what cohesion remains is supplied by the powerful acting of Gyllenhall as Hathfertiti.78 One cannot help but recall, as she is confronted in a scene that involves gymnastic female pissing and competitive dwarf tossing during a confrontation with a pustulating Usermare, that this is the same actor that competed against The Joker in Heath Ledger’s electrified performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In both cases her essentially tranquil features and melancholic air balance the anarchistic and excessive

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aspects of the Joker and Usermare. A further similarity to the two films’ casting was made by Jed Perl in The New Republic: “Mailer’s youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, holds his own playing his father: his looks and demeanor suggest a reincarnated Heath Ledger.” Perl also compares Barney’s initial appearance to Christian Bale—who played The Batman in The Dark Knight—accepting his Oscar for The Fighter (2010), which is, indeed, an apt juxtaposition.79 Physical correlations of the mouth, and the actors utilized, in the works of Barney, Lynch and Cronenberg give pause for thought. The mouth of Gyllenhall as Hathfertiti in River of Fundament and Rachel in The Dark Knight remains pursed. It is the orifice of stoppage in the face of the carnivalesque. She is the mother figure, made explicit in River of Fundament by her milking of her own breast. Gyllenhall’s breast here becomes a momentary organ without body, but the milk is wasted thus, as the readings of Melanie Klein (1882–1960) would suggest, Gyllenhall is the bad mother whose character Hathfertiti, as played by Burstyn, goes on not to birth the final Mailer. Deborah Harry’s mouth also appears in both Cronenberg and Barney’s work. Barney underutilizes the pop-siren’s sensuality in River of Fundament, however Cronenberg makes the most of her moist, pouting orifice in Videodrome. The role of the female here (especially Mullins and Gyllenhall) also suggests the influence of female artists on Barney. Mignon Nixon, utilizing three works, Louise Bourgeois’ The Destruction of the Father (1974),80 Janine Antoni’s Gnaws (1992) and Rona Pondick’s Legs, Mouth and Milk (1994), analyzes their work via Klein’s concept of the ‘good’ mother versus the ‘bad’ mother in which the breast (nurture) is either offered or taken away—as such the breast becomes an organ without body—in a brief moment Gyllenhall’s breast is center frame, ‘removed’ from the body. Bourgeois, Antoni and Pondick all utilize a peculiar mix of materials with a focus on the object, the orifice and consumption. In this regard Antoni’s chocolate steps in for Barney’s Vaseline. Louise Bourgeois on The Destruction of the Father (1974): “It is basically a table, the awful, terrifying family dinner table headed by the father who sits and gloats. And the others, the wife, the children, what can they do? They sit there in silence. The mother of course tries to satisfy the tyrant, her husband. The children are full of exasperation. … My father would get nervous looking at us, and he would explain to all of us what a great man he was. So, in exasperation, we grabbed the man, threw him on the table, dismembered him, and

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proceeded to devour him.” Nixon notes that: “Bourgeois’s oral-sadistic fantasy of dismembering and devouring her father’s body is the double of another one, the desire to eat his words.”81 An observation that is echoed when Paul Giamatti slices into the pig’s tongue while musing on Mailer’s love of the Word. For Ballard the breast is the source of obesity and over-consumption: “The American Dream is of an enormous nipple pressing to our lips its over-sweet milk. We suck contentedly unafraid of the comic book demons who howl through our sleeping brains.”82 Both Lynch and Cronenberg vividly utilize Willem Dafoe’s rotting maw in Wild at Heart and eXistenZ respectively. As grotesqueries, Dafoe’s Bobby Peru, Marcus’ Le Bov and Hopper’s Frank are matched by Stephen Payne as Usermare, becoming Jungian archetypes of evil.83 They encapsulate the darker side of what Jung called The Shadow. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung claimed, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”84 Figures such as Usemare would appear to lack a ‘conscious’ life outside of their Shadow.

Dissipating the American Spirit At one point the first Norman, played by John Buffalo Mailer, is handed a knife by Isis who has just guided him out of the septic river. He then eviscerates a dead, bloated cow he finds by the river and extracts a stillborn calf. Norman climbs into the gutted belly and moments later, Norman II emerges as the 72-year-old, African-American jazz drummer Milford Graves. The cow is in effect the womb. As Nietzsche points out in Ecce Homo, “One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.”85 The evisceration of the cow is one of those moments of potent ritual devised by Barney for maximum impact. However, the evisceration of the cow and the choice of an Indian elder, the third Norman is Chief David Beautiful Bald Eagle, a 94-yearold Lakota tribal leader—in a typical Barney palimpsest—is strangely logical. Despite the American indigenous people having been visited by Jesus in Mormon lore, any trust between the Lakota and the Mormons, if it existed in the first place, was shattered by The Grattan Massacre which began on August 19, 1854 after a cow belonging to a Mormon migrant wandered onto a camp of Lakota Sioux people and was promptly consumed.86 The Mormon demanded retribution and the United States Army stepped in. The event is often considered the

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opening moment of the First Sioux War. The discomfort many felt with Joseph Smith’s inclusion of the American native people in the Lost Tribes of Israel continued on—in 1871 Brigham Young stated that: There is a curse on these aborigines of our country who roam the plains and are so wild that you cannot tame them. They are of the House of Israel: they once had the Gospel delivered to them, they had oracles of truth: Jesus came and administered to them after his resurrection and they received and delighted in the Gospel until the fourth generation when they turned away and became so wicked that God cursed them with this dark and benighted and loathsome condition.87

Thus Barney, via the carcass of a cow, and the casting of a Lakota elder, raises issues of Mormon relations with race and, via the reincarnation of Norman Mailer, the author of The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s own history of coverage of the Mormon faith. The eviscerated cow is matched in turn by the roasted but eventually rotting, maggot-infested pig at Mailer’s wake, a perverse allusion to his Judaic background. There are, perhaps also suggestions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979), replete as it is with rotting animals, the evisceration of a water buffalo and specific literary references such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and T. S. Eliot. Like Barney, Coppola made numerous references to his literary influences. Shortly before Kurtz is murdered he recites a section of Elliot’s The Hollow Men (1925), which begins with the epigraph ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead,’ from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Apocalypse Now two books can be spied on Kurtz’s table—Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1906–1915) and From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston (1920), two books that Eliot cited as inspirations for The Waste Land (1922). Coppola takes these references even further when Willard meets Dennis Hopper’s photojournalist character who describes himself alongside Kurtz as: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” from Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). Our first image of Barney arising from the river carries strong echoes of the emergence of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) from the river in the closing chapter of Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War was also a preoccupation of Mailer’s and his Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) helped establish his literary position in America. Cinematic comparisons such as Lynch, Cronenberg and even Coppola and Nolan seem

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far more apt for Barney than such art world luminaries as Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Douglas Gordon or Christian Marclay, who utilize the moving image, but whose use of narrative is decidedly sparse. There are also shadows of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Ingmar Bergman’s (1918–2007) The Seventh Seal (1957), Jean Cocteau’s (1889–1963) Orphée (1950) and, more specifically, Luis Buñuel’s (1900–1983) Un Chien Andalou (1928), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922 –1975) Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Of these, Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain would seem particularly pertinent. There are references to Masonic design and Modernist architecture throughout and Jodorowsky’s character climbs a tower a la The Apprentice in CREMASTER 3. Like Barney, Jodowrowsky references Bataille’s eviscerated eye. Indeed, with his religious iconography, killer dwarfs, malevolent clowns, hyperactive amputees, protruding alien growths and human excrement, The Holy Mountain predates many of the images discussed herein. The script of Fundament is littered with literary references and quotes from the ‘major’ men of American letters: alongside Mailer himself, Hemingway, Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and William S. Burroughs (and, arguably, although not acknowledged, Cormac McCarthy). However, there is a melancholy to these references, a sense that the great days of American writing are past in much the same way as the great days of the American automotive industry are past. A sense that each time Norman is reincarnated something of his spirit: the ‘spirit’ of America, is dissipated. A perhaps surprising omission in Barney’s chorus of authors, especially given his visual flirtation with whaling in Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) is Herman Melville (1819–1891). Whaling is a central visual thematic in Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 (2005). Working closely with his then-partner, singer Björk, the set of the film is based on the Japanese factory whaling vessel, the Nisshin Maru in the Sea of Japan, as it makes its annual journey to Antarctica. As Bloom points out, Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is arguably “the most apocalyptic of major American novels.” Given Barney’s fascination with esoteric religions this would also have allowed a degree of entre into the world of Zoroastrian beliefs. Captain Ahab, the protagonist of the novel, is portrayed as a Zoroastrian. Zoroastrian was founded by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra or, for the

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Greeks, Zoroaster, some 3000 years ago and replete with its own apocalyptic mythos. It was the foundation for Nietzsche’s fictional account of Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883). Bloom notes that it was Zoroaster, rather than the Hebrew prophets, who established Western notions of both Hell and the Devil and is the “ultimate ancestor of the full range of recent American millenarians.”88 Unfortunately, by the end of the epic, the audience too feels dissipated. The last hour drags on interminably, as though Barney either didn’t know how to end it or had to keep innumerable repetitive endings to simply test his audiences’ endurance. We close in the mountains of Idaho near Hemingway’s cabin with numerous National Geographicstyle slices, half expecting a new monologue to start, narrated by David Attenborough: “that inexhaustible genre of nature films, electronic wallpaper for the ecologically concerned,” as Hughes describes the style, “known to skeptics in the trade as ‘bugs fucking to Mozart’.”89 Many moments in River of Fundament carry this problem—the points having been made, Barney insists upon belaboring them, evidently believing that endurance on behalf of his audience is part of the project. But regardless of one’s feelings about sodomy or the ultra-scatological, River of Fundament is in essence a work of potent imaging, albeit one that requires an edit.

Christian Iconography Christian iconography haunts Fundament, perhaps most bizarrely when Barney plays the role of the performance artist James Lee Byars, who was born in Detroit and died in Cairo in 1997. Byars, in turn, via Barney, plays Houdini. The scene is set in the Detroit Catholic St. John Cantius Church in which an ambulance, coated internally in gold leaf, resides upon the altar. Whether or not by design, the Church chosen by Barney supplied a locus for four underpinning elements: belief systems, the automobile, the fading of the automobile industry (American potency) and the scatological. The church had been built to service a nearby car factory. When the factory shut down the city utilized the surrounding property for sewage treatment and, due to the all-pervasive stench, this led to services at the church being shut down as well, arguably representing the death of ritual and belief under the weight of olfactory excrement. Barney’s overt utilization of a specifically Catholic church indicates the artist’s keen awareness of Christian iconography and self-conscious

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acknowledgement of it as fundamental to American culture and as a symptom of the cultural-schizophrenic divide between Church and State. Above the ambulance, in perfect symmetry, is the image of the Crucifixion. Barney’s choice of church is also no doubt conscious as a specific religious distinction: Bloom compares the Roman Catholic crucifix with the cross of Baptist churches most American Protestant denominations present, noting that. “The Catholics worship Christ crucified, but the Baptists salute the empty cross from which Jesus already has risen.”90 (Bloom also makes the point that one never witnesses the Cross in Mormon churches. Theirs is an American Jesus, the crucifixion a memory.)91 Byars was similarly inspired by religious and spiritual symbolism, involving a Catholic nun named Sister M. Germaine for two of his performances.92 Throughout River of Fundament the image of two fingers entering the mouth with gold flake is repeated, an image that also recalls the granting of bread in Holy Communion. The Catholic urge towards ‘cannibalism’ is an unnerving one. While celebrating the image of a man slowly suffocating under his own weight and simultaneously oozing blood from various inflicted wounds, believers consume his ‘flesh’ and his ‘blood’ with regularity. Known as Transubstantiation—the transformation of flesh into bread, blood into wine via the Eucharist— the eating of human flesh begins at an early age in a ritual known as Holy Communion. Indeed, the Apprentice’s forced consumption of the remains of Gary Gilmore in CREMASTER 3 could be read as a deformed form of Transubstantiation. An initially prone ‘Byars’ arises, adorned in a golden straitjacket and a black blindfold. His mouth is bloodied, an explicit reference to the Apprentice in CREMASTER 3 (he is also adorned with knee pads, confirming that this indeed is the Apprentice, but also perhaps suggestive of the painful practice of kneeling on hardwood planks during prayer). Indeed, in excerpts from the script reproduced in the catalogue, Barney refers to his own character as the APPRENTICE and that of Mullins’ as the NOVICE.93 Wakefield notes that it is no coincidence that “the bodies of one work pass into the bloodstream of another. This after all is Barney’s own sacrament.”94 The camera lingers on this image, which takes on the formalities of a Renaissance frieze. Byars himself was strongly influenced by theology and died, coincidentally but aptly for Barney, in Cairo, the site of Mailer’s opus, in 1997. Indeed, Byars, not long before his departure for Cairo, executed his last performance

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in front of the Pyramid situated at the Cour Napoléon at the Louvre. “The gold leaf floating away had something of the vaudeville about it,”95 writes Angus Cook. Barney takes the vaudeville of Byars and Houdini and adds a dose of the carnivalesque and ritual. The film locks onto a scene in the church as Barney plays a ‘holy trinity’ of Houdini, Byars and Osiris embodied in one. Here Norman II is represented as a gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The myth of Isis and Osiris is then reenacted by the Ka spirits, (Mullins and Barney). Set (Eugene Perry and Herbert Perry) locks Osiris into the Trans Am after attiring Barney in a golden straitjacket and placing five top hats onto his head, stating that: “There are five points to a man,” a reference perhaps to the Five Points of Calvinism.96 He then plunges a staff through the car’s windshield. What ensues could well have been a homage to the famous chase scene starring Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968)97 as the Trans Am speeds away, veering around abandoned, rusted automobiles in a scenario that strongly suggests the post-apocalyptic as it careers off the side of the Belle Isle Bridge, landing in the Detroit River. The film returns briefly to the wake in Mailer’s floating brownstone and Barney’s tactic becomes clear as he leaps from a clichéd action shot back to the claustrophobic interior of the house and then back again. As with the aforementioned graphic novel Watchmen, Barney’s style of directing recalls the approach that Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics: “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moment.”98 As Zac Rose points out, Barney here is adorned in a mille-feuille of Byars’s ringmaster top hats, leading to a simultaneous sense of vaudeville and mystery: Barney has found a trove of ravaged Americana that translates those jeweled anthropoid coffins of the valley of the Kings into his own steel and leather soul-sarcophagus. The grim industrial setting and the Pontiac’s climactic plunge into the contaminated Detroit waterway emphasize the performance’s connection to the United States’ moribund manufacturing economy.99

This is a reinterpretation of The Death of James Lee Byars, a 1994 performance in which Byars, dressed in gold lamé, sat in a golden memorial chamber, “practicing death.”100 The Trans Am’s jump off the Belle Isle Bridge is a nod to both Harry Houdini’s most controversial escape act,

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in which he bound himself inside a wooden coffin and was lowered into a hole in the frozen Detroit River, and also the legend of Set’s murder of Osiris, which involved Set imprisoning Osiris in a coffin and dumping him into the Nile. Osiris, as king of the underworld and the representation of death in Ancient Egypt was, like Houdini, something of an escape artist. Trapped in a coffin by his brother, Set, and thrown into the Nile to drown, he was resurrected by his sister Isis. Houdini’s escape from the Detroit River is a potent parallel identified by Barney. “I think Byars had this Egyptian subtext through his work. His roots in Detroit felt important,” Barney told The Guardian newspaper: Ancient Evenings is to do with the ambition of the Pharaoh and the ambition of the nobleman to live again and again and again. So there’s something about Byars that has always interested me in his work to do with its ambition to become pure gold and its failure to be pure gold. It’s always a veneer. It wants to be something it can’t be. And I love that about the work, I love the theatre of it.101

The figure standing beneath the crucifixion is a palimpsest of characters: Byars, Houdini, The Apprentice and Barney himself. Like Christ who hangs above this figure of multiple personalities, arising from the dead seems implicit in their DNA via Barney’s own visions. Of course, it is Christ, who escaped from Death, who outdoes Houdini and, indeed, all of Barney’s literary allusions. As Bloom has noted: “Death, in literature, is the mother of beauty: death, in life, is the father of religion.”102 Similarly, for Taylor, “the birth of tragedy is the origin of art.”103 Death, in our fictions, whether they be visual art, cinema or literature, has inspired the greatest works. Death, in life, carries the weight of fear and thus the theoretical necessity of religion. One recalls the observation made by Žižek quoted earlier in which he describes two missionaries, one proclaiming the notion of living a happy life, the other proclaiming that “The end is near — repent or you will suffer immensely.”104 The end, in other words death, is the more powerful meme. This also segues with Ben Marcus’ argument against ‘kitchen fiction’—day-to-day existence is not a gripping subject—like kitchen television, such fictions are little more than opiates. David Lynch captures this dichotomy brilliantly in the opening scene of Blue Velvet where nigh blissful (but boring) suburban existence is abruptly snapped by the father’s heart attack. As

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a species, humanity is gripped by the apocalyptic and this is articulated via religion: a realm of crucifixions, burning eternities and a plethora of plagues. Nowhere is this more often articulated than via American cultural formations. Setting the Byars’ mise-en-scène in the St. John Cantius Church is far from the only Christian moment in the film. In an early scene during the wake we witness Ptah-nem-hotep (Paul Giamatti) having his feet washed with unguents, a distinctly Christian rite (although he also appears to be being masturbated, which is not recounted in the Old or New Testaments). In this one gesture, Barney transforms Mailer’s wake into a malformed Last Supper. In the workshop where DJED resides, a Latino mechanic pauses briefly to make the sign of the cross. Another moment has Isis (Aimee Mullins) hovering ecstatic above the Trans Am, her face veiled in a portrayal powerfully reminiscent of many traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary. Yet again, when Isis becomes pregnant, it is via an inanimate, inorganic phallus, thus in effect a Virgin Birth (although live snakes are seen being poured into the engine block she straddles for insemination, another potentially Biblical allusion). We then witness this decidedly graphic birth in the back seat of a semi-submerged car. The camera focuses in on the extended orifice of the vagina, which begins to pulsate vigorously until what emerges from the vaginal canal is the bald head of a baby falcon. In Christian iconography the wild falcon has been symbolic of evil, of that which preys upon the innocent. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the falcon often represented the word for ‘god,’ and was representative of sky deities, who often featured the head of the falcon. The tamed falcon has also often been used as a symbol of the converted Gentile. The emergence of the birds’ head is reminiscent of the emergence of the child from Henry’s neck in Eraserhead or that of the alien from William Hurt’s torso in Alien (1979). “Distorted re-workings of the primal scene are central to many sci-fi horror films in which birth is represented as a grotesque, impossible scenario,” notes Creed.105 Barney also enters the realm of the Judaic during the opening scenes in which a pig is being roasted. As the chefs test the cooked pig with knives, the cooked meat emits eerie sounds. This is again reminiscent of Lynch in Eraserhead in the scene where Henry attempts to carve the ‘man-made’ chickens (there is also more than a hint of Peter Greenaway in this baroque approach to food, as seen in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and the excesses of Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel [1962]). Given that Mailer, while non-practicing, was born of Jewish descent, the

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choice of pork for the feast can be read as a deliberate disruption. This scene is followed by Giamatti, slicing into the pig’s tongue and musing on Mailer’s love of the Word in a moment that cannot help but recall Evenson’s Altman’s Tongue. The physicality of these scenes was paramount. Speaking to the New York Times, Stephen Payne commented that: “a scene around a table was chaotic as all get out. Matthew kept the dead carcass of a pig in there for weeks. The stench of death and decay was overwhelming.”106 “Someone asked me if I wanted tiger balm up my nose,” Gyllenhaal recalled in the same article: I said no. Then we walk into the studio and there’s this decaying pig and maggots in the food. It smelled so bad I thought I was going to pass out. Then we start doing the scene. There are these women singing, and the camera is going around the table, and Matthew comes in and says, ‘Can you guys be a little more natural?’ I didn’t know what he meant. Natural, as in natural, or natural for a Matthew Barney movie? After that it became some wild, crazy experience.107

In a comment that reflects Žižek’s observation that Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal,108 Gyllenhaal added that: “at the time, I was also shooting White House Down, which could not be more different.”109 It takes little imagination in these scenes to sense the olfactory impact. In a not dissimilar way, Ben Marcus’ protagonist refers to his own and his wife’s smell thusly: “something wasn’t washing out, and I was versed enough in rotting, spoiling, putrefaction — we all have our specialties — to know that these odors of ours were not the oils of the skin or the tolerable foulness of sweat.”110 River of Fundament is a work obsessed with the orifice. As an ‘opera’ the central focus is, inevitably, the mouth. Barney described his approach as being: “about using violence and visceral imagery — and comedy, really, for that matter — to open a wound in a piece through which something else can pass.”111 But the mouth here is of equal import to the anus. As an adaptation of Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, the scatological was inevitable and extreme. As the wake in Mailer’s apartment descends into bacchanalia, a debauched Arkham Asylum (one arguably worse than either H.P. Lovecraft’s or Gotham’s), another anal penetration is featured after which the recipient reclines languorously and begins to

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defecate a seemingly endless pouring of greenish-brown diarrhea, a river of faeces. An interesting and perhaps obvious comparison to Barney’s use of shit would be Piero Manzoni’s [1933–1963] Merda d’artista (1961) who ostensibly canned his shit as a form of abject authorship. The key difference would be that Barney’s faeces are constantly in motion, either as active defecation or flowing river, while Manzoni’s was static and sealed. Perhaps closer to Barney’s faecal aesthetic would be Mike Kelley’s in such works as Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood [1990] in which he smeared stuffed toys with his own excrement. Throughout, the anus and the vagina are allowed close, almost medical, treatment, but attempts at eroticism per se are a rarity (although it could be argued that Aimee Mullins copulation with an engine block, as strange as the image may be, is an exception here).

Barney and the Feminine Following the world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in February 2014, River of Fundament experienced its second screening in Australia at the Adelaide Festival in March 2014. One reviewer concluded that: “What is most troubling is Barney’s treatment of women — seeming to reduce many of them to wordless cameos in which they are only there for shots of their gaping, penetrated body parts.”112 This interpretation is simplistic at best. While Barney’s work is almost invariably androcentric, the males herein are also penetrated, beginning with Barney himself. Indeed, the most powerful figures throughout are Hathfertiti (played at various stages by Burstyn, Coakley and Gyllenhall) and Isis (Mullens). Isis is penetrated by choice, indeed, helping mold the phallus that she utilizes. Given his pantheon here (Mailer notoriously stabbed one wife, Burroughs, also referred to in River of Fundament, famously shot his wife) and the title of his CREMASTER series, Barney’s position on sexuality is always going to be an issue, and with River of Fundament accusations of misogynistic intent are perhaps inevitable. Matt Pieknik also simplifies the role of women in Barney and Mailer’s world, claiming that they are simplified as “deceivers and tricksters,” as “mere wombs deprived even of a creative role in reproduction” and occasionally “reduced to singing about how much they enjoy being the sexual objects of men.” However, it must be noted that Isis’ molding of a phallus and fornicating with an engine block is nothing if not “creative.” To press

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home his point, Pieknik notes Isis’ “aria about the joy of being filled with Osiris’ cum, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Hathfertiti, privileged to be the chosen woman who will help Norman be reborn, ecstatically singing ‘fuck yes!’ before her horrified, dead father, Usermare.”113 In a wave of knee-jerk political correctness, such criticism rapidly became commonplace.114 Another example would be a review on the ArtsHub website by Richard Watts (March 4, 2014) “Throughout the film, women exist only to serve men: as sex objects, as mothers, as supportive wives. They are penetrated and desired, oiled, oogled and oozing. Even when played by the likes of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ellen Burstyn, or Paralympian Aimee Mullins, they lack agency and independence. It’s this aspect of the film, rather than its over-extended running time, occasional violence and sporadic attention to bodily functions, which truly discomforted this viewer.” Perhaps surprisingly there was more would-be offence at the depiction of women from critics in Australia that there had been in the land of the Puritans which, as Umberto Eco among others points out, suggests more about the almost cultural-schizophrenic love/hate relationship the viewer can have—it is more about the viewer/critic than the object itself. Eco suggests that “mass man” reduces “even the worthiest artistic product to pure fetish,” which reveals more about the emotional state of the critic than it does the work itself, that of an “unresolved love-hate complex.”115 However, I feel compelled to defend Barney on this charge. Yes, a woman is anally penetrated, but she appears to consider it a moment of jouissance—she is not held down against her will. Barney, as the Ka of Norman, is also sodomized (which appears far less pleasurable, if necessary to the story arc). Barney’s male characters are interred in the guts of a rotting cow and have eyes and testicles torn asunder. Gyllenhaal, Mullins and Burstyn, by contrast, are largely treated with gravitas. Hathfertiti’s singing “Fuck yes” is a joyous compliance, a willingness to choose mortality over immortality in order to ‘have’ Norman. Aimee Mullins is depicted fucking an engine block, but again it is very much of her characters’ free will. The scene is far from gratuitous, we do not witness vaginal penetration—indeed, it is arguably the closest Barney comes to gentle eroticism. Barney has expressed difficulty with the sexualization of the imagery imposed on him by explicit aspects of Ancient Evenings. “In a way, it’s against my nature,” he said in an interview at the time of the Australian

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premiere and in the face of attempts by certain media factions to deride the film as government-sponsored pornography.116 “A lot of the more sexually driven images I have made in the past are not genital. They are often sexless — it’s often about an undifferentiated sexuality, a third sex. The Ancient Evenings scenes were much more genital than that, so I found it challenging to go there. But I did.”117 As Zadie Smith has noted, commenting on Ballard’s Crash, but in a statement equally applicable to Barney: “Some of the deadening narrative traits of pornography can be found … but surely this flatness is deliberate: it is with the banality of our psychopathology that Ballard is concerned.”118 Barney, like Ballard before him, clearly disrupts the everyday banal, representing radical deviations from the stereotypes of everyday behavior described by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). This disruption inevitably leads to reactionary responses. Barney’s androcentric obsessions border on the homoerotic, not just in River of Fundament, but throughout his oeuvre. He is fascinated with the bombastic, ‘heroic’ extremes of American male culture, thus his fascination with Mailer’s aspirations to author the Great American Novel arguably coincides with Barney’s desire to author the Great American ‘Video Artwork.’ (I am using the term ‘video’ in the context of Video Art tradition, although such terminology in this context is under discussion among practitioners, curators, critics and conservators alike.) Creative machismo is not unique to America (consider Gerhard Richter’s massive canvases or Umberto Eco’s tomes), but it is the Americans who take it to its extreme in terms of almost religious worship. With Barney it is Serra, Byars, Otto, Beuys, Houdini, Hemingway and Mailer (less so, interestingly, the overtly homosexual Burroughs with whom Barney arguably shares more in common in terms of surreal aesthetics). Pieknik recalls Leslie Fiedler’s influential work Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), in which he argues that American literature is incapable of dealing with sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.119 Fielder was concerned with foundational works of the so-called canon — Poe, Twain, Whitman — wherein he thought he located deeply repressed anxieties over women and sex, latently expressed in male homosocial adventures that occurred far from the domestic sphere or the proximity of women. Think of Huck Finn drifting down the Mississippi with Jim, or the crew of the Pequod ecstatically crushing globules of sperm oil in MobyDick. The story of American literature, in Fieldler’s reading, is the story of

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castration anxiety. Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament represents a radical desublimation of the obsession with sex and death: in its unflinching presentation of the twin poles of mortality, what was previously obscene has shifted to center stage, to the stomach’s chagrin.

Barney’s idealization/fetishization of macho demi-gods is yet another symptom of what can be described as an attempt to fill an American gnostic void and the cultural-schizophrenic desire to ‘be’ the idealized celebrity. Such figures—sports stars, famous authors/artists/actors/ rock stars—are attributed to a god-like status in American culture. Gary Gilmore and Frank Booth120 replace the religious deities of old: they are the demi-gods, angels, saints and demon: of America’s newest belief system: the church of the cathode ray (as Cronenberg has it in Videodrome) and the computer screen, which, like Marcus’ Moses Mouth in The Flame Alphabet, provides a conduit for worship. For Johnson: “In Lynch’s eschatology, Frank is the archetypal reprobate, an incorrigible archangel beyond salvation.” This obsession with celebrity, with the ‘unreal,’ has been captured competently by Brandon Cronenberg’s film Antiviral (2012) in which the general public can purchase their heroes virus’ and Spike Jonze’s Her (2014) whose protagonist falls in love with the voice of his operating system: a voice without body or organs, an ultimate void. Barney’s ‘hero-worship’ is perpetually called into question by the artist himself. His choice to base River of Fundament on the inarguably flawed Ancient Evenings is one such case in point. When asked why, Barney responded that: “One of the reasons I was attracted to Mailer’s book is, to be honest, it wasn’t something I loved, I could have some distance from it, unlike, say, certain books by Ballard or DeLillo. What I was interested in is how Mailer managed to combine human waste with transcendent states.”121 Another example of hero-adoration would be Serra’s role in CREMASTER 3. As Arthur C. Danto noted: “The molten Vaseline is flung against the parapet by the Architect, which reenacts one of Serra’s most famous sculptures, and indeed one of the signature works of the late 1960s.”122 Splashing (1968) saw Serra throwing molten lead into the corner of Leo Castelli’s warehouse. In documentary photographs of the time, Serra appears as the ultimate ‘Artist Hero,’ a macho figure in control of his unpredictable and dangerous media. But as Danto points

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out: “It is difficult not to see the demotion of lead to Vaseline as an emblematic degradation of that heroic moment to the present moment of postmodern art.”123 This, yet again, can be read as suggesting the emasculation of the American spirit. Serra’s molten metal became hard, Barney’s petroleum by-product remains soft, flaccid.

Mailer, Bloom and Barney Intriguingly, it seems that Barney’s inspiration for River of Fundament was almost equally sourced from a review of Ancient Evenings by Bloom as it was by the book itself. It suggested that “Mailer is the protagonist, and that it’s basically about his relationship to the American literary canon,” Barney told the New York Times. “So I developed the story from there, placing Mailer at the center of the film as three spirits who transform through the body of an animal. I was deeply into horror as a teenager. Still am.”124 When asked what he considered the most memorable scene in a film, Barney replied that it was: when the light bulbs start bleeding in Evil Dead II — it’s a real classic, cabin-in-the-woods horror film. That would be very influential to me in the sense that the evil lives in the architecture rather than the person. Even if there is some antagonist circumnavigating the cabin, it’s the cabin which is still the vessel that holds the psychology.125

The “cabin” is very likely the inspiration behind Mailer’s floating house, Mailer the “antagonist” circumnavigating the “vessel.” Similarly, Ben Marcus places a cabin over his Prayer Hole. The “cabin” or house is a recurring theme in American fictions, a void, theoretically filled by family and language but often depicted as haunted or a form of entrapment.126 “What was once a refuge from the monstrosity without becomes a haven to the monstrosity within,” Neville Wakefield notes of the Chrysler Building in CREMASTER 3. “Like the cabin of the Evil Dead, the Chrysler building serves as both structure and repository of a rampant id.”127 Houses, cabins, shelters ‘haunt’ the American landscape as much, if not more, as European legends. They are represented in numerous cultural expressions, from Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic (1930) to a number of literary works by Edgar Allen Poe, to Mark Z. Danielewski’s book House of Leaves to the television series American Horror Story (2011). Hughes describes the male figure in American

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Gothic as: “the father defending the virtue of his not very alluring daughter against all comers. The pitchfork, Satan’s archetypal tool for tossing souls into eternal fire, becomes the weapon against Satan.”128 Reading River of Fundament as being inspired as much by the scholar Bloom as the author Mailer raises thorny issues. “I was influenced as much by a review of Ancient Evenings as by the book,” Barney told The Paris Review.129 Bloom’s review, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, was vexed by parts of the novel, but rather more accepting of its scope than many others at the time. “Our most conspicuous literary energy has generated its weirdest text,” Bloom wrote, before making a case for its endearing, invigorating, weirdness. In a comment that could be almost equally true of River of Fundament, he continued: “I don’t intend to give an elaborate plot summary, since if you read Ancient Evenings for the story, you will hang yourself.” But he juxtaposes Ancient Evenings with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in their shared “monumental sado-anarchism.” He argues that Ancient Evenings is “on the road of excess, and what Karl Kraus said of the theories of Freud may hold for the speculations of Mailer also — it may be that only the craziest parts are true.”130 Bloom reiterated this point in 1994 in his literary study The Western Canon in which he described Mailer’s novel as an “exuberantly inventive” and a “marvelous anatomy of humbuggery and bumbuggery.”131 Key to Bloom’s reading of the book, for Barney, was his notion that the most meaningful characters in Ancient Evenings were in fact standins for Hemingway and Mailer himself. The review, Barney suggests, posited that Mailer’s book was essentially autobiographical and that Mailer considered himself as “being too late — that the great American novel wasn’t needed anymore by the time he had come into his own. He wanted to be Hemingway, but he couldn’t. That interested me. So, I started putting Mailer himself into the role of the protagonist, in reincarnations of the same character.”132 Alternatively, for Pieknik, in a distinctly Oedipal reading, via the “mercurial insemination that opens River of Fundament, Barney, the megastar daddy of the contemporary art world, has adopted a spiritual father, and become a son to Norman Mailer.”133 In an aspect of Bloom’s review that Barney seems to have whole-heartedly embraced, Ancient Evenings is read through his own theory of poetic influence, and persuasively suggests that the novel

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is an autobiographical work that poses Mailer, as Menenhetet (based on Menenhetet One, 20th Dynasty, 1290–1100 BC), against his literary father Hemingway, as Usermare. “Mailer clearly idolized Papa Bear, modeling his lean writing style and hypermasculine persona on his literary pater, and self-consciously considered himself the heir of Hemingway’s legacy,” argues Pieknik.134 “I had never even heard of it, really: it’s not a very popular novel of his,” Barney said of Ancient Evenings when River of Fundament was screened in Canada, admitting that at first, he found Mailer’s book largely “unreadable.” “I didn’t feel there was any way I was ever going to get through it, but, once I eased into it, I started to feel quite liberated by its density.”135 Barney had only managed to map out the basic structure of his threeact opera when Mailer died of renal failure in 2007, aged 84. Mailer himself remains a complicated character, one whose own life seemed to cross between fiction and fact all too easily. That he had the ego of a Pharaoh was beyond doubt. However, as Ptah-nem-hotep expresses his doubts to Norman about his own potency as a Pharaoh, it is clear Mailer doubted his own role as the Great American Author. Nonetheless he evidently planned a sequel to Ancient Evenings set 3000 years hence, featuring none other than a reincarnated Norman Mailer.136 Perhaps Mailer, in his ailing years, planned yet another reinvention of ‘Norman Mailer.’ After acting in CREMASTER 2, Mailer befriended Barney, and it is no secret that he encouraged the artist to consider Ancient Evenings as source material. Barney was already (in)famous, a young Pharaoh in the contemporary art world. Could he also be the ideal womb for Mailer’s rebirth? One thing that is certain, Ancient Evenings, languishing and largely ignored since its publication in the early ’80s, will have something of a rebirth in the new millennium via art students, academics and Barney fans in general. Sales of the book will no doubt flourish. Perhaps Little Brown will re-release Ancient Evenings with a Barney image on the cover and a blurb stating, ‘now a major movie by Matthew Barney.’ It is, perhaps, the final turn of the screw for Bloom’s prescient review, however with a further twist: it required a visual artist of Barney’s stature to re-project Mailer’s vision, above and beyond the authors’ own work. Mailer had implanted himself in Barney’s vision to engineer a reincarnation unlike any before, but perhaps ironically via an interpretation by Bloom.

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Ancient Evenings ends with a rebirth in language that is both preposterous and pretentious. Is it conceivable that in finalizing his epic, Barney, having apparently disallowed Mailer his resting place alongside Hemingway, turned to another towering figure of American Letters? River of Fundament concludes with stunning, albeit belabored, imagery of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain Range, in the depths of Redfish Lake, near Hemingway’s cabin, where sockeye salmon make their journey from the Pacific Ocean. The penultimate scene, where Hemingway fires a rifle, is where the film should have concluded. Instead we are treated to innumerable images of salmon spawning. Repetitious and tedious, it is a scene that should have been cut in half.137 However it is possible to imagine that this scene was, at least in part, inspired by the final paragraph in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.138

Had Barney, in a last gesture of Oedipal rejection, turned from Mailer to McCarthy? Given Barney’s sense of apocalypticism, and the attention given to McCarthy’s The Road, and Barney’s penchant for no-nonsense, macho American characters, this would not seem unlikely. Both artists allow a small sense of reprieve at their conclusions via the image of the fish—an ancient symbol to identify fellow Christians. Is there also a sense of environmentalism? In The Road it is made explicit that Man has destroyed the Earth. In Barney’s film images of environmental disaster are commonplace. Indeed, in his world rivers are made of shit and toxic waste. Indisputably, those salmon would last a nanosecond. Barney himself avoids the question of McCarthy’s influence: “I grew up in Idaho, which is quite close to where Hemingway’s cabin was and where the fish spawn and you knew how it ended up, it was a local mythology.”139 A tendency to conclude with idyllic pastoral or suburban scenes is a commonplace in even the most apocalyptic American fictions. They can fail spectacularly, as in the directors’ cut of Blade Runner (1992) where

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the protagonists are suddenly seen fleeing into an Arcadian paradise. McCarthy’s conclusion succeeds due to the beauty of the language used and the jolt it supplies in its context after 240 pages of dust and toxins. The end of Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet, which suggests the possibility of a happy ending in a sunny forest, works because it illustrates its narrator’s tragically delusional state of mind. The end of Blue Velvet, with the couple staring complacently at a mechanical robin, works because it reminds us that their ‘reality’ is a simulacrum. This takes us back again to Žižek’s “Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal”140—by returning us to ‘normality’ or to ‘nature’ we are reminded of how tentative these notions can be. Mailer’s ending for Ancient Evenings, although suggestive of further reincarnation, is far less beatific. Indeed, it is the opposite extreme as that of McCarthy’s or Barney’s works. Mailer’s river remains one of faeces, its reek, we are repeatedly informed, unbearable. “The stench grew worse, the waters rose above my head and I did not know how to swim. By the horror of my limbs, I knew I was sinking into fecal waters.”141 Our narrator does ascend from the murk, but covered in shit (as was much of the critical reception to Mailer’s book). However, Mailer’s ending perhaps provided the potential for Barney’s beginning. Mailer’s Menenhetet climbs a ladder of umbilical cords to board a floating vessel. In Barney’s world, Menenhetet emerges from the sewerage to board Mailer’s brownstone floating down the Hudson. But then it turns to the clean waters of the Sawtooth. At the time of the inaugural showing of River of Fundament, Manhattan was also awash in faeces beyond Barney’s film. Two other major artists were also provoking via the scatological. The late Mike Kelley had a huge retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,142 his work maintaining a delirious mixture of the scatological and the eschatological in such major works as Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile (1985–1986). Perhaps equally ambitious as River of Fundament was Paul McCarthy’s WS (White Snow) at The Armory.143 Both projects shared intriguing parallels: both are ‘based’ on specific American fictions: WS on Disney’s 1937 animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, River of Fundament on Mailer’s novel. Both share little in common with their source texts—Barney’s film resembles Mailer’s text about as closely as Blade Runner resembles the Philip K. Dick novel upon which it is ‘based,’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Enwezor suggests that Barney’s film is “less an interpretation” as it is “the novel’s ka, the artistic

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double of the literary text.”144 They require endurance (McCarthy’s film component clocked in at a grueling seven hours). Both refer to specific signature motifs and themes: sex, degradation, art history, violence and popular culture. And both make use of meticulously reconstructed replicas of living quarters—the aforementioned ‘cabins’—Mailer’s brownstone and McCarthy’s childhood suburban home in Salt Lake City.

Transformation and Transition As Deleuze and Guattari said: “Don’t go for the root, follow the canal,”145 and the chthonic canals that run beneath America are realms of shadows and sewers, rusting wires and toxic murk. Beneath Barney’s brownstone lies the river of fundament. Beneath Ben Marcus’ Prayer Hut lies a network of muddy, claustrophobic tunnels designed for language transmission. Beneath Bruce Wayne’s mansion lies the Bat Cave and beneath Lynch’s beatific lawn lies an Insectum Hades. Dark gnosis is sought beneath the surface, hidden, deus absconditus. Gnosis is also, perhaps, sought via physical transformation. Like Barney’s Norman, Lynch’s Fred in Lost Highway undergoes a painful transmogrification in his jail cell to become the more docile Pete Dayton. As Eric Wilson has noted, one can read Lost Highway: “psychologically, and therefore opine that Fred through his negation of concepts has achieved an inner transformation, has metamorphosed into a new self.”146 However at the end of Lost Highway Fred appears to have reverted and is last seen on a long stretch of darkened highway pursued by police, once again a lost soul. Similarly, the last images of Norman III adrift without the companionship of Hathfertiti, suggests an abject, lost spirit. Like America itself, in its constant attempts at reinvention and its desire to achieve gnosis has led instead to a dispirited exhaustion replete with the tang of rot. Wilson reads the final scenes of Lost Highway as Fred’s transcendence, that he “reaches union with the void.” Having metaphorically escaped his pursuers and “becomes a spirit moving effortlessly over the empty highway …”147 Like Barney’s river and Marcus’ tunnels, Lynch’s highway becomes a metaphor for transcendence, and/or the futility of the American desire for freedom, for gnosis. The highway as metaphor is a common Hollywood trope. Mention should also be made to Thelma & Louise, the 1991 film written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott starring Geena Davis as Thelma and Susan Sarandon as Louise,

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and Easy Rider, the 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper At the end of CREMASTER 3, the Entered Apprentice (Barney) reached the top of the Chrysler Building and killed the Architect (the Oedipal father, Serra) after facing a series of hardships that included perverse dentistry and battling the Entered Noviate (Mullins). Though he was killed by the Architect’s men, he had completed a Masonic/alchemical/mystical journey of ascension, growth, and self-transformation. Thus, when a bearded, older version of the Entered Apprentice emerges from the river of faeces at the beginning of River of Fundament, one thing is explicit: this is Barney’s continued exploration of transformation and differentiation. River of Fundament is, in effect, the final part of a trilogy that follows CREMASTER 2 and 3. This, in its own twisted way, is apt. CREMASTER 3 was in fact the last of the films to be executed in the CREMASTER Cycle, thus the sequence either bifurcates from the final scene in CREMASTER 3 to the more abstract CREMASTER 4 or it joins the narrative of River of Fundament. CREMASTER 3, as the last of the series to be filmed, also reflects Barney’s growing confidence as a film director and shares far more in terms of cinematic style and narrative confidence with River of Fundament that it does with CREMASTER 4. Taking this notion of linkage between CREMASTER 2, 3 and River of Fundament further, Barney himself has said there would be a: “collision between the CREMASTER language and the Ancient Evenings language.” In this reading the three films become Barney’s ‘American Underworld’ trilogy,148 a ‘secret’ history of mutated Masonic symbolism, Mormon ritual, Christian and Judaic lore and Egyptology. Barney himself, in November 2014, seemed delighted by this reading: “Yes, I can see that. There are the themes of Mormonism, the Masonic and Egyptology…”149 But it is also made explicit by Barney’s use of the title APPRENTICE for himself and NOVICE for Mullins in the script excerpts reproduced in the River of Fundament catalogue.150 In Barney’s film, Mailer’s protagonist, the nobleman Menenhetet I, becomes Norman. This undermines Mailer’s role as Oedipal father, that of The Author, and takes Bloom’s interpretation of the novel almost literally. Where Menenhetet I aspires to overcome his status from that of nobleman to pharaoh, Mailer aspires to join the pantheon of Great

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American Writers. Menenhetet/Norman utilize arcane ritual and magic in order to be reincarnated three times in the womb of his wife, who then, in yet another familial twist, becomes his mother. In what could potentially be a piece of literary criticism by Barney, on his third attempt to transform, Menenhetet III/Norman III becomes trapped in the womb, failing to reincarnate and thus failing to reach the desired status of Great American Writers represented by Barney as Hemingway. Despite Barney’s clear adoration of Mailer, he seems to acknowledge that, as charismatic and adventurous as the author was, he did not achieve the status of the Greatest of American Authors. This is apt. It would take an extraordinarily generous reading of Ancient Evenings to forgive its multitudinous sins, as was agreed by most critics at the time of its release. Even Bloom, among the most generous of these, expressed grave doubts. It is, in a word, a pretentious text: instead of a Barney Drawing Restraint, Mailer needed a writing restraint. In both cases a good editor should have stepped in. Barney sources his title from the second paragraph of Ancient Evenings. As Menenhetet reincarnates he recounts the pain involved. “Is this the feat that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain?” In what would seem a bounteous bowel movement, in the book Menenhetet is eviscerated, creating the river of faeces that he must cross to be reincarnated: it is in fact his own shit through which he must wade.

Sound Pressure River of Fundament is very much a collaboration between Barney and musician Jonathan Bepler. The two have worked together since CREMASTER 1 in 1995 and Bepler went on to score CREMASTER 2, 3, and 5. With a clear belief in the spirit of collaboration, the duo have worked with a broad and rather bizarre range of talents including actress Ursula Andress, performance artist Marti Domination, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, thrash metal drummer Dave Lombardo, the Budapest Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra, hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law and the Radio City Rockettes. Barney’s decision to work with Bepler on what they describe as an “opera” comes down to the notion of opera as orifice, both bodily and architecturally. “I don’t have much of a relationship with opera,” Barney told The Paris Review:

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But I’m interested in opera houses, the way organic spaces are designed acoustically to receive the human voice. It’s like the resonant chamber in your body. You feel like you’re inside another body when you’re in an opera house. I like thinking about a character on stage performing inside another body.151

Barney’s description recalls David Lynch’s opening of the labia-like red curtains152 onto the stage, an orifice allowing the viewer entre into “another body,” or, as Creed would suggest, a return to the womb. Creed notes that: “This representation of the primal scene recalls Freud’s reference to an extreme primal scene fantasy where the subject imagines traveling back inside the womb to watch her/his parents having sexual intercourse, perhaps to watch her/himself being conceived.”153 At times soaring and melodic, at others discordant and jarring, the soundtrack to River of Fundament is an integral piece of the overall ‘sculpture.’ Bepler, writing with Shane Anderson, most certainly embraced the spirit of excess when writing the accompanying literature.154 Their excessive pseudo-poetic language aptly reflects the maelstrom of experimental techniques utilized in the soundtrack. At the mill, nearer, furnaces press out upon the walls while workers wearing dust masks, small organs, heat metal to melting, breathe in chords for the pour. Oxygen jets increase the heat, injected air pressure lights up the system and gravity’s reckless sonata, nearer, extends into the hollow, vibrating everything touched at a pitch below hearing, beyond the perception of those long since outworn. This rugged sound pressure continues, deeper, into the rebar termite tomb of steel shavings, progressing on piano wires, infiltrating the rusty coke oven frames above to make them sing a last passage before crumbling into the dust of ancient burial mounds.

Bepler as a composer twirls like a dervish through hip-hop, mariachi, a marching band, rhythm and blues and more-or-less ‘traditional’ arias. He clusters an array of well-known avant-garde performers to his ends: his teacher, Milford Graves, turns a cow carcass into a percussive drum, avant-metal guitarist Mick Barr turns to the ukulele while experimental vocalists Phil Minton and Joan La Barbara produce glossolalia-like alien sounds and jazz musician Lonnie Smith supplies low, threatening organ drones. There are hints of the dark industrial tones of Glenn Branca (with whom Bepler has collaborated), experimental vocalist Diamanda Galas and the strident industrial-orchestral tonality of Michael Gira’s

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band Swans. Bepler and Barney here eschew Barney’s own predilection for making use of such bands as Slayer or Morbid Angel, however the musicians do contribute a major visual as well as aural factor in the proceedings. Reviewing the work for frieze, Ross Simonini noted that: “In some ways, viewing River of Fundament as cinema is unhelpful. Film is its medium, but opera is its form, and it often vibrates with the intensity of Richard Wagner, whose final opera, Parsifal (1882), also ran at around six hours.”155 Phreddy Wischusen came to a not dissimilar conclusion: Leaving no creative stone unturned, the orchestra consists of a combination of singers, saxophones, instruments invented by Barney and Bepler — such as ‘the long strings’ (also dubbed ‘land harps’), 250-foot metal wires, bowed and strummed — and the percussive thumping of machinery, among other noises. This is high opera indeed, and you could describe this spectacle with the Wagnerian term gesamtkunstwerk — ‘total art work’ — and not overreach.156

Fetish and the Automobile: Barney’s Sculpture As Bloom noted in his review of Ancient Evenings, tackling Mailer’s novel as pure narrative is a thankless task, and Barney’s ‘adaptation’ is equally arcane. Utilizing footage of three live performances157 which integrate the automobile—the 1967 Chrysler Imperial from CREMASTER 3, a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor—as symbolic in the process of reincarnation. Similarly, he embraces the use of rivers, a time-honored symbol in American culture, from Huck Finn to Apocalypse Now. In Barney’s film the Mississippi and the Mekong are replaced by New York’s East river, the industrially poisoned Detroit River and the polluted River Rouge which play central roles in the reincarnation process. Following its viewing in Adelaide, River of Fundament flowed onto Munich with a major exhibition accompanying the film.158 The first work visitors encountered was Canopic Chest: “There is something about the sculpture that suggests the aftermath of a disaster, Armageddon, the apocalypse: the color of charred remains, it is easy, standing before it, to imagine the smell of death and ash,” wrote Anna McNay in Studio International. Going on to describe it, like Wischusen, as a total Gesamtkunstwerk, she noted it as an appropriate feat “for a monumental

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exhibition being held in the house of Nazi propaganda, the Haus der Kunst.”159 In the performative aspect of the work one recalls the casting of a medieval church bell in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1996), which Barney admits as an influence.160 Elements of DJED also recall Ballard’s infamous 1969 exhibition at London’s ICA, Crashed Cars.161 Nancy Spector describes Ballard as an “important source for Barney,”162 citing The Atrocity Exhibition especially, where “body becomes landscape, and landscape becomes body.”163 Ballard is often mentioned in the context of Barney’s work, especially his classic surrealist psych-fi novel Crash that was adapted by Cronenberg. “I was asked by Artforum to review Cronenberg’s Crash,” says Barney. “But there was no way I was going to like Cronenberg’s version, there was no way I was going to like my version. Crash remains one of my favorite books. There were also those wonderful RE/Search books which were definitely an inspiration.”164 Barney’s referencing of RE/Search, an arcane series of San Francisco publications featuring the likes of Ballard, Burroughs and the industrial performance group Survival Research Laboratories,165 is telling. Elements of Barney’s works reveal a similar explosive aesthetic to the performances of SRL and other subjects covered in RE/Search. The influence of RE/Search opens a Pandora’s Box into how to (re) consider Barney’s modus operandi. Based in San Francisco and founded in 1980 by publishers Andrea Juno and V. Vale, Re/Search grew out of Vale’s seminal punk fanzine Search & Destroy from the late ’70s and continued to wear its punk/industrial/hardcore credentials with pride, covering such acts as Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and Throbbing Gristle (Barney’s own interest in hard-hitting rock is abundantly clear via his inclusion of such bands as Morbid Angel, Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law and Slayer in his works and in conversation he also cites The Butthole Surfers and Swans.). In some ways it was Semiotext(e)’s evil brother. While Semiotext(e) was the quintessential New York publication, introducing its audience to French theoreticians, RE/Search was archetypal San Francisco and it rapidly segued into a semi-literary journal. Its fourth issue saw William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Genesis P. Orridge discussing notions of the “Control Process,” cut-ups, violent crime and revolution. Always restless and relentless, its next issue was dubbed Industrial Culture Handbook (1983) and carried a theme of ‘deviant’ performance artists and musicians including Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Non,

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Monte Cazazza, Johanna Went and Z’ev. Of these, is it abundantly clear that the work of SRL left a lasting impression on Barney. Founded in 1978 by machine-artist Mark Pauline, SRL rapidly gained a reputation for its monstrous robotic battles and life-threatening (to the audience as well as the performers) antics. One can see the resonance in Barney’s oeuvre in such works as Hoist (2004) and in the cinematic aspect of River of Fundament in which a backhoe eviscerates a 1967 Chrysler Imperial in an almost sexualized mechanical orgy. (It transpired that both Barney and I had met Pauline and uncomfortably agreed that his handshake was decidedly memorable: In 1982 Pauline was working with a rocket motor that exploded in front of him, severing most of his fingers. He was rushed to hospital where his hand was ‘remade’ by attaching some toes and skin off his back.) Yet another edition of RE/Search was titled Modern Primitives and considered the phenomena of multiple piercings, tattooing and ritual scarification in contemporary times. The issue, published in 1989 and featuring such extremists as Fakir Musafar, Anton LaVey, Monte Cazazza and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge clearly preempts many similar elements running through Barney’s work such as the flensing scene in Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and Aimee Mullins self-mutilation in River of Fundament and the solid emphasis on tattooing in that film. Indeed, Barney rather literally quotes from Musafar in his use of agonizingly tight corsets in CREMASTER 2. Musafar infamously created and wore a corset that reduced his waist to 48.26 centimeters. P-Orridge, who resettled from London to New York in 1995, and Barney have been curated into a number of shows together such as ‘Decadence Now! Visions of Excess’ at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in 2011. Perhaps of most significance, both in terms of written and visual content, would be several books revolving around J. G. Ballard that RE/ Search published. The first of these, simply titled J.G. Ballard, appeared in 1984 and is lavishly illustrated with grainy photographs of crashed cars and ruined buildings, as in the kind Barney captures when he portrays Detroit in Fundament—a form of Ruin Porn. Along with interviews, non-fiction and Ballard’s own montages, the RE/Search book contains an excerpt from Ballard’s novel Crash. In 1990 RE/Search also reprinted Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition—perhaps most significantly for Barney was the fact that RE/Search commissioned gruesomely sexualized illustrations by artist Phoebe Gloeckner and decidedly dystopian photos by Ana Barrado. The illustrations clearly parallel Barney’s fascination

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with biological aesthetics. The Cremaster muscle isn’t illustrated but the Urogenital groove, Cloacal-uretha fold and the Naso-lacrimal groove are, as is a severed penis, (a doppelganger of which features in Fundament.) There is also a malformed or unformed phallus a lá Gary Gilmore’s in CREMASTER 2. The RE/Search edition also featured a preface by William S. Burroughs who is quoted in Fundament. Barney’s automobile is, perhaps, “the celibate machine” identified by Deleuze and Guattari, which “reveals the existence of a much older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law.” The celibate machine itself is not a paranoiac machine, however. Everything about it is different: its cogs, its sliding carriage, its shears, needles, magnets, rays. Even when it tortures or kills, it manifests something new and different, a solar force. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the ‘miraculating’ powers the machine possesses due to the inscription hidden inside it, though it in fact contains within itself the most impressive sort of inscriptions … A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth …166

Barney represents these alliances in various ways. In Hoist a man (Barney) fucks a truck, in River of Fundament Aimee Mullins copulates with an engine shaft. But one must question whether these machines are not so much “celibate,” as “impotent.” The car is both phallic and a feminine void in which we insert ourselves. A hermaphrodite capable of initiating violent narrative: Gilmore murdering the attendant after climbing from his car, Jeffrey being beaten after being driven by Frank. For Ben Marcus, in The Age of Wire and String, the automobile takes an utterly organic texture and form that has much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s machine. Marcus, if anything, goes further, allowing his machines glands and membranes and breathing apparatus.167 THE AUTOMOBILE comprises the thin leaflike structure of elastic cartilage that rises at the root of the road and forms the front portion of the entrance to the ocean, home, or empty space. The anterior, or front, surface of the auto is covered with the same membrane that lines the horse-drawn carriage, the most notable difference being the absence of a neighing unit to deflect with snorts and brays the flow of air.

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Peter Sloterdikj, in a somewhat less poetic way, also melds the machine and the organic: “The car is like a uterus on wheels,” he suggests. It has the advantage over its biological model for being linked to independent movement and a feeling of autonomy. The car also has phallic and anal components — the primitive-aggressive competitive behavior, and the revving up and overtaking which turns the other, slower person into an expelled turd.168

These machines suggest a strangely post-apocalyptic scenario. As G. Roger Denson noted: “We as viewers don’t require full knowledge of the Osiris mysteries to appreciate that in Barney’s we’re fathoming the inevitable entropy that marks our own future demise as a civilization.”169 Denson goes on: “It’s an anxiety that is always there at some layer of consciousness beneath our everyday distractions. It’s informing American politics and media everyday. And although art is rarely taken seriously as warning, in its dredging up of our repressed fears — literally embodied in Barney’s dredging the River Rouge for the once glorious Chrysler Imperial — it is for us each to find where we personally stand in this great scheme of unwinding time and space.” This demise is evident not only via polluted rivers and decaying cityscapes—Ruin Porn—but in the man-machine interface, a crude singularity: Barney’s sexualized Mustangs conjoined by fallopian-like tubes in CREMASTER 2, his fetishized truck in Hoist, the ability of Marcus’ automobile to eject or vomit its passenger or driver seemingly by will.

A Theologian of Excessive Ritual In November 2014, Barney’s sculptures were re-exhibited at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Rendered in iron and rope, they potentially resembled three-dimensional illustrations of Marcus’ Age of Wire and String. Barney’s massive Boat of Ra170 resembles Marcus’ boat in The Father Costume, the Father here being Mailer. The Father in Marcus’ book changes costumes or ‘skins’ as readily as ‘Mailer’ changes bodies in the film. Both Ark-like structures suggest hints of the Biblical Covenant. Barney’s is in fact the aforementioned inverted roof of Mailer’s house as it was remade to float down the Hudson. Consisting of 400 items, the work must be disassembled for shipment and reassembly takes an

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intense two weeks and includes the ladders, or at least crude reconstructions thereof, from Mailer’s library and parts of his writing desk. The towropes snaking away from the craft similarly replicate the ropes used to tow the Pontiac Firebird in the Detroit salesroom, all elements featured in the film. One is aware, as with the works of one of his heroes, the modernist Serra, of the sheer weight of these objects—the heaviest, Rouge Battery,171 weighing more than five tons. The sculptures carry a brooding intensity, suggesting, as Enwezor puts it, “prehistoric vessels formed from an ancient periodic table, as if they had been exhumed from the sediment of an ancient dried-up riverbed.”172 The incredibly elaborate Pharaoh’s toilet, Shaduf173 was wedged in a massive Triassic sandstone rock niche. Scattered throughout were Barney’s one-dimensional works, his line work cut delicately into brass, in effect adumbrations, in such pieces as River of Fundament: Leaves of Grass174 and River of Fundament: Isis Rises On The Water.175 Barney also undertook a series of “interventions” incorporating antiquities from the MONA collection of encased sarcophagi, over which he placed zinc covers with roughly sculpted holes revealing portions of the ancient coffins below. To this he added cast and maimed crowbars, ‘spines’ for malformed heads cast from zinc which, heated, had been immersed in water to create amorphous blobs which sit atop the coffins of Ankh-Pefy-Hery (Egypt, 25th-early 26th Dynasty, c.730–600 BC), Tai-es Khen (Egypt, late 26th Dynasty c.600–525 BCE) and others. Rot and decay come in numerous forms in both film and sculpture. Amidst his storyboard vitrines sat a ‘sketch’ for The Case for Saving Detroit, a number of model cars exuding a black, fungal-looking growth which would grow into the dung beetle vehicle in the film. Elsewhere a glass case featured the rotted remains of the pig from Mailer’s wake in the film, the dried epidermis of dead maggots still visible, its teeth painted blue and gold, the apple from its mouth a dry, blackened shell. Never one for allowing restraint in his projects, Barney undertook another intervention titled Portcullis Block by employing the Glenorchy women’s football team to ‘draw’ on the walls with a gigantic 2268-kilogram hunk of graphite, generating a ragged line linking his wall works, an umbilical cord metaphorically joining his own one-dimensional metal works to stone reliefs from Egypt. Barney undertook a similar intervention in Munich where the team of women who dragged and pushed the Portcullis Block were a soccer team called the Munich Cowboys.

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The overall aesthetic carried a post-apocalyptic sensibility, an almost Mad Max-style scenario, the vehicles dismembered, celebrated archaic documents of a once fossil-fueled renaissance, reliquaries, objects of theoretical and theatrical religiosity, relics in a post-rapture world of Barney’s own making. Barney’s fixation on Mailer is telling. Although a bombastic and charismatic figure, Mailer is nowhere near as challenging as such contemporaries as Pynchon and Burroughs in terms of language usage. Interestingly however Burroughs acknowledged Ancient Evenings as an influence on his own The Western Lands (1987).176 In sharp contrast, Cronenberg has tackled Burroughs, Ballard and DeLillo. Barney seems to utilize Mailer more as a cipher than a literal cartographer. Although at times breathtaking in its ambitions, Ancient Evenings is far from the masterpiece its author thought it to be. Harold Bloom described it as being a “wild, speculative work, but hard work nevertheless. Its quality is not durable, and perhaps does not attempt to be.”177 What is particularly intriguing about these moments of excess in literary terms is that Mailer’s book appeared two years after William Burroughs’ Cities of The Red Night, a novel equally saturated with reincarnation, Egyptian rituals, anal sex and general bacchanalia. Indeed, Burroughs’ description of orgiastic excess is perhaps more apt than that of Mailer’s in Barney’s interpretation.178 Ancient Evenings is, by far, Mailer’s least ‘mainstream’ book and the closest he veered to a sense of the avant-garde. However, it pales in comparison to the experimentations carried out in more contemporaneous books such as Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, books that have at heart the disruptive narrative approach that Barney applies to ‘cinema.’ But Bloom also acknowledges that: “there is a relevance to current reality in America that actually surpasses that of Mailer’s largest previous achievement, The Executioner’s Song.” More than before, Mailer’s fantasies, now brutal and unpleasant, catch the precise accents of psychic realities within and between us. Ancient Evenings rivals Gravity’s Rainbow as an exercise in what has to be called a monumental sado-anarchism, and one aspect of Mailer’s phantasmagoria may be its need to challenge Pynchon precisely where he is strongest. Paranoia, in both these American amalgams of Prometheus and Narcissus, becomes a climate.179

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Mailer’s, and Barney’s, fixation on Egypt has an intriguing literary precedent. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates recounts the story of the Egyptian God of Invention, Thoth, offering King Thamus “a brand-new techne: writing. By giving the gift of writing to the king, Thoth hoped to pass on its wonders to all of the Egyptian people.”180 Among those playing Mailer’s reincarnated spirit is Chief Dave Bald Eagle who, Barney has pointed out, sings the last page of Ancient Evenings in Lakota to a live ibis, who in Egyptian terms is Thoth, the god of letters.181 Barney’s idiosyncratic fascination with religiosity, and his eccentric methods of illustrating it, fall into line with a range of millennial thinkers, tracing back to Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th Century. Newton’s desire to concoct a ‘United Messianic Theory’ reflects Barney’s apparent desire to accept, illustrate and unify any and all religious symbology—from Celtic beliefs to Egyptology—as long as they are linked via a unique American dialect and an aesthetic of apocalypticism. Egyptology, at first a bewildering choice, is in fact an inherent piece of this DNA. As Katz and Popkin point out, Newton’s Theory was to “interpret all existing mythologies, especially the religion and culture of ancient Egypt.”182 (italics mine). Egyptology is not, inherently, an apparent slice of Bloom’s American Religion, but River of Fundament is, as Barney notes, “fundamentally American but wrapped in a thin layer of gold from another culture.”183 It is as American as the dollar bill emblazoned with an Egyptian pyramid. Egyptology is but one course in Barney’s feast of religious simulacra, another means to fill the gnostic void. As Diedrich Diederichsen notes, Barney’s camera scours “all zones, realms, hiding places, stretches of river, mines, open territories, urban wastelands, cities and sewers,” which leads his protagonists to traverse innumerable “cavities, buildings, basements, shafts, chambers, bathrooms, sewers, depths, and heights.” In the process the camera “keeps watch at their orifices, which in turn lead to cavities.”184 “Yes, there is a sense of the Apocalyptic about it,” Barney confirms. “Especially the depiction of the city of Detroit, but there are glimpses of rebirth. But yes, there is the apocalyptic but there’s a strange sense of logic to it, it’s like fires with eucalypt trees, they need the fire for rebirth. Humans are part of nature and need something similar.”185 Barney’s hint of optimism, perhaps illustrated by the final scene of River of Fundament, is difficult to reconcile given the overall aesthetic, set as it is, as Enwezor suggests: “amid the blue vapors and gangrened stench of death and decay roiling the collective American body.”186 That Barney is a master of the perfectly composed image is beyond dispute. River of Fundament, both exhibition and film, is resplendent

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with such images: the Byars moment in the Church, the pouring of liquid metal or gushing water in industrial settings, the falcon perched ominously above a police cruiser, the haggard face of Usermare, the resulting DJED sculpture. There are more powerful singular images in this film/sculpture/opera/performance than there are in a year’s worth of Hollywood extravaganzas or exhibitions in Manhattan. It is too long, and that is also, perversely, deliberate. One must suffer an act of endurance for Barney’s hubris, as experienced all too clearly with the CREMASTER cycle. Most of the actor’s performances, especially those of Gyllenhaal, Giamatti and Payne, are beyond reproach. Unlike his previous works, Barney is not the central focus. Alongside Mullins, they act more as anchors, charismatic spirits who, aptly, guide the practitioners along their narratives. The moments of pure aesthetic genius largely compensate for the moments of tedium. Flawed though it may be, River of Fundament, especially when viewed in conjunction with the sculptural component, is the most powerful work of visual art to emerge thus far in the new millennium. In 2008 David Cronenberg was also dabbling in opera, adapting his 1986 film The Fly for operatic performances in Paris and Los Angeles. In an intriguing exchange between Barney and Cronenberg published in TAR magazine, the filmmaker probed the artist about his fascination with death and belief systems: Cronenberg: Much of your work has to do with death, either alluded to or anticipated and conceived in very bodily terms. And yet, the aspects of Ancient Evenings that you’re focusing on are all post-death, the idea of life after death. Aside from the intriguing aspect of trying to connect with ancient Egypt and a whole other mindset that goes with it, is there something that you’re consciously exploring? In opposition to your approach before? I would have said that your approach before was existentialist, if we wanted to put it in the context of traditional philosophy. Barney: Exactly, and I think it’s precisely one of the things that interests me most about working with Ancient Evenings, that it is opposed to the CREMASTER language, a huge amount of body awareness. It’s done in a different way, not in a sci-fi or fantasy way, but it’s certainly there, in the tattooing and the violence and so on. … Cronenberg: Do you believe in life after death? Barney: [Pauses] I certainly believe in an energy that lives on and functions like some sort of adhesive between living people. So, on that level I would say yes, but I think on the level of Egyptian mythology, no, I do not.187

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Barney specifically chose a Catholic church as one of his settings in River of Fundament due to his inherent awareness of the virulent divide between Catholicism and Fundamental Christianity in America as well as the divide between the sacred (the desecrated church) and the secular (the sewage works). He is unafraid to utilize such imagery in a way that essentially dissects its role in American culture. Barney is a theologian of excessive ritual. His work is Bakhtin’s carnivalesque on steroids. He extends Ben Marcus’ questioning of traditional narrative to new extremes, in the process populating molten landscapes populated with zombies and specters. In CREMASTER 2, CREMASTER 3 and River of Fundament—his American triumvirate—he meshes Masonic lore, Catholic iconography, Mormon ritual and Baptist excess. The automobile becomes both chariot and sarcophagus, the skyscraper becomes both cathedral and impotent phallus, and the river becomes portal. He fills the gnostic void with shamanistic visions and feverish dreams. Like Lynch and Marcus he clutches at sacred texts, tearing them asunder and re-confabulating them with Burroughs-like (in)sanity. This is the American tradition writ large, a land of apocalyptic visions and hallucinatory textures and secret histories. Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament, with its sprawling mosaic of religious iconography and his clearly self-aware plundering of Catholicism, Egyptology and other religious sources may well be the ultimate expression of deformed belief systems inspiring forms of cultural-schizophrenic eschatological crisis in contemporary American culture to date.

Notes







1. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Penguin, 1995), pp. 28–29. 2. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption (Zone Books, 1991), p. 188. 3. Ben Marcus, The Father Costume (Artspace Books, 2002), p. 48. Reprinted in Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 4.  Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 10 through September 8, 2013, the Bibliothque Nationale de France in Paris, October 8, 2013 through January 5, 2014. 5. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 28. 6. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution, p. 249.

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7.  Holland Cotter, “Fixations of a Fabulist, Hermetic and Mystical ‘Subliming Vessel,’ Drawings of Matthew Barney,” New York Times, May 9, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/arts/design/subliming-vessel-drawings-of-matthew-barney-at-morgan.html?ref=design&_r=0. 8.  Isabelle Dervaux, ‘Introduction,’ Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney (Skira Rizzoli, 2013), p. 44. 9.  Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘A Possible Reading of Matthew Barney’s Drawings,’ The Brooklyn Rail, www.brooklynrail.org/2013/07/art/ the-library-fornom-amnesiacs. 10. Holland Cotter, ‘Fixations of a Fabulist, Hermetic and Mystical.’ 11. Ann McCoy, ‘Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney,’ The Brooklyn Rail, July 15, 2013, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/07/ artseen/subliming-vessel-the-drawings-of-matthew-barney. 12. Adam Phillips, Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail (Schaulager, Basil, 2010), p. 33. 13. Adam Phillips, ‘Keeping it Going,’ Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, p. 50. 14.  Isabelle Dervaux, ‘Introduction,’ Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, p. 54. 15.  Mark Stryker, ‘Artist-filmmaker Matthew Barney sees “so many possibilities” in Detroit,’ Detroit Free Press, May 30, 2014, http://www. freep.com/article/20140530/ENT05/305300163/Matthew-BarneyRiver-of-Fundament-Detroit. 16. Matthew Barney in Isabelle Dervaux, ‘Interview with Matthew Barney,’ p. 44. 17. Matthew Barney in Isabelle Dervaux, ‘Interview with Matthew Barney,’ p. 57. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 19. 19. Dan Brown is the author of a number of highly successful conspiracy thrillers, most notably The Da Vinci Code (2003). 20. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 131. 21.  Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘A Possible Reading of Matthew Barney’s Drawings,’ The Brooklyn Rail. 22.  Isabelle Dervaux, ‘Introduction,’ Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, p. 43. 23. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Post-Barney,’ The New Yorker, May 1, 2006, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/01/post-barney. 24. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014). 25. Jim Krusoe, ‘There Must Be Some Misunderstanding ‘Leaving the Sea,’ Stories by Ben Marcus,’ New York Times, January 24, 2014, http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/books/review/leaving-the-sea-stories-by-ben-marcus.html?_r=0.

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26. Jim Krusoe, ‘There Must Be Some Misunderstanding.’ 27. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 119. 28. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 183. 29. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 185. 30. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 188. 31. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 187. 32. Ben Marcus in C.B. Smith, ‘Interview with Ben Marcus,’ Mad Hatters Review, January 1, 2006, http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue4/ interview_marcus.shtml. 33. Peter Galison and Caroline Jones, ‘Theories and the Dead,’ Parkett No. 61, 2001, http://www.matthewritchie.com/projects/publications/ GalisonJones,Parkett61web.pdf. 34. Genesis 6:17, King James Bible. 35. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 199. 36. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 199. 37. Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea, p. 209. 38. Jeff Turrentine, ‘“Leaving the Sea”,’ 15 new stories by Ben Marcus.’ The Washington Post, January 13, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost. com/entertainment/books/leaving-the-sea-15-new-stories-by-ben-marcus/2014/01/30/ae460fca-8445-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html?tid=hpModule_5fb4f58a-8a7a-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e&hpid=z10. 39. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 242. 40. Mark Dery, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, p. 177. 41. Quinn Latimer, ‘Matthew Barney,’ frieze magazine, http://www.frieze. com/issue/review/matthew-barney/. First published in Frieze, No. 133, September 2010. 42. Quinn Latimer, ‘Matthew Barney,’ frieze magazine. 43.  Leo Steinberg, ‘The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,’ October, Summer, 1983. 44. Quinn Latimer, ‘Matthew Barney’, frieze magazine. 45. Quinn Latimer, ‘Matthew Barney,’ frieze magazine. 46.  Neville Wakefield, ‘Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail,’ http://nevillewakefield.com/ matthew-barney-prayer-sheet-with-the-wound-and-the-nail-2/. 47. Neville Wakefield, ‘Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail.’ 48. Mark C. Taylor, ‘Is Matthew Barney the Most Religious Artist Working Today? — Mark C. Taylor Explains.’ 49. James Joyce, Ulysses. 1922 (Penguin Modern Classics, New York, 1982), p. 67. 50. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Portals and Processions: Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament,’ Matthew Barney River of Fundament (Haus Der Kunst/ Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2014), p. 246.



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51. Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, p. 77. 52. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 35. 53. Don DeLillo, Underworld (Scribner, New York, 1998), p. 77. 54. Slavoj Žižek, Plague of Fantasies (Verso, New York, 2009), p. 217. 55. Joann Greco, ‘The Psychology of Ruin Porn,’ The Atlantic. 56. Okwui Enwezor and Matthew Barney, ‘These Weary Territories.’ Modern Painters, April 2014, p. 66. 57. Leo Bersani, ‘Is The Rectum A Grave?’, October 43: AIDS: Cultural analysis/Cultural activism, Winter, 1987, pp. 197–222. 58. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, New York, 2011), p. 23. 59. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 607. 60. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, p. 66. 61. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, p. 67. 62. J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, p. 262. 63.  Manuel Dries, ‘David Lynch’s Lost Highway: Perpetual Mystery or Visual Philosophy,’ http://www.davidlynch.de/mdries.pdf. 64. Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters/Sexy Beast,’ New York Times, February 7, 2014. 65. Okwui Enwezor and Matthew Barney, ‘These Weary Territories,’ p. 70. 66. Newtown Creek, the 3.5 mile-long waterway that separates Brooklyn and Queens, which is considered one of the most intensely polluted industrial sites in America. From The City Concealed, Newtown Creek Clean-Up Efforts, PBS, WNET, 2008: “The creek water contains hundreds of years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30 million gallons of spilled oil, and raw sewage from New York City’s antiquated sewer system. To make matters worse, there is no current in the creek, and over the years the sludge has congealed into a 15-foot thick layer of ‘black mayonnaise’ on the creek bed.” http://www.thirteen.org/ thecityconcealed/2008/12/12/newtown-creek-clean-up-efforts/. 67. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 118. 68. Norman Mailer, The Fight (Little, Brown, New York, 1975). 69.  William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959, Fourth Estate, London, 2009). 70. Mark Dery, Self-Dissection: a conversation with satirical English author Will Self, http://boingboing.net/2015/01/21/self-dissection-a-conversatio.html. 71. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 18. 72.  Angus Cook, ‘Osiris in Detroit,’ River of Fundament catalogue (Adelaide Festival 2014), p. 16. 73. Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings (Picador, London, 1983), p. 705. 74. Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings, p. 705.

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75. Synopsis, River of Fundament, catalogue (The Adelaide Festival, 2014), p. 5. 76. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell Publishing, Hoboken, 1990), p. 45. 77. Crash, directed by David Cronenberg (Alliance Communications, Garretson, 2004). 78. Hathfertiti is played at various points by Gyllenhall, the young Madyn Coakley and the mature Ellen Burstyn, their dialogue drawn in large part from the poetry of Walt Whitman perhaps as something of a retort to Mailer, who was married six times, notoriously stabbing one of his wives after a drunken party. 79.  Jed Perl, ‘Matthew Barney’s New Epic Is a Mythomaniacal MailerHemingway Mash-Up,’ The New Republic, February 11, 2014, http:// www.newrepublic.com/article/116572/matthew-barneys-new-epicmythomaniacal-mailer-hemingway-mash. 80. Louise Bourgeois 1947–1984, catalogue, Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris, 1944, quoted in Mignon Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother,’ October, Vol. 71, Winter, 1995. 81. Mignon Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother,’ October, Vol. 71, Winter, 1995, p. 74. 82. J.G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard Quotes, ed. V. Vale. (RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2004), p. 182. 83. C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 2): Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979). 84. C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (1938. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975), p. 131. 85. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’ in Walter Kaufmann ed. and trans., The Portable Nietzsche (1888, published posthumously 1908. Penguin Books, London, 1977), p. 660. 86.  This moment is sourced from numerous sources. See, for example, Sioux Wars—1851–1890, http://www.nrcprograms.org/site/ PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_siouxwars or http://www.u-s-history. com/pages/h3864.html. 87. Brigham Young, delivered in the New Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, April 9, 1871, Journal of Discourses Vol. 14, 78–91 (86–87), http://mit.irr. org/brigham-young-on-race-later-comments. 88. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, pp. 221–222. Zoroastrian continues to be practiced today but in severely dwindling numbers. 89. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint, p. 169. 90. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 40. 91. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 94.

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92.  The performances took place on November 6, 1964 (1 × 50 Foot Drawing) and January 13, 1965 (A 1000-Foot Chinese Paper). Both were performed by Sister M. Germaine, and involved her carrying a folded paper object to the center of the room, then slowly unfolding and refolding it over the course of an hour. Michael Auping suggests that Byars was “a romantic visionary attempting to implant a sense of philosophical and religious fantasy into our tense emotionally repressed and matter-of-fact environment.” http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/4. 93.  Matthew Barney River of Fundament (Haus Der Kunst/Skira Rizzoli New York, 2014), pp. 22–23. 94. Neville Wakefield, ‘The Son Also Rises’ (Playbill for Ren, Los Angeles, May 17, 2008), p. 8. 95.  Angus Cook, ‘Osiris in Detroit,’ River of Fundament catalogue (Adelaide Festival 2014), p. 17. 96. The Five Points of Calvinism is known by an acronym: T.U.L.I.P. Total Depravity (also known as Total Inability and Original Sin) Unconditional Election Limited Atonement (also known as Particular Atonement) Irresistible Grace. Perseverance of the Saints (also known as Once Saved Always Saved). 97.  Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates (Solar Productions). 98. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics (Harper Perennial, New York, 1993), p. 67. 99.  Zac Rose, ‘Matthew Barney. Ancient Evenings,’ http://032c. com/2011/matthew-barney-ancient-evenings/. 100.  John Perreault, ‘James Lee Byars at The Whitney,’ Arts Journal, December 6, 2004, http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2004/12/ james_lee_byars_at_the_whitney.html. 101. Matthew Barney in Adrian Searle, ‘Matthew Barney: “My Work Is Not for Everyone”,’ The Guardian, Monday 16 June 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/matthew-barney-riverof-fundament-film. 102. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 257. 103. Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, p. 100. 104. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p. 109. 105. Barbara Creed, ‘A Journey Through Blue Velvet,’ p. 112. 106. Stephen Payne in Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters/Sexy Beast,’ New York Times, February 7, 2014. 107. Maggie Gyllenhaal in Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters/Sexy Beast.’ 108. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird and Psychosis Is Normal,’ http://www.lacan.com/ripley.html.

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109. Maggie Gyllenhaal in Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters/Sexy Beast.’ White House Down (2013) is a mainstream action movie. 110. Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet, p. 20. 111.  Murray Whyte, ‘Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament Comes to Luminato,’ The Star, June 5, 2014, http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2014/06/05/matthew_barneys_river_of_fundament_ comes_to_luminato.html. 112. Debbie Cuthbertson, ‘River Flows Deep with Gilt-Edged Crap,’ Sydney Morning Herald, March 4, 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/river-flows-deep-with-giltedged-crap-20140303-3409x. html. 113.  Matt Pieknik, ‘Crude Thoughts & Fierce Forces,’ The American Reader, http://theamericanreader.com/crude-thoughts-fierce-forcesmatthew-barneys-river-of-fundament/. 114.  http://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/reviews/festivals/ river-of-fundament-198326. 115. Umberto Eco, Apocalypse Postponed, p. 39. 116.  An example headline at the time read: ‘Adelaide Festival Says Controversial Art-House Film River of Fundament Is Shocking but Not Pornographic,’ The Advertiser, February 26, 2014. 117. Matthew Barney in Matthew Westwood, ‘From Sex to Excrement, a Film of Extremes,’ The Australian, February, 27, 2014. 118. Zadie Smith, ‘Sex and wheels,’ The Guardian, 5 July 2014 http://www. theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/zadie-smith-jg-ballard-crash. 119. Matt Pieknik, ‘Crude Thoughts & Fierce Forces.’ 120. Jeff Johnson, Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch (McFarland & Co Inc, Jefferson, 2004), p. 7. 121.  Matthew Barney, interview with the author Hobart, November 19, 2014. 122. Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Anatomy Lesson,’ The Nation, April 17, www. thenation.com/article/anatomy-lesson#. 123. Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Anatomy Lesson.’ 124. Linda Yablonsky, ‘Art Matters/Sexy Beast.’ 125. Amy Jean Porter, ‘Fluid Talk: A Conversation with Matthew Barney,’ Stunned.org, undated, http://www.stunned.org/barney.htm. 126.  See, amongst other recent examples: Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (Pantheon, New York, 2000); Blake Butler, There is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011); and David Lynch, Lost Highway (Asymmetrical Productions, 1997). 127. Neville Wakefield, ‘The Passenger.’ 128. Robert Hughes, American Visions, p. 441.

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129. Matthew Barney in Andy Battaglia, ‘Matthew Barney’s Singular New Film.’ The Paris Review, February 12, 2014, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/02/12/river-of-fundament/. 130. Harold Bloom, ‘Norman in Egypt.’ The New York Review of Books, April 28, 1983. 131.  The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994), p. 21. 132. Matthew Barney in Amy Jean Porter, ‘Fluid Talk: A Conversation with Matthew Barney,’ Stunned.org. 133. Matt Pieknik, ‘Crude Thoughts & Fierce Forces,’ The American Reader. 134. Matt Pieknik, ‘Crude Thoughts & Fierce Forces,’ The American Reader. 135. Kate Taylor, ‘Luminato 2014’s crown jewel: Behind the scatological sixhour filmed opera based on a 700-page novel by Norman Mailer,’ The Globe and Mail, June 6, 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ arts/theatre-and-performance/luminato-2014s-crown-jewel-behindthe-scatological-six-hour-filmed-opera-based-on-a-700-page-novel-by-asexist-has-been/article19047467/, December 12, 2014. The film was screened as part of the 2014 Luminato Festival, 2014. 136. Louis Menand, ‘The Norman Invasion,’ The New Yorker, October 21, 2011, p. 86. 137. Indeed, after the screening in Adelaide, Barney did in fact cut this scene considerably. 138. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Vintage, 2007), p. 241. 139.  Matthew Barney, interview with the author Hobart, November 19, 2014. 140. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird.’ 141. Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings, p. 707. 142. Mike Kelley, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens. October 13, 2013–February 2, 2014. 143. Paul McCarthy, WS, The Armory, NYC, June 19–August 4, 2013. 144. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Portals and Processions: Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament,’ Matthew Barney River of Fundament, p. 243. 145. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 19. 146. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 133. 147. Eric G. Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch, p. 133. 148.  As has been mentioned, here I borrow James Ellroy’s term for his Underworld trilogy: American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001) and Blood’s A Rover (2009). 149.  Matthew Barney, interview with the author Hobart, November 19, 2014, for The Saturday Paper, February 14, 2015.

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150.  Matthew Barney River of Fundament (Haus Der Kunst/Skira Rizzoli, New York, 2014), pp. 22–23. 151. Andy Battaglia, ‘Matthew Barney’s singular new film,’ The Paris Review. 152. David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 15. 153. Barbara Creed, discussing the ‘birthing’ of the alien in Alien, Creed, ‘Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine.’ 154. Jonathan Bepler and Shane Anderson, ‘Notes on the Music: Lines Wind Pipe with Steel Or: How the Music Is Built,’ River of Fundament Catalogue (Adelaide Festival, 2014), p. 7. 155. Ross Simonini, ‘Black Water,’ frieze No. 163, May 2014, http://www. rosssimonini.com/files/Ross%20Barney.pdf. 156.  Phreddy Wischusen, ‘Society and spectacle,’ The Metro Times, Detroit, November 10, 2010, http://metrotimes.com/arts/ society-and-spectacle-1.1061668. 157.  REN (Los Angeles, 2008), KHU (Detroit, 2010), and BA (New York City, 2013). 158. Haus der Kunst, Munich, 17 March–17 August 2014. 159. Anna McNay, ‘River of Fundament.’ review, Studio International, April 3, 2014, http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/matthewbarney-river-of-fundament-haus-der-kunst-munich. 160. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 140. 161. Crashed Cars took place at the ICA, London, between April 4–28, 1970 and featured a Pontiac, an Austin Cambridge A60 and a Mini. 162. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ p. 9. 163. Nancy Spector, ‘Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,’ p. 8. 164.  Matthew Barney, interview with the author Hobart, 19/11/2014, February 14, 2015. 165. Matthew Barney, interview with the author. 166. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 18. 167. Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String, p. 127. 168. Peter Sloterdikj, quoted in Thomas Meaney, Doktor Zeitgeist, The New Yorker, February 26, 2018, p. 28. 169. Roger Denson, ‘From Detroit, Egypt: Matthew Barney Resurrects an American God,’ The Huffington Post, September 30, 2011, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/matthew-barney-djed_ b_988369.html. 170.  Boat of Ra (2014, Wood, resin-bonded sand, steel, furniture, cast bronze and gold plated bronze, 335.3 × 1524 × 731.5  cm). 171.  Rouge Battery (2014, Cast copper and iron, 71.1 × 228.6 × 454.7  cm). 172. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Portals and Processions: Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament,’ Matthew Barney River of Fundament, p. 245. 173.  Shaduf (2014, cast brass, 365.8 × 304.8 × 457.2  cm).

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174.  River of Fundament: Leaves of Grass (2014, engraved brass in brass frame, 37.5 × 31.1 × 3.8 cm framed). 175. River of Fundament: Isis Rises On The Water (2014, engraved brass and liver of sulfur in brass frame, 37.5 × 31.1 × 3.5 cm framed). 176. William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands (Penguin, London, 1987), acknowledgements section. 177. Harold Bloom, ‘Norman in Egypt,’ The New York Review of Books, April 28, 1983, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/apr/28/ norman-in-egypt/?pagination=false. 178. William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (John Calder Ltd., New York, 1981), see p. 136. 179. Harold Bloom, ‘Norman in Egypt,’ The New York Review of Books. 180. Erik Davis, Techgnosis, p. 23. 181.  Pip Cummings, ‘Late Mailer: An Egyptian Book of the Dead Now Lives,’ Sydney Morning Herald, October 30, 2013, http://www.smh. com.au/entertainment/movies/late-mailer-an-egyptian-book-of-thedead-now-lives-20131030-2whib.html. 182. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution, p. 250. 183. Matthew Barney in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Barney, p. 139. 184. Diedrich Diederichsen, ‘River of Many Returns,’ Matthew Barney River of Fundament, pp. 261–262. 185. Matthew Barney, interview with the author, Hobart. 186. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Portals and Processions: Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament,’ p. 250. 187. Matthew Barney and David Cronenberg, ‘II Operas/I Ancient/I Fly,’ TAR Magazine, Fall, 2008, http://www.gladstonegallery.com/sites/ default/files/TAR_Fall_08_e.pdf.

CHAPTER 7

Dark Gnosis

It is decidedly out of character that the American Right Wing hasn’t provoked some furor about the works of Barney and Marcus. One may recall the hubbub surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe or Andre Serrano. But conservative Rabbis have not decried The Flame Alphabet as blasphemous. Hard-core Evangelicals have not blockaded River of Fundament as sexist pornography. The usually ultra-vocal Republican and Fundamentalist gatekeepers have remained silent in the face of Barney’s excesses. Barney is a media celebrity, but there is religious imagery, arguably sacrilegious, aplenty, enough, one would have thought, to fuel some form of public backlash. Even the popular success of Parker and Stone’s The Book of Mormon failed to ruffle the LDS.1 Bloom’s perpetual apologies for the Mormons in The American Religion are not shared by many critics, from the fascinated but bewildered Baudrillard in America to the critical in Erik Davis’ writings. It is also not a position taken by Barney in CREMASTER 2. Theoretically inspired, at least in part, by Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, it is an entre into more arcane observations and aesthetics. Bloom’s American Religion was perhaps unwittingly encapsulated in the 68th episode of South Park: ‘Super Best Friends’ in 2001 in which a cult called the Blaintologists—an unsubtle allusion to the Scientologists—led by magician David Blaine descends upon the town. Amidst the ensuing chaos Stan beseeches Jesus for help, who in turn ensnares his Super Best Friends to assist in stopping Blaine from engendering a mass, Jim Jones-like suicide. Christ’s rather motley group © The Author(s) 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6_7

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of friends consisted of Krishna, Joseph Smith, Lao Tse, Muhammad, Buddha, Moses and Seaman (the latter was based on DC comics Aquaman and is constantly mocked for his name—pronounced ‘semen.’) Meanwhile Christ is addicted to pornography, Buddha has a serious cocaine habit and Muhammad is depicted as a censor bar. In the ensuing battle Blaine activates the Washington, DC statue of Abraham Lincoln to his service to which the Super Best Friends create a giant stone John Wilkes Booth who shoots the former President in the head. Never ones for subtlety, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In an interview during the hoopla surrounding The Book of Mormon, Stone summed up the euphoria of apocalypse: Everyone wants the end of the world to happen during their lifetime. Because it makes you feel really fucking important because you’re a central character in a huge narrative. And that’s what Joseph Smith did … if he’s a conman it’s completely brilliant, and if he’s somewhere in between — that’s a really powerful idea. And as storytellers, we’re always trying to come up with new stories, and we kind of know how hard that is — [so] to watch Joseph Smith take these old stories and make America a central character and inspire people, that’s just great. I don’t know why, or how else to explain it, other than that it makes me feel good.2

American Schizo: The Malformed Gnosis Referring to novelists, but in a comment that could be applied to artists of many forms of expression, Gilles Deleuze suggests that such people “know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.”3 Dissecting such cultural artifacts as The Flame Alphabet and River of Fundament uncovers an endemic cultural contradiction: America the secular maintains a futile search for a spiritual language. Bloom identified the shifting sands of what he had dubbed The American Religion, recognizing the destabilisation of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism. However, Barney, Marcus, Lynch and others discussed in this book take these mutations of The American Religion and its attendant cultural-schizophrenia to new and unruly levels, representing forms of eschatological crisis in contemporary American culture via their work. It is in their American DNA. The perversity of Columbus’ seeking a land of and for Armageddon has manifested. The search for gnosis has led to chthonic sewage, the oral void, the rotting maw ever hungry.

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Bloom’s The American Religion is subtitled “The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.” Jameson critiques the postmodern. Accordingly, we must ask, post-Christianity and post-Modernity, what remains for the American psyche? The posthumous? The post-mortem? The posthuman? The post-condition clears the way for a visceral horror vacui or cenophobia, an obsessive fear of the void. In many respects Bloom’s American Religion(s), despite their variations and mutations and bizarre dialects, are cloying institutions, and are linked by self-righteousness and, often, pure delusion and hypocrisy. They supply a series of escape routes from reality, and even often from traditional religion itself, and even the further extremes of Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians, the Scientologists, but also the peculiarities of the Amish and the Shakers. Its permutations are vast and infiltrate contemporary culture in often insidious and, at times, inspired forms. Marcus creates his own: the Forest Jews. Lynch portrays, in Mormon parlance, the ‘organizer’ (the gnarled gear-meister) in the beginning of Eraserhead. But it is Barney who encapsulates this mission to recreate a series of codes and symbols, a dialect and a language. American nostalgia haunts these projects. A nostalgia for the arcadia the Puritans ‘discovered’ and promptly ‘desecrated.’ Eden made Hell for all too many. The American Religion has always been an amalgam of Baptists, Assemblies of God, Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Methodists and Catholics alongside their extremist malformed offshoots (Branch Davidians, The Church of Bible Understanding et al.) and others. As bizarre as these may be, they are no less so than those concocted in the fictions discussed in this discussion. Indeed, we can now add Ben Marcus’ Forest Jews and Barney’s orgy of symbolism, a religion not yet named, but perhaps simply that of the ‘New American Religion,’ based on doubts rather than beliefs, but replete with its own sense of the End of Days. As Bloom notes of America: “Our nation, from 1800 until now, never lacks for new religions.”4 On that same page Bloom provocatively asks why it is that America has produced “so few masterpieces of overtly religious literature.”5 But he does not state what the “few” masterpieces are. Marcus and Barney are “overtly” religious in their imagery, their reinterpretations of Mormon, Christian and Judaic rituals no less strange than the adaptations of their original forms via their transplantation to American soil. Moore claims that: “The separation of church and state in America has not done as much for the virtue of either church or state as its

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proponents usually claim. It did not much help Americans to find God or public virtue. What it did do was enable them to find themselves.”6 But that only inspires the question—what is it that they have found? Delusion? As Ballard points out: “the two sickest societies are the two most religious societies, America and the Middle East. And they’re getting sicker.”7 America’s ‘sickness’ takes shape in part in strange deformations. As Jameson points out: “Even the alleged spiritualisms and religious cults of the present are so grossly materialistic that their founders would scarcely recognize any of them.”8

The New American Religion To the plethora of legions of faith under The American Religion cited by Bloom, Moore, Taylor and others, perhaps one day, branches of the Marcusian (the Forest Jews, the Silentists, the Female Jesus) and the Barneyites (a rich amalgam of the malformed Mormon, Celtic, Baptist, Christian and anything else at hand) will take hold. The simple reality of the existence of the Mormon Church, let alone the Scientologists, must allow any potentiality. And why not? We have our own fallen angels, our community of the perverse: Frank, LeBov, Gilmore, Usermare.9 We have our apostles and warrior saints: Jeffrey, Samuel, The Apprentice. We have our ‘Virgin’ mothers: Hathfertiti/Rachael, our Mary in Eraserhead and we have our share of apocalypse: from rivers of shit to landscapes swept with salt and toxic children. Hell, like almost everything else here, is inverted. Unlike the traditional Christian Hell, one of flames and sulfur, fire and brimstone, it is one of larvae and worms, rot and sewage. For Barney, Marcus and Lynch, Hell is moist: Barney’s undead zombie is ‘wet’ and his protagonists crawl out of fetid sewage. Marcus’ protagonist must crawl through damp rotting muck deep below the surface. Lynch’s opening to Blue Velvet is a slimy morass of hellish insect horrors. This is yet another symptom of the deformation of American religious imaging. And we have our seers, padres and charismatics: no less credible than Joseph Smith, in Barney, Marcus and Lynch and their ilk. These would be, in Platonic terms, mimetic religions. They are shadows on the walls of gnosis, and Plato would undoubtedly have banished them from his Republic. They are, as Baudrillard and Philip K. Dick would have it, simulacra, or perhaps Gibson’s “consensual hallucination.”10 As Baudrillard asks: “But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the

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supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination — the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?” 11 It must be recalled that neither Marcus’ Samuel or Barney’s Norman do not achieve their gnostic ambitions. Sam fails to reunite his family. Norman fails to reach his reincarnation. Optimistic outcomes do not, it seems, suit the American psyche or the American Age—the age, one could say, of the End of Days. And, despite the rapture felt by many Republicans and conservatives for The Rapture, the apocalyptic makes for poor therapy, although Americans, Robert Hughes notes, “seem to feel, on some basic level, that the main justification for art is its therapeutic power.”12 Education and ‘spiritual uplift’ are its entire raison d’être, and for the Fundamentalist, Evangelical Republicans and their ilk, art simply has to be “morally and spiritually uplifting … a bit like religion.”13 However, as Žižek phrases it, this is the period when Straight Means Weird and Psychosis is Normal.14 Disney co-opting Lynch for The Straight Story (1999) does not make Eraserhead retrospectively therapeutic. Barney, screening River of Fundament in stately opera houses does not remove its visceral disturbances. Oprah beatifying McCarthy’s The Road does not make it comforting bedtime reading. Indeed, one could go so far as to suggest that after the ingestion of these Apokálypsis’ therapy may indeed be in order. This tome began with a litany of American woes circa 1967, the year of Marcus’ and Barney’s birth. Almost half a century on little, it seems, has changed. A random glance at recent copies of the New York Times or The Washington Post contain similarly toxic evocations. Vietnam has been replaced by the Middle East, The Cold War by Russia’s annexation of Georgia, Nixon is dwarfed by Trump. African-American civil rights, despite the election of an African-American president, remain a gangrenous wound. Potential nuclear annihilation has been superseded by Global Warming and Islamic extremists. AIDs by Ebola. In all of these cases America seems impotent, unable to lead despite its prayers and proclamations. Indeed, the firebrand Doors, searing Hendrix, acidic Dylan and mesmerising Joplin and the more recent Stooges, Nirvana and Sonic Youth have been replaced by the pusillanimous Britney Spears and the pungently plasticized ‘rebellion’ of Beyoncé. Author Jack O’Connell suggests that: “It’s an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text.”15

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It is text and narrative that live on in a form of belief, replacing the Latin Mass and glossolalia with a language almost as obscure and bewildering to the general bystander. This “obsessive” love for text and narrative permeates and infests the artworks discussed here, a series of deuterocanonical artifacts forming a series of secondary canons of sacred writings and images in an attempt to fill a gnostic void. One can see this even in the titles of the key works discussed: Subliming Vessel, River of Fundament, Leaving the Sea, The Flame Alphabet. The Sublime (the Spirit), the Vessel (the Arc), the Sea (the Flood), the River (the Baptism), the Flame (the Sacred Heart), the Fundament (the Earth), the Leaving (the Rapture). There is movement or turbulence throughout such words. There are the fundamentals of water and fire. The profound sense of restless pursuit and seeking: leaving, vessel, river, sea. The potential of the sublime alphabet. But then there is the schizo twist beneath the surface. The Alphabet is poisonous—it burns and turns to salt. The River is shit. The Sea is The Flood, annihilation and despair. The Vessel is the crushed automobile, a site for the dead, or the inverted roof of Mailer’s dwelling. Perhaps what they are, in fact, leaving is the ‘American Dream’ as it fails to supply gnosis, despite being wrapped in blue velvet. River of Fundament, The Flame Alphabet and the other works discussed are illustrations of eschatological crisis, are vehicles for when the subliming vessel leaves the sea. They are both, at heart, religious artifacts, not so much postmodern (Jameson) or post-Christian (Bloom) as mutant forms that embrace both the modern and the non-secular with heightened self-awareness. They represent a new wave of a fundamental alphabet created to describe the decaying spirit of America. America is not a Body without Organs, it is more that those organs are inflamed, rancorous, gangrenous and infectious. But clearly, religiosity endures when, and even especially when, it is declared “dead.”

Notes

1. The Book of Mormon opened on Broadway in March 2011, replete with such with lyrics as “Fuck you, God, in the ass, mouth and cunt!” The church released an official response stating that:” The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.” http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/ church-statement-regarding-the-book-of-mormon-broadway-musical.

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The head of Public Affairs for the church also responded mildly. “Of course, parody isn’t reality, and it’s the very distortion that makes it appealing and often funny. The danger is not when people laugh but when they take it seriously — if they leave a theater believing that Mormons really do live in some kind of a surreal world of self-deception and illusion.” (Otterson, Michael, Why I won’t be seeing the Book of Mormon musical. The Washington Post, April 14, 2011). The LDS Church has advertised in the playbills at many of the musical’s venues with phrases like “you’ve seen the play, now read the book.” 2. Carl Swanson, ‘Trey Parker and Matt Stone Talk About Why The Book of Mormon Isn’t Actually Offensive, and the Future of South Park,’ http:// www.vulture.com/2011/03/trey_parker_and_matt_stone_tal.html. 3. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations • 1972–1990 (Columbia University Press, New York, 1995), p. 23. 4. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 257. 5. Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 257. 6. Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders, p. 208. 7. J.G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, p. 422. 8. Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (Verso, 2015), p. 236. 9. Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, p. 4. For Dery: “There’s a growing belief that mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as Yeats foretold: that the best lack all conviction, while the worst—terrorists like the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, cult leaders like David Koresh (an adopted name: Koresh is the Hebrew for Cyrus, a quasi-messianic figure in the Old Testament) of the Branch Davidians and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate fame—are full of passionate intensity.” 10. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, New York, 1984), p. 51. 11. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 4. 12. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint, p. 171. 13. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint, p. 171. 14. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When Straight Means Weird.’ 15. Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh, p. 182.

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Index

A Acconci, Vito, 37 Acker, Kathy, 37, 41 Adorno, Theodor, 32, 51, 72, 115, 149 The Stars Down To Earth, 35 Agnostic Front (band), 37, 115, 253, 256 Ali, Muhammad, 229 American Constitution, 15 Amish, The, 22, 180, 277 Amis, Martin, 29, 51 Anglicans, 43 Anthropodermic bibliopegy, 81, 127 Antoni, Janine Gnaws, 232 Apocalypse Now (film), 2, 38, 64, 234, 255 Argenta, Dario, 131, 230 Armstrong, Karen, 23, 49 Aslan, Reza, 7, 10 Assassination of John F. Kennedy, 26, 33, 34, 139

of Martin Luther King, 26, 33 of Robert Kennedy, 33 automobiles, 9, 56, 119, 123, 132, 137, 157, 167, 196, 197, 208, 211, 220, 224, 225, 236, 238, 255, 258, 259, 264, 280 B Bacon, Francis, 72 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 45 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 27, 50, 56, 57, 264 Rabelais and His World, 91 Bakker, Jim, 225 Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition, 49, 50, 66, 68, 93, 134, 151, 153, 156, 167, 172, 256, 257 Concrete Island, 215 Crash, 136, 140, 156, 157, 215, 244 The Drowned World, 177, 215

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 A. Crawford, Religious Imaging in Millennialist America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99172-6

305

306  Index Baptists, 43, 191, 237, 264, 277, 278 Barkun, Michael, 2 Barney, Matthew CREMASTER 2, 4, 28, 37, 56, 60, 62, 70, 85, 86, 101, 112, 116, 118–120, 122, 125, 128, 130, 132, 135, 138–140, 145, 152, 197, 228, 248, 252, 253, 257–259, 264, 275 CREMASTER 3, 4, 36, 37, 65, 75, 83, 112, 115, 128–130, 132–135, 137, 144, 149, 166, 169, 188, 195–197, 212, 221, 227, 231, 235, 237, 245, 246, 252, 253, 255, 264 DJED, 220, 227, 240, 256, 263 Drawing Restraint 9, 81, 141, 174, 235, 257 Hoist, 135, 156, 231, 257–259 Rouge Battery, 260, 272 Shaduf, 260, 272 Barthes, Roland Mythologies, 137, 156 Bataille, Georges, 113, 207, 211, 229, 230, 235, 264 Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 31, 51, 128, 155 Baudrillard, Jean, 15, 18, 25, 29, 48, 50, 55, 60, 61, 83, 90, 91, 97, 101, 102, 139, 146, 157, 275, 278, 281 Bava, Mario, 131, 230 Beautiful Bald Eagle, Chief David, 231, 233 Bellmer, Hans, 67, 114, 209 Study for Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil, 229 Benjamin, Walter, 35 Bepler, Jonathan, 53, 220, 253–255, 272 Berg, David Brandt, 50 Bergman, Ingmar The Seventh Seal, 235

Bersani, Leo, 223, 267 Beuys, Joseph, 37, 38, 40, 157, 190, 212, 244 Beyoncé, 279 Björk, 81, 141, 235 Blake, William, 58, 110, 212 Bloom, Harold The American Religion:The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 53, 58, 90, 95, 105, 146, 154, 158, 162, 198, 203, 264, 268, 269, 275, 277, 278, 203 The Western Canon, 145, 158, 247, 261 The Book of Mormon, 40, 41, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 120, 138, 153, 275, 276, 280 Borges, Jorge Luis, 37, 172 Other Inquisitions, 52 Bourgeois, Louise, 268 The Destruction of the Father, 232 Branch Davidians, 29, 277, 281 Brando, Marlon, 64 Brooks, Joanna, 158 Brooks, Max World War Z, 131, 176 Brown, Norman O., 59, 91 Buchanan, Ian, 127 Buddhism, 80 Bullitt (film), 238 Bundy, Ted, 82 Buñuel, Luis, 212 Exterminating Angel, 240 Un Chien Andalou, 235 Burden, Chris Trans-Fixed, 55 Burns, Charles, 59 Black Hole, 184 Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch, 47, 58, 140, 201, 230, 267 The Ticket That Exploded, 177, 201

Index

The Western Lands; Cities of the Red Night, 261, 273 Bush, George, 114, 160 Butler, Blake, 30, 50, 84, 96, 111, 121, 181, 270 Butthole Surfers (band), 37, 135, 256 Byars, James Lee, 144, 236, 237, 239, 240, 244, 263, 269 The Death of James Lee Byars, 238 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 174, 200 C Cage, John, 37 Calvino, Italo, 172 Candomblé, 22, 142, 143 Caravaggio Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 45 Cash, Johnny American IV: The Man Comes Around, 122 Cazazza, Monte, 257 Chabon, Michael, 177 Chrysler Building, 128–130, 137, 154, 209, 211, 218, 224, 246, 252 Church of Bible Understanding, The, 277 Church of Latter-day Saints, The, 107, 145 Clinton, Hillary, 160 Cocteau, Jean Orphée, 235 Coen Brothers Barton Fink, 133 The Hudsucker Proxy, 133 Cohen, Joshua, 163, 166, 185, 194, 199, 202, 203 Book of Numbers, 159 Witz, 164, 166, 185, 195 Cohn, Norman, 197 Messianic Revolution:Radical Religious Politics to the End

  307

of the Second Millennium, 53, 198, 203, 264, 273 The Pursuit of the Millennium, 30, 35, 51, 161 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 234 Cook, Angus, 230, 238, 267, 269 Cotter, Holland, 209, 265 Cousins, Mark, 125, 153 Crash (Ballard), 136, 139, 140, 156, 157, 215, 244, 257 Crash (Cronenberg), 70, 113, 231, 256, 268 Creed, Barbara, 62, 83, 85, 86, 91, 97, 98, 118, 130, 151, 155, 240, 254, 269, 272 Critchley, Simon, 106, 147 Cronenberg, Brandon Antiviral, 245 Cronenberg, David Consumed, 28, 50, 109, 147, 189 Dead Ringers, 134, 210 eXistenz, 56, 88, 133, 179, 184 The Fly, 121, 263, 233 Naked Lunch, 227 Crowley, Aleister, 32, 120 Crucifix, 119, 237 display of, 55, 78, 89, 145, 218, 237, 239, 240 D Dafoe, Willem, 55, 62, 233 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 82 Dalí, Salvador, 134, 156, 209 Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves, 27, 175, 246, 270 Danto, Arthur C., 141, 157, 245, 270 Darwinism, 97 Davis, Erik, 22, 39, 102, 103, 143, 146, 155, 157, 187, 191, 275 Techgnosis, 49, 53, 155, 199, 203, 204, 273

308  Index Davis, Mike City of Quartz, 51, 224, 267 Dawkins, Richard The God Delusion, 23, 49 Dean, James, 134, 137, 139, 225 Delaney, Samuel R. Dhalgren, 73, 74, 223 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 10, 15, 35–37, 47, 52, 60, 63, 92, 98, 108, 127, 135, 139, 147, 156, 157, 175, 191, 201, 204, 251, 258, 265, 267, 271, 272, 276, 281 DeLillo, Don Cosmopolis, 140 The Falling Man, 159 Libra, 85, 149 Mao II, 26, 29, 49 Underworld, 149, 222, 267 Derby, Matthew, 111 Super Flat Times, 195 Dervaux, Isabelle, 209, 210, 212, 265 Dery, Mark I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, 96, 98, 155, 266 The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, 91–94, 203, 281 Detroit, 73, 74, 157, 195, 211, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226–228, 236, 238, 239, 255, 257, 260, 262, 265, 267, 269, 272 Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 89, 250 Dr. Bloodmoney, 111 The Man In The High Castle, 182 Diederichsen, Diedrich, 262, 273 Dissociative Personality Disorder, 117 The Doors, 33, 57 Dries, Manuel, 57, 91, 225, 267 Dr. Strange (comic), 2

Duchamp, Marcel, 167, 209 Dürer, Albrecht, 217 Durrell, Lawrence, 5 The Avignon Quartet, 10 Durrenmatt, Friedrich, 109, 147 Dylan, Bob, 52, 279 E Eastwood, Clint Gran Torino, 55 High Plains Drifter, 229 Pale Rider, 118, 123, 228 Eco, Umberto, 29, 30, 39, 53, 243, 244, 270 Faith in Fakes, Essays, 50, 51 Eddy, Mary Baker, 10 Egypt, 5, 24, 103, 122, 138, 151, 220, 225, 239, 260, 262, 263 Eizenstein, Rabbi Ira, 188, 189 El Akkad, Omar American War, 20 Eliot, T.S. The Hollow Men, 14, 234 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 234 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 235 Enwezor, Okwui, 221, 223, 250, 260, 262, 266, 267, 271–273 Erickson, Steve American Nomad: Pop Visions, Restless Politics and Apocalyptic Memories at the End of the Millennium, 47, 48, 146 The Sea Came in at Midnight, 30, 176 Ernst, Max, 209 ether (band), 153 Evangelicalism, 24, 43 Evenson, Brian Altman’s Tongue, 241 Baby Leg, 110, 114, 148 Dark Property, 107, 109, 181 Immobility, 107, 114, 147, 195

Index

Evil Dead (film), 37, 246 Exorcist, The (film), 2, 37 F Falwell, Jerry, 3, 8 Faulkner, William, 106 Ford, Henry, 138, 167, 211 Foster, Hal Prosthetic Gods, 70 Foucault, Michel, 1, 9, 36, 60, 64, 66, 91, 92, 128, 154, 217, 231, 266 A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 10, 15, 47 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 9, 91, 92, 266 Franzen, Jonathan, 41, 53, 190–193, 203–205, 213 Frazer, Sir James The Golden Bough, 234 Frazier, Joe, 229 Freud, Sigmund Civilization and Its Discontents, 10, 156 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 194, 244 Fundamentalist evangelicals, 25, 26, 47, 85, 117, 163, 207, 227 G Ghost Rider (comic), 2 Giamatti, Paul, 109, 225, 226, 233, 240, 241, 263 Gibson, William Count Zero, 142, 143, 157 Neuromancer, 56, 142, 143, 281 Pattern Recognition, 11, 33, 52, 159 Spook Country, 142, 157 Giger, H.R., 118, 221, 230

  309

Gilmore, Gary, 28, 60, 64, 67, 116, 117, 120, 129, 130, 237, 245, 258 Ginsburg, Allen, 34 Gira, Michael, 254 Glossolalia, 24, 26, 27, 30, 128, 166, 168, 175, 254, 280 Golem, The, 81 Goodeve, Thyrza Nichols, 91, 126, 154, 209, 265 Gopnik, Adam, 70, 93 Gordon, Douglas, 235 Gotham, 73, 221, 241 Goya, Francisco de, 127, 208, 212 Saturn Devouring His Son, 45 Graham, Billy, 17, 38, 48 Graham, Dan Rock My Religion, 115, 149 The Grattan Massacre, 233 Graves, Milford, 213, 233, 254 Gray, John, 21, 24, 25, 27, 74, 163, 165 Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 49, 51, 94, 199 The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom, 49, 198 Greco, Joann, 93, 267 Greenaway, Peter The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 235, 240 Grosz, Elizabeth, 166, 199 Grosz, George, 209 Guattari, Félix, 3, 10, 15, 35–37, 47, 52, 63, 92, 98, 108, 127, 135, 139, 157, 175, 191, 201, 204, 251, 258, 265, 267, 271, 272 Gyllenhaal, Maggie, 241, 243, 263, 269 Gysin, Brion, 256

310  Index H Hammett, Dashiell The Dain Curse, 30, 51 Harding, Susan, 2, 4, 9, 10 Harry, Deborah, 232 Haut, Woody Neon Noir, Contemporary American Crime Fiction, 52 Heaven’s Gate, 26, 29, 277, 281 Hegel, Georg, 10, 63 Hemingway, Ernest, 208, 212, 218, 223, 228, 229, 235, 236, 244, 247, 249, 253 Hendrix, Jimi, 33, 279 Herr, Michael Dispatches, 38, 116, 150 Hesse, Hermann, 28, 117 Heston, Charlton, 55 Heteroglossia, 27 Hitchcock, Alfred Vertigo, 125 Holy Communion. See Transubstantiation Hopkins, Anthony, 66 Horsley, Jason, 63, 92 Houdini, Harry, 5, 116, 120, 124, 130, 139, 141, 144, 195, 208, 236, 238, 244 Hubbard, Ron L., 32 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 114 ‘Dada Manifesto’, 149 Hughes, Robert, 6, 16, 17, 19, 32, 34, 69, 80, 167, 224, 236, 246, 279 American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, 10, 47–49, 51, 52, 93, 267, 270 The Culture of Complaint—The Fraying of America, 95, 268, 281 Hungerford, Amy, 26, 162, 166, 184

Postmodern Belief : American literature and religion since 1960, 24, 49, 50, 198, 199, 202 Hurt, William, 55, 75, 240 I Imber, David G., 80, 95 Insects, 58, 85, 97, 121, 137, 278 Islam, 14, 24, 102, 144, 198 J Jameson, Fredric, 6, 7, 17, 19, 30, 32, 33, 35, 39–41, 56, 57, 85, 111, 116, 119, 121, 277, 278, 280 The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms, 91, 281 Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 48, 91, 148, 152 Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1, 9, 48, 51–53, 97, 150 The Seeds of Time, 10, 151 Jarmusch, Jim Only Lovers Left Alive, 227 Jaspers, Karl, 56 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 44 Jenkins, Henry, 131, 155 Jesus Christ, 4, 31, 101, 106 Joachim of Fiore, 45, 208 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 230 The Holy Mountain, 235 Johnson, Denis Tree of Smoke, 116 Johnson, Jeff, 270 Johnson, Jeremy Robert Extinction Journals, 121, 152 We Live Inside You, 150

Index

Johnson, Robert, 121 Jones, Jim, 30, 148, 275 Peoples Temple, 29 Jonze, Spike, 67 Her, 245 Joyce, James, 33 Finnegan’s Wake, 166, 191 Ulysses, 220, 266 Judaism, 1, 3–5, 8, 14, 24, 39, 40, 44, 144, 146, 162, 164, 170, 178, 180, 184, 186, 188, 195–197, 202, 217, 276 Jung, C.G., 233, 268 Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9, 268 K Kabbalah, 178, 184, 186, 202 Kane, Bob, 161 Kaplan, Rabbi Mordecai, 188 Katz, David S., 24, 39, 45, 49, 53, 186, 198, 203, 208, 262, 264, 273 Kauffman, Charlie Being John Malkovich, 67 Kelley, Mike, 83, 111, 250, 271 Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, 242 Kennedy, John F., 21, 22, 33, 48, 52, 87, 134, 139, 157, 217 Kennedy, Robert, 33 Kerouac, Jack, 5, 35, 225 Kesey, Ken One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 57 Kienholz, Edward Back Seat Dodge, 224 State Hospital, 69 King, Martin Luther, 20, 26, 33 Kirby, Jack, 161 Kloss, Robert The Alligators of Abraham, 20, 106

  311

The Revelator, 106, 147 Kruger, Barbara, 41 Kubrick, Stanley The Shining, 2, 37, 134 L LaHaye, Tim, 2 Lakota Sioux, 233 Lapham, Lewis, 117, 150 Latimer, Quinn, 217, 218, 266 Latin Mass, 24, 26, 37, 280 Lee, Ann, 9 Lee, Stan, 275 Lethem, Jonathan, 215 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 18 American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, 48 Lincoln, Abraham, 20, 84, 106, 127, 276 Lombardo, Dave, 122, 253 Los Angeles, 30, 31, 69, 73, 101, 111, 138, 162, 220, 224, 225, 263 Lotringer, Sylvère ‘Schizo Culture’, 36, 37 Lovecraft, H.P., 2, 30, 51, 61, 127, 154, 241 Lutherans, 22, 43 Lynch, David Blue Velvet, 3, 4, 37, 74, 86, 95, 223 Catching the Big Fish, 76, 91, 92, 94, 98, 272 Crazy Clown Time, 36, 52, 61 Eraserhead, 3, 4, 37, 41, 61, 73, 74, 81, 86, 221, 223, 240 Lost Highway, 5, 36, 57, 61, 91, 94, 131, 136, 251, 267, 270 Lynch on Lynch, 94, 156 Mulholland Drive, 129, 136 Twin Peaks, 136

312  Index Wild At Heart, 62, 75, 87, 233 Lynch, Jennifer Chambers Boxing Helena, 70, 113 M Mailer, John Buffalo, 232, 233 Mailer, Norman Ancient Evenings, 5, 7, 41, 127, 145, 220, 222, 239, 241, 243, 245–248, 250, 252, 253, 255, 261–263 The Castle in the Forest, 195 Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, 85 Why Are We In Vietnam?, 234 Manson, Charles, 28, 64, 117, 142, 148 Manzoni, Piero Merda d’artista, 242 Marclay, Christian, 235 Marcus, Ben The Age of Wire and String, 4, 35, 65, 67, 92, 125, 126, 136, 153, 166–168, 171–173, 175, 199, 200, 208, 258, 261, 272 The Father Costume, 5, 166, 175, 214, 215, 259, 264 The Flame Alphabet, 3, 4, 30, 39, 41, 46, 124, 139, 176, 178, 184, 188, 192, 193, 195–197, 212, 214, 245, 250, 275, 276, 280 Leaving the Sea, 197, 213, 214, 216, 280 Notable American Women, 4, 30, 92, 139, 166, 169, 171–173, 175, 176, 197, 200, 201, 206, 214 Marcus, Greil A New Literary History of America (with Sollors, Werner), 47 The Doors, 50, 52, 91, 92

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 45 The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and The American Voice, 48 Masons, 129, 132 Mathews, Harry, 172 McCarthy, Cormac Child of God, 110, 174 No Country for Old Men, 228 Outer Dark, 110 The Road, 107, 109, 171, 181, 194, 205, 249, 271, 279 McCarthy, Paul, 112, 114, 149, 222, 271 White Snow, 83, 111, 250 McCloud, Scott Understanding Comics, 238, 269 McClure, John A., 6, 10 Melville, Herman, 5, 106, 111, 235 Moby Dick, 5, 235 Methodists, 277 Meyrink, Gustav The Golem, 81 Michelangelo, 208 Miller, George Mad Max : Fury Road , 66, 205 Mad Max: The Road Warrior, 231 Miller, Henry, 37 Miner, Horace Body Ritual among the Nacirema, 69, 93, 169, 200 Money, Reverend William, 31 Moon, Revered Sun Myung Unification Church, 29 Moore, Alan & Gibbons, Mark Watchmen, 27, 149, 150, 238 Moore, R. Laurence, 15, 47, 146, 163, 198, 201, 206, 281 Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, 105 Morbid Angel (band), 37, 115, 122, 255, 256

Index

Mormonism, 1, 3, 4, 8, 14, 22, 39, 40, 44, 90, 105, 106, 111, 112, 133, 144, 145, 188, 208, 217, 252, 276 Morricone, Ennio, 118 Muhammad, 144, 276 Murphy, Ryan, 37, 115, 182, 253, 256 American Horror Story: Freak Show, 64, 70, 92 Musafar, Fakir, 120, 152, 257 N Nauman, Bruce, 37, 64, 83 Neshat, Shirin, 235 The New Gods (comic), 2 New York, 2, 17, 26, 31, 32, 36, 40, 47–49, 51–53, 64, 66, 69, 93, 108, 128, 129, 134, 149, 150, 156, 161, 177, 180, 189, 211, 220, 223, 227, 242, 255–257, 264–267, 269–273, 281 Nietzsche, Friedrich Ecce Homo, 233, 268 The Gay Science, 40 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 236 Will to Power, 149 The Night Stalker (tv series), 2 Nitsch, Hermann, 221 Nolan, Christopher The Dark Knight, 64, 83, 87–89, 231, 232 The Dark Knight Rises, 66 O Obama, Barack, 21 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 116, 140, 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 265, 267, 272, 273 O’Connell, Jack Box Nine, 182

  313

The Resurrectionist, 175, 181 Word Made Flesh, 65, 66, 73, 81, 92, 127, 154, 174, 175, 181, 201, 223, 281 Ohle, David The Age of Sinatra, 67 Omega Man, The (film), 2, 55, 74 Omen, The (film), 2, 37 Orridge, Genesis P., 256, 257 Oulipo school, The, 173 P Pagels, Elaine, 162 Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, 197 Paracelsus, 187 Parfrey, Adam, 109 Parker, Trey. See South Park Parsons, Jack, 32 Pasolini, Pier Paolo Salò, 235 Pauline, Mark. See Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) Pentecostalism, 24, 43, 44, 128 Phillips, Adam, 210, 265 Pieknik, Matt, 242–244, 247, 270, 271 Pietism, 43 Planet of the Apes, The (film), 2, 65 Platoon (film), 55 Poe, Edgar Allen, 246 Pondick, Rona Legs, Mouth and Milk, 232 Popkin, Richard H., 24, 39, 45, 49, 53, 186, 198, 203, 208, 262, 264, 273 Preacher (comic), 92 Prince, Richard, 41 Protestants, 144, 162, 277 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 163 Puritans, 15–17, 19–23, 60, 138, 160, 161, 207, 243, 277

314  Index Pynchon, Thomas Bleeding Edge, 159, 197 The Crying of Lot 49, 224 Gravity’s Rainbow, 41, 247, 261 V, 220 R Rapture, The, 9, 25, 26, 279, 280 Reincarnation, 5, 120, 130, 132, 220, 225, 234, 247, 248, 250, 255, 261, 279 RE/Search, 49, 91, 152, 156, 205, 256–258, 268 Industrial Culture Handbook, 256 Modern Primitives, 257 Richter, Gerhard, 244 Ritchie, Matthew, 214, 215 Robertson, Pat, 3 Romney, Mitt, 104 Rosemary’s Baby (film), 2 Roth, Philip Everyman, 164, 198 Ruin Porn, 34, 73, 74, 76, 195, 223, 227, 257, 259 Ruiz, Raúl, 173 S Saint Augustine, 44, 218 Sallis, James, 81, 95 Sapir, Edward, 187 Satan, 95, 162, 247 Satmar Hasidics, 180 Saunders, George Lincoln in the Bardo, 20 Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman M., 188 Schizophrenia, 2, 6, 15, 34, 46, 55, 59, 65, 70, 84, 86, 87, 90, 163, 189, 209, 230, 276 Schjeldahl, Peter, 212, 265 Scientology, 22, 29, 103

Scott, Ridley Alien, 55, 61, 75, 118, 221, 230, 240, 272 Blade Runner, 60, 73–76, 89, 133, 227, 249, 250 Self, Will, 267 Cock & Bull, 184 Sellars, Simon & O’Hara, Dan Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967-2008, 10, 53, 281 Serra, Richard, 37, 129, 132, 208, 221, 223, 244–246, 252, 260 Seventh Day Adventists, 10 Shakers, 9, 22, 115, 160, 277 Shroud of Turin, 20, 63, 170, 173, 209 Silent Running (film), 2 Simpson, O.J., 58 Simpsons, The, 92 Sioux War, 234, 268 Slayer (band), 37, 115, 122, 255, 256 Sloterdijk, Peter, 29, 50 Smith, Joseph, 7, 20, 102, 104–106, 108, 133, 144–147, 234, 276, 278 Smith, Patti, 3, 36, 52 Smith, Zadie, 244, 270 Sonic Youth (band), 279 South Park (television), 106, 222, 230, 275, 281 Soylent Green (film), 2, 110 Spears, Britney, 279 Spector, Nancy, 38, 53, 120, 123, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 139, 152–155, 256, 272 Spiegelman, Art In The Shadow of No Towers, 159 Maus, 161 Spiritualist movement, The, 195 SPK (band), 256 Star Trek (television), 2, 107 Stephenson, Neal, 190

Index

Sterling, Bruce, 190 Stewart, Kathleen, 2, 4, 9, 10 Stone, Matt. See South Park Stone, Oliver The Doors, 63 Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), 132, 226, 256 Sutton, Matthew Avery, 25, 114, 163 American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, 2, 9, 47, 49, 149, 198 Swaggart, Jimmy, 3, 7, 36, 105, 225 Swans. See Gira, Michael T Tarkovsky, Andrei, 58, 256 Taylor, Charles, 33, 52 Taylor, Mark C., 7, 10, 45, 130, 221 After God (Religion and Postmodernism), 53 Refiguring the Spiritual:Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, 155, 219, 267, 269 Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo, 153 Teitelbaum, Rabbi Moshe, 180 Television, 2, 4, 31–33, 42, 64, 92, 104, 117, 136, 180, 188, 191, 239, 246 Thompson, Hunter S., 116 Thor (comic), 2 THX 138 (film), 2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 17 De la démocratie en Amérique/On Democracy in America, 48 Tofts, Darren, 166, 172, 199 alephbet — essays on ghost writing, nutshells & infinite space, 200 Torah, 41, 166, 168, 178, 179, 185, 187, 188, 197

  315

Tower of Babel, The, 27, 128 Transubstantiation, 109, 132, 141, 237 Tucker, Steve, 122 Twain, Mark, 88, 103 Roughing It, 146 U Utah, 108, 112, 116, 118, 119, 122, 153, 168, 228 V Vatican Council, 26 Vertigo Comics, 125 Vesalius, Andreas, 187, 211 Vietnam War, 34, 53, 234 Vinge, Vernor, 13, 47 Viola, Bill, 235 Virilio, Paul, 137, 151 Art and Fear, 53, 156 Vodun, 22, 143. See also Voodo W The Wachowski Brothers The Matrix, 7, 56 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 255 Wakefield, Neville, 133, 135, 141, 144, 155, 157, 217–219, 237, 246, 266, 269, 270 Wallace, David Foster, 55, 59, 82–84, 86, 111, 139, 176, 213 Broom of the System, 139 Infinite Jest, 30, 41, 42, 67, 113, 175, 220, 222 Warren Report, The, 27 Weber, Max, 16 The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, 47 Weiss, Allen S., 124 Went, Johanna, 257

316  Index Wertheim, Margaret, 35 The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, 52 Weston, Jessie From Ritual to Romance, 234 White, Duncan, 4, 10, 93, 167, 170, 173, 199, 200 White, Ellen G., 10 Whitehead, Colson Zone One, 131, 176, 195, 205 Whitman, Walt, 235 Leaves of Grass, 39, 208 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 187 Wilson, Edmund, 156 The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, 137, 156 Wilson, Eric G., 23 The Strange World of David Lynch, Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr., 49, 94, 95, 98, 99, 271 Wilson, Peter Lamborn, 39 Winters, Ben H. Underground Airlines, 20 Winthrop, Elizabeth, 21, 49 Witkin, Joel Peter, 67, 68, 72, 114 Wolfson, Louis, 189 Wood, Grant

American Gothic, 246 Wright, Stephen, 116 The Amalgamation Polka, 20 M31: A Family Romance, 176 X X-Files, The, 227 Y Yahweh, 23, 171 Young, Brigham, 102, 108, 234, 268 Z Zapruder, Abraham, 28 Z’ev, 257 Žižek, Slavoj Living in the End Times, 13, 47, 267 Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, 53, 89, 91, 92, 99, 269 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 52, 53, 94, 197, 198, 201, 206, 267 Zoroastrian, 235, 268