Back when we called a monster a monster and set out to drive a stake through its heart, Americans did not fear the evil that lurks in the psyche of the Old World. The horror movie genre after World War II gave us Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a spoof that showed what Americans thought of Dracula, the Wolfman, Hitler, Mussolini, and other exotic monsters. We refused to be horrified by Hitler. But we were less resilient during Vietnam, and even less so after 9/11. Americans have become prey to morbidity. Our leaders no longer tell us who our enemies are and how to defeat them. Instead, the liberals tell us that we are to blame for Communist aggression in Vietnam, or for Muslim terrorism against the West. And this has horrified us. It has changed our culture.
During the mid-60s the horror genre was represented mainly by lampoons like The Munsters; as the shadow of Vietnam fell over the United States in the late 1960s, it returned to the mainstream.
That’s what worried me most after 9/11. On Oct. 12, 2001, I wrote,
The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy “des Schreckens” (to cause horror) and “Entsetzens” (terror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler’s tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.
America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America’s experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad’s story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: “The horror! The horror!” It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization, The Waste Land, with a quote from the Conrad story: “Mr Kurtz, he dead.”
In an essay today at Asia Times Online, I conclude with sadness that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in their most important goal. They have horrified us. Osama bin Laden’s a moldering in the grave, but his foul spirit still infects our psyche. We haven’t yet driven the stake through his heart. When we blame ourselves for horrific events, the horror becomes part of us.
As I observe in the essay, “The ‘horror’ genre supplied one out of 10 feature films released in the United States in 2009, according to the International Movie Database. During Universal Studios’ heyday in the 1930s, the proportion was one in 200; only a decade ago it was one in 25. By way of contrast, 716 horror features were released in 2009, compared to 39 Westerns, a ratio of almost 20 to one. Westerns invariably portray a well-understood form of evil and contrast it to the courage to stand up to evil. Horror films involve an evil that is incomprehensible because it is supernatural and so potent that ordinary courage offers no remedy. In the 1960s, Americans thought they understood what they most feared; today they appear to fear most what they cannot understand.”
Until our leaders can rally America on the strength of it exceptionalism against the evil directed at us by the moribund cultures of the Old World, horror will continue to erode our culture. Be afraid; be very afraid.
(Sorry, hit the Submit button too soon!)
Re: “On Oct. 12, 2011, I wrote…”
Perhaps you mean 2001 rather than 2011?
Thanks, corrected.
Now for a few good Westerns? Where is the Duke when you need him?
In general I don’t like Westerns, but my candidate for the Great American Movie is “Stagecoach” (1939), which portrays America as a journey toward redemption.
Spengler, is this book …
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-End-World-Just/dp/product-description/1614122024/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
… a collection of your Asia Times essays, or something new?
Lanbenbahn,
It is a re-editing of essays published in First Things and Asia Times.
Ah. Good stuff, but it did need some editing. I have How Civilizations Die book on the way (it shipped today, according to Amazon) and I’ll get the other sometime. It’ll be nice to have a compendium all in one place.
Asia Times Online, with its skeleton staff, never did much editing, and I had the benefit of first-rate editors and proofreaders for this project. Thanks for your interest.
Been following you for a long while. Went by Brother William at your AToL board.
Langenbahn,
I remember you from the old “Spengler” board at AToL, of course. You’re the guy that preferred .223 for squirrel hunting and played the French horn, not necessarily in that order. Welcome back.
In your AT essay you mention “vampire teen heartthrobs”. I’ve never sampled the teen vampire heartthrob genre, but these wimpy EMO vampires seem a bit different from Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glNuQiE77E (Youtube parody from Key of Awesome).
Side note: I just read Lugosi’s wiki. He was a decorated infantry/ski troop officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI. Who’d have thought …?
In his remarks at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn observed that horror films are as corrupting as pornography.
Induction of horror is effective to the extent that the targets are weak personalities. We have acted weakly. Violence against the perpetrators of horror is purgative. We chose nation-building over retribution; therefore horror has not been purged.
Thought-provoking AT essay, thanks.
“It is not the spurting blood or mangled flesh that defines horror but the presentiment that the world itself is disordered: Demons abound in the absence of a beneficent God, who is somehow absent.”
-I’m wondering if this fully captures the “appeal” of horror films. One begins perhaps with the fear that the world is disordered but as one “gets into it”, one can identify positively with “the pagan” cult or become susceptible to the idea that the world is rightly ordered by a violence implicit in the sacred force to which one is being drawn (and also repulsed) by the movie. (I put “the pagan” in scare quotes because i think that even for the ancient pagans there was always already some degree of paradoxical realization that the sacred is both a force of love and potential violence.) But howevermuch one identifies with the ancient horror, one can’t really become pagan again. The legacy of our covenantal culture is too great. One might then think that what is horrific to Americans today is the fear of what they will have to do to re-order the world, the amount of human sacrifice they will have to perform to win against a death cult. And this fosters a white guilt that pre-empts that possibility by preferring social suicide as a kind of last, pathetic, gasping nod to a God of justice and love.
Perhaps you are too polite to point out the Western was, among other things, a way of remembering how Americans once very violently dealt with the terror of aboriginal warfare and its cults. It seems a Western can no longer be made that doesn’t “correct” the earlier genre by accentuating the white guilt of America’s frontiersmen, which would help explain the decline of the genre. What horrifies Americans today is not just some demonic Other, but their own “white” selves. You come to a similar conclusion with respect to the Vietnam generation.
p.s. my earlier comment was not meant to imply that I think American has to deal out great violence to win against the present death cult. That fear may well be unfounded and, as David Goldman suggests, a renewal of faith in American exceptionalism is likely key to developing the strategy that can divide the necessary enemy from the larger mass of humanity who are presently trapped by the death cult.
I don’t fear anything about Islam, having studied it more or less continuously since 9/11.
What I fear is weakness in “the west”, particularly our immediate west under the tutelage of the current crop of liberals/leftists/progressives, whatever your preferred label might be.
Unfortunately, many in the crowd currently running Washington DC either don’t get the subtle assault underway or, locked in elitist mind lock, think if they’re nice to the people who want to kill them, those people will no longer want to kill them.
Islamists laugh at American political correctness all the way to the bank.
“An appeaser feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
~W. Churchill
I think you’re drawing an awfully broad generalization. The pansies in charge of the media are horrified, but we aren’t.
Americans are finally seeing the true nature of their political structure, wall street, the Federal Reserve, the retail banking system, and the base corruption that drives it all.
Wachovia and Wells Fargo laundered hundreds of Billions in cartel drug profits, Wall street invested those Billions and gives itself massive bonuses for drug fueled success, The Federal reserve gave 16 Trillion in unsecured undisclosed cash transfers to Europe in 2007 and 2008, The Retail banking system is corrupt as a result of cash flooding into its accounts from illegal activities as well as no strings attached treasury loans…and people wonder why Americans are afraid..?
They fear for the future, knowing American Leadership on both sides of the aisle are corrupt beyond redemption, the financial system is collapsing under its own schemes, and there is no valor or honor on the Horizon.
“I conclude with sadness that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in their most important goal”
Their goal was to disrupt and force white house to over react, which America did by invading Iraq. The Iraqi invasion will go down in History as perfect example of thoughtlessness and imprudence, a mad rush to irrational judgement. The cost in Blood and dollars have pushed America into a corner it cannot escape financially or politically.
Iran was the silent manipulating partner in the war on terror, supplying the White House with Fake intelligence and manufactured evidence through individuals such as Mr. Chalabi, who now operates the Iraqi petroleum industry supplying Iran with refined gasoline it so desperately needed.
America gave Iraq to Iran on a silver platter, paid with the lives and limbs of its own soldiers…disgusting.
Of course Americans are afraid, we have completely inadequate individuals managing the Nation these last 40 years.
What happened in 1970, when they started to search each and every airline passenger , was disarm us. The Hi Jackers changed America, for sure.
I traveled all over the country in the 60′s and always had my old Smith and Wesson .357 in my brief case, always, same weapon I carried in VN.
There were a lot of other old Veterans that did the same. I knew a number of guys that carried. But with the start of search downs before boarding , we all had to leave our weapons in the car or office. I have always believed that the current situation would not be the same if a number of “HiJacker Nutballs” would have had to face armed passengers.
Maybe 9/11 could have been avoided if the Terrorist had to contend with the thought of armed passengers. I think they would have changed their plan. Or maybe not even considered such a plan .
What think you about all the horrific sights that we are subjected to on the tv programs like “Bones” and CSI Las Vegas and their ilk? I would think that most people who would enjoy viewing these sights would either become EMT’s, Doctors, Morgue attendants, and Morticians. Or maybe serial killers! I don’t know what type of “group non thinking” this personifies, but it is not my cup of tea!
The serial killer genre is a monster movie without the supernatural. It’s a close cousin, to be sure, but the difference is that reason and procedure invariably catch the monster. In that sense, it’s a bit like the science fiction/monster films of the 1950s in which the monster always has a fatal weakness. The first horror films in which the monsters win came during the Vietnam era: The Omen, and Rosemary’s Baby. Excessive violence is repulsive, to be sure, but the horror genre, with its implication of an absent God, is especially pernicious.
David – Gut gezukt (well said).
Alex give me a break, the middle east isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago, yes we do have to have accountability for the actions, good,bad and,indifferent, of what the US government, has done on the world stage in our name. we aren’t the only dirty game players on this stage.
You need to stay out of movie theaters, Dave. Even if the film industry was a proper barometer, the film industry statistics you present require context. There are a lot of Celtic and Gothic and Asian fantasy heroes vs monsters and other subgenres mixed into your larger numbers that scare no one. Bottom line, I question your basic premise that contemporary Americans are like Japanese making Godzilla and Mothra movies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I also think you’re scanting horror films as a creative form. Levin/Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a tour de force. B-films like the l The Fly and The Thing and too many others to name were fine storytelling and terrific entertainment. Ask any New Yorker how many times he has seen Escape From New York. Alien is a Blitz.
As for “Hitler’s tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine,” so what? Hitler did not invent terror as a military tactic. Nor the uprooting and displacement of native populations.
The Mongols whose invasions dwarf those of better known barbarians and marauders were very far from home and had long supply lines that were impossible to adequately protect. Their solution was the terror—tearing infants live from their mothers bellies and the like—for which they remain infamous, so that no matter how cut off they were, no one ventured anywhere near Mongol horsemen or their supply lines. As for moving populations hither and tither, David, you need to read Roman history. Come to shuffling nations and races from one patch of geography to another, Hitler didn’t hold a candle to his one-time ally Stalin.
Apocalypse Now was certainly not a “dreadful film.” Coppola’s high falutin intentions notwithstanding, the film would never conjure up Conrad’s Heart of darkness if Coppola didn’t heavy-handedly hammer the Conrad connection home with Brando’s swan song. You harp on this imagined insight like it’s the font of revelation. Brando was the worst part of an otherwise good film. It is Robert Duval who steals the film and remains emblematic of Michael Herr’s Vietnam. And the California surfer colonel who loves the smell of napalm in the morning ain’t no character from Conrad.
Please don’t tell all of us out here in PJMland to be very afraid, David. We are not children in the dark, afraid of the unknown. The debt is scary but it’s quantifiable. Obama is a horror but not because of his hideous fangs and claws.
We Americans are not frightened, David, we are furious. We are being deliberately rope-a-doped by cunningly duplicitous and well financed Islamist outreach and betrayed by cowardly, incompetent and, in the current administration, malevolent leadership. Our slide began with the first response of our State Department to 9/11 which was to see Bin Laden’s Saudi relatives swiftly safe out of America before they could be held for questioning.
Americans are frustrated and fuming. Take your nose out of the air and listen to a Sara Palin stump speech, David. We’re headed toward a grand throw-the-bums-out election. Times are about to get better.
The fear that was on display in NYC manisfested itself in the failure to even consider rebuilding the Twin Towers. The politicians (Republican at the time: Pataki, Giuliani and Bloomberg) and leftist elites joined forces to paint anyone who wanted to rebuild the Twin Towers as materialistic and greedy, selfish, and desirous of “erasing history.” To even mention rebuilding was tantamount to defiling the victims and disrepecting their families. Such was the fear that in the birthplace of the skyscraper, no one wanted to build tall and “create a terrorist target”, never mind that those building would have lasted for hundreds of years if our society were not infested by political correctness and refusal to profile suspicious Muslim men. There was even talk of turning the WTC site into a 16-acre memorial with exposed bedrock. It is sickening that the binladen family builds the tallest skyscraper in Dubai, while the victims of a member of that family are forced to nurse their tears in a subterranean memorial where two of the tallest buildings once stood.
In the aftermath of 9/11, I have found that offense to Muslim sensibilities has become a bigger crime against humanity than Muslim terrorism. Furthermore, we will not define the enemy! Roosevelt knew that we were attacked by the Japanese; Churchill fought tenaciuosly against the German Nazis. But after we were attacked, Bush could only inveigh against “evildoers” who hijacked “a religion of peace” and told American kids to send $1.00 to Afghan kids, go shopping and prepare for a “long war against terror”. If FDR had make pains to state “Shintoism is a religion of peace” and declared war against “Blitzkrieg,” “Kamikazes” and “sneak-attack bombers” we would have lost WWII.
What do you mean, “We”? You and I are outraged, for sure. But a lot of our fellow citizens, especially our kids, are horrified. I live in Manhattan and saw the impact first hand in a lot of families — most kids knew a classmate who had lost a relative, and many still bear the scars. Our kids, sadly, aren’t doing too well spiritually, and the proliferation of the horror genre is a very bad thing. Maybe not for you personally, but for a lot of adolescents and young adults. I don’t know if you have kids, but no-one I know who has kids sounds quite as dismissive as you do.
Truth told, I haven’t been able to watch a horror flick all the way through since “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” — tried to watch “Rosemary’s Baby,” etc., but got bored (actually, I saw “The Ring,” but regret the waste of time). For forensic reasons I saw twenty minutes of the original “Night of the Living Dead.” I think we’re going to win — we’ll beat Obama and we’ll prevail, once again, by the grace of God and by the skin of our teeth. And things will get better. But we’re going to leave a lot of our kids behind as spiritual casualties.
“…What do you mean, “We”?..Our kids, sadly, aren’t doing too well spiritually…”
What you mean “Our,” David? Two of my kids were in Stuyvesant high school that morning of 9/11 ten years ago. My youngest was in a 10th floor chem lab with huge windows looking directly out at the WTC barely two blocks away. What she couldn’t make out by naked eye could easily be seen in camera close-ups on the large screen TV wall-mounted in all classrooms at Stuy-Hi. She watched people jumping out of windows. She watched horror-struck as a solid wall of black ash and debris taller than the school building, rolled slowly toward her to entirely engulf the building and reduce visibility to zero. On the 6-7 mile walk home along the Hudson to the Upper west Side after evacuation, her older sister who had been locked down in a lower floor math class was particularly struck by the thousands of discarded women’s shoes lining the way.
Stuy-Hi remained closed for cleanup until the following semester. At the end of the year, the older of the two, a promising young mathematician who took all the prizes the Math Department had to offer when she graduated and who never before expressed interest in anything military, sat my wife and I down and asked our permission to apply for AFROTC even though she had scholarships up the kazoo. Carnegie-Mellon didn’t offer ROTC so she joined a squadron at Penn-state. Made Deputy Squadron Commander–the highest position a freshman cadet can achieve–in her first year. Her younger sister, with two years left in high school, went off to Israel where she volunteered for the IDF and filled sandbags for a month on a Druse border base before the dustup in Lebanon.
“Spiritual casualties?” Not my kids, Davy. Your views and attitudes are symptomatic of the deep sickness in the noisy, cowardly Jews who dominate opinion in MSM and increasingly, the Internet. Speak for yourself and your own.
You’re making my point. Israelis know who the enemy is and fight; Americans are told that they are at least in part responsible for the attacks, and internalize them. It might interest you that I delivered a paper on the horror issue at a terrorism conference at Ariel, one of my favorite places in the world.
I love the Jewish state and forthrightly and proudly support Zionism. But I am not an Israeli, David. I’m a Jewish American born under the British Mandate. A Palestinian American if you will. My wife is American born as are my children. You don’t have to be an Israeli to be a proud and courageous Jew.
The spiritual and moral sickness of American Jews predates the foundation of the modern State of Israel and remains ingrained despite the truly awesome accomplishments, social, economic and military of their psychically healthier Israeli brothers and sisters.
The Sulzbergers and the Ochsen at the NYT and their cousins at the WaPo are archtypical Jewish turncoats and enemies of their own people. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was a Nazi collaborator who turned his own German family members away when they begged him for sponsorship to emigrate to America. Sulzberger denied any connection to his European relatives and they perished. Sulzberger deliberately suppressed news of the Holocaust when Jews were being shoveled into crematoria because in the Jewish publisher’s “wisdom,” publicity about the industrial mass murder of European Jewry might call forth latent Nazism in Americans and increase anti-Semitism in the United States where the fat and comfortable Sulzbergers and Ochsen made their home.
Distrust and contempt for Christian American civility and decency along with hostility to Israel and Jews remains strong at the NYT and the Wapo to this day.
Punch’s son Pinch, a proud Episcopalian who reportedly takes umbrage at being confused for Jewish, continues to project his father’s evil influence.
The great irony is that sophisticated Jewish Americans overtly detached from Jewish concerns or outwardly hostile to all things Jewish are often secretly ashamed of their Jewish background. Walter Lippmann’s biographer points out that Lippmann, who wouldn’t publicly touch anything “Jewish” with a ten foot pole, was internally obsessed and tortured by his Judaism. The celebrated and worldly journalist was, in reality, a grotesque shtetl Yid trembling in his boots for fear of the Goyim.
Cowardice and disloyalty are degenerate character traits. Disloyal Jews are almost inevitably disloyal Americans. Those who oppose a robust Israel oppose a robust America. Self-hating Jews are usually self-hating Americans. They are a profoundly corrosive and powerfully seditious influence that undermines our media, our universities, and our political institutions. Rooting them out by any means could not be more urgent.
Profoundly twisted Jews, perversely hostile to their coreligionists, are nothing new. Where our generation differs is that contemporary Jewish Jew-haters are legion and they are monstrously brazen. This is because modern American Jews have become dangerously soft. In former times, our self-hating Jewish enemies didn’t advertise and promote their deranged views for fear of their lives.
The solution to American Jewish psychological and spiritual corruption is plain for anyone to see. Hamevin Yavin, Spengler.
Don’t get me started on the Sludgeburgers and their New York Slime. That’s why we’re at Pajamas Media. Plenty of Jewish kids are doing well. A lot of the families at my shul send their kids for a year’s study at a yeshiva in Israel before college, and a lot of them serve in the IDF. Sadly, most of them aren’t. Outside of Orthodoxy, we have a fertility rate barely over 1 child per woman, and a 50% intermarriage rate. And 88% of us voted for Obama. Kol ha-kovod for your kids’ devotion.
BTW: As a longtime reader of you stuff at the Asia Times, I find your film critique depressing and disappointing. You sound like the self-assured fellow, absent a palate, who sees nothing special in fine cuisine. The color-blind guy who loudly proclaims he finds nothing special in a fine painting. Boring and arrogant nonsense from and ordinarily intelligent and insightful source.
I agree that fear was the result of 9/11. It remains the only event that ever made my knees physically buckle. Over time that fear and ensuing hatred have been replaced with some level of enlightenment. The gradual revelation and understanding that the middle east culture and its radical beliefs are evil personified. I have zero doubt who my enemies are. I don’t need a liberal to tell me, hell they are always the last to know. And I have replaced my fear with resolute preparedness.
“I conclude with sadness that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in their most important goal. They have horrified us”
Nobody I know ever talks about it or cares about it very much. It’s a big thing for New Yorkers, so they therefore think it’s omnipresent to the rest of us. I was over it and tired of hearing about it in less than a week. A bunch of people screwed up and allowed a fluke hit on us.
What we should have done is quickly rebuild the towers. I just assumed it would be done, and then when it wasn’t, I was surprised and dismayed. Further dismay at this great commercial site becoming a memorial with all the names on it, etc. Bad idea. Cemeteries and graveyards are not a good place for the World Trade Center, and that’s what the families tried to create, on our dime.
I am not sure that Hollywood is synecdoche for American culture any more. Their inability to make a good GWoT movie is a major tell. Not only have they become a far left island unconnected to the American mainland, but it seems to me that they are behaving as if their real money is now being made by selling DVDs in the third world. An American oriented GWoT movie would be a dead bang looser in Eurabia and the Middle East
We were spectators to the hatred,cruelty and barbarism in the Middle East.We would turn on the tv,empathize with the day’s violence,then go eat dinner.
Then a plane flew into a building,then another and another and We stepped into the news story on the tv.
The terrorist in the tv showed us the part of human beings that is the real monster – vile,primitive and repulsive.They gave us a peek into the mindset of the followers of Hitler,Mao and the boogeyman.
But unlike a movie,the real monsters didn’t politely die at the end of our story.The hero in our story isn’t brave and moral,he is tainted with the monster’s disease.
We are left with an unfinished movie,a director blaming everyone for bad lines,a vague plot,monsters that shapeshift and multiply and a fear of the unknown.The audience of our children are confused and lost in the storyline and don’t know if they are villains ,heroes or bit players.
Sorry,i watch too many movies
“I conclude with sadness that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in their most important goal. They have horrified us.”
Their most important goal was to impose shari’a on us. Fortunately, they — or rather their allies — haven’t succeeded in that, even though liberals and leftists here in the West want to empower them whenever they can.
Mr Pepple, I was writing of the goal of this specific operation, not the goal of radical Islam in general. The 9/11 attack itself was above all a form of PsyOps. If our leaders had seen this for what it was — a Hitlerian act of Nihilistic theater instead of an aberration from adherents of a “religion of peace” — we would have been inoculated against the effects. If they had declared a global war on radical Islam rather than a GWOT, things would have been better. But the fact that virtually all of our leaders, political, civil, and religious, bent over backwards to “engage” or “dialogue with” Islam, put the blame back on us. If only we had been more understanding….
MarcH wrote:
“In your AT essay you mention “vampire teen heartthrobs”. I’ve never sampled the teen vampire heartthrob genre, but these wimpy EMO vampires seem a bit different from Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee:…..”
You must be talking about TWILIGHT. Ah…. to be young, beautiful and androgynous…….’>…….
There is a disturbing aspect of horror in youth culture. An acceptance, almost a preference, as if this is at last, the valid response to a world without sense nor cosmic justice. When there is no G_d, an option is to be a little god with pretty hair and looking good in tight pants……
A brilliant essay. As you note, Westerners blaming themselves for enemy attackers started long before 9-11. Bin Laden can’t take credit for it. But the Libs who teach this self-horror in our schools – teaching that the US is to blame, and failing to teach true American history, failing to teach that the US has led the world in long-life, health, wealth, and freedom for all, to a degree that is unique in world history – those Libs have set the American people up for the attack Bin Laden made. We must begin to teach a true appreciation for America in our schools. This must become a top priority for Conservatives.
You called osama bin laden – obama bin laden. Just letting you know.
Sigmund Freud, call your office.