Статті в журналах з теми "Tales of the grotesque and arabesque"

ABSTRACT: This essay examines how Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque demonstrates the ways in which he accrued different types of capital in order to leverage his position within the US literary market. Transposing Leon Jackson's analysis of Thomas White's success as the proprietor of the Southern Literary Messenger to Poe's first book-length publication, I explain how the Advertisements section prefacing the second volume reflects his methodical strategy for soliciting and collecting positive reviews from influential literary figures for use at a later, favorable time.

Este texto analisa três traduções brasileiras de obras literárias góticas anglófonas feitas pela aclamada autora Clarice Lispector. Traduções de Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, de Edgar Allan Poe, The picture of Dorian Gray, escrito por Oscar Wilde, e Interview with the vampire, de autoria de Anne Rice, foram comparadas e contrastadas em busca de regularidades na abordagem de Lispector para a literatura gótica. Os achados demonstram que Lispector utilizou um registro alto em suas três traduções, uma abordagem que, surpreendentemente, pode refletir o cuidadoso uso de língua daquela autora na tradução de diferentes tipos de texto.

Abstract A brief overview of Poe’s most iconic illustrated editions shows that the humorous and satirical features of his texts have called the attention of fewer editors and artists than the aspects of the beautiful, the sublime, the arabesque, the grotesque, the macabre, and so forth. Here we review many of the freshest and liveliest interpretations in which parody is put forward, using as a reference some exceptional visual renderings that also display the likes of times and places. The early interpretations provided by artists such as Church (1884), Sterner (1894–95), or Coburn (1902); later on by Servolini (1929), Rackham (1935), Bofa (1941), Eichenberg (1944), or Dubout (1948); in the second part of the twentieth century by Calsina (1971); and very recently by Grimly (2004, 2009) prove that the parodical side of Poe’s oeuvre mattered and still matters.

ABSTRACT: Poe's short fiction tends toward extremes—toward the grotesque and arabesque. This crowd-pleasing (or crowd-horrifying) content plays within carefully designed formal structures that complicate the act of reading and draw attention to "the reader," a figure of some interest to Poe's critical essays. I argue that the play between content and form in Poe, coupled with his ideas of readership, exposes a series of traps within many of his tales. Poe's stories draw the reader into an active role responsive to moral problems before shifting ground and rendering a moral response difficult, impossible, or paradoxical. Through the confessional mode in particular, Poe guides readers into positions that extend the work of the tale beyond the fictional realm, transmuting his stories into practical jokes or complex moral problems. The visibility of these jokes and problems, however, and their deliberate layering into so many of Poe's works, suggest an author working to prepare his audience for a specific flavor of hoax. By blurring the boundaries of the short story, and perhaps even finding ways to undermine its shortness, Poe opens a relationship between himself, his "reader," and whatever human being happens to actually be holding a copy of his tales. Poe's famous "unity of effect" unfolds through the creation of a predictable, synthetic commonality between author, reader, and audience.

In the article, based on the theory of intertextuality (Roland Barth, Julia Kristeva), the question of the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the formation of the satirical style of Edgar Allan Poe in the cycle of stories Grotesques and Arabesques (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839)). The author argues that Hoffmann’s recognizable plots (“The Sandman”, “Princess Brambilla”, “Elixirs of Satan”, etc.), which were popular during this period in Europe, as well as the relevance of the problems of his works and the original style, could become a source of not only satire (the story “Loss of Breath” is written as a parody of works from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where Hoffmann was also published during this period), but also samples for the early works of Poe. The hypothesis of the article is the statement about the possibility of applying in American literature, on the example of Poe’s story “Loss of Breath”, the previously developed methodology of “Hoffmann’s complex” (characterized by the integrity of the reproduced content, the unity of issues, images and stylistic techniques), which allows highlighting the traditions of the German romantic in Poe’s works, where they are not obvious. The features of Hoffmann’s poetics are considered in Poe’s “Loss of Breath” (1832) in the form of “Hoffmann’s complex”, which includes the following components. Firstly, it is the transformation of the romantic plot (Hoffmann’s “Adventure on New Year’s Eve”), which Poe reinterprets ironically, depriving it of an infernal context. He rethinks the idea of a two-world and mixes the real-life and theatrical narrative planes by combining the puppet element with the human one, by characters’ behaving theatrically, by acting out the roles that are imposed by society (a corpse, a criminal), by replacing household details with theatrical attributes (a false jaw, two buslles, a false eye). Secondly, it is the actualization of the problem of mechanization of life and man, which is realized in the opposition of the living – the inanimate (“The Sandman”, “Princess Brambilla’) and is aimed at criticizing society, which devalues a person and turns him into a “living” corpse, a doll. In contrast, objects come to life, and abstract concepts (breath) become materialized. Another manifestation of the problem of mechanization of life and man is the comparison of a man with an animal, and an animal with a man. Thirdly, it is the use of stylistic techniques characteristic of Hoffmann (“The Golden Pot”, “Little Zaches Called Cinnabar”, “Princess Brambilla”, etc.): hyperbole, self-explanatory names, romantic irony and grotesque, which are characterized by a sharp change of the serious and the frivolous, a combination of the objective and the subjective, a continuous parody, as well as the use of alogism – reasoning that violates the laws of logic, when something terrible (execution, autopsy of the body) is described as funny, etc.

Nesse artigo discutimos os limites entre tradução e adaptação, tomando o contexto de publicação de duas traduções para o português da obra Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, de Edgar Allan Poe. Tratou-se do estudo da publicação de Histórias Extraordinárias (1978; 2003) com tradução de Breno Silveira e de tradução e adaptação, com o mesmo título, de Clarice Lispector. Observamos que o conjunto de contos da obra original diferiu do conteúdo dos volumes produzidos em português, o qual apresenta título bem diverso do original. Por meio de uma análise comparativa, envolvendo o original e as duas traduções, investigamos o que nesse contexto foi considerado o original. Além disso, um dos volumes em português já se coloca como adaptação, o que, do ponto de vista investigativo levantou outra questão a ser estudada: se a própria tradução não reproduz o original, então qual seria o limite entre tradução e adaptação? Procuramos responder a essa questão tomando a idéia de que todo texto traduzido já é uma reescrita e transforma o original (Lefevere 1992, Amorim 2006). A reflexão sobre o limite entre tradução e adaptação na contemporaneidade traz para o debate o questionamento sobre o próprio conceito de original e de tradução (Paz 1990; Derrida 1982, Ferreira 2006 e 2007) e sobre os condicionantes da constituição de imagens nas culturas alvo (Rodrigues 2001, Amorim 2006); conceitos em que nos concentramos para responder a questão aqui proposta.

This paper intends to highlight the effectiveness of the concepts of Arabesque and Grotesque in the architecture “between” of Peter Eisenman, evoking a whole system of concepts and methodologies that synchronously led his work.

Abstract Japanese modernist writer Taro Hirai (1894–1965) admired Poe so much that he crafted a pseudonym, Edogawa Rampo, based on Poe’s name. I contend that Rampo’s reimaginings of “The Masque of the Red Death” in “The Red Chamber” and of “The Man That Was Used Up” in “The Caterpillar” correspond closely with the aesthetic principles of 1920s and ’30s Japan. One might say that by the age of modernism in Japan, Poe’s grotesque and arabesque had (d)evolved into erotic grotesque nonsense. What Rampo’s deliberate misreadings and his inventive rewritings teach us is that Poe is endlessly contemporary. The relationship between the two writers is not so much a one-way influence as a reverberation or an oscillation between Poe and Rampo. Rampo’s work offers a creative retelling that is modern and Japanese and maybe even changes the way we look at Poe.

This paper, besides a short introduction concerning general information on themes and the structure present in the short story collection Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de’ peccerille, written by the Italian Baroque author Giambattista Basile, whose masterpiece enjoyed great fame abroad much earlier than in Italy, is concerned with the analysis of fantastic and grotesque elements which generally characterise oral tradition, fairy tales and myths. The above-mentioned elements were identified in the fifty short stories which Basile wrote and included in his collection. Various sources were used in the analysis, relying on myths and fairy tales with the aim of explaining the presence of the grotesque. Besides its great literary value, this collection is also of great historical importance because, just like many other examples of oral tradition, it fosters a vast span of costumes and traditions that are typical of the Mediterranean folklore. From one tale to another, the collection slowly but surely reveals the Mediterranean identity of the people from the South of Italy and explains the function of the grotesque and its didactic purpose.

This paper attempts to define the grotesque and its primary literary features before examining the grotesque components in two Victorian authors' works with the goal of separating their approaches to the grotesque based on gender. The most well-known novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens will be one of the authors covered in this paper through his story To be Taken with a Grain of Salt, and the other one is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s story Eveline’s Visitant. Dickens and Braddon particularly make use of the grotesque elements to convey their ideas and ideals through satire, comedy, tragedy, suspense, and a sense of fear, gloom, and obscurity. The research results show that both tales can be regarded as significant Victorian grotesque literature since they share, in various ways, elements of the grotesque notion. The real meaning of the grotesque is only exposed by itself-contradictory nature with the opposite, which is in this sense the ideal. Both stories are based on the main contrast between the spiritual and material worlds. They attempt to persuade us that there is yet another mysterious force that, despite the efforts to conceal it in the physical world, it exposes human wrongdoing. Thus, abnormal human beings, ghostly figures, and terrifying events will be detected through which grotesque elements are found.

The article examines the attempts to modernize folk narratives in Turkey, with a special emphasis on the ones characterized by grotesque imagery, including shadow theatre and Keloğlan tales. During the 1930s, the early Republican regime launched a project aimed at employing folk narratives in the service of its Kemalist national pedagogy. This study argues that the transposition of humorous folk narratives was bound to fail because of the incongruity between the “cheerful folk word” and the “dismal official word.” The study also analyzes the later adaptations of Keloğlan tales and transfigurations of Keloğlan, and argues that they followed the early Republican project insofar as ideological discourses speak in and through them. It asserts that despite all attempts to suppress the grotesque elements of the folk tradition of laughter, these have permeated into modern popular culture.

Prince V.F. Odoyevsky (1803-1869) was the Russian writer, philosopher, musicologist and subtle musical critic, public figure, founder of «Society of philosophy-lovers» and author of «Motley Tales with Witticisms», fascinating monument of native culture; the book was published only once during the life of the writer and afterwards was not republished as the cycle. In literary criticism «Motley Tales» as the unified and important cycle by V.F. Odoyevsky were given scant coverage, although this literary work marked the beginning of new period in the writer’s oeuvre; an image of narrator Homoseyko is especially interesting because it is not only the intellectual hero, but also the alter ego of the writer. «Motley Tales» manifest a unique opportunity of watching the rising of themes and motives which will be revealed in the writer’s creation later, as well as following the formation of philosophical, aesthetic and artistic principles of author, as his fairy tales include the patterns of philosophical grotesque, social and moralizing story, folklore/psychological fantasy.

Washington Irving was the first American to gain international recognition for his remarkable creation, Rip Van Winkle, and is the best known and best loved of American folklore characters. Washington Ring was not only a brilliant historian, but he was also a superb biographer. During his first three and a half years in Spain, he spent a lot of time reading extensively. The majority of his time was spent at the library, and the subjects of his research notes were Arabs and Arab culture. In this study, we will investigate the personal and cultural factors that led Washington Irving to write about the Arab world. While travelling, Irving "thought of producing a collection of tales of various places made of legends," as he wrote in his journal. A closer examination reveals deeper connections between the two endeavours (gathering legends and developing a pan-history) than it at first appears. A list of Irving's Arabesque works should show how important they are in relation to the rest of his work and how much reading and research went into them. This research will utilise Irving's extensive readings to provide a historical context for the major traditions that will be examined, while also providing an overview of the current condition of orientalism in relation to Arab culture. To illustrate Arab culture, I will analyse every facet of Orientalism in Irving's works (settings, satire, history, fiction, etc.) and see how they relate to the study of Arabic literature. This work will encourage future researchers to conduct a thorough examination of Irving's background research that compelled him to write his other works.

Abstract This article seeks to examine the construction of female embodied identities via metamorphosis in two works of Uruguayan and French literature: Armonía Somers’s La mujer desnuda (1950) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996). The internal and external transformations of these heroines are a result of bodies that refuse to be disciplined into silence and passivity, and, instead, make a spectacle of themselves, symbolically voicing their right to take up space and delight in the unacceptable – the grotesque, nudity, lust. Hence, it is not surprising that both novels, in foreshadowing new ways of being in the female body, generated scandal and controversy. Read through the lens of écriture féminine, the much-debated ambiguity of these texts can be understood as a device affirming women’s corporeal autonomy. Nevertheless, the tragic ending of these tales ultimately points to society’s persistent and violent rejection of female excess as an embodied identity.

The article highlights the problem of interaction of the ancient Egypt laughter culture with the category of sacred. A person is confronted with the fact that the examples in question can often be phenomena of a different order, and the use of terms such as “carnival” or even “religion”, “temple” or “priest” in relation to ancient Egypt requires an additional explanation. We find “funny” images on the walls of tombs and in the temples, where the Egyptians practiced their cult. In the Ramesside period (1292-1069 BC) a huge layer of the culture of laughter penetrated a written tradition in a way that Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalization of literature. Incredible events are described in stories and fairy tales in a burlesque, grotesque form, and great gods are exposed as fools. Applying of the Bakhtinian paradigm to the material of the Middle and New Kingdom allows to reveal the ambivalent character of the Ancient Egyptian laughter: the Egyptians could joke on the divine and remain deeply religious.

The historical and political prototypes are the material for the creation of bright and memorable images in the novel by M.A. Bulgakov “Fatal eggs” are described: A.S. Rokk (chief commander of the Workers' And Peasants' Red Army S.S. Kamenev), Polaitis (Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky), Shchukin (A.I. Egorov), “red-moustached driver” (a talented scientist-inventor, engineer of III rank P.K. Oshchepkov). We determine theatrical and genre sources that influenced the creation of images: mystery, farce, buffo, pantomime. The text satirical and grotesque nature the is investigated. In the framework of the farce and buffo the First Moscow process where the prototypes are is considered. The composition and genre issues are touched upon, the problem of attribution of the story is raised. To the source base of the work are added: occult novel by A. Crowley “Moonchild”, stories by A. Schnitzler “Rock”, U. Allen “Fatal Experience”, R. Market “Invention of Professor Carter”, R. Presber “Last Feast of the Last of Birkovich”, B. Lavrenev “The Child Gregory”. References to the iconic systems of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the collection of Arab fairy tales “One Thousand and One Nights” are used.

The historical and political prototypes are the material for the creation of bright and memorable images in the novel by M.A. Bulgakov “Fatal eggs” are described: A.S. Rokk (chief commander of the Workers' And Peasants' Red Army S.S. Kamenev), Polaitis (Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky), Shchukin (A.I. Egorov), “red-moustached driver” (a talented scientist-inventor, engineer of III rank P.K. Oshchepkov). We determine theatrical and genre sources that influenced the creation of images: mystery, farce, buffo, pantomime. The text satirical and grotesque nature the is investigated. In the framework of the farce and buffo the First Moscow process where the prototypes are is considered. The composition and genre issues are touched upon, the problem of attribution of the story is raised. To the source base of the work are added: occult novel by A. Crowley “Moonchild”, stories by A. Schnitzler “Rock”, U. Allen “Fatal Experience”, R. Market “Invention of Professor Carter”, R. Presber “Last Feast of the Last of Birkovich”, B. Lavrenev “The Child Gregory”. References to the iconic systems of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the collection of Arab fairy tales “One Thousand and One Nights” are used.

The article analyzes the unknown poems of the West Belarusian poet, prose writer, publicist and artist Yanka Malanka (1895 – 1938). Considering the characteristic features of the creative personality of Ya. Malanka, the author notes the richness of the problem-thematic content, as well as the variety of genre-structural forms of the poet’s works, who wrote not only poetry, but also sketches, stories, fairy tales, jokes, feuilletons, political ditties, etc. others. Sincerity and warmth presupposed in them a characteristic internal mobilization and tension were supplemented by an offensive logic of thinking, lyrical ridicule was intensified by the pathos of civic spirit and patriotism, as well as humorous-satirical revealing and exposure.The leading motives and images of Ya. Malanka’s poetic creativity are revealed. At the same time, it is emphasized that a cheerful mood, categorical invectives, heightened emotionality were intensified in him by hyperbolized images and grotesque drawings. Ya. Malanka combined the accuracy of realistic reflection of phenomena and events with the peculiarities of the romantic elevation of the hero’s aspirations and impulses, lyrical spontaneity and penetration were complemented by journalistic and satirical sharpness. Attention is drawn to a certain sketchiness of the word-image of the poet, “primitive accuracy” of his ideas and thoughts, roughness of style and linguistic constructions.

The Prussian Giant Mountains — some remarks about the ideologisation of Silesia’s highest mountains during the flourishing of mass tourismThe author of the article examines the beginnings of the national or, more broadly, state ideologisation of the mountains, using as an example Karkonosze or the Giant Mountains, which undoubtedly come to the fore in the case of the popularisation of mountain tourism. Already in the second half of the 18th century a chapel dedicated to St. Lawrence was built on the summit of Śnieżka, becoming straight away a pilgrimage destination and launching tourism in this mountain range. Just as quickly the Giant Mountains were ideologised as border mountains unique in the state to which it partially belonged — the Kingdom of Prussia. Authors describing Silesia’s highest peaks in the Enlightenment period including J.T. Volkmar, J.E. Troschel, E.F. Buquoi and J.Ch.F. GutsMuths did refer to Swiss models, yet they showed the Giant Mountains as the highest range in Silesia and Prussia, stressing the exceptional role and nature of this mountain range. Throughout the 19th century the ideological appropriation of the Sudetes’ highest range continued, acquiring in the early 20th century a virtually grotesque dimension, a manifestation of which was the equation of the Spirit of the Mountains with the ancient pan-Germanic god Wotan, known from old tales and poems and, more recently, from Richard Wagner’s music dramas.

“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.

Today in Japan, people continue to show considerable interest in yōkai. In the past, a yōkai craze centering on MIZUKI Shigeru’s work GeGeGe no kitarō, had swept the country. However, more recently in 2014 the role-playing game Yōkai Watch (launched by Level-5 Inc. in 2013) was turned into a television anime and is boasting explosive popularity. In addition, while kaidan (yōkai stories) used to be transmitted orally, now they have appeared on the internet, and unique tales continue to be spun. In this way, by continuing to encounter yōkai in some form or another, fixed images of them have been formed amongst people today. In most cases, these images are of grotesque things with a specific appearance, for example, an ‘umbrella-shaped ghost’, a ‘painted wall’, or a ‘haunting cat’. However, these popular images of yōkai are hindrances when engaging in academic research on the subject. Compared to those found at the popular level, researchers’ definitions of yōkai are not uniform. The aim of this paper is, while referring to efforts to reconsider the concept of yōkai in contemporary folklore studies, to decipher INOUE Enryō’s philosophically motivated Yōkai Studies (or, Mystery Studies), and above all, to inquire into its limits and possibilities through his late-year “Mutual Inclusion” theory. By taking as an unconscious ontological premise the non-existence of yōkai, yōkai research in contemporary folklore studies has come up against the ontologies of folklorists that speak of actual existence of yōkai. For this reason, we must newly inquire into the ontological premise of the yōkai concept. However, this requires not something that results in an ‘anything goes’ perceptual relativism, but rather a pluralistic methodology that allows the co-existence of diverse ontological viewpoints while unifying them on a meta-level. In this sense, the perspectival conception of the interrelated structure of matter, mind and principle in Enryō’s Yōkai Studies and his late period philosophy of the Mutual Inclusion of the ‘front’ and ‘back’ offer considerable clues. A research approach that is not partial to a specific view of yōkai and makes use of folklorists’ worldviews can provide a metatheory for yōkai research. However, Enryō did not fully traverse this path. In his own Yōkai Studies, he did not choose to adopt the perspective of the superimposition of time, space, mind and matter within mutual inclusion, or approach yōkai phenomena as the edge of the cosmos that is formed within this perspective. Drawing from Enryō’s ideas, the paper proposes to newly define the concept of yōkai as the edge of the cosmos. Yōkai are things that continually threaten the concepts of the cosmos that researchers and folklorists hold. Having inquired to this point, our questions reverse themselves. Perhaps it is us humans who are interrogated by yōkai.

This article presents a comparative reading of two folktales that are also characterised as children’s stories (one from Venda folklore and the other a popular European narrative) in order to explore a number of similarities between these stories. These similarities include the grotesque activity of eating human flesh, the way that overly trusting people are tricked by means of a masquerade and other ‘unethical’ and ‘immoral’ activities that occur in both narratives. In The Greedy Hippo (Hippopotamus throws his weight around), the monster for instance mimics the voice of a little boy in order to trick his sister and gain access to the children’s hut, whilst in Little Red Riding Hood the wolf tricks the grandmother in the same way to gain access to her house, in order to later trick Red Riding Hood. Furthermore, in both stories, the little girls (as well as the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood) are swallowed by vicious wild animals (either a hippopotamus or a wolf). As is often the case in fairy tales; however, the victims are saved or escape and live happily ever after. In this article, I argue that, although it seems absurd for children’s stories to deal with the grotesque, the presence of the grotesque actually serves an elevating purpose. I conclude that, because of the shock value of the grotesque, these stories not only intrigue children emotionally, but that the shocking quality of the grotesque also serves as a source of fascination for them. Therefore, the warning messages contained in the stories are more persuasively communicated and better remembered by the child audience.

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists of, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists of randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic, or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ descriptions, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent on awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists in, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up by killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists in randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ description, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work, but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent of an awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

The aim of the paper is a critical evaluation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival laughter’s theory, and along the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s notion of laughter, and its relation to modernity. While Bakhtin concentrates his attention on a few medieval festivities, this paper focuses on the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum) as a metaphor for carnival laughter. For Bakhtin, clown, joker, etc. represents Medieval and Renaissance carnival spirit, while an animated Mickey Mouse, alongside with Charlie Chaplin’s movie character, appears in Benjamin’s texts as a figure of modernity. Carnival laughter can be cruel, and it was cruel indeed, participated in violence during the festivities. The same cruelty Benjamin had found in a few fairy tales collected by the Brother Grimm. How cruelty and laughter are connected? The lack of common experiences in modernity was the reason why Bakhtin wanted to find a counterbalance to modern atomistic bourgeois society, and laughter could have given it. According to Bakhtin, the spirit of carnival as a collective laughter gradually dried up and in the 16th century it has self-transformed into a novel and became a genre of grotesque realism. For Benjamin, only epic, architecture and cinematograph are able to create the collective experience.

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists of, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists of randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic, or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ descriptions, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent on awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O’Connor’s stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists of, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O’Connor’s oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O’Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O’Connor’s work consists of randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic, or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics’ descriptions, the somehow systematic approach to O’Connor’s stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer’s work but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O’Connor’s short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O’Connor’s aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent on awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.

Given that the new advances in technology in the 1980s had a major impact on the carefully constructed myth of authenticity in horror and pornography, ranging from flawless special effects at one extreme to the idea of the handheld voyeur movie at the other, it is rather ironic that the key progenitor to the erotic-grotesque form is a long-established and in some ways basic form: the pen and paper art of manga. This medium can be traced back to pillow books and the illustrated tradition in Japanese culture – a culture where even written language has evolved from drawings rather than alphabetical ciphers. Technological innovation notwithstanding, the 1980s is an extraordinary period for manga and it is perhaps here that we find the most startling hybridisation of porn and horror where, to borrow a phrase from Liz Kotz, “pathology meets pleasure, where what we most fear is what we most desire” (Kotz 188). Many of the most extreme examples of 1980s manga repeatedly confront the reader with tales that intersperse and interlink imagery and narrative sequences of sex, violence and the abject. Suehiro Maruo is in many ways a commercially marginalised but highly renowned manga artist of the erotic-grotesque. His full-length manga novel Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a sweeping tale of carnival freaks redolent with sex and sadism, but in this article I will address his short comic strips from around the same period. The stories collected in Suehiro Maruo’s Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001) present a mortifying vision of sex and horror with stories that draw on the erotically tinged world of classical Japanese theatre and the short fiction of Edogawa Rampo but push them into the domain of extreme pornography. In “Putrid Night” (1981), an abusive man, Todoroki, subjects his teenage wife, Sayoko, to vicious cunnilingus and anal sex. In one sequence, Sayoko gives oral sex while Todoroki runs a samurai sword across her cheek. In her misery, Sayoko finds true love in the teenage boy Michio. Their illicit sexual love is tender and fulfilling and yet the imagery that intersperses it is ominous: when they have sex in a field, their conjoined bodies are juxtaposed with rotting fruit infested with ants and Michio’s erect penis is juxtaposed with a serpent in the grass. Sayoko and Michio plot to murder Todoroki. The result is disastrous, with Todoroki cutting off the arms of his wife and her lover through the elbows, and lancing their eyeballs. In the carnage, Todoroki has sex with Sayoko. The young lovers do not die, and Todoroki keeps them alive in a cell as “pets” (19). In a grotesque triumph of true love, Todoroki, to his horror, spies on his two victims and sees them, their eye sockets and arm stumps pouring blood, tenderly making love. In “Shit Soup” (1982), Maruo produces a comic strip with no story as such and is therefore a highly simplistic pornographic narrative. We witness a menage a trois with a young woman and her two male lovers and the comic presents their various exploits. In their opening bout, the woman squeezes a cow’s eyeball into her vagina and one man sucks it out of her while the other licks her beneath the eyelid. Later, the three excrete onto dinner plates and dine upon their mixed shit. The story ends with the three laughing deliriously as they fall from a cliff, an emblem of their joyful abandon and the intersection of love and death. As epilogue, Maruo describes the taste of excrement and invites us to taste our own. This ending is an ingenious narrative decision, as it turns on the reader and strives to deny us – the viewer/voyeur – any comfortable distance: we are invited, as it were, to eat shit literally and if we refuse, we can eat shit metaphorically. Suehiro Maruo’s work can also be subtle: in what looks like a realistic image at the opening of “A Season in Hell” (1981), a dead teenage girl lies, covered in “gore and faeces” (45), on a grassy path which resembles the hairy opening to female sexual organs. The surrounding field is like a pudenda and the double arch of the nearby bridge resembles breasts. Maruo can thus outwit the censorship tradition in which pubic hair is generally forbidden (it does appear in some of Maruo’s comic strips), although erections, ejaculations and hairless openings and organs would seem to be always graphically permissible. Probably the most excessive vision in Ultra-Gash Inferno is “The Great Masturbator” (1982). In this, Suehiro Maruo presents a family in which the father repeatedly dresses his daughter up as a schoolgirl in order to rape her, even cutting a vagina-sized hole into her abdomen. Eventually, he slices her with numerous openings so that he can penetrate her with his fists as well as his penis. Meanwhile, her brother embarks on an incestuous relationship with his ancient aunt. After her death, he acquires her false teeth and uses them to masturbate. He ejaculates onto her grave, splitting his head open on the tombstone. The excess and debauchery make it a shocking tale, a kind of violent manga reworking of Robert Crumb’s cartoon “The family that lays together, stays together” (91) from Snatch 2 (January 1969). Like Crumb, we could argue that Maruo employs explicit sexual imagery and an ethos of sexual taboo with the same purpose of transgressing and provoking the jargon of particular social norms. The political dimension to Maruo’s work finds its most blatant treatment in “Planet of the Jap” (1985), anthologised in Comics Underground Japan (1996). This manga strip is a devastating historical-political work presented as a history lesson in which Japan won the Second World War, having dropped atomic bombs on Los Angeles and San Francisco. The comic is full of startling iconic imagery such as the Japanese flag being hoisted over the shell-pocked Statue of Liberty and the public execution of General MacArthur. Of course, this being Maruo, there is a pornographic sequence. In a lengthy and graphic episode, an American mother is raped by Japanese soldiers while her son is murdered. As these horrors are committed, the lyrics of a patriotic song about present-day Japan, written by the Ministry of Education, form the textual narrative. Although the story could be seen as a comment on the subjection of Japan at the end of the Second World War – a sustained ironic inversion of history – it seems more likely to be a condemnation of the phase of Japanese history when, tragically, a minority of “atavistic, chauvinistic, racist warmongers” secured for themselves a position of “ideological legitimacy and power” (Lehmann 213). However, Maruo is being deliberately provocative to his contemporary reader: he writes this story in the mid-1980s, the peak of Japan’s post-war prosperity. As Joy Hendry says, Japan’s “tremendous economic success” in this period is not just important for Japan but marks an “important element of world history” (Hendry 18). Maruo ends “Planet of the Jap” with a haunting international message: “Don’t be fooled. Japan is by no means a defeated nation. Japan is still the strongest country in the world” (124). The porn-horror creator Suehiro Maruo follows in the tradition of figures like Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille and Robert Crumb who have used explicit pornography and sexual taboo as a forum for political provocation. The sexual horror of Maruo’s erotic-grotesque manga may terrify some readers and titillate others. It may even terrify and titillate at the same time in a disturbing fusion which has social and political implications: all the Maruo works in this essay were produced in the early to mid-1980s, the peak of Japanese economic success. They also coincide with the boom years of the Japanese sex industry, which Akira Suei argues was terminated by the repressive legislation of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act of 1985 (Suei, 10). Suei’s account of the period paints one of frivolity and inventiveness embodied in the phenomenon of “no-panties coffee shops” (10) and the numerous sex clubs which offered extraordinary “role-playing opportunities” (13). The mood is one of triumph for the sexual expression of the customers but also for the extremely well-paid sex workers. Maruo’s stories contemporaneous with this have their own freedom of sexual expression, creating a vision where sexually explicit images comment upon a wide variety of subjects, from the family, scatological taboos, through to national history and Japan’s economic success. At the same time as presenting explicit sex as a feature in his films, Maruo always closely weaves it in with the taboo of death. Martin Heidegger interprets human existence as Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) (Kearney 35): in Maruo’s vision, existence is evidently one of sexual-being-towards-death. Like Suehiro Maruo’s hideously maimed and blind lovers, humanity always returns to the impulse of its sexuality and the desire/will to orgasm: what Maruo calls “the cosmic gash” of physical love, a gash which also reveals, in a Heideggerian sense, the non-being that is the only certainty of existence. And we should remember that even when love is blind, someone will always be watching. References Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb, Volume 5: Happy Hippy Comix. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1990. Hendry, Joy. Understanding Japanese Society. London: Routledge, 1987. Kearney, Richard. Modern Movements in European Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Kotz, Liz. “Complicity: Women Artists Investigating Masculinity” in Paula Church Gibson (ed.) More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (Second Edition). London, BFI, 2004, 188-203. Lehmann, Jean-Pierre. The Roots of Modern Japan. London: Macmillan, 1982. Maruo, Suehiro. “Planet of the Jap” in Quigley, Kevin (ed.). Comics Underground Japan. New York: Blast Books, 1992. —-. Mr Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show. New York: Blast, 1992. —-. Ultra-Gash Inferno. London: Creation, 2001 Mizuki, Shigeru. Youkai Gadan. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1992. Rampo, Edogawa. Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York: Tuttle, 1956. Suei, Akira “The Lucky Hole as the Black Hole” in Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln: Taschen, 1997, 10-15. MLA Style Hand, Richard J. "Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/05_horror.php>. APA Style Hand, R. (2004 Oct 11). Dissecting the Gash: Sexual Horror in the 1980s and the Manga of Suehiro Maruo, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/05_horror.php>

Monsters are everywhere in our popular media narratives. They lurk in the shadows of video games and computer animations, ready to pounce. They haunt the frames of horror films and fantasy televisions shows. They burst out of panels in many comics and graphic novels, bringing with them grotesque forms and nightmarish transformations. They feature recurrently in scary stories for children, echoing the fears of old myths, legends, and fairy tales, and forever drawing attention to our complex views of heroes. They inhabit our nightmares, and challenge our certainties. Monsters are, above all, metaphors. They function both as warnings and as reminders of that which we fear, and which we do not want to admit we desire. Monsters are creatures of difference, but they are never far removed from our human worlds. They aptly reflect not only our fears, but also our deepest and most illicit desires, and like to draw attention to the darkest aspects of our human experience, from the extraordinary to the everyday, from our fictional contexts to the horrors of social media. The monster metaphor is not just part of the imagination, but particularly functions as a representation of “features of a world” that “we are not altogether comfortable living in” (Scott 5). Because of their versatility, monsters refuse to be related to one single aspect of media and culture, and like to resurface in the most unexpected situations. Monsters are entangled with our histories and ways of life, and their representations speak loudly of the complex ways in which we negotiate our relationships and ways of communicating. Monsters present themselves differently from context to context: whether they are covered in scales or equipped with mighty fangs, whether they are undead or all too alive as Internet trolls, monsters always make us wonder about notions of safety and of reliability. While monsters have always been a central part of our modes of storytelling, they can tell us much about our contemporary moment, as we negotiate our concerns over technology, the body, globalisation, and social interaction in our Twenty-first century. Indeed, “while monsters always tapped into anxieties over a changing world”, they have never been “as popular, or as needed, as in the past decade” (Levina and Bui 2). Monsters, for sure, need to be slayed, but that process inevitably entails reflection and understanding of what the monster ‘is’, and what (or who) created it in the first place. In this issue, we approach monsters with fresh curiosity, and enquire into the meaning of their multifaceted incarnations, as both metaphors and as constant—and frightening—reflections of our ways of life. We explore what makes something ‘monstrous’, and how this term is applied figuratively across a variety of media and cultural contexts. We survey how monsters are represented, both physically and metaphorically, and acknowledge them as creatures of both identification and disparity. As Jeffrey Cohen suggests, the monster is always born “as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment, of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 4). If it is true that monsters reflect our cultural and social anxieties at given moments in time, then we must also wonder what it means to ‘embrace’ the monster, and see its very existence as a definitive part of who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen by others. The articles in this issue all pivot on the idea of exploring the monster in media and culture as inevitably connected to our identities. We begin with our feature article, “‘Waiting with Bated Breath’: Navigating the Monstrous World of Online Racism” by Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield, which connects art, social media, and experiences of racism with the concept of the Internet as a ‘monstrous’ space in which new rules apply. We then move to Lawrence May’s “Confronting Ecological Monstrosity: Contemporary Video Game Monsters and the Climate Crisis”, which explores how games can facilitate new forms of ecocriticism through encounters with monsters that both embody and critique ecological collapse. In “Subverting the Monster: Reading Shrek as a Disability Fairy Tale”, Jordan Fyfe and Katie Ellis consider the transgressive potential of the monster in the context of subverting ableist norms and narratives. In the following article, “Kamen Rider: A Monstrous Hero”, Sophia Staite examines how heroism and monstrosity intersect in the Japanese live-action superhero franchise Kamen Rider, noting that “the line between hero and monster has become blurred beyond comprehension”. Angelique Nairn and Deepti Bhargava illustrate how specific professional identities can be framed as monstrous by popular media in “Demon in a Dress? An Exploration of How Television Programming Conceptualises Female Public Relations Practitioners as Monsters”. In “The Megalodon: A Monster of the New Mythology”, Edward Guimont highlights the intersecting forces of science and popular culture in building ‘new’ myths and monsters from nature and the not-so-fossilised past. Drawing on interviews with innovative sonic artist raxil4 (also known as Andrew Page), Will Connor explores the contours of a uniquely ‘monstrous’ musical instrument with the potential to both repel and attract, in “Positively Monstrous! Layers of Meaning within raxil4’s Bone Guitar Thing”. In “Frankenstein Redux: Posthuman Monsters in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein”, Emily McAvan engages with Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic that challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day. Morgan Pinder’s “Mouldy Matriarchs and Dangerous Daughters: An Ecofeminist Look at Resident Evil Antagonists” brings us back to digital media by focusing on the gendered representation of fungal monstrosities in the video game franchise. In “The Serpent (2021): Monstrous Tourism, a Serial Killer and the Hippie Trail”, Gemma Blackwood explores a Netflix true crime series in which monstrosity intersects with imperialist and globalised ideologies of mass tourism. Finally, Donna Lee Brien explores how conflicting public discourses continue to shape our understanding of the living world in her article “Demon Monsters or Misunderstood Casualties? Writing about Sharks in Australia”. These articles address a wide range of themes and media forms, from climate change to gender and sexuality, from video games to musical instruments. Such diversity illustrates the breadth of research currently being undertaken in the arena of monster studies, but also the extent to which the monster as a symbolic figure continues to have resonance across a variety of academic fields. References Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory. U of Minnesota P, 1996. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My Bui. Introduction. In Monster Culture in the 21st Century. Eds. Marina Levina and Diem-My Bui. Bloomsbury, 2013. 1-13. Scott, Niall. Introduction. In Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. Rodopi, 2007. 1-5.

Images of anal flesh have been flashed on Australian television in the popular animated American 'kidult' cartoon series, Ren and Stimpy (1991-95) and South Park (1997-). Ren and Stimpy relates the tales of two male human-voiced animals: Ren, a skinny hyperactive chihuahua, and Stimpy, his stupid fat cat friend. The "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails" episodes of the series contain landmark references to the anus which have informed the broader range of representations of the orifice in the South Park series. South Park explores the lives of four pre-pubescent Colorado schoolboys -- Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. Commentary about the excessive depictions of violence and viscera in these masculinist comedy cartoons has avoided analysis of their representations of anal flesh. How have ani been represented in these popular cultural productions? "Son Of Stimpy" pioneered with a narrative of male anal birth. At Christmas, Stimpy passes his first fart. His bare buttocks gurgle and a fart cloud rises and disappears. Stimpy's anus is not visually (re)presented. His attempts to produce another fart fail. Stimpy and "Stinky" search desperately for each other. Stinky, the personified fart, resembles a wrinkled hybrid of Casper The Friendly Ghost and Tweety Bird. Appearing outside the closed window of Ren and Stimpy's bedroom, Stinky ogles the sleeping Stimpy's unreachable buttocks. "Oh why did I leave home? I'll never find a home as warm and snuggly as the one I left", he reflects on Stimpy's anus. Father and son eventually meet, the adult Stinky marries a rotting dead codfish, and the newly-weds then live in Ren's nostrils. As probably the most conspicuously homoerotic televised cartoon, "Son of Stimpy" also shows Ren flirtatiously snuggling up to Stimpy under some mistletoe, the pair sharing a bed, and reminiscences about their nuptials. Thus, the unavoidable thrust of this play is that Stinky-the-fart (the son) was farted (born) through the anus of Stimpy (the male mother) after sodomitical penetration by Ren (Stinky's father). Moreover, Stimpy's search for his fart-child and Ren's relishing of Stinky's smell provide a clear metaphor for Ren and Stimpy's continuing desire for more fun, fart-producing, "gay", an(im)al sex. Although Stimpy's anus and Ren's penis are not depicted, the fleshy intercourse between them (that produced the cherished Stinky) can hardly be ignored in the imagination of the viewer. "Blazing Entrails" includes a groundbreaking image of inner male anal flesh. The title refers to Blazing Saddles with its famous comedy scene involving bean-eating, farting cowboys. The plot loosely reworks that of Fantastic Voyage, with Ren taking a crazed Stimpy to see a scientist who inflates him into a giant. Ren then travels through Stimpy's (unseen) anal sphincter (in a significant departure from the plot of Voyage). Ren is shown reading The Bowel Daily News on a speeding subway train that travels along the giant Stimpy's rectum. After this close-up depiction of Ren's (total body) penetration of Stimpy's anal canal, Ren travels via various vital organs to Stimpy's brain, which he shatters. Stimpy soon recovers. The fundamental thrust is that Ren 'fucks Stimpy brainless' through his anus for another mutually happy ending. The South Park series (Parker and Stone) also contains spectacular depictions of anal birth, a personified anal product, and anal sex between male animals. However, none lead to consensual homoerotic ecstasy. In "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which spoofs Communion, Cartman is raped in his sleep by male space aliens who penetrate his anus with a probe. Thus 'impregnated', he experiences immense pain (and ridicule), until his blazing anus delivers an enormous satellite dish. Instead of Stinky-the-fart, South Park features the more 'fleshy' Mr Hankey, a non-denominational talking Christmas turd that resembles Mr Potato Head. "Big Gay Al's Gay Boat Ride" contains the only reference to 'gay' male sex in the series. Sparky, a stray "gay homosexual" dog mounts another male canine before anally raping yet another. The anus is not depicted in these scenes. Anything but eroticised, the unexposed human male anus is valorised in South Park as an arsenal of multiple farts which are either deployed as weapons against male enemies, or shared between male friends as penultimate acts of affection and sacrifice. In "Not without My Anus", Terrance and Phillip organise a stadium full of Canadians to don gasmasks and fart on cue, thus generating an enormous cloud of gas that kills Saddam Hussein. In "Chicken Pox", Phillip worries that he "won't be able to fart anymore", due to his anal cancer. After he and Terrance appear in surgery with their buttocks and heads (but not ani) exposed, the two men literally 'bond' through an (unseen) "anal transplant". Terrance donates half his anus to Phillip, who happily farts again after the successful operation. The "Cow Days" episode of South Park includes close-up images depicting the outside and inside of an anus. The Chamber of Farts sideshow ride first appears from the outside as a giant pair of pink body-less buttocks, decorated with a vampire bat, spider and cobwebs. After buying tickets, the schoolboys take the traincar ride into the Chamber through the front door -- a giant asterisk which designates the anal sphincter. Inside, the boys pass clothed male dummies (one with a bare front bottom) and a farting black oval anus. They exit through a back door between the spread legs of a farting clothed female dummy. This arrangement codes the anal chamber as female (or feminised), with the rear door configured as a 'pussy-farting' vagina, or (to borrow a gay term for the male anus), as 'backpussy'. Therein, the confusing boys-in-the-train-in-the-haunted-Chamber-of-Farts scenario seemingly expresses heterosexual male anxieties about engaging in (paid group) penetration of a female anus, because the act too readily evokes visions of the beastly queer male things gay men and Sparky do with (their or other) male ani. Eve Sedgwick has stressed that "there has been no important and sustained [modern] Western discourse in which women's anal eroticism means anything" (129). In the form of the Chamber of Farts, the eroticised female anus has been conflated by hysterical heterosexual males to mean something horrific. There are few other farting females in these cartoons. In the "Powdered Toast Man with Vitamin 'F'" segment of Ren and Stimpy, a girl and boy fart after eating Powdered Toast. An empowering image of an exploding atomic bomb is superimposed only over the fart-inflated pants of the girl. In South Park's "Not Without My Anus", Terrance's baby daughter farts once, but only to establish her resemblance to her father. Women contribute only in long shot to the fart cloud that kills Saddam Hussein. While the female anus is demeaned in South Park, other female flesh is overwhelmingly cast as terrifying. Barbara Creed has demonstrated that classic horror films feature seven female archetypes (archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator) that express male fears of the mythical vagina dentata. Versions of these 'monstrous-feminine' figures in South Park include the Conjoined Fetus Lady; Frieda (the herpes-spreading prostitute); Cartman's highly-sexed hermaphrodite-born mother; Aunt Flo (the red-haired "monthly visitor" who personifies menstruation and gives away a serial killer fish), Barbra Streisand's "spooky" face; Wendy and Ms Crabtree (with their gnashing teeth); and Stan's mother with her herpes-infected genitalia. While male genitals are celebrated in South Park, the anus is configured as the most grotesque zone of male flesh, sometimes through misogynist references. The penis and "chocolate salty balls" of the black man, Chef, are praised through descriptive (heterosexual) innuendo. One father's insult to another, "I wasn't born with a silver enema up my ass", exploits the experiences of birthing women who have received enemas. In Ren and Stimpy, on the other hand, horrific (hairy, muscled, excretive, male) flesh belongs to hyper-masculine bodies, and sex organs other than male genitalia are celebrated. The joyous anal birth of Stinky mimics, yet edifies, non-vaginal birth. Stinky-the-fart and his female codfish wife celebrate the joining of the odours of anal and vaginal flesh, which they respectively incarnate. Key episodes of Ren and Stimpy provided the seminal subversive representations of ani in the history of televised animated cartoons. In "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails", the meta(eu)phoric valorisation of the creativity of gay anal eroticism, orgasmic farting, and gay fatherhood (through metadiegetic narratives of inter-male conception and anal birth) challenges the dominant homophobic culture which demonises the (anal) sexuality of gay men and denies them access to reproductive technologies and families. Ren and Stimpy also pioneered with a skit celebrating the farting power of the female anus. In South Park, these subversive themes have been twisted into misogynist and homophobic contexts. Perhaps the anal transplant innovatively satirises the seriousness of rectal (bowel, colon, and prostate) cancers. However, this scenario is overshadowed by the show's gynophobic grotesquerie of female flesh, exemplified by the disturbing graphic imag(in)ing of the sexualised farting female anus as a chamber of horrors. The representation of collective killer ani and inter-male (human and animal) anal rape as comedy, is also disturbing. There are no references to fleshy practices -- such as anal masturbation, pleasurable inter-male or inter-female human anal eroticism, or female penetrations of male ani -- which could upset the hetero-masculinist homosocial phallologocentric order. How sad. References Blazing Entrails." Dir. Bob Camp. Ren and Stimpy 4.43 (1994).Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 9 April 1995. Blazing Saddles. Dir. Mel Brooks. Warner Bros., 1974. Communion. Dir. Philippe Mora. Allied Vision, 1989. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous~Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Richard Fleischer. 20th Century Fox, 1966. "Powdered Toast man with Vitamin 'F'." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 3.27 (1993). Nickelodeon. Big Breakfast. TVQ10, Brisbane. 14 May 1994. "Son of Stimpy." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 2.19 (1992). Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 1995. Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone, dirs. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride." South Park 1.4 (1997). Comedy Partners/Celluloid Studios, U.S.A. SBS, Brisbane. 19 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe." South Park 1.1 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 28 Sept. 1998. ---, dirs. "Chicken Pox." South Park 2.10 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 12 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cowdays." South Park 2.13 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 23 Nov. 1998. ---, dirs. "Mr Hankey." South Park 1.10 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 5 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Not Without My Anus." South Park 2.01 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 31 Aug. 1998. Sedgwick, Eve K. "A Poem Is Being Written." Representations 17 (1987): 110-143. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) How funny?: spectacular ani in animated television cartoons. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]).

Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside downA lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegmThe CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic Bob has Cystic Fibrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art. Spooner has commented, “Contemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its previous phases: bodies become spectacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented” (63). Today, culture’s preoccupation with the body runs the gamut from horror films obsessed with the penetrated body, to subcultural style and body manipulation, and the increasing popularity of plastic surgery makeovers on mainstream television. The body has never been so exposed, so open to the audience’s gaze. Key artists such as Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, the Chapman Brothers, Gabriela Friðriksdóttir, and Sue de Beer respond to this contemporary preoccupation by exploring the body in its manifold Gothic forms. This is a rich body of work that uses abject materials, references slasher movies, and plays with notions of identity, societal violence, body-horror, and the grotesque. This article looks specifically at works by contemporary transgressive artists that utilise their own bodies as site of performance, and the challenges to accepted tastes that this work poses. Performances by Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and Marina Abramovic are analysed in terms of boundaries, identity, and other implications in using the body of the artist as the site of art. Tropes of torture, pain. and body modification are examined as contesting the parameters of what body limits and of what is acceptable in contemporary art practice. An Intimate Canvas: The Artist’s Body as Site So what does it mean to use your own body as site of exploration? The work of artists who use their own bodies as a site of spectacle, as a medium of art, has several interesting implications. By its very nature, such an act is transgressive. It blurs the boundaries between artwork and artist. This creates an interesting tension between self and other and, indeed, arguably explores the notion of self as other. This work has an autobiographical function, in that it not only reveals universal themes of significance to the artist but, given the intimacy of the canvas, it also betrays personal preoccupations, and signifies the artist’s own relationship with the body and bodily practices. The use of the human body as canvas brings an intense physical and emotional proximity to the piece. The bodily traumas that are witnessed via performance art—whether it is Chris Burden being nailed to a Volkswagen (Trans-fixed, 1974) or Marina Abramović and Ulay collapsing, unconscious, lungs filled with carbon dioxide from reciprocal exchange of breaths (Breathing In/Breathing Out, 1977)—constitute an intimate link with the audience that arises from the shock of witnessing these transgressive acts. The body of the artist exposed in this way—a body normally only viewed by a partner, doctor or close family member—creates immediacy, giving the individual spectator in an intimate connection with the artist. Francesca Gavin, in her introductory essay to Hellbound: New Gothic Art, cites this voyeurism as essential to the experience of viewing Gothic art: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). The first of these areas of discomfort to consider is the association of the body with pain, torture and mutilation, and the use of the artist’s body to explore this theme. Pushing the Limits: The Artist’s Body as Site of Pain The work of Marina Abramović has had a powerful effect on the contemporary landscape of body-based performance art that tests the limits of endurance of the corporeal body. Her past projects have focused on the uneasy power exchange between audience and performer. In Rhythm 0 (1974), her first long durational performance, Abramović offered her audience a choice of 72 objects including a gun, a hammer, sugar, and scissors, to be used on her own body, without any limitations on their deployment. This six-hour performance featured a motionless Abramović offering her body passively to the spectators to interact with. The intensity of the resulting video piece is remarkable; the recording of the performance captures the potential dissolution of the societal contract between artist and audience, a mutable discourse of agency and power. Abramović spoke of the sense of fear she experienced during this performance— “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere” (quoted, Danieri 30). Her work plays constantly with the idea of boundaries and limits, often pushing her physical self past extraordinary barriers of pain and exertion, as in Rhythm 5 (1974) where she lost consciousness as a result of smoke inhalation and had to be rescued by the spectators. Amelia Jones has analysed these performances of pain as central to the artist’s desire to establish a connection with the audience during performances: “While pain cannot be shared, its effects can be projected onto others such that they become the site of suffering […] and the original sufferer can attain some semblance of self-containment (paradoxically, through the very penetration and violation of the body” (230). One could also argue that this sharing of experience also effectively normalises the abnormal body by establishing a common bond between viewer and performer. However, this work raises questions for the viewer. Is what these artists do self-harm, presented on a public stage? Is this ethical? And, importantly, is it within the bounds of taste? The answer, it would seem, lies in issues of agency and control and, of course, in the separation of art from life that occurs due to the act of performing itself. As Coogan puts it “[t]he performance frame is contingent and temporary, holding the performer in a liminal, provisional and suspended place” (1). While Abramović’s work experiments with bodily endurance and performative limits, other artists who produce autobiographical, body-based performance can be located within the world of medical discourse and performed disability. An artist who subverts the boundaries of the body, and taste alike, is Ron Athey, the HIV-positive artist who makes performance work based on blood rituals, torture, and cutting. His use of blood is central to his practice, and the fact that this blood, which is let through performances, contains the HIV virus, gives it a doubly abject aspect. His performance Excerpted Rites Transformation (1995) which took place at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis caused an extreme reaction. During this performance Athey pierced own his skin with needles, and also cut into the skin of black artist Daryl Carlton in a mimicry of tribal scarification rituals that highlighted issues of race, then hung handkerchiefs dipped in Carlton’s blood on clotheslines that ran over the heads of the audience. Mary Abbe, an art critic with the Minneapolis Star Tribune who had not attended the performance, wrote an article about the danger posed to the audience by what she wrongly termed Athey’s blood. (Carlton is not HIV positive). It is clear from the tone of this response that such disease causes a profound dis-ease in the beholder. Bob Flanagan’s oeuvre also locates him in this tradition of artists who perform their disability on a public stage. Critics such as Kuppers consider Athey and Flanagan as artists who subvert the medical gaze (Foucault), refusing to accept the passive role of ‘patient’, and defiantly flaunting their abnormal bodies in the public arena. These bodies can also be considered as modified bodies. Sandahl has contextualised Athey’s performance as going beyond the parameters of the human body: “Athey’s radical cyborg identity is a temporary mode of survival, an alternative way of being in there here and now. A body not interested solely in cure nor submissive to medical interventions” (59). Kuppers, in The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, reflects on Flanagan and Athey’s careers as disabled artists. She examines how Flanagan constructs his identity as a chronically ill artist, and his pain performances that allowed him to avoid attracting the sentimental pity associated with illness; replacing audience empathy with shock and often revulsion. Kuppers highlights Flanagan’s use of dark humour in his performances through songs like Fun to be Dead (1997), which work to subvert the dominance of his illness. In fact, Flanagan’s work often asserts his central belief that his relative longevity (he lived to be 43, a decade longer than most CF sufferers) was achieved by his ability to counter the pain of his chronic condition with the pain of his masochistic suffering. The stereotype that the masochist is snivelling and weak is actually not true. The masochist has to know his or her own body perfectly well and be in full control of their body, in order to give control to somebody else or to give control to pain. So the masochist is actually a very strong person. I think some of that strength is what I use to combat the illness. (Dick) Athey’s description of his relief at the act of cutting echoes Flanagan’s identification of these rites as way of asserting control over a dysfunctional body: “The sight of your own blood, brought forth from your own hand, spells an almost immediate relief, a release to the pressure valve. It’s a violation that you yourself now control.” What effect does this painful and masochistic art have on the audience? On the act of viewing? On taste itself? Taste and Transgression: Beyond the Parameters of the Body The notion of taste is a hotly debated area in contemporary art practice—arguments rage as to what constitutes good or bad taste. Woodward argues that “[B]ad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals ‘transgressive’ intent” (1). Grunenberg (1997) has addressed the problematic notion of the audience engagement with this mode of Gothic art, asking whether it has ilost its power to shock. He contends that with the contemporary saturation of all media with violent and shocking imagery, “the ability to be shocked and moved by real or fictitious images of horror has been showing positive signs of attrition.” Nevertheless, the proximity of performance, the immediacy of the artist’s body as canvas, the feelings of horror, empathy, and even wonder occasioned by the manipulation and excesses of the body, continue to draw audiences. The artist’s body as site of performance becomes a space in which the audience may inscribe their own narratives. The body is a locus of projection, almost ab-human, “a not-quite-human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other” (Hurley 3–4). As the artist’s body becomes ever more manipulated and pushed beyond boundaries of taste and pain, it forces artist and audience alike to ask what lies beyond the parameters of the body. Experimentation with torture methods, with cutting, with abject materials, seems to lead back inevitably to the notion of Gothic, othered body, and a desire to pass beyond the boundaries of the repeatedly invaded and wracked body. Once you transgress the boundaries of the body, the logical locus that lies beyond is death. Dick’s Sick documents Bob Flanagan’s death, which formed part of the agreement between documentary maker and artist before shooting. Flanagan hoped his body art would continue beyond death: “I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I’m coming along” (Dick). Playing with the shadow of death becomes a mode of performance itself. Abramović recalls her acceptance of this fact in her early performance pieces: “When I was in Yugoslavia I was always thinking that art was a kind of question between life and death and some of my performances really included the possibility of dying, you know, during the piece, it could happen” (quoted in McEvilley 15). She also records her fear experienced during Rhythm 0 (1974), stating “What I learned was that [... ]if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you” (quoted in Danieri 29). Death has receded from us in the 21st century. Death happens in hospitals, in the antiseptic confines of the Intensive Care Unit, it is medicated and mediated by medical staff. Traditional rituals of deathbed conversations and posthumous wakes are gradually disappearing. The discourse of death has grown silent except through the medium of the Gothic and especially the Gothic body, as the Gothic “consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable—that is, death” (McGrath 154). Artists such as Abramović, Flanagan, and Athey function within this Gothic tradition. By insistently presenting their Gothic bodies, they force the audience to acknowledge death, transgression, and decay as realities. With collaborative partners, they mediate the process of surgery, torture, dying, and even the moment of death through photography and lens-based media. This use of media in capturing the moment also functions in a contemporary post-religious society as a mode of replication and, even, perhaps, of immortality. Bold, provocative, and challenging, the work of these transgressive artists continues to challenge the idea of bodily limits and boundaries and highlight the notion of the body as site of transformation. They continue to challenge our taste, our definition of art, and our comfort as audience. The words of Gavin come again to mind: “By looking at the violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, part of the cause—hence part of the discomfort in looking” (7). Using the artist’s body as site of performance forces us to challenge our conception of art, illness, life and death and leads to a reappraisal of taste itself. References Abbe, Mary. “Bloody Performance Draws Criticism.” Star Tribune 24 Mar. 1994. 1A. Abramovic, Marina. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.marinaabramovicinstitute.org›. Athey, Ron. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://ronatheynews.blogspot.ie›. Coogan, Amanda. “What is Performance Art?.” Irish Museum of Modern Art [website] (2011). 4 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212496.htm›. Daneri, Anna, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, L. Hegyi, SR Sanzio, & A. Vettese. Eds. Marina Abramović. Milan: Charta, 2002. Dick, Kirby. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Dir. Kirby Dick. 1997. Flanagan, Bob. [website] 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/flanagan/flanagan.html›. Gavin, Francesca. Hellbound: New Gothic Art. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2008. Grunenberg, Christoph. “Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 160–212. Kuppers, Petra. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Mc Grath, Patrick. “Transgression and Decay.” Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. Ed. Christoph Grunenberg. Boston: MIT Press, 1997. 153–58. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Sandahl, Carrie. “Performing Metaphors: Aids, Disability and Technology.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11.3–4 (2001): 49–60. Woodward, Richard B. “When Bad is Good.” ARTnews [website] (2012). 4 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.artnews.com/2012/04/12/when-bad-is-good›. Zylinska, Joanna. The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London: Continuum, 2002.

IntroductionClowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this paper, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing performances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fiction, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.Diminutive CatastropheI have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small “c.” In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if anything he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus; Stradda). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of "failing better” in the vein of Charles Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala; Coover; Salisbury)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big “C” Catastrophes? Creation and CatastropheTo wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catastrophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological “completeness” of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by “disaster” which changed but ultimately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of species wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance:Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into nothingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 109–10)For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a powerful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evolutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreciated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to western thought which privileges progression—and here evolution is a prime example—Hindu conceptualisation appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdependency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge.To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regeneration through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Territory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role.In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, projections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu time scale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different?Turning the Lens onto the Small-ScaleSmall-scale, clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incompetence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with the virtuosic delicacy—take Charles Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nail-bones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of decorum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” (87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to continue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this continuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongruous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pursuit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage.I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his persona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he intervened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory.Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charles Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri:They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (496) Clowning as a State of Mind/ConsciousnessAnother perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is “to keep on trying even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Le Feuvre 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradictory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: “Failure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power” (Werry & O’Gorman 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theatrical clowning pivots on “finding that basic state of vulnerability and allowing the audience to exist in that state with you” (Butler 64). Butler argues that this “state of clowning” is “a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion” (ibid). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indication of this intricate lineage:Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch's universe to the world of fairy tales. “History invades it like trouble, like summer flies [...] The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe [...] The whole is nothing but children's play”. (Biro 68)Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clownish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Dancing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions side-by-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None are able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.Becoming “Inhuman” or SacrificialA variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the “inhuman” rights of clowns. His premise matches a “grotesque attachment to the world of things” to a clown’s existence that is “victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality” (133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms:Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)The play on a clown’s “undead” propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend "man’s inhumanity to man.” It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and visa versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice.There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns:Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real. (47)Miller’s fictional Auguste’s “special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself” (29). With overtones of a Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes “wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens” (40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imagination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and...—the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction.With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: “Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world” (505).Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devastation. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small “c” catastrophes. They are known otherwise as clowns.ReferencesBala, Michael. “The Clown.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4.1 (2010): 50–71.Bausch, Pina. Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre, 1977.Big Apple Circus. Circopedia. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page›.Biro, Yvette. “Heartbreaking Fragments, Magnificent Whole: Pina Bausch’s New Minimyths.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 68–72.Butler, Lauren. “Everything Seemed New: Clown as Embodied Critical Pedagogy.” Theatre Topics 22.1 (2012): 63–72.Coover, Robert. “Tears of a Clown.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.1 (2000): 81–83.Dancing Dreams. Dirs. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. First Run Features, 2010.Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. “Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns.” SubStance 39.2 (2010): 131–41.Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom.” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 281–302. Ghosh, Oroon. The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India. New York: New American Library, 1965.Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ’65. Dir. Pina Bausch. Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 2007.Le Feuvre, Lisa. “Introduction.” Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Lisa Le Feuvre. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. 12–21.McKnight, Jesse H. “Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.3–4 (2008): 493–506.Miller, Henry. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. New York: New Directions Books, 1974.Raoul. Dir. James Thiérrée. Regal Theatre, Perth, 2012.Salisbury, Laura. “Beside Oneself Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude.” Parallax 11.4 (2005): 81–92.Stradda. Stradda: Le Magazine de la Creation hors les Murs. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.horslesmurs.fr/-Decouvrez-le-magazine-.html›.Weitz, Eric. “Failure as Success: On Clowns and Laughing Bodies.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 79–87.Werry, Margaret, and Róisín O'Gorman. “The Anatomy of Failure: An Inventory.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 105–10.

Introduction Many examinations of magic and witchcraft in film and television focus on the gender dynamics depicted and what these can reveal about attitudes to women and power in the eras in which they were made. For example, Campbell, in Cheerfully Empowered: The Witch-Wife in Twentieth Century Literature, Television and Film draws from scholarship such as Greene's Bell, Book and Camera, Gibson's Witchcraft Myths in American Culture, and Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture to suggest connections between witch-wife narratives and societal responses to feminism. Campbell explores both the allure and fear of powerful women, who are often tamed (or partially tamed) by marriage in these stories. These perspectives provide important insights into cultural imaginings of witches, and this paper aims to use anthropological perspectives to further analyse rituals, spells, and cosmologies of screen stories of magic and witchcraft, asking how these narratives have engaged with witchcraft trials, symbols of women as witches, and rituals and myths invoking goddesses. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television series that ran for seven seasons (1997-2003), focusses on a young woman, The Slayer, who vanquishes vampires. As Abbott (1) explains, the vampires in seasons one and two are ruled by a particularly old and powerful vampire, The Master, and use prophetic language and ancient rituals. When Buffy kills The Master, the vampiric threat evolves with the character of Spike, a much younger vampire who kills The Master's successor, The Anointed One, calling for “a little less ritual and a little more fun” ('School Hard'). This scene is important to Abbott's thesis that what makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such an effective television program is that the evil that she battles is not a product of an ancient world but the product of the real world itself. Buffy has used the past four years to painstakingly dismantle and rebuild the conventions of the vampire genre and work toward gradually disembedding the vampire/slayer dichotomy from religious ritual and superstition … what we describe as ‘evil’ is a natural product of the modern world. (Abbott 5) While distinguishing the series from earlier books and films is important, I suggest that, nonetheless, ritual and magic remain central to numerous plots in the series. Moreover, Child argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer disrupts the male gaze of classical Hollywood films as theorised by Mulvey, not only by making the central action hero a young woman, but by offering rich, complex, and developmental narrative arcs for other characters such as Willow: a quiet fellow student at Buffy's school who initially uses her research skills with books, computers, and science to help the group. Willow’s access to knowledge about magic through Buffy's Watcher, Giles, and his library, together with her growing experience fighting with demons, leads her to teach herself witchcraft, and she and her growing magical powers, including the ability to conjure Greek goddesses such as Hecate and Diana, become central to multiple storylines in the series (Krzywinska). Corcoran, who explores teen witches in American popular culture in some depth, reflects on Willow's changes and developments in the context of problematic 'post-feminist' films of 1990s. Corcoran suggests these films offer viewers tropes of empowerment in the form of the 'makeover' of witch characters, who transform, but often in individualised ways that elude more fundamental questions of societal structures of race, class, and gender. Offering one of the most fluid and hybrid examples, Willow not only embraces magic as a conduit for power and self-expression but, as the seasons progress, she occupies a host of identificatory categories. Moving from shy high school 'geek' to trainee witch, from empowered sorceress to dark avenger, Willow regularly makes herself over in accordance with her fluctuating selfhood (Corcoran). Corcoran also notes how Willow's character brings together skills in both science and witchcraft in ways that echo world views of early modern Europe. This connects her apparently distinct selves and, I suggest, also demonstrates how the show engages with magic as real within its internal cosmology. Fairy Tale Witches This liberating, fluid, and transformative depiction of witches is not, however, the only one. Early in season one, the show reflects tropes of witchcraft found in fairy tale and fantasy films such as Snow White and The Wizard of Oz. Both films are deeply ambivalent in their portraits of fascinating powerful witches, who are, however, also defined by being old, ugly, and/or deeply jealous of and threatening towards younger women (Zipes). The episode “Witch” reproduces these patriarchal rivalries, as the witch of the episode title is the mother of a classmate of Buffy, called Amy, who has used magic to swap bodies with her daughter in an attempt to recapture her lost glory as a famous cheerleader. There are debates around the symbolism of witches and crones, especially those in fairytales, and whether they can be re-purposed. For example, Rountree in 'The New Witch of the West' and Embracing the Witch and the Goddess has conducted interviews and participant observation with feminist witches in New Zealand who use both goddess and witch symbols in their ritual practice and feminist understandings of themselves and society. By embracing both the witch and the goddess, feminist witches disrupt what they regard as false divisions and dichotomies between these symbols and the pressures of the divided self that they argue have been imposed upon women by patriarchy. In these conceptions, the crone is not only a negative symbol, but can be re-evaluated as one of three aspects of the goddess (maiden, mother, and crone), depicting the cycles of all life and also enabling women to embrace the darker aspects of their own natures and emotions (Greenwood; Rountree 'New Witch'; Walker). Witch Trials That said, Germaine, examining witches in folk horror films such as The Witch and The Wicker Man, advises caution about witch images. Drawing from Hutton's The Witch, she explores grotesque images of the witch from the early modern witch trials, arguing that horror cinema can subvert older ideas about witches, but it also reveals their continued power. Indeed, horror cinema has forged the witch into a deeply ambiguous figure that proves problematic for feminism and its project to subvert or otherwise destabilize misogynist symbols. (Germaine 22) Purkiss's examination of early modern witchcraft trials in The Witch in History also questions many assumptions about the period. Contrary to Rountree's 'The New Witch of the West' (222), Purkiss argues that there is no evidence to suggest that healing and midwifery were central concerns of witch hunters, nor were those accused of witchcraft in this period regarded as particularly sexually liberated or lesbian. Moreover, the famous Malleus Maleficarum, a text that is “still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was woman-hunting” was, in fact, disdained by many early modern authorities (Purkiss 7-8). Rather, rivalries and social tensions in communities combined with broader societal politics to generate accusations: a picture that is more in line with Stewart and Strathern's cross-cultural study, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip, of the relationship between witchcraft and gossip. In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Gingerbread”, Amy has matured and has begun to engage with magic herself, as has Willow. The witch trial of the episode is not, however, triggered by this, but is rather initiated by Buffy and her mother finding the bodies of two dead children. Buffy's mother Joyce quickly escalates from understandable concern to a full-on assault on magical practice and knowledge as she founds MOO (Mothers Opposed to the Occult), who raid school lockers, confiscate books from the school library, and eventually try to burn them and Buffy, Willow, and Amy. The episode evokes fairy tales because the 'big bad' is a monster who disguises itself as Hansel and Gretel. As Giles explains, fairy tales can sometimes be real, and in this case, the monster feeds a community its worst fears and thrives off the hatred and chaos that ensues. However, his references to European Wicca covens are somewhat misleading. Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, explains that Wicca was founded in the 1950s in England by Gerald Gardner, and claims it to be a continuation of older pagan witch traditions that have largely been discredited. The episode therefore tries to combine a comment on the irrationality and dangers of witch hunts while also suggesting that (within the cosmology of the show) magic is real. Buffy's confrontation with her mother illustrates this. Furious about the confiscation of the library's occult collection, Buffy argues that without the knowledge they contain, young people are not more protected, but rather rendered defenceless, arguing that “maybe next time the world gets sucked into hell, I won't be able to stop it because the anti-hell-sucking book isn't on the approved reading list!” Thus, she simultaneously makes a general point about knowledge as a defence against the evils of the world, while also emphasising how magic is not merely symbolic for her and her friends, but a real, practical, problem and a combatant tool. Spells Spells take considerable skill and practice to master as they are linked to strong emotions but also need mental focus and clarity. Willow's learning curve as a witch is an important illustrator of this principle, as her spells do not always do what she had intended, or rather, she is not always wise to her own intentions. These ideas are also found in anthropological examples (Greenwood). Malinowski, an anthropologist of the Trobriand Islands, theorised that spells and magical objects have their origins in gestures and words that express the emotional states and intentions of the spellcaster. Over time, these became refined and codified in a society, becoming traditional spells that can amplify, focus, and direct the magician's will (Malinowski). In the episode “Witch”, Giles demonstrates the relationship between spells and intention as, casting a spell to reverse Amy's mother's switching of their bodies, he shouts in a commanding voice 'Release!' Willow also hones skills of concentration and directing her will through the practice of pencil floating, a seemingly small magical technique that nonetheless saves her life when she is captured by enemies and narrowly escapes being bitten by a vampire by floating a pencil and staking him with it in the episode “Choices”. The pencil is also used in another episode to illustrate the importance of focus and emotional balance. Willow explains to Buffy that she is honing these skills as she gently spins a pencil in the air, but as the conversation turns to Faith (a rogue Slayer who has hurt Willow's friends), she is distracted and the pencil spins wildly out of control before flying into a tree (“Dopplegangland”). In another example, Willow tries to conjure lights that will guide her out of difficulty in a haunted house, but, unable to make up her mind about where the lights should take her, she is plagued by them multiplying and spinning in multiple directions like a swarm of insects, thereby acting as an illustrator of her refracted metal state (“Fear Itself”). The series also explores the often comical consequences when love spells are cast with unclear motives. In the episode “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, Buffy's friend Xander persuades Amy to cast a love spell on Cordelia who has just broken up with him. Amy warns him that for love spells, the intention should be pure, and is worried that Xander only wants revenge on Cordelia. Predictably, the spell goes wrong, as Cordelia is immune to Xander but every other woman that comes into proximity with him is overcome with obsession for him. Fleeing hordes of women, Xander and Cordelia have the space to talk, and impressed with his efforts to try to win her back, Cordelia rekindles the relationship, defying her traditional friendship circle. In this way, the spell both does not and does work, perhaps because, although Xander thinks he wants Cordelia to be enchanted, in fact what he really wants is her genuine affection and respect. Another example of spells going amiss is in the episode “Something Blue”, when Willow responds to a break-up by reverting to magic. Despondent over her boyfriend Oz leaving town, she wants to accelerate her grieving process and heal more quickly, and casts a spell to have her will be done in order to try to make that happen. The spell, however, does not work as expected but manifests her words about other things when she speaks with passion, rendering Giles blind when she says he does not see (meaning he does not understand her plight), and in another instance of the literal interpretation of Willow’s word choices causes Buffy and the vampire Spike to stop fighting, fall in love, and become an engaged couple. The episode therefore suggests the power of words to manifest unconscious intentions. Words may also, in the Buffyverse, have power in themselves. Overbey and Preston-Matto explore the power of words in the series, using the episode “Superstar” in which Xander speaks some Latin words in front of an open book that responds by spontaneously bursting into flames. They argue that the materiality of language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [means that] words and utterances have palpable power and their rules must be respected if they are to be wielded as weapons in the fight against evil. (Overbey and Preston Matto 73) However, in drawing upon Searle's Speech Acts they emphasise the relationship between speech acts and meaning, but there are also examples that the sounds in themselves are efficacious, even if the speaker does not understand them – for example, when Willow tries to do the ritual to restore Angel’s soul to him and explains to Oz that it does not matter if he understands the related chant as long as he says it (“Becoming part 2”). The idea that words in themselves have power is also present in the work of Stoller, an ethnographer and magical apprentice to Songhay sorcerers living in the Republic of Niger. He documents a complex and very personal engagement with magic that he found fascinating but dangerous, giving him new powers but also subjecting him to magical attacks (Stoller and Olkes). This experience helped to cultivate his interest in the often under-reported sensuous aspects of anthropology, including the power of sound in spells, which he argues has an energy that goes beyond what the word represents. Moreover, skilled magicians can 'hear' things happening to the subtle essence of a person during rituals (Stoller). Seeing Other Realities Sight is also key to numerous magical practices. Greenwood, for example, has done participant observation with UK witches, including training in the arts of visualisation. Linked to general health benefits of meditation and imaginative play, such practices are also thought to connect adepts to 'other worlds' and their associated powers (Greenwood). Later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer also depict skills in meditation and concentration, such as in the episode “No Place Like Home”, in which Buffy, worried about her sick mother, uses a spell supposedly created by a French sixteenth-century sorcerer called 'pull the curtain back' to try to see if her mother’s illness is caused by a spell. She uses incense and a ritual circle of sand to put herself into a trance and in that altered state of consciousness sees that her sister, Dawn, was not born to her mother, but has been placed into her family by magic. In another example, in the episode “Who are You?”, Willow has begun a relationship with fellow witch Tara and wants to introduce her to Buffy. However, the rogue Slayer, Faith, has escaped and switched bodies with Buffy, and Tara realises that something is wrong. She suggests doing a spell with Willow to investigate by seeing beyond the physical world and travelling to the nether realm using astral projection. This rather beautiful scene has been interpreted as a symbolic depiction of their sexual relationship (Gibson), but it is also suggesting that, within the context of the series, alternate dimensions, and spells to transport practitioners there, are not purely symbolic. Conclusion The idea that magic, monsters, and demons in the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer act to some extent as metaphors for the challenges that young people face growing up in America is well known (Little). While this is certainly true, at least some of the multiple examples of magic in the series have clear resemblances to witchcraft in numerous social worlds. This depth is potentially exciting for viewers, but it also makes the show's more negative and ambiguous tropes more troubling. Willow and Tara's relationship can be interpreted as showing their independence and rejection of patriarchy, but Willow identifying as lesbian later in the series obscures her earlier relationships with men and her potential identification as bi-sexual, suggesting a need on the part of the show's writers to “contain her metamorphic selfhood” (Corcoran 158-159). Moreover, the identity of lesbians as witches in a vampire narrative is fraught with potentially homophobic associations and stereotypes (Wilts), and one of the few positive depictions of a lesbian relationship on television was ruined by the brutal murder of the Tara character and Willow's subsequent out-of-control magical rampage, bringing the storyline back in line with murderous clichés (Wilts; Gibson). Furthermore, storylines where Willow cannot control her powers, or they are seen as an addiction to evil, make an uncomfortable comment on women and power more generally: a point which Corcoran highlights in relation to Nancy's story in The Craft. Ultimately, representations of magic and witchcraft are representations of power, and this makes them highly significant for societal understandings of power relations, particularly given the complex relationships between witch-hunting and misogyny. The symbols of woman-as-witch have been re-appropriated by fans of witch narratives and feminists, and perhaps most intriguingly, by people who regard magical power as not only symbolic power but as a way to tap into subtle forces and other worlds. Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers something to all of these groups, but all too often reverts to patriarchal tropes. Audiences (some of whom may be magicians) await what film and television witches come next. References Abbott, Stacey. “A Little Less Ritual and a Little More Fun: The Modern Vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies 1.3, (2001): 1-11. “Becoming Part 2.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 2, episode 22. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1998. “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 2, episode 16. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1998. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions and Twentieth Century Fox Television (Seasons 1-5), Warner Bros. (Seasons 6 and 7), United Paramount Network. 1997-2003. Campbell, Chloe. “Cheerfully Empowered: The Witch Wife in Twentieth Century Literature, Television and Film.” Romancing the Gothic. Run by Sam Hirst. YouTube, 21 July 2022. Child, Louise. Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts: Anthropological Perspectives on the Sacred and Psychology in Popular Film and Television. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. “Choices.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 3, episode 19. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1999. Corcoran, Miranda. Teen Witches: Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2022. The Craft. Dir. by Andrew Fleming. Columbia Pictures, 1996. “Dopplegangland.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 3, episode 16. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1999. “Fear Itself.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 4, episode 4. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1999. Germaine, Choé. “’Witches, ‘Bitches’ or Feminist Trailblazers? The Witch in Folk Horror Cinema.” Revenant (4 Mar. 2019): 22-42. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. Oxon: Routledge, 2007. “Gingerbread.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 3, episode 11. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1999. Greene, Heather. Bell, Book, and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and TV. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2018. Greenwood, Susan. Magic, Witchcraft, and the Otherworld: An Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. ———. The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP, 2017. Krzywinska, Tanya. “Hubble-Bubble, Herbs and Grimoires: Magic, Manicheanism, and Witchcraft in Buffy.” Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Little, Tracy. “High School Is Hell: Metaphor Made Literal in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Ed. James B. South. Chicago: Open Court, 2003. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Magic, Science and Religion.” Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. London: Souvenir Press, 1982 [1925]. 17-92. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed Sue Thornham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2003 [1975]. Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. “No Place Like Home.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 5, episode 5. Mutant Enemy Productions, 2000. Overbey, Karen E., and Lahney Preston-Matto. CStaking in Tongues: Speech Act as Weapon in Buffy.” Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London: Routledge, 2005 [1996]. Roundtree, Kathryn. ”The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone.” The Journal of Popular Culture 30 (1997): 211-229. Roundtree, Kathryn. Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual Makers in New Zealand. London: Routledge, 2004. Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. “Something Blue.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 4, episode 9. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1999. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. by David Hand, Perce Pearce, William Cottrell, Larry Morey, Wilfred Jackson, and Ben Sharpsteen. Walt Disney, 1937. Stoller, Paul. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes. In Sorcery’s Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. “Superstar.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 4, episode 17. Mutant Enemy Productions, 2000. The Wicker Man. Dir. by Robin Hardy. British Lion Film Corporation, 1973. The Witch. Dir. by Robert Eggers. A24, 2015 The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939. Walker, Barbara. The Crone: Women of Age, Wisdom and Power. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Wilts, Alissa. “Evil, Skanky, and Kinda Gay: Lesbian Images and Issues.” Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television. Eds Lynne E. Edwards, Elizabeth L. Rambo, and James B. South. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. “Who Are You.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 4, episode 16. Mutant Enemy Productions, 2000. “Witch.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Created by Joss Whedon. Season 1, episode 3. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1997. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2013.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. 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