Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Aaron Winslow

Horror movie nerds are kind of usually white boys. Like Aaron Winslow. And sometimes I like to think about how bad white boys have it. It’s really hard for them! It’s really hard to to be straight and white, to be small, or comically tall, or have like acne or a thin underdeveloped body, or to have your mom walk in when you’re jerking off or feed you pizza when you’re playing Fall Out 3 till like 5 in the morning or whatever. Aaron Winslow is like the whitest boy. And Aaron Winslow’s writing is the whitest boy writing because basically it’s a long ass sci fi novel full of bioengineered workers loving and hating being plugged full of computer parts. But unlike other white boy sci fi, Aaron’s work sees white boy nerds NOT as defenders of the purity of computation whose internal aesthetic must be protected (like "hackers" or whatever, ugh) but as exploited objects to be raped by symbolic order supercomputers like it’s their job. But no, really, it is. Their job that is. Sometimes they like it. And I can get down with that.

Aaron Winslow is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Four Gashes: Tales of the Great Misery (Make Now) and the novel Jobs of the Great Misery (Company Books, Fall 2015). His fiction has appeared in Smallwork, P-Queue, Armed Cell, and Intercourse, among other locations. Audio recordings can be found on the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound website, and excerpts from Jobs of the Great Misery have been profiled on the web journal Jacket2. He currently works as an archivist in Washington, DC.

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TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favorite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice? And I do mean that in the most general of terms, since no one in this series identifies purely as a poet.

AW: My own personal horror experience orbits around two grand celestial bodies, two separate strands of horror that are quite distinct but make up the crux of my thoughts not just about horror, but also probably the whole world as it exists.

The first is Daniel Myrick’s and Eduardo Sánchez’s BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999).

Let’s talk about BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, the elephant in the room, the red-headed stepchild of the horror world. Though popularly derided, this is a movie with serious horror bonafides, riding the tail-end of that salty wave of low-budget, maximum-scare regional horror right into the endless sludge pile of “found footage” movies (which, btw, I am a huge fan of almost categorically—the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY series is probably the greatest franchise since HELLRAISER. They are like structural films with ghosts. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (Williams 2010) has the best real dadz villain since Jack Torrance, and the latest, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (Landon 2014), is set in the barrio, has an all Latino/a cast, and features 40% dialogue in Spanish with no subtitles, which has gotta be a landmark in US cinema history). Anyway, back to BWP. This movie is surprisingly literary—it’s loosely based on the short story “Sticks” by one of my personal fave horror writers/editors, Karl Edward Wagner, a major player in the 70s/80s Lovecraft scene. It also digs deep for its references, the most obvious being CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (Deodato 1980) but also video nasties/folk horror like WITCHFINDER GENERAL (Reeves 1968) and WICKER MAN (Hardy 1973). I also love how they went all-out with the claim that the movie was authentic found footage—a truly innovative and prophetic marketing campaign. I respect that. By the time it trickled down to bum-fuck South Carolina and I saw it in the theater three times in one week it was absolutely unclear whether this thing was real or not.

It is a film that I found and still find absolutely terrifying. The characters in BWP are transported to a realm of total sensory deprivation, trapped in an endlessly-repeating loop where all affect is replaced by terror, anger, and paranoia. It’s a realm of terror that also happens to be rural Maryland, so in a way it’s also basically social realism, which makes for the best horror, regional or otherwise

This brings me to my other fave, which is anything by David Cronenberg, but especially that sweet spot of THE BROOD (1979), SCANNERS (1981), and VIDEODROME (1983). And out of that, VIDEODROME most of all. It’s about all the horror of the world emanating from an illicit porn cable channel coming out of Pittsburgh. This seems to be both true, symbolically, and also anthropologically accurate. Props too to DEAD RINGERS (1988), which has double Jeremy Irons—every movie should have double Jeremy Irons. Sinister doesn’t begin to describe this movie about twin experimental gynecologists and their descent into substance abuse and madness. A lot of horror is concerned with the flesh—ripping the flesh, slicing the flesh, tearing the flesh, wearing the flesh, etc etc—but Cronenberg really loves to think about “the new flesh,” flesh that isn’t just defiled or mutilated (although it certainly is) but is also transformed into something worse and( importantly) more utterly profane. Cronenbergian horror is very insistently not about the supernatural. There’s nothing spiritual about bodily disfigurement—it doesn’t originate from, or take us to a beyond, either utopic or malicious (should we even be able to make that distinction). Rather, we remain, now and always, situated in the most mundane world of the present, which is reflected in Cronenberg’s focalization of horror through pulp. Horror, here, isn’t a “state of exception,” but basically constitutes our day-to-day social interactions (and in the interest of full disclosure, I typically start my day by inserting a VHS cassette into my chest).

If Cronenberg could speak he would say—consistently and unequivocally, with some hideous barely articulate voice— that not only are the present forms of the human body fragile and contingent (on, for instance, not being disemboweled by one of Jigsaw’s boobytraps), but also that embodiment itself implies suffering—whatever form your flesh takes, it’s going to be just as painful and traumatic and horrific as before. And also just as boring, bureaucratic, and media-saturated. “Humanity,” Cronenberg would say in a pained yowl that reverberates in our heads, and makes our blood boil, “will try its best to progress by cutting new holes and slits and orifices in itself and then sticking a plug or a cartridge into it, in some desperate attempt to unlock new realms of sexual pleasure—our last respite from a world on a one-way slide into infinite decay--but it’s all for naught. Humanity shall only find in this new forms of horror and trauma to match the shape of the new flesh. He shall be doomed to experience painfully violent and boring sexual trauma unto infinity.”

And I would concur.

TL: I am kind of speechless because this might be the most concise (lol) articulation of horror qua horror that I’ve heard, possibly ever? But okay, banality and existential horror aside, I’m also interested in how this presents a problem of the uncanny. Like, I’m interested in that moment where you are feeling literal pain as you watch someone be flayed alive (like in Martyrs) but you also become simultaneously hyperaware of the artificiality of what’s in front of you. Like, that’s like four makeup artists and a couple of buckets of fake blood, however you slice it right? How do you feel about artificiality? Is there a way that this gets built into the "new flesh"?

AW: I see where this is going. You’re trying to make me talk about aesthetics and art—WELL NO DICE. Not yet anyway. Let’s talk more about horror movies first. Martyrs is a great example, and probably does a lot of the same things that I like about Cronenberg’s stuff—obsession with gender and violence (and gender as violence, and vice versa), transcendence through pain and mutilation, etc. etc.—except a lot more "in genre."

And that genre is total insanity.

I guess it’s part of the so-called New French Extremity movement/ad-hoc category, the lot of which seems invested in pushing the edges of filmic depictions of violence, so in that sense I will say that the makeup designers are the real heroes here. They took all the best lessons of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and made it more nihilistic and bloody. But the goal isn’t really realism—instead, NFE movies, along with a lot of the much-maligned (but much-loved by me!) "torture-porn" sub-genre in the US, seem to be asking what tends to be actually very technical, formal questions. How much extreme violence can you cram into a film? How do you build narrative/plot/character around it? How real can something look before it looks "un-real" or surreal, right? The excessive visual intensity of horror films really pushed the boundaries of cinema, and that’s why they’re behind so many of the medium’s important technical innovations (re: Carpenter’s stop-motion animatronics in The Thing (1982), or the gnarly violence of Irreversible (Noé 2002) that inspired Drive (Winding Refn 2011). More classically, Italian giallo and horror by Argento, Fulci, etc. uses buckets of blood but isn’t really very realistic. Or particularly frightening. But they are often genuinely disturbing, and do have a lot to say about trauma and psychic violence, and the artifice of that is crucial. Artificiality seems absolutely necessary in making representations "real," or to make them matter. Because without that hint of artifice, it loses the claim to being art, and so just seems like a slightly watered-down document of real life.

For instance, I think a lot about watching Faces of Death as a kid, and like most healthy adults I watch probably 50-100 videos on youtube and elsewhere daily (full disclosure: I have an office job). A lot of videos I end up watching are accidents/disasters, and it hits me once in awhile that I am basically watching a snuff film. But I almost never have the same reaction that I do to violence depicted in a horror film.

In raw videos of violence, you usually can’t see much detail, there’s not much dramatic tension or build-up. The terror that such a video may induce depends on its verisimilitude, its truth-claim. So, my armchair explanation of the distinction between that and horror is that "genre" itself—as a practice/form/reading and writing protocol—acts as a focalizer for violence/terror by centering it and making the viewer pay attention to it, and one of the mechanics for doing so is artificiality/artifice. There has to be some slippage between how something looks IRL and how it’s represented in order to get the full physical reaction, the "terror effect," of flinching/looking away.

As a side note, and just thinking of how this all plays out in literature, a good place to start would be Peter Straub’s short story, “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” which has a lot of similar themes as Martyrs—it’s about a rich Wall Street dude who hires two goons to punish his wife for an affair, and they basically just spend a lot of his money on alcohol and cigars and giant meals before kidnapping the Wall Street guy himself and torturing him until he is "purified" of his attachments to the world. It’s very zen. But the story is told with lots of references to “Bartleby” and so it ends up being actually really funny and disturbing at the same time. It’s a hyper-literary story, with lots of intertextual and postmodern/self-referential elements to it, which actually end up making it "horrific" in that gut-reaction kind of way, but also technically/formally innovative in its approach to the genre form.

TL: It’s funny because you say I’m trying to get you to talk about art, and then you say you want to talk about horror movies instead. Which is a distinction people either don’t notice at all—genre vs art—or want to make too hard—like "that's not art, it's genre!"  Personally, I feel like genre as something that is like historically and, for lack of a better way to put it, spacially or architecturally demarcated and people don't want to acknowledge the history of that form. Like what makes genre do its job is something very material. It’s different than something like "art" because it creates literal gaps (narrative or bodily or between orienting or focalizing modes, as you say) in a way that is totally insane and illogical, one might even say pointlessly nihilistic. It doesn’t conceptualize or complete or accomplish or craft what it set out to because its conventions already literally mean it can’t. Poetry or art tends to want to see itself, on the other hand, as aesthetically or morally superior in some way. Would you say that genre feels like something separate to poetry or do you think the two are necessarily related—genre in poetry is possible for instance, as is poetry as genre, I guess. Both are kind of boring though.

AW: Well, there is a pretty huge history of SF poetry. And horror poetry too. Lovecraft has a book of Cthulhu myth poems that are probably not very good as poems but are also, on the other hand, batshit insane so I guess they are actually kind of good. If only poetry had taken its cue from Lovecraft rather than Eliot or Pound…he’s definitely the more interesting racist modernist. That would actually be a good alternative history SF novel—everything is the same, except Lovecraft is our Eliot. And Pound. Combined. An immortal mutant poetry god who stalks through time and space, clutching the ragged bones of his rivals, sharpened into indestructible blades. Good lord he would be unstoppable.

Anyway. Back to your question. I like what you say about how genre creates “gaps,” that it refuses to “complete or accomplish or craft what it set out to” because of the very conventions of the genre—I think that’s what draws me—as a consumer of literature/film and as a writer—to genre forms—failure is inscribed into the structure of the narrative itself. So in a way my ramblings about Lovecraft were fortuitous, because he’s a great example of a writer who fails so hard but is still amazing. He’s racist as fuck, not particularly great at the prose level, and willing to steal and recycle ideas from his best friends. And yet the genre protocols that he followed—hell, helped establish—sort of push all those problems to the forefront. All of his work, but especially his early stuff, is racist—and at one level, he’s just a garden-variety patrician New England racist who’s afraid of anyone who isn’t a WASP. On the other hand, the genre turns this fear not only into the structuring principle of the entire fucking cosmos, the most horrific thing imaginable that will stamp out the human race like bugs, but also adds to it an obsessive fear/attraction of being penetrated and transformed by tentacles. It pretty much explains itself, really, but I do think that it is precisely Lovecraft’s immersion in genre that allows him to double-down on his racism and come out the other side not necessarily un-racist (actually, maybe more racist than ever) but at least with the magnitude and nature of racism--as intertwined with gay panic, and being the obsessive structuring element of white subjectivity--being absolutely, glaringly apparent.

Does it redeem Lovecraft as a person in any way? No. Not a bit. But genre, as a set of writing and reading protocols (to borrow from Samuel Delany’s theories of genre) that focalize our approach to the work, pushes these failures of the self outward, to a radical extreme, the better to examine, diagnose, and, if we so choose, destroy them. It’s like when you get sick and you take three shots of whiskey and wrap yourself in a blanket and sweat it all out. Genre is like the whiskey, and horror is the Old Granddad of genre. And just like when you drink Old Granddad, when you read/write horror you are basically agreeing to stare into the horrible depths of your wizened and corrupt soul.

So, in that way, genre is a limit but also a productive limit. The best genre in general and horror in particular is pushing against this limit, testing it, and trying to both be faithful to some form that is recognizable and beloved but also escape those confines. It’s the only way genre can grow—and you see that in the explosion of certain experimental sub-genres of horror, such as the torture porn and New French Extremity, but even earlier in 70s horror that followed hot on the heels of New Hollywood Cinema. In writing, there’s currently a miniature boom in genre-transcending horror by people like Michael Cisco, Chesya Burke, and Thomas Ligotti, among others, well worth checking out.

And another thing (he says, waving his bottle of Old Granddad). The relationship of genre readers/writers to the failures of the text is another thing that marks genre as a practice, over and against so-called poetry. I think readers of genre expect to not agree with the works they read 100% of the time. They expect to be challenged in their beliefs, and are also willing to completely disagree with the politics of the text but still find it interesting, even necessary. There are limits, of course—for instance, there was a major controversy in the SF/F/H world recently when Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian-American speculative fiction writer, called for the World Fantasy award to stop being shaped like Lovecraft’s head. Because he was a vile racist and it made everyone generally uncomfortable to have to be handed a racist bust that harbors the soul of Lovecraft and speaks in cryptic utterances. So there was a big debate about whether or not to replace it, and it did bring out a lot of the underlying racism/racists in that community. BUT, nowhere, for even really a second, was anyone suggesting that Lovecraft shouldn’t be read. The debate was about real-world, institutional practice, and with actionable demands, to boot.

Btw, this is indeed a not-so-coded reference to the Mongrel Coalition bullshit in the poetry world, where people tend to conflate immediately a person’s writing with their politics, and also to expect some sort of purity. You don’t get that in genre—it simply wouldn’t work. Genre—particularly horror—is too invested in exploring human limits, including evil, for that to be possible. For instance, in the early Seventies Samuel Delany also wrote a horror-porn book called Hogg that wasn’t published until 1991. As Delany himself tells it, publisher Maurice Girodias, who ran the erotica/avant-garde press Olympia said that it was the only book he ever refused to publish based solely on its content. The book is about an 11 year old boy, the narrator, who becomes the sidekick/sex slave of a truck driver and professional rapist—or “rape artist—named Hogg. Hogg typically refers to the unnamed narrator as “Cocksucker,” and indulges in a lot perverse sex. The book is basically one scene after another of extreme sexual violence against women perpetrated by a crew of men who also fuck each other. This goes on pretty steadily until one character, a teen named Denny, starts to admire the dick piercing of another guy in the crew and attempts to perform the operation on himself with a rusty nail. The wound gets infected, which for some reason turns Denny into a violent, murderous, rampaging psychotic. It’s a brilliant move because it doubles down on the conceptual premise of the novel, taking the rape, incest, misogyny, and pedophilia to probably the most extreme and illogical conclusion possible. However, Denny’s psychotic rampage isn’t depicted directly—it’s shown primarily through news reports of the carnage—which would be an easy critique of the spectacularization of violence if it weren’t interlaced with Delany’s own passages spectacularized sexual violence. The book, then, contains its own critique, but it’s not a stable critique. The moral, ethical, and political lines of the book are radically unstable—indeed, one of the best and most disturbing parts of Hogg is that the pedophilia in it, on the part of the narrator, isn’t depicted as coercive—the narrator isn’t a victim through all of this, but seeks out and enjoys Hogg’s sexual perversions. In fact, the book closes with the narrator preparing to leave Hogg for another older man because he—unlike Hogg—is uncircumcised, and thus able to produce smegma, or “dick cheese” to the uninitiated.

I’ll rephrase this by referencing The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), which opens with the villain watching the original The Human Centipede: First Sequence and masturbating with sandpaper—a really horrific representation of the norm world’s fantasy of a Human Centipede—or horror in general--fan, and the whole movie plays this out with the fan kidnapping a bunch of people and an actress from the original so that he can realize the dream of actually bringing to life Human Centipede: First Sequence. Sure, on the one hand, it’s a metafictional device and metafiction is a pretty classic literary device—but too often metafiction, like irony and satire, plays a conservative function, representing the un-representable, the taboo, only to show that it’s safely contained within starkly delimited borders, within a readable and cognizable framework—a form of policing that lets the reader know that the writer doesn’t agree with what he’s representing. Works like Hogg and Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (not Human Centipede: First Sequence, mind you) do the opposite of this—they erect these borders in order to better represent what’s on the other side.

I’m not suggesting that we need more "shock" fiction or cinema or poetry—only that, to me, it seems like the best way to interrogate any concept is to look at its limits, its extreme cases, its excesses. And I suppose I’m proposing to do that through writing that, like Delany’s pornography-laced SF and Human Centipede isn’t afraid to a) totally reject the real, and, b) also isn’t afraid to be not just wrong, not just taboo, but also evil or morally corrupt. These two proposals are intertwined, because to do the latter, to really represent something negative or evil, we need to be able to inhabit a subject position that might not be our own, that we might—of all things—disagree with or find repugnant. To use genre not to “understand” each other or any other sort of liberally-tolerancy bullshit, but to better illuminate what’s probably the essential part of our world: the grotesque and profane.