Session 15: Evil in Cinema and Media

Session 15: Evil in Cinema and Media
Chair: Tonya Broyles

The Language of Evil: Popular Versus ‘Higher’ Culture
Neil Forsyth
Université de Lausanne, Switzerland

I have previously claimed that as a noun ‘evil’ serves no purpose other than to increase itself. As an adjective, however, to call someone or something evil does say something worth saying, even if the word has been highjacked by the Holocaust. What I now want to explore is one restricted aspect of our use of the word. It is common enough in low-level journalism, the world in which murder is perpetrated by ‘fiends’ and most criminals worth writing about, whether convicted or not, are ‘evil’, a word often splashed in capitals across the front page. In more interesting ways, it is used with less vulgarity in popular detective fiction, including television drama, a world which attracts many of the best writers of our time, and some of the biggest budgets. But in otherwise similar literary contexts the sense of the word soon evaporates when more rigorous critical tools are applied to it. Some of the first readers of Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, for example, a kind of Gothic ghost story, denounced it as ‘evil’. These opinions soon came to seem beside the point, and the tale itself to be out of range for such a vocabulary. This critical gap between popular journalism and higher literary contexts, this division within our culture, is what I should now like to explore.
There are important and popular exceptions, literary contexts in which the language of evil is common enough. The literature of fantasy, as it has come to be known (Tolkien, Lewis, Peake), is the most obvious site in which a struggle of good and evil is seen to be taking place. Yet even here there are some surprises. Fiona Shaw, in commenting on the BBC version of Peake’s Gormenghast (2000) in which she acted, says that ‘there is a lot of talk of Steerpike as a sort of journey of evil, but that doesn’t interest me at all about Steerpike. I think it is in a way the incredibly fluctuating class system of the past 200 years that is being very honestly described by Mervyn Peake’. The critical move Shaw makes here is typical of those who see all talk of good and evil as a way to avoid the politics and history of genuine conflict. The language of ‘the evil empire’ or the ‘axis of evil’ deflects attention from the faults of American foreign policy.
The actor who actually plays Steerpike, however, differs. He has obviously had to reflect on the issue a lot. He thinks of his character as lonely and sexually frustrated, and explains his behaviour as the result of child-abuse. Yet he also makes another move that is common in discussion of ‘evil’: evil people do not think of themselves as evil, he thinks. Hitler ‘laughed and he smiled and he loved his relations. He loved dogs and played with children, and thought he was a great, great man…you do’. This is almost a necessary move if the actor wants to avoid becoming simply a melodramatic villain. But shifting the ground from the literature of fantasy to real history is also a common move. Hitler as a personality, Nazism as a political phenomenon, are almost unavoidable in such discussions. Indeed, as Stephen Fry points out in the same context, ‘Mervyn Peake was an official war artist … and was one of the first people to see Belsen, in other words, was one of the first people to see a new kind of evil that mankind had not yet realized it was capable of’. One sees what he means here, and one sympathizes. Such language is very common in speaking of the Holocaust, especially the move to using ‘evil’ as a noun. And yet Peake was obviously not one of the first people to see Belsen. He was just one of the first outsiders. And Fry’s statement begs the question of how ‘new’ was the Holocaust. Potential confusions of this kind arise wherever the language of ‘evil’, or the Holocaust itself, enter critical discourse.
Some historians have argued that making the Holocaust such a special evil removes it from the possibility of explanation (see for example, Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 2001). In the same way the move to the world of fantasy literature, or to a metaphysical battle of good and evil, is often seen to preclude understanding. Nonetheless the move itself is a common one, and worthy of reflection or explanation in its own right. Indeed it is worth considering that Tolkien, Lewis and Peake were all three reacting to the events of the Second World War, that they were in some sense accounting for what happened even without referring to it. They were not writing allegory — they were very firm about that — , and they were obviously not writing history, but they were nonetheless constructing literary forms that could, they seem to have felt, enable understanding of that conflict. As for many of the participants, this war seemed to reproduce some archetypal conflict, even something like Milton’s war in heaven. It is not merely a joke when Peake’s Steerpike calls the pet monkey ‘Satan’.
Where else is my restricted investigation of the language of evil going to lead? Some of the preliminary work for my project, but in very different contexts, has already been published in my books on the devil (The Old Enemy) and Milton (The Satanic Epic), both from Princeton UP. But there are problems, I now think, with the relevant chapters in those books, especially the ones on the language of apocalyptic religion, which is where I located the origins of the concept of the devil, and of evil. I want to rework those chapters with a new focus: how close are the origins of Christianity to the world of popular culture (very close I argued before, but now I want to make the conclusion explicit in this new context), and are the Miltonic inventions similar in any ways to the world of more popular literature and fantasy? At the level of language, Milton does distinguish between ‘evil’ as noun and as adjective, although he does not always make it easy to tell which is which: Hell is ‘A universe of death, which God by curse/ Created evil, for evil only good’, and the first two words of that second line (II 623) invoke an inescapable but heretical possibility. Milton knew that in our ordinary world, the confusion of noun and adjective is rife, and exploits the confusion for his poetic, political and theological ends. But can we retain much of that kind of close literary analysis when we turn to the more popular usage? That is part of what I should like to explore. Does Milton’s explicit deployment of the relevant terms — hate, sin, envy, revenge, as well as ‘evil’ and devil — throws any light on how the literature of fantasy works, if only by contrast?
Some of my other research has been published as contributions to the work of our Wickedness.Net group. But the essay on ‘Evil: Grandeur and Nothingness’ published in the Margaret Breen collection oscillated without much thought, I now see, between popular and higher culture. I should now like to push those reflections a little further by making use of an informal discussion with Anthony Scher. In preparing to play Macbeth at the RSC in 2001, he went to interview two criminals. He explains on the DVD version that while one of them deliberately avoided confronting what he had done, the other had thought deeply about his crime, and enabled Scher to develop his own extremely powerful reading of the part. He managed to make a direct connection between the lowest level of popular culture and the very highest. This example, together with the remarks quoted above about the BBC Gormenghast, shows that some of the most intelligent recent discussion of evil has come not from philosophers but from actors. And this helps us understand why the young man who played Steerpike felt the need to try to imagine Hitler from inside, as a man who did not think of himself as evil. As I argued in my essay on Macbeth, what Shakespeare does is to invite us inside his villain, and so compels an intelligent actor like Scher to try to follow. But that may also provide a measure of the difference between the knowing confrontation with one’s own evil that we meet in a great writer, and the world of fantasy literature, where the villain does not know his own depth.

If we speak of evil in the sociological sense, as a force that does a person harm, this paper/workshop will explore the role of media image as holding its’ captives in a state of evil “terror” — terror that enforces, and reinforces, a state of worry, fear and insecurity.   This is a terror we exist in, day to day, without realizing its’ wicked effect upon our own self image and our actions.  And while the media image presents itself as a benevolent entity, this is truly a disguise, a kind of “Trojan Horse” we readily receive into our lives.  For the enemy within the Trojan Horse is like the enemy within the media image – we don’t know the harm it causes until it is too late.
Examining the images of everyday media, from entertainment, advertising, and our pop celebrity culture, we will look at the gap between the promise of that image and its’ real pay-off.  Somewhere in that gap, or the inability to close that gap, lies a very influential evil in our everyday lives.

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Taking their cue from such literary texts as the Bible, Richard III, Moby-Dick, and Peter Pan, filmmakers and television producers have often associated evil with disability in their works.  This conflation has led to a particularly odious and enduring stereotype: the ‘Obsessive Avenger,’ an inflamed male who relentlessly pursues those he holds responsible for his disablement, some other moral-code violation, or both with the intent of taking revenge.  Appearing in numerous productions throughout the 100+ year history of moving-image media, this monomaniacal figure reinforces some of mainstream society’s most deeply entrenched beliefs about disabled people: ‘deformity of body symbolizes deformity of soul,’ and ‘disabled people resent the nondisabled and would, if they could, destroy them,’ as Paul Longmore has observed.
Citing Althusser’s contention that the media shape our view of the world, Alison Hartnett has argued that we as media consumers need to analyze the disability-evil connection.  Her reasons are compelling: ‘If we look at the portrayals of disability that embody evil in a physical disfigurement, or any of the other stereotypes, there seems just concern as to what they say to disabled and able-bodied people about disability.  When disabled children see close screen connections between evil and their physical condition, [these representations] cannot contribute to a positive self-image.’
Following Hartnett’s lead, I propose to examine the film/TV linkage of evil and disability primarily through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s landmark 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny.’  Originally published at a time when the world was pondering the disabling consequences of war on countless soldiers, sailors, and civilians, ‘The Uncanny’ is rife with references to disability that have direct bearing on the Obsessive Avenger stereotype.  An exploration and application of Freud’s concepts as developed in ‘The Uncanny’ and related works may help expose the forces behind this seemingly deathless image and the ways it has been received.