In contact with the abject
May 19, 2025 12:50 AM Subscribe
The grotesque body’s position as neither one thing nor another taps into human anxieties about our fundamental nature and our place in the world. We see the boundary between us and not-us—life and death, human and animal, animate and inanimate—as inherent and inviolable, yet the grotesque body bridges that gap. It is too familiar for us to reject, yet too horrifying for us to accept. This is a very powerful image. It transcends the order of the world and forces us to confront concepts that we might prefer to ignore—that we are animals, for example, or that every one of us is a corpse in the making. Life is fundamentally grotesque because it is itself a transitional state. from Searching for the Feminine Grotesque [Typebar]
I expected some discussion of Titane and its director, Julia Ducournau.
The character of Mary Jo Elliott in Nope seemed to strike some folks in this direction as well.
posted by mykescipark at 8:26 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
The character of Mary Jo Elliott in Nope seemed to strike some folks in this direction as well.
posted by mykescipark at 8:26 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]
I was surprised, given the mention of The Substance, that the essay didn't reflect back on that other exploration of the feminine grotesque in the pursuit of youthful beauty, Death Becomes Her. It's comedy, and maybe more importantly it's star-studded 1990s comedy, so there's only so far it will go--but the question of "how do I deal with a body that is rapidly decaying, twisted and broken, missing a big chunk of abdomen thanks to a shotgun blast?" powers so much of the fun.
Still though, as I'm sitting here trying to think through other examples--Saint Maud, the spugna in her shoe, piercing the flesh, does that count? I don't think it does because that's injury rather than a real boundary issue between outside and inside?--I really do think she has a point that this is under-explored.
posted by mittens at 9:29 AM on May 19 [4 favorites]
Still though, as I'm sitting here trying to think through other examples--Saint Maud, the spugna in her shoe, piercing the flesh, does that count? I don't think it does because that's injury rather than a real boundary issue between outside and inside?--I really do think she has a point that this is under-explored.
posted by mittens at 9:29 AM on May 19 [4 favorites]
I enjoyed this, and the characterized arc of the rise and fall in American horror with that peak in the 80s-90s feels really spot on. It's odd at a surface level to think of the 80s—not a decade I think of as being exactly culturally progressive or non-misogynistic on the whole—as being a stand-out decade for exploring feminine and non-cismale ideas. But the ground at that time for really playing with visual form in practical effects in horror (a genre that I *also* don't really think of as particularly progressive on the whole in the 80s, cf. the constant theme of varyingly naked conventionally attractive young women mostly featuring as fodder for a one-two punch of sex object and murder victim) does nonetheless seem like it was about as rich as could be for those who wanted to actually explore that. The skills and materials were there, the horror audience was there, people being able to jump in with a non-bog-standard pitch would have been able to do so more easily than ever, and the actual practical effects issues were a matter of hands-on ingenuity and DIY-able invention in a way that got stripped back a lot by the rise of CGI as a dominant solution.
One thing I found myself thinking of a lot while reading this is (thematic spoilery thoughts ahoy) Annihilation, more the book than the film though both do play with the idea of grotesquerie. A lot of my disappointment with the (otherwise really pretty great!) film compared to the book is how much the film fails to capitalize on and bring in the book's constant confrontation of the uncanny and transitional. There are foregrounded elements of it that still show up in the film, but they feel more glancing or flattened out or passive—the prior expedition footage of whatever squiggling around in the squaddie's belly is visceral, but a bit more parasitic horror than presented as a change of his own body; the aggressive hybridization of the flowers is on-theme but pretty abstract; Tessa Thompson's transformation late in the film is almost too dreamy and gentle to land; the screaming bear-monster bit gets a little caught up in the duller tropey conflict that precedes it. Ultimately I feel like the movie flirts with but never really fully embraces the uncanniness of the book. The final, mostly-wordless sequence at the end with the main character and her mirroring doppelganger gets part of the way there but it still remains something of a hero vs. other setup rather than an internalization of change and horror at one's own compromised flesh.
Whereas the book is utterly steeped in that sense of an inescapable, choking atmosphere of the uncanny, of the invasive transitional force of the place, from the main character's mixed horror at and fascination with the strangeness and mutability of Area X to her internal struggle (and again mix of horror and fascination) with what that place may be doing to her body. There is an immediate and constant sense of an uninvited but inevitable, unavoidable strangeness on their expedition that Vandermeer never lets idle but also doesn't wield like a clumsy antagonist in the story, something to be fought with and conquered so much as to be perceived and coped with and in the end in some sense accepted if not welcomed.
There is a weirder, harder-to-make version of a film adaptation (honestly I think a couple short seasons, really, capturing the whole trilogy) that could focus more and better on those themes, take more time with the interiority of the protagonist as a self-aware subject of change rather than a character fulfilling various external narrative beats; Natalie Portman, as good as she is in the movie that was made, is very much fulfilling the brief of conventionally attractive woman occupying a horror space rather than the grotesquerie that is looming (if mostly in anticipation) over the course of the first book. The rest of the trilogy digs in on these ideas from several other angles and present additional significant bits of exploration of that idea of female characters confronting the spectre of grotesquerie, both natural (cancer and mortality) and supernatural (doppelgangers, radical biological transformation) and I'd love to see that actually made to work on screen to full effect.
posted by cortex at 10:22 AM on May 19 [5 favorites]
One thing I found myself thinking of a lot while reading this is (thematic spoilery thoughts ahoy) Annihilation, more the book than the film though both do play with the idea of grotesquerie. A lot of my disappointment with the (otherwise really pretty great!) film compared to the book is how much the film fails to capitalize on and bring in the book's constant confrontation of the uncanny and transitional. There are foregrounded elements of it that still show up in the film, but they feel more glancing or flattened out or passive—the prior expedition footage of whatever squiggling around in the squaddie's belly is visceral, but a bit more parasitic horror than presented as a change of his own body; the aggressive hybridization of the flowers is on-theme but pretty abstract; Tessa Thompson's transformation late in the film is almost too dreamy and gentle to land; the screaming bear-monster bit gets a little caught up in the duller tropey conflict that precedes it. Ultimately I feel like the movie flirts with but never really fully embraces the uncanniness of the book. The final, mostly-wordless sequence at the end with the main character and her mirroring doppelganger gets part of the way there but it still remains something of a hero vs. other setup rather than an internalization of change and horror at one's own compromised flesh.
Whereas the book is utterly steeped in that sense of an inescapable, choking atmosphere of the uncanny, of the invasive transitional force of the place, from the main character's mixed horror at and fascination with the strangeness and mutability of Area X to her internal struggle (and again mix of horror and fascination) with what that place may be doing to her body. There is an immediate and constant sense of an uninvited but inevitable, unavoidable strangeness on their expedition that Vandermeer never lets idle but also doesn't wield like a clumsy antagonist in the story, something to be fought with and conquered so much as to be perceived and coped with and in the end in some sense accepted if not welcomed.
There is a weirder, harder-to-make version of a film adaptation (honestly I think a couple short seasons, really, capturing the whole trilogy) that could focus more and better on those themes, take more time with the interiority of the protagonist as a self-aware subject of change rather than a character fulfilling various external narrative beats; Natalie Portman, as good as she is in the movie that was made, is very much fulfilling the brief of conventionally attractive woman occupying a horror space rather than the grotesquerie that is looming (if mostly in anticipation) over the course of the first book. The rest of the trilogy digs in on these ideas from several other angles and present additional significant bits of exploration of that idea of female characters confronting the spectre of grotesquerie, both natural (cancer and mortality) and supernatural (doppelgangers, radical biological transformation) and I'd love to see that actually made to work on screen to full effect.
posted by cortex at 10:22 AM on May 19 [5 favorites]
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posted by HearHere at 6:02 AM on May 19 [2 favorites]