Nature as Occulted Abyss
EXCERPT
When surveying the contemporary media landscape, there is no doubt there has been a renewed interest in 'weirdness'. From fashion, television, literature and music, popular culture seems somewhat enchanted by all things darkly inexplicable, incongruously magical and irremediably strange. Perhaps this public hunger for some sort of divine, supernatural mystery which exceeds logical or empirical explanation is a reaction to the information saturation of our times: where all categories of knowledge and modes of communication are made immediately accessible by the powers of our present day technologies. Yet, if this sociological observation has any truth to it whatsoever, then NASA's first ever image of a black-hole, released back in 2019, is a telling sign of our times: where technology, with all its purported abilities to illuminate all the world's secrets, succumbs to the infinite depths of the universe - manifesting, in its efforts to visualise the deep recesses of space, nothing more than an abstract void. Or, to put it another way, as we technologically extend ourselves out further and further into the nether regions of the cosmos, casting humanity's all seeing eye across the universe, the black-hole image represents a moment where reality seems to break with human thought and reason altogether, forcing us to recognise the limited scope of our own intellectual faculties.
Philosopher cum mystical pornographer Georges Bataille describes this particular kind of experience as a form of psychical impalement, whereby an object or moment of extreme otherness throws into question all of one's ideals and certainties by corrupting our conceptual and ontological coordinates, thusly 'impaling' one with a sense of unknowing. To be impaled is to then realise that all our rationalising concepts do not necessarily correlate to the objective nature of the world, thusly laying bare the innate insufficiencies of man's Being. Therefore, the revelation inspired by this act of 'impalement' is resolutely negative in the way "nothing is revealed, expect the unknown." It is my contention that this paradoxical turn as demonstrated by the black-hole image - where knowing regresses into unknowing and illumination mutates into occultation - is exactly where popular media finds itself today, as exemplified in this current fascination with 'weirdness'. And nowhere else is this pivot from the enlightened glow of humanism to the blackening void of the weird more firmly established than in the realm of contemporary horror.
In Mark Fisher's book The Weird and The Eerie, he defines 'the weird' as a sense of wrongness, where an entity or object is so strange "that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here." For Fisher, weird objects or entities are things which do not adhere to our systems of representation and categorisation, meaning they refuse to be easily assimilated or integrated into the symbolic fabric of our known cosmos. Unlike say vampires or zombies, whose vaguely humanoid appearance allows us to accept them more readily into our sensible vision of reality, the creatures of the weird remain eternally alien and, as result, abstract and undefinable to those that witness them. However, Fisher than goes on to say that this sense of wrongness which is initially attributed to these otherworldly entities gradually infects our own methods of perception and understanding, signalling the illusionary nature of all the concepts and frameworks we use to make sense of the world around us. Or, as Fisher simply puts it "The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate." Much like Bataille's notion of impalement, to have an encounter with the weird is to have one's faith in the powers of human reason shaken by an object or entity which exceeds our ability to comprehend it in time and space. In my view, this notion of 'weirdness' as a rupturing alien force is the defining feature of this new wave of horror cinema. From the unearthly doom metal mysticism of Panos Cosmatos's Mandy (2018); to the beguiling yet unnerving druidism of Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019); to the haunting mythological symbolism of Robert Egger's The Lighthouse (2019), it seems that contemporary horror is less interested in jump scares or gore and, instead, seems more invested in generating an unearthly sense of apprehension and dread, whereby the usual laws which govern our experience of reality are eerily suspended or gruesomely violated by some indefinable force which exists beyond the realms of man.
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