CHAPTER FIFTEEN
W. Scott Poole
“I’m the person least in need of counseling in this entire fucking state.”
So claims Rustin Cohle in the enormously popular, deeply chilling, first season of HBO’s hit series True Detective.
Not everyone would agree.
Cohle’s precise, systemic nihilism makes him an unlikely television hero. He spends much of the series arguing a deeply unsettling worldview. He succeeds so admirably that many viewers found the optimistic rejoinder to Cohle’s ideas in the last episode soporific in relation to the rest of the series intensity.
“I’d consider myself a realist” he tells his dubious partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), “but in philosophical terms I’d call myself a pessimist.” Marty somewhat reluctantly prods Cohle to explain what that means and Cohle responds that, “it means I’m bad at parties.” Guffawing, Marty says, “let me tell you, you ain’t great outside of parties either.”
Rust Cohle’s philosophy goes further than the tradition of modern pessimism. In episode 3 of the series, entitled “The Locked Room,” he suggests that the eyes of the dead contain a revelation, the sudden discovery that they are waking up from “the dream of being a person.” Cohle understands human experiences, even the most intensely felt emotional experiences, as a series of chemical, electrical, and molecular processes. In fact, for Cohle, our subjective experience of ourselves as persons, and certainly as individuals, represents nothing more than the elaborate neurological mapping necessary for our brains to process experience. We are not persons. We are our own metaphors.1
Most critics and culture watchers agree that Matthew McConaughey’s delivery of these ideas from the far reaches of speculative philosophy gave tremendous depth to a show that already offered a many-layered blend of neo-Gothic weird fiction with the police procedural. The series, not surprisingly given its conflation of classic horror fiction with true crime narratives, deals explicitly with the blurred boundaries of madness, sanity, and moral evil. In fact, we are left pondering several times throughout the season whether or not Cohle himself bears responsibility for some or all of the murders; whether his “nihilism” has taken on its popularly understood dimensions in his character and exploded into a murderous war against life itself.2
The DSM would diagnose Rust Cohle with major depressive disorder. Indeed, Cohle’s case falls into the category of “severe with psychotic features” given that a focus on “death” and “nihilism” is integral to his philosophy. In this medicalized reading of Cohle, his worldview masks a worship of the death impulse, a desire to negate the premises and possibility of life itself. He does not have a philosophy. He displays a set of symptoms.3
The horror tradition, especially the “new horror” that began to appear in the late 1960s, has been described from a psychoanalytic perspective as both “nihilistic” and “paranoiac.” Horror fandom recognizes this and sometimes celebrates the appellation. It’s easy to find online fan lists of “the worst [best] nihilistic films available.”4
Nihilism has a peculiar history in relation to concepts of sanity. It is perhaps the only philosophical position, not excluding solipsism, that has invited diagnosis. One of its first uses in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in John Charles Bucknill’s 1854 Criminal Lunacy. In an odd juxtaposition, the author claimed that a devotion to “rationalism” in Continental philosophy has led to “an absolute nihilism.”5
The most interesting early effort to ponder nihilism in relation to mental health appears in Cotard’s syndrome. Named for the French alienist who classified it in 1880, the malady includes a range of symptoms from believing oneself dead, to the idea that one’s internal organs have disintegrated or, most important in philosophical terms, the belief that one does not exist as a person.
Called Le délire des négation or “the delirium of negation,” Cotard’s syndrome does not appear in the current DSM and its symptoms are placed under the rubric of delusional disorders in DSM-5 297.1. The World Health Organization identifies it as symptomatic of a larger disorder. Psychiatry currently regards it as a set of “nihilistic delusions” that accompany schizophrenia. A brief discussion of Cotard’s in the summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Neuropsychiatry called it “an infrequent condition with monothematic, nihilistic delusions” that can “lower the threshold for violence against others.” Hello, Rust … or so it might seem.6
Subjective rejection of the subjective experience of personhood has several implications for the examination of mental health and horror tropes in popular culture. First, horror’s tendency to suggest nihilism as a deeper wisdom about the world jostles with the “positive psychology” trend that began in the 1990s. This movement discouraged a theoretical and contextual construction of mental illness and focused instead on behavioral modification leading to ill-defined notions of happiness. This, William Davies has argued, represented a larger philosophical change in the goal of psychiatric care. Efforts at normalization gave way to therapies to promote happiness.7
Second, the medicalization of nihilism ignores an outré, if well-regarded, tradition in speculative philosophy that regards nihilism as something other than a manifestation of a Freudian death drive or as Lacan’s notion of attraction and repulsion to the unknown. Several important texts, all of them with explicit links to the horror genre, introduce nihilism as a basic premise for understanding the world rather than a symptom.8
Finally, we find a contradiction within popular horror texts themselves over the nature, or ephemerality, of a human person. Some horror tales purposefully avoid the logic of their own self-representation amid flumes of gore and frightening suggestions about the nature of human experience. The demands of commodity production and enthusiastic audience reception frequently prevent films in this allegedly “nihilistic” genre from asking deeper questions about the reality and stability of the self in relation to the larger world of time and things.
The first point requires relatively little argument. The popularity of horror as a genre has actually waxed and waned in relation to American optimism and social crisis. The golden age of the new horror opened in the cataclysmic year of 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and closed in 1984 with Nightmare on Elm Street. The 1990s proved a slough for both cinematic and literary horror in an era of economic boom and an atmosphere in which neoconservative intellectuals referred to “the end of history” with a sense of elation, insisting that the end of the Cold War meant that democratic reform and free market liberalism would prosper together. Only after 9/11 did a reinvigorated horror genre appear, not only in film but also television, video games, literature, and graphic novels.
In recent years, the horror genre has become more intricately hardwired into nihilism as a set of ideas rather than simply creating a series of representations that produce a nihilistic affect. A philosophical literature, doubtful of the stability of personhood and the necessity of normalization in human behavior, has used the horrific fantastic as a vehicle and reflective tradition. These efforts self-consciously follow the small collection of tales and short novels of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who asserted that horror must have a “cosmic” dimension that creates “a profound sense of dread.”9
Lovecraft doubted the substantiality of personhood and believed that representations of emotional affect and even personal belief systems are epiphenomena that human beings engage in to avoid the universe’s profound lack of interest in their affairs. “Sensations,” no larger framework of meaning or even systems shaped by human intellect, are primarily responsible for human values, he told James Morton in 1930.10
The horror tales that flowed from this worldview mythologized Lovecraft’s philosophical premises by creating monstrous alien gods, “Great Old Ones,” with no particular interest in human beings. He made his protagonists purposefully uninteresting, in part because their fate is either a welcomed ignorance or, more often, a voyage across what Lovecraft called “the black seas of infinity” that ends in questions about the possibility of human consciousness and meaning.11
A large number of recent works have followed Lovecraft in using the horror genre itself as a premise for nihilism. These works have included Eugene Thacker’s three-volume Horror of Philosophy series, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror, Benn Woodard’s Slime Dynamics, and Michel Houellebecq’s older work H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.
Thomas Ligotti’s 2010 The Conspiracy Against the Human Race perhaps represents the most sustained and straightforward case for nihilism as a mood and even an aesthetic in line with what the best of the horror genre has proposed about humanity’s predicament. Ligotti’s short stories are deeply philosophical, aesthetically sophisticated and are perhaps the truest heir of Lovecraft’s work. In his nonfiction that argues a pessimistic antinatalism, he also offers a powerful target for those in the psychiatric profession who would seek to medicalize nihilism as a system of a larger disorder.
Understanding Ligotti requires some definition of the personhood he denies. He’s not a simple determinist (as Lovecraft sometimes seemed to be). He does assert that we have a consciousness but sees that fact as the primary tragedy, evolution’s “single calamitous event” and “the parent of horrors.” Consciousness acts as “a parent of horrors” in terms of giving us a self-awareness of suffering that makes many experiences utterly unendurable while pushing us toward a creation of a notion of “self” that anchors us against the inescapability of death but also makes us aware of our impending demise.12
Consciousness also acts as a parent to the genre of horror narrative. Ligotti, building off some of Lovecraft’s comments in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, suggests that an awareness of the supernatural comes from the human act of stepping outside of nature, the paradox of having a consciousness wholly determined by nature that imagines it has an integrated self-exercising free will. The very experience of the uncanny comes from a sudden realization of death, that we’ll all at least find a personal resolution someday to the philosophical problem of “why is there something rather than nothing.”
Horror tales depend on the paradox of belief in a fully intact self. Inanimate puppets that move, the undead that come to life, indescribable Lovecraftian horrors with a profound indifference to the human, manage something more dreadful than suspending the laws of nature. They suggest to us, Ligotti writes, “that we are not what we think we are” and derail our efforts at repressing, denying, and sometimes asserting with all the force that comes with lack of conviction that we are Persons with a Destiny living a Life that, the revealing and paradoxical joke explains, “is better than the alternative.” Horror suggests that we are perhaps a broken, self-aware mechanism, an accident, a sarcasm. This can elicit an uncanny response in which our disposition begins to display symptoms reminiscent of Cotard’s and, if we express the ideas too loudly and to a concerned medical professional, may give lead to our diagnosis.13
The notion of Cotard’s syndrome as a delusion, or the more recent conception of its particularities as symptomatic of schizophrenia, assumes that sanity requires us to subscribe to an optimistic philosophical view about not only the nature of life and of death but the nature of the self. Psychoanalyst David Livingstone Smith has described this premise by noting that his field “works on the assumption that the healthy and the viable are at one with the highest in personal terms.” Nihilism thus becomes “viewed as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter.”14
Popular culture, particularly in the realm of horror, enables us to play with such ideas without risking the terror of the disappearing self, the lurking fear of being a puppet unaware of its truest fate. Human beings, even when they expose themselves to horror, work terribly hard to avoid drawing any ultimate conclusions about personhood. We are, Ligotti claims, exceedingly careful that we “do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms.”15
Ligotti’s work, per True Detective writer and showrunner Nic Pizzolato, proved especially pertinent for the series. He has said that in Ligotti’s “nightmare lyricism” he found a new definition of “the hardboiled detective” and a way to think about horror in which the monster and the self are interchangeable. However, the series did end on that off-key optimistic note, something of a conversion on the part of Cohle from his allegedly unhealthy state of mind even though this change in worldview made even less narrative than philosophical sense.16
True Detective has not been alone in using themes from the gothic and horror traditions to secure a kind of ultimate victory for the triumphant human personality that sees survival of the person, and the species, as the primary, ineluctable value. Horror, especially in its cinematic form, has safeguarded the sublime (quotes implied) nature of the human person. In fact, those subgenres that tend to steer clear from the “Hollywood ending,” that are supposedly the most daring in their willingness to kill the characters we empathize with, are actually the least nihilistic. They pretend to test the borders of our optimism and then either save the hero or turn their horrific death into Nietzschian tragedy (precisely what the philosopher believed gave meaning to human suffering). We often partake communally in cinematic terror agreeing that our most deeply held values about human life and personhood are at risk; how else do we explain the nervous thrill in a packed audience waiting to see a particularly harrowing horror film? However, we risk a peek at the void only to have these commodities powerfully reaffirm what for most human beings provides their core of absolute meaning, that they are a person and that it’s better that they are than that they are not.
Zombie tales offer an intriguing example. The zombie film, particularly in the hands of George Romero, has frequently offered piquant social commentary, challenging various aspects of American experience. Kim Paffenroth makes a convincing argument that Romero’s oeuvre has challenged classism, militarism, consumerism, racism, and misogyny with ever greater perspicuity.17
The zombie seemingly offers an ultimate image of nihilism, a monster that sacrileges the very notion of a stable human person. Vampires transcend human limitations while other traditional creatures of film and folklore represent humans transformed as various were-creatures and witches. Monsters of cosmic dread shore up the boundaries of the human by presenting us with a threatening Other that displays no human characteristics, reaffirming the meaningfulness and exceptional nature of human experience.
Zombies are animated rotting corpses. Worse, their decaying flesh suggests they have sloughed off personhood and yet continue to mill about, blasphemies of our need to be, and act, as persons. They sometimes follow the impersonal routine they pursued before death, most famously in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when we are told that zombies are stumbling to the mall because “they just remember that they want to be there.”18
However, social critique in the zombie genre, even the most radical, does not question the basic premise of human existence. Romero’s films in particular have moved close to an identification of humans and zombies, the suggestion that “we are them and they are us” to such a degree that, in at least two of his major films, audience sympathies are directed toward the zombie itself. However, it’s notable that even in these cases we are not encouraged to face the possibility that we are chemical epiphenomena or even to see the zombie as a kind of postmodern “Danse Macabre.” Romero’s sympathetic zombies are on their way to becoming human, wakening up to the wonders of personhood, usually evidenced as communicative skills and autonomy.19
Our most popular current zombie fictions don’t even bother with wondering about zombie personhood and depend heavily on what Kyle William Bishop calls the “invasion sub-genre.” These apocalyptic and postapocalyptic scenarios center on a small group of diverse survivors with varied personalities, backgrounds, and skills that allow viewers to identify with at least one of these characters. The personhood of such characters, both valorized and sentimentalized, radically contrasts with the undifferentiated hordes that threaten efforts to rebuild the world before the coming of the zombie menace.
A wonderfully entertaining example appears in the gun-toting partisans of humanity’s survival in the television (and comic) series The Walking Dead. Our heroes are driven not only by the desire to survive and the assumption that this is an unmitigated good; they want to recreate “normal” human experience, which, in the television series, recently materialized as a first-world, indeed, suburban experience (a sort of gated community in fact!) under threat. The spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, has raised our expectations further. Not only does the zombie not call into question personhood, the human spirit will struggle to maintain rather traditional notions of family, even as it plays with the soap opera and talk show conventions of the “dysfunctional family” trying to “make it work.”
We fans, and I am a fan of all these fictions, are tricked; an ideological prank is played. We are shown corrupted flesh that has lost all semblance of humanity, indeed to such a degree that we are asked to question the boundaries of the human and nonhuman (thus the much discussed, though entirely obvious, irony of the title “The Walking Dead”). However, filmmakers and showrunners explore the terror of such a narrative to, at least in the final frame, remind us of some notion of collective humanity. Even the bleakest of such visions—here we think immediately of Danny Boyle’s important 28 Days Later—avoids what Lovecraft calls “the sheer artistic nightmare” and “take(s) a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare.”20
Ironically, the supposedly staid, conservative 1950s produced one of the most startling conceptions of the human self to appear in horror film. Generally regarded as a critique of 1950s conformity or a comment on Cold War paranoia, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) borrows such tropes but also burrows deeply into our ideas about personhood and the value of human experience. Most distressing for some viewers even today, the film can be read as taking the side of the invading body snatchers, whose creation of empty pod puppets triumphs over the conventionalities of sentiment. As Ligotti points out in his reading of the film, becoming a pod person really does not seem so bad in comparison to the emotional dilemmas and the malignant narcissism of the male lead and some of his fellow townsfolk.21
So why does the film end with Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) screaming in traffic a warning that no one at first attends? What’s McCarthy’s interesting example of 1950s male hysteria about?
The “body snatchers” are not coming to torture us, kill us, or rule over us. They are simply creating homunculi, organic mannequins and fleshy puppets. The possibility of this in the narrative, and its seductive appeal, calls into question the possibility of an individuated human self. How different, really, are the pod folk from the daily round of human experience in which, the film constantly reminds us, feels both tortured and attenuated by “all that’s going on in the world?” The difference is that the parent of horrors, personal consciousness, has ceased to haunt their minds. The “body snatchers” are the trust exorcists. Rather than giving the victims of Ligotti’s “conspiracy against the human race” a dubious sense of inviolable self, they free them from the haunted consciousness.
In the last moment of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, evidence of this conspiracy prompts the authorities to act. However, credit goes to filmmaker Don Siegel for an ending so unlike most 1950s sci-fi horror, in which the army and the scientific community unite successfully against the threat. We’re left wondering if Dr. Bennell and the rest of the human race will continue with their masquerade of essentialist selfhood or not.
Nihilism of the self lives at the roots of the horror tradition, both in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and in filmmakers’ increasing desire to turn terror into despair in post-1968 horror films and literature. However, even in the far reaches of experimental horror culture, the self has remained an invincible citadel while the notion of a universe firmly on our side has been bloodied and gored into unrecognizability. In this commitment to an essential value, the horror genre has sided with prevailing psychiatric opinion that to suffer the loss of self signifies the truly unbearable monstrousness, a delusion that must be cured or, in your average zombie, serial murderer, or possession drama, destroyed or exorcized.
So much in the horror tradition acts then as a surprising bromide, appealing to us because it offers danger to the self in order to rescue it. The human self, or at least the idea of it, can survive even as human bodies are gored, possessed, tortured, and turned into rotting versions of their former owners. When you consume such material you are a person reaffirming your unbreachable self. You’re not a pod person; your true self can escape the demon that possesses you; you can save the last bullet to preserve that precious personhood. A true detective can decide that stars show evidence that all is not void (rather than the actual astronomical corpse lights they are). Thinking otherwise might require a diagnosis and a program of treatment. Don’t you, after all, want to feel better?
Notes
1. The neurological mapping notion of consciousness has been most fully developed by Michael S. A. Graziano in Consciousness and the Social Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2. Philosopher Paul J. Ennis described both the influences on Cohle’s ideas and his own understanding of how they influenced the character’s representation in a February 2014 interview. See Matt Patches, “Ask a Philosopher: What’s Up with True Detectives Rust Kohle?” in Vulture: Devouring Culture, Feb. 28, 2014, accessed December 14, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/philosopher-assesses-true-detective-characters-rust-cohle-marty-hart.html#.
3. This essay bypasses the controversy over the growing collapse of symptom into syndrome (and vice versa) in the APA and in various revisions of the DSM. Philosophical nihilism has, at different times, been read as both symptom and syndrome, though most recent tendencies are to view it as a sign of a deeper malady. Hannah Decker examines the controversy in The Making of the DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4. Han-Yu Huang, Horror and Evil in the Name of Enjoyment: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Ideology (Bern: Peter Lang Press, 2007), 38.
5. “Depersonalization disorder” might be considered the fruit of a solipsistic worldview, though it’s not an exact match, bearing some relation to so-called “out of body” experiences. See Depersonalization Disorder, DSM-IV 300.6, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. Nihilism features a generally peculiar taxonomic history. Its most widespread use in the 19th century occurred in relation to the political situation in czarist Russia after the publication of Mikhail Bakunin’s “Reaction in Germany” (1842) and its more widespread usage after the publication of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” (1862). Freud did once make an interesting connection between the symptoms of paranoia and the attitude of modern philosophy, but this stray comment has never been fully developed in medical literature. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 399n. 7.
6. Cotard’s syndrome is described in detail in a report following an August of 1892 “congress of French alienists” that took place at Blois. The modern discussion of the term that uses “nihilism” as a general description of symptoms appears in Hans Debruyne et al., “Cotard’s Syndrome,” Journal of Psychiatry 2, no. 1 (July 2011): 67. See also “We Are All Zombies Anyway” in the “Letters” section of Journal of Neuropsychiatry 4, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 21.
7. See William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso Books, 2015), 174–179, 260–261.
8. See Jacque Lacan, chapter IVX, “Love of One’s Neighbor, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
9. H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre (London: Gollancz Press, 2011), 425, 6.
10. See David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, eds., H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to James P, Morton (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011), 220–221.
11. Lovecraft referred to human consciousness as “a momentary incident … the life, images and thoughts of mankind are of the utmost triviality and ridiculousness.” See H.P. Lovecraft Selected Letters III (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House), 261.
12. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 31, 51, 60.
13. Ligotti notes that psychiatry has tended to see speculative pessimism as “a maladaptation”; see Conspiracy, 44.
14. David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolution of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007).
15. Ligotti, Conspiracy, 29.
16. I see no reason to engage with the absurd discussion, picked up by several major new outlets, that Pizolatto “plagiarized Ligotti” in True Detective. This accusation appeared five months after he talked at length to the Wall Street Journal about the influence of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race on his ideas. The claim rests on a notion of plagiarism that works for college exams and research papers but not the nature of writing fiction and shows no awareness of influence, pastiche, and homage.
17. Kim Paffenroth, The Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).
18. Dawn of the Dead, dir. George Romero (1978).
19. The increasingly self-aware “Bub” in Day of the Dead (1985) began this trend. Romero continued to explore the idea in Land of the Dead (2005).
20. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror,” 446.
21. Ligotti, Conspiracy, 91.