This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Forbidden Sight, part three: Summoning Demons (re: Faust and Radcliffe)

“We do not treat with Sauron, forsaken and accursed!” / “It takes more to make a king than a broken elvish blade!”

—Gandalf and the Mouth of Sauron, The Return of the King (2003)

Picking up where “Making Demons (re: Prometheus)” left off…

As demonstrated and popularized by Milton, binaries aren’t always a problem; i.e., if they’re subversive and develop Communism through camp; re: camping the usual good-versus-evil dogma, and their manmade heroes and cartographic refrains. From Amazons to knights of an earthly to hellish to Promethean origin, demons and their dark sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are legion, but dualistic; i.e., you can reclaim any demon made for war and capital (re: the Creature, the T-800 and others). But what about those summoned, and what of their fires of unknown origin to trade and (mis)treat with in inflammatory ways—especially the torturous and queer mutilative elements involved (no vampires, this time)? Let’s take a look!

“Summoning Demons” divides in two basic parts, both of which feature Faust and Ann Radcliffe, as well as Evil Dead, H.R. Giger and others (note: this is where the Demons Module really starts to abbreviate; i.e., “Summoning Demons” is less about close-reads, and more about introducing ludo-Gothic concepts you can apply through demon BDSM, yourselves—strict [the fash inquisitor aesthetic, above] or gentle):

• “Raw Deals, Impostors, the Occult and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite ‘Torture’” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Marlowe’s Faustus, Evil Dead, Smile and others—partially included in this post): Per Faustus, Smile, Evil Dead and other Gothic stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through Radcliffe’s refrain/the classic Neo-Gothic model: the demonic (damsels, detectives and demons) trifecta vis-à-vis canonical torture vs Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture.”
• “Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World” (feat. H.R. Giger and Ann Radcliffe): Lays out the poetic ability to summon the “ancient” past, then explore it through Radcliffe’s classic trifecta in increasingly subversive ways (from the xenomorph to Amazons to damsels of various kinds choosing to “imperil” themselves”)!

We’ll introduce Radcliffe’s ubiquitous, virtuous, hypocritical and hypnotic “torture sex” arguments, then slowly camp them as well (thus, her ghost: “There’s still life in the old lady, yet!”).

Raw Deals, Impostors, the Occult and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Marlowe’s Faustus, Evil Dead, Smile and others)

I am trans, thus embody a marker of stigma according to my gender as something to identify with and perform […]  As such, I feel as women classically do in such stories, wherein my lived experience is an attraction to power through strength in ways that sometimes have done me a disservice—i.e., the paradox of wanting to be near power to keep an eye on it, to want a protector or to face ones lived/imagined fears through calculated risk: the vicarious passion or exquisite torture that I call “the palliative Numinous” (a pain-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics). It’s very Promethean, but expressed through the venues and activities of the (for me) white female domestic: the home, but also the dance hall while being “on the market” as an imperiled, damaged debutante; i.e., drawn to excitement and danger though maladaptive responses that yearn nevertheless for catharsis (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

In camping the (mono)mythic blueprint, Mary Shelley’s process of detecting forbidden knowledge moved paradoxically away from and towards the “ancient” land of the gods, mise-en-abyme. She fought fire of the gods with fire of the gods, theft with theft, her own “failed” experiment a resounding success (deprived of unironic violence inside realms of mutual consent, most men don’t know how to handle a naked, pissed-off woman—especially if she’s smarter than them).

Now, we’ll delve into and towards a Gothic flame (re: Varma) that is more magically Numinous; i.e., as something to make, but also trade in, ourselves—like Magic: the Gathering cards, but also Faust and the magicians of yore dealing with Satan direct (versus making him): summoning demons through dark wishes; e.g., Matthew Lewis critiquing capital through a faux-medieval revival! Good BDSM (sex or otherwise) is about getting what you want while balancing the needs of someone else, and Lewis’ story concerned Ambrosio as someone who—like any good Gothic villain—is an insecure and greedy coward who only cares about himself and total permanent power over others (and who pays the ultimate price for it: the ignominious death by a crossdressing destroyer greater than he is).

There’s still a technological element (re: Clarke’s Law), of course; i.e., these older ideas of “magic” were simply interactions with technology as abstracted into riotous exchanges (and any outcomes of the desired result), while working against canonical forces; e.g., the Philosopher’s Stone being a poetic desire to create for all peoples—Isaac Newton being an alchemist, Galileo being put under house arrest for his own discoveries, and Groundskeeper Willie and the lads showing the people of Springfield how to have a real soccer riot (they’d call it football, but I digress). When demons are about, they’re speaking to the dualistic, Frankensteinian power of technology and desire, but also “ancient” (often tokenized berserks, left) personas going hand-in-hand:

Except, the closer you get to the imaginary past, the more magical technology becomes in neo-medieval forms (the forward-facing elements of the retro-future decaying backwards into older-appearing hauntologies that occupy the same performative zones). Power is knowledge and vice versa. Per Faust, power is a performance; i.e., unto whores in Faustian narratives wrestling with state pimps, the latter raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine by using the same ergodic/egregoric likenesses’ demonic threats of canonical vs exquisite “torture”:

(artist: Artpaque)

So whereas “Idle Hands” focused on whores, period—and “Making Demons,” on the Promethean Quest—now part two focuses on Faustian bargains and the seeking of forbidden knowledge through magic and deals (the two are functionally synonymous but I digress): those offered by aesthetically occult demons when summoned on the self-destructive and -penitent[1] quest for knowledge; i.e., by those closer to such things, having this or that for sale “for the right price”; e.g., women and queer folk from the 1800s onwards, treated as sin/vice sponges—classy and profane, their endless “final forms” and infernal tutelage seen as everything and the kitchen sink, then pursued by everyone and their grandma to Hell and back!

• “Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent” (included in this post): Introduces the idea of summoning whores (and by extension sex demons of a Lewis or Radcliffe style); i.e., in strictly magical, Faustian language. Introduces Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but discusses them vis-à-vis Faust through modern versions of each; e.g., not just Marlowe’s early modern Doctor Faustus (1590), but Greg Beeman’s Mom and Dad Save the World (1992), Alan Rickman in Die Hard (1988), John Landis’ Animal House (1978), Roger Ebert’s weird white moderate voyeurism, and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999).
• “The Road to Hell; or, Summoning the Whore, Ourselves (and Other Considerations of the Faustian Bargain vis-à-vis the Participants)“: Considers poetically summoning demons/the whore (through magic), doing so while “pulling a Faust”; i.e., according to a brief history of demons and their torturous summoning rituals and effects dating back to Marlowe’s science wizard. We’ll start by demasking a “strict” double of old harmful forms—Jadis, in my case, being someone to clone and demask, as Radcliffe’s future stand-in Velma Dinkley would, but expanding the interrogation to benefit all oppressed groups—then explore how to do so while engaging with the Gothic past as it continuously evolved out of itself. This includes onstage and off; i.e., from the chaos of the Middle Ages and various famous works (from Hammer of Witches to Doctor Faustus) into the Enlightenment and beyond towards 20th and 21st century variants; e.g., Smile and Evil Dead, but also my ex Jadis’ abuse of me: as collectively built on top of an earlier history whose demonic tradition endlessly haunts us, and which we must respond to by camping it, ourselves!

We’re not the first to do this, the basic idea is from Matthew Lewis, who summoned his demons through the School of Horror to expand the mind beyond state illusions; Radcliffe flirted with sex demons (of a purely non-magical sort) to maintain Capitalist Realism while punching down against Lewis and the French Revolution; re (from “On the Supernatural and Poetry”):

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).

In short, whereas Lewis used scandal to speak for the oppressed, Radcliffe pimped out nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., summoning demons for profit while highlighting torturous, demon lover (re: Cynthia Wolff’s 1979 “Radcliffean Model“) devices she couldn’t monopolize (and, in fact, stole from Lewis when writing her own novels). She was a fraud, secret freak and hack, but undoubtedly a talented fraud, secret freak and hack whose fictions (and signature devices) we’ll reclaim by camping her ghost, in “Exploring the Derelict Past”!

Regardless of who summons them, such demons take endless variety of form, but obey one of two basic functions; re: workers vs the state, the two warring on different surfaces and inside different thresholds during liminal expression/oppositional praxis embodied as a matter of unequal, forbidden and dark/radically transformative wish, want and desire fulfillment; re: “living deliciously” by torturing our enemies not simply to death, but in stories about doing so that extend to real-world politics theatrically discussing such things during the dialectic of shelter and the alien. Per Radcliffe, such things are classically temporary to uphold the state. We want to make them permanent to dismantle the state (re: like the Devil did to Ambrosio): a new better world without end beyond Capitalism!

This includes Dragon Ball‘s own legionary (and arbitrary) power levels, desires (to be strong enough to win love/gain revenge) and “final forms” denoting a self-contained cryptomimesis that outlived the original author inside/outside itself (next page); i.e., something to control by those in state control selling them back to us through a neoliberal Protestant ethic reifying those desires into the usual bourgeois dragons (and their sickness) to fall unironically in love with:

Mastermind of religion refined

They were promising wealth

But causing you delusion

Dictating with hatred and disdain (Sacred’s “Fire and Ice[2],” 2025).

“To critique power, you must go where it is”; i.e., the imaginary past presently on and offstage, during the liminal hauntology of war. In American Liberalism, the castle is already here but white, benevolent; when fascism invariably occurs, the actual causes are abjected Elsewhere, and the usual Supermen from Elsewhere are called upon to whitewash the castle (thus genocide) again:

(source: DataDaft’s “Dragon Ball Power Levels Over Time (1 Second = 1 Episode),” 2020)

To it, power is ultimately arbitrary as a concept, form, quantity/quality and matter of exchange; cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred; and whose subsequent forms are literally endless, not “final” (e.g., power levels in the Dragon Ball series[3], above): to have power as normally unequal, forbidden and dark, leading to radical transformation (often for survival, advancement, love or revenge). A common thread are Nazis and Communists occupying the same shadow zone, as do exploitation and liberation, pleasure and pain. Demons trade in all such devices, often doing so through kayfabe, Amazonomachia and psychosexual canon and camp.

In the middle of all of these, the whore remains as universally loved-hated as ever—chased across Hell’s half-acre because she (as Shelley showed us) holds the keys to creation and power as a monstrous-feminine device! We want to turn love/hate simply into love, wherever we can (within reason; i.e., in public displays/galleries with some sense of forewarning versus sticking our asses out car windows before the sex/revenge happens: “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s!”).

(artist: Andrew Cockroach)

Before we get to the explicitly “summoning” element of their histories, then, first a primer section speaking about whores per Faust. Then we’ll delve into demon BDSM closer to Radcliffe’s unironic demon lovers and bad BDSM; i.e., minus her explained supernatural (the poetic argument is the same; the aesthetic is different) but considering an element to her works that we can salvage during healthier sex games we devise through ludo-Gothic BDSM: canonical torture vs exquisite “torture!”

Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Doctor Faustus, Alan Rickman, Roger Ebert, John Landis’ Animal House, Kevin Smith, and more)

“I got news for you, pal; they’re gonna nail us no matter what we do, so we might as well have a good time!”

 —Otter to his male friends/giving advice to “Adam,” Animal House (1978)

“Eat the fucking apple. They are going to blame you regardless. You might as well go to the gallows with a full belly knowing more than God.”

—Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary “What I Would Tell Eve” (2021)

(exhibit 45b2b: Model and artist: Scoobsboobs and Persephone van der Waard. While summoned, the ritual is still something that must be played out; e.g., between myself and Scoobs, who posed for me, and for whom I then drew as a demon from a series of reference photos.)

Canon is a matter of prescription, whose defiance is also a matter of interpretation depending on who’s arguing for it, to whom and why (dialectical-material context, see epigrams). In classic Gothic language, a false preacher is a whore in disguise; in the Faustian tradition, demons (usually sex demons) exchange power for knowledge while haunted by the threat (and delight) of paradoxical torture. Their demonic appetite and agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM are things to abbreviate and summon as a matter of preferential code, in this respect; i.e., as fleshy but also loquacious presentations of various things reduced to walking symbols and hedonism, misbehavior and dealings with ladies-of-the-night and gigolos: superheroes and supervillains embodying all manner of trauma, virtue and vice, per the whore’s paradox! Time to pay rent/the Devil his due!

By extension, they’re not “pure evil” (though the state treats them as such, because profit demands it); they’re simply beings of power and knowledge to call in for favors of a “fatal” sort (who, just as often, respond by being drawn to power and trauma, hence knowledge)! As usual, the state will demonize them for profit; i.e., making them cool, but paywalled, toothless, offensive and inoffensive! We want to agitate through our own creations’ demonic contributions: to mobilize workers and wake them up (anyone who doesn’t challenge profit/demonic privatization is short-sighted and tokenized by the state and its pimps; i.e., profit is inherently unequal and rapacious, versus “rape” as rape preventative).

Note: Despite its own bastard origins, Christianity hegemonized after the fall of Rome. Since the Renaissance, a drive for scientific knowledge sought to push past dogma, hence found itself in excommunicated, hellish grounds. Goetic demons appeared as occult entities to summon, generally as familiars of pandemonic regents, or even kings and queens of Hell, itself; these remained under a Protestant ethic, abused by state proponents under the shadow of Capitalism. We’ll talk about the basic act of summoning, here; i.e., as a secularized Protestant ethic presuming guilt and sacrifice that workers must consciously camp beyond older popular models that, from Radcliffe onwards, haven’t gone anywhere!

However, while expressing the human condition is certainly not limited to humanoid bodies, that’s where I’ll be limiting my focus; i.e., sex positivity as grounded in the tangibly human expressing of demons instead of total abstractions through religious experience, Numinous power and more abstract, terrifyingly inhuman-looking bodies; e.g., the angels from Revelations (artist: Jopfe). There’s certainly room for asymmetrical, non-Vitruvian demonic bodies in sex-positive discussions, too (e.g., Stolas, a Goetic prince of Hell who appears in the shape of an owl), but I want to stay grounded, here, giving human workers my full attention (with further focus being supplied to animals and animalistic entities in the “Call of the Wild” chapter). —Perse

 

(exhibit 45b2a: Artists: far-top-left: ED Creations; to-middle-left: Anato Finnstark; top-middle-right and bottom-middle: Fin Nomore; far-bottom-left: Neal D. Anderson; top-and-bottom-right: Vicious Trunk. While demons, angels and similar beings can take an infinite number of forms, the oft-pornographic art itself—and its pornographic, psychosexual violence during demon BDSM as a ludo-Gothic activity—is what summons them. The art is an extension of the artist as part of the material being worked with, and both of those are part of the larger socio-material world being commented on; i.e., whose demonic persona offers up knowledge about everyday things that have become abstracted by canonical demons and rituals’ guilty pleasures.

Camping those, sex-positive demons can be incredibly intense or bizarre, but just as many are frank, down-to-earth depictions of activities policed under heteronormative, puritanical conditions that use demonic language as an unironic call for violence against marginalized groups targeted by the state through Satanic Panic canonized as “mere play”; e.g., Stranger Things and the Duffer Brother’s canonical, thus harmful D&D spuriously “under attack” by “real” BDSM demons; i.e., actually raping white American girls and monopolizing such theatrics for the bourgeoisie, whose dogwhistles and false flags we must subvert through our own convulsionnaire’s cryptonymic, state-of-grace jouissance: by adding deliberate irony and actively Miltonic rebellion to the game; re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom.”)

Summoning is classically Faustian (one-way); i.e., a quest for demons by dealing with them, especially when capital makes them scarce but also when it returns their return under alienating conditions; i.e., when the whore as a moral panic invades the current ordering of things while threatening unspeakable pleasures unknown to current mortals: a dualistic pervasion of sluts being sluts, painting whores of all kinds in the same cruel brush, during DARVO/obscurantism.

(source: Lilith Atheist)

In keeping with Radcliffe’s much-mimicked neo-conservatism, this generally has forbidden, non-heteronormative, torturous knowledge linked to all demon types being “homewreckers” pilfered from older persecution language; re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts having an anti-Semitic past and holistic current usage by tokenized forces we’ve reclaimed said usage from; i.e., as things to play with now in freshly naughty ways that, sure enough, historically-materially yield a plethora of double standards: boundaries for the pious detective hunting the whore down.

In part one, we discussed the modern Promethean Quest; i.e., wherein Mary Shelley famously frames her composite bodies as children of mad science and buried colonial guilt, abjecting nature as “dark,” “ancient,” and magical. Yet, Shelley’s build-your-own-demon commentary actually constitutes a logical continuation of what came before; i.e., the supernatural or occult demon class; e.g., the summoned demons of alchemy like Mephistopheles; the artificial kind constructed from older Jewish-coded wizardry like the golem; morphologically extensive and varied demons and angels of the Bible, William Blake, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc. Their existence is a sin, coded as “vice” but sold everywhere that corporations can. What we seek in connection through artifice, they privatize: to summon whores for demonic revenge operating at cross/dialectical-material purposes!

A few further points (eight pages) about whores and Faust before we get to summoning. We’ll keep things conversational as we go—critiquing the likes of demon lovers and torture porn vis-à-vis not just Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis (and giving special attention to Lewis’ Ambrosio/The Monk), but a variety of authors and works chosen arbitrarily (to be holistic); re: Judas Priest, Marlowe’s Faustus, Greg Beeman’s Mom and Dad Save the World, Alan Rickman and Die Hard, John Landis’ Animal House, Roger Ebert’s weird blind spot/obsession with geek shows, torture porn, whores, and demon lovers; and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (exhibit 45c2b).

As we shall see, these supernatural demons are often—like the composite demon, but also other monster types such as the vampire—adversarial; i.e., not just opponents, but nemeses, impersonators, beings of rancor and harbingers of unrest and torment, shame incarnate, and opportunity personified challenging the nuclear Cartesian model. Their animus reflects on us through direct manipulation amid menticidal head games; i.e., committed by beings of deception, persuasion, and control—not to mindless feed and take, but give us more than we bargain for while hopefully opening our eyes, mid-ludo-Gothic BDSM: to the unironically deceptive (cryptonymic) nature/genuine-and-total enslavement practices of Capitalist Realism, demons existing “in Hell” both outside Plato’s cave, but also inside it illuminating truth through shadowy paradox/darkness visible.

Unlike vampires, which take essence through lust, demons give knowledge through unfair games, treachery and lopsided power arrangements; they’re canonically poisonous, something to consume and instantly regret, but also relish—by putting such things campily in quotes, enjoyed as such for being the Devil’s advocate helping workers escape state pimps. Yet, such guerrilla warfare remains dualistic, unfolding for both sides during liminal expression: the witch hunter policing the witch whore and the witch whore using the same basic language’s war of mirrors, on the Aegis; re: complicit cryptonymy vs revolutionary; i.e., one furthering abjection during the state’s revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine, and the other reversing it during the whore’s revenge against profit.

As such, demons are (undercover) cops and criminals, but also incredibly queer, charming, mendacious, covert/concealed, concentrically masked, imposturous and xenophilic (a concept we shall examine here, but also in “Call of the Wild” when we look at totem demons and nature-themed, queer transformation through magical/drug-fueled poetics; re: acid Communism): nature is wild and misshapen in ways that, like a misbegotten child, must be repeatedly punished not simply as misbehaved, but alien and wicked; i.e., “The demon is a liar, do not trust it!” In short, they must be canonically summoned and exorcised; re (from the Undead Module, “Fatal Homecomings,” 2024):

state zombies vs zombie workers as a matter of dogmatic possession. Whatever the likeness, this generally is a thoroughly abject enterprise; i.e., demons and the undead having far more in common than they do differences, insofar as the giving and receiving of state force is concerned!

For example, Reagan from The Exorcist (1973) is seemingly possessed with the far-off spirit of colonized lands, which she vomits up on principle (dyspepsia, maybe); i.e., a bad girl needing to be exorcized of said evil as making her zombie-like, the bougie mother calling upon holy men to do the job in a suitably martyred, cop-like fashion. It’s obscurantism, crudely waving away postcolonial voices like one might a fart. Releasing such class-to-racial tensions canonically works with all the grace of ripping ass as one’s default response; i.e., minus the vague pretenses of irony that such bad-taste jokes foist onto the audience, the black penitent turned into the worst sort of spoof: colonial rehabilitation (with James Woods, below, being a thoroughly horrible person on and offscreen) by literally shitting out any spectres of Marx as stubbornly haunting us, waiting to return.

(source film: Scary Movie 2, 2001)

Except, it’s not just a feeling of undead invasion, but of one being followed, watched and occupied by the undead as something to abject however one wants (what Jordan Peele calls “the tethered”). In canonical media, such toilet-themed antics (so-called male humor) leaves the audience with a bad distraction—one made by the usual throwers of reactionary-to-moderate tantrums versus legitimate attempts to move past William Friedkin’s intensely problematic picture. That cannot happen unless the undead come out in ways that don’t constitute rejection. They’re people, not bodily waste!

More to the point, these ethnocentric attitudes are taught at the earliest age possible, and not just from a historical perspective; e.g., Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel as something to critique from a historical perspective (Bad Empanada’s “Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique,” 2020) but also a Gothic one tied to similar reifications of what, by the late ’90s, was already a very dated concept: white supremacy as geographically essentialized (aka “moral geography” as something cryptofascists call Western Chauvinism, pro-European, and other dogwhistles we’ll unpack in Volume Three) [source].

We must, in response, release/shit these abject attitudes out, but also summon/consume/deal with them in ways that account for such reckonings in places where they unfold; i.e., in the bathroom of the world, whereupon “blackness” puts such Cartesian infantilizings of nature into a constant state of recognition/panic.

In doing so, Medusa becomes something to summon and play with (among general stigmas); i.e., in ways that—like Shelley’s novel—routinely play out for or against the state: demon ass, booty and all the things that asses, wombs, and pussies do (with female biology being more policed than male biology but male behaviors being policed through sodomy arguments). Muffins, cake and pie, forbidden fruit, ambrosia, Coleridge’s honeydew and milk of paradise—it’s literally food for thought saying, “Eat me!” Like Alice, you (and parts of you) shrink and balloon; you identify with alien predicament, fetishization, and (dis)empowerment through paradox, being turned into cis-het slave food, bugs to stomp, whores to rape, etc. They don’t just play but play naughtily in pursuit of forbidden things that reverse abjection:

(exhibit 45b2b: Model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard. Monsters are poetic lens that help us think about abject things in relatable language while divided by capital and its qualities. In turn, these recognize through weird trauma and expression, one poet/sex worker seeing the same qualities in others, “out in the wild”; i.e., as Rose saw in me and vice versa, the two of us enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM together for my book series vis-à-vis informed labor action.

I drew them, above, but also put them on my book covers/promo posters, next page, because their own synthesis of demons and sex work embodied praxial catharsis in ways that fit nicely together with my book series: a shared means of promotion that involves a legion of other cuties besides, working in good faith using demonic “baddie” language to torture the elite but also make us “squirm”; i.e., for being naughty-naughty sex rebels promoting Gothic Communism as only fully appreciative when assembled as such: I have befriended many of my models, but also played with them [mostly online, save for Cuwu (who I made tons of porn with, in person, to do with as we agreed to) and my other exes (who I also made porn with, but cannot share said porn because it is private)].

[artists (from top-left to bottom-right): Romantic Rose, Victoria, Roxie Rusalka, Blxxd Bunny, Ashley Yelhsa, Maybel and Jackie, Nyx, Crow, Bay Ryan, Mikki Storm, Casper Clock, Quinnvincible, Mugiwara, Ms. Reefer and Ayla, Angel Witch, Mercedes the Muse, Harmony Corrupted and Annabel Morningstar. Heaven is a Hell we make on Earth. Go to Sex Positivity‘s one-page promo for all the models in my project; go to my Acknowledgements page to see all those involved beyond sex workers; go to “Paratextual Documents” (2023) to see the core ideas we’re working with. Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Only by uniting to subvert this demonization—during the dialectic of the alien and humanizing ourselves—can we hope to stand a chance; re: humanize the harvest, expose the state as inhumane. ACAB, ASAB, AHAB, ABAB [all billionaires are bad]!]

Gothic Communism summons little whores/phallic women that evoke the Big Whore, Medusa [aka the Whore of Babylon, or some other Archaic Mother/wandering womb]. A single “madwoman in the attic” is far easier to dismiss, discount and demonize than a group of them speaking in pandemonic unison against their abusers; all of these models do sex work, and many of them are open about it [to varying degrees; i.e., with an alias that links to a page versus one that doesn’t]. When you look on it, you look on our past agreements holistic context of mutual consent, but one devised to stand up for the rights of all peoples by me invigilating an army of workers standing against universal exploitation/selective liberation; you look on our naked bodies, but also the logo of the project [a sex-positive tramp stamp] and its book covers adorned with all of these things, mise-en-abyme.

It’s not a brand of private ownership, then, but of active-if-cloaked rebellion against privatization and state models—not dialectically-materially vague because the aesthetic was made through informed consent, sexually descriptive monsters, and culturally appreciative forms of Gothic counterculture; i.e., as a trend I developed and worked on for years, and invited more and more people to participate in, along the way! This includes these promo posters being something the models agreed to ahead of time[4], along with everything else; and it includes sex work as a matter not just of sexual enjoyment through sexualized media, but the Gothic asexuality of public nudism/muses-and-illustrators critiquing trauma—i.e., by refusing to tokenize during ludo-Gothic BDSM: to make the Wisdom of the Ancients wise again; re: more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and class, culturally and racially aware during oppositional praxis per our creative successes!  

To that, the old gods return through us; i.e., not as a matter of fascism cannibalizing workers for the state, but of Medusa’s avatars eating the cannibals to stall state shift during the Capitalocene! So forget “the universe is singing to me!” [re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Sigma’s Origin Story and Its Gothic Depiction of Mental Illness,” 2019] but to us through our Song of Infinity challenging profit, thus genocide and rape! “Yeah, baby! So wicked!” The elite and their weird canonical nerds are cat-calling us, but behind all that empty bravado, our counterterror is secretly [or not-so-secretly] pissing them off! “‘Tis but a scratch!” 

When they come to take control every man must play his role
They won’t take our world away when the children we leave
Will have to believe in today

We warn you now you things out there
Whatever you may send
We won’t give in without a fight, a fight until the end
With vigilance by day and night our scanners trace the sky
A shield is sealed upon this earth, a shield you won’t get by

Invader invader nearby
Invader, invader is nigh [Judas Priest’s “Invader,” 1978].

[source: Stephanie Nolasco’s “Judas Priest Singer Rob Halford Reflects on His Sobriety,” 2022] 

Red Scare works on Cartesian division to further abjection within constantly evolving and imbricating persecution networks; i.e., which only expanded further after neoliberalism certified through Thatcher and Reagan. For example, Judas Priest’s own sodomy and demon BDSM arguments [above] having far more critical bite in the 1970s[5], only to lose it as time went on when they sobered up/found religion, but kept their rebellious, “bad religion” demonic façade, post-selling-out; re: like Black Sabbath, and so many other white metal acts’ controlled opposition; i.e., becoming warriors for the state by playing rebels to protect the state from the working class: fascism weaponizing working class sentiment [and the ghost of the counterfeit] to further abjection/avenge the middle class for the elite by often enough pacifying labor. Fredrick Douglas acknowledges how the state always defaults through force, and Nelson Mandela how we must fight fire with fire to break Apartheid; I [and my friends] argue how this must be done through sex work, recultivating the Superstructure through iconoclastic sex work—re: [from “Psychosexual Martyrdom”]: 

All the while, surrender and segregation[6] are no defense because the state requires criminals to exist inside harmful, highly unequal distributions of power (“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” — Frederick Douglas). Instead, we must short-circuit the exchange of violence by humanizing ourselves as ordinarily being the givers and receivers of state harm made into something whose sex positivity—the giving and receiving of pleasure and pleasurable pain; i.e., sadists and masochists during sex-positive demon BDSM—of which the establishment cannot challenge: “The givers and receivers of a state-sanctioned conflict reveal both to be human, one losing its ability to receive punishment and the other to give it. Both must happen simultaneously and en masse for settler-colonialism to stop” (“Bushnell’s Requiem“). The state mustn’t colonize us through fascism, thus decaying into fractured forms of itself (and Capitalism) through medieval regressive defenses of capital; it must be developed before then, from moment to living moment, as gleaned from monstrous hauntology into something that stalls genocide altogether. Though violence and force are required to challenge the state, liberation comes not from sheer feat of arms, but rather from subversive and transgressive reclamation of monstrous symbols: a pedagogy of the oppressed that makes us human while presenting us as monsters abused by the state. It’s a tricky balance, mainly because violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical; i.e., martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit): finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Again, it’s tricky because mid-development, we will be criminalized regardless of what we do; but if criminals become human, then the state’s power crumbles, not ours [source].  

Betrayal—regardless of the motivation [re: desperation or convenience]—is not good praxis/stewardship; “diversity is strength!” to quote Hannah Gadsby. The more inclusion we have, the stronger our voice, but the harder the enemy will fight to divide us; i.e., with cheap rewards, including the ability to camp blindly for the state; re: the KISS problem dating back to Milton and before him, to Plato’s Republic [c. 375 BE]. Any form we devise, the state will tokenize, commodify and pervert; i.e., through a bourgeois corruption putting Shelley’s whore back in chains and having it argue for the subjugation of any rebels fighting back—to fight for the colonizer by wearing their mask [re: Fanon, but extending “black” to any stigmatized group; e.g., female, GNC, non-Christian, non-white, etc].

To it, Gothic Communism is universal rebellion, hence holistic; capital is built on Cartesian thought, which is heteronormative and settler-colonial, thus thrives on systemic division with selective and flexible tolerances engendering widespread intolerance: “Shoot yourself in the head!” As Jon Lovitz shows us in Mom and Dad Save the World, this is generally a bad idea; as the director Greg Beeman shows us—aping Napoleon and Victor Frankenstein, while casting a real-life pedophile to be the hero of his [otherwise charming and genuinely funny] movie[7]—such things can tokenize during liminal expression:

(artist: Bernie Wrightson) 

And while white straight men [and token groups; re: Halford, but also Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons] can’t tokenize themselves beyond their own oppression, they can camp their own survival and holocaust [or ancestor’s holocaust, in Stanley and Simmons’ case] to punch down with; e.g., “The last request of my life is to die killing my enemies!” [Megadeth’s “This Day We Fight!” 2009].

Gothic Communism works with the same principles in reverse, our own cryptonymy stacking less like a Greco-Roman phalanx/shield wall, mid-hauntology and dualism, and more like something that feels impenetrable during class, culture and race unified against the elite gentrifying/decaying such tokenized slogans and paraphernalia for themselves; re: to triangulate against labor and nature by imitating it in bad faith. “This day we fight,” doing so on and off field, in the hearts and minds of those who wish to destroy us, and who we recruit to our cause or expose as enemies to said cause.

Our aforementioned wall resists control, thus dismantles systems of oppression and their monomythic copaganda [see: footnote]. This collocates, growing fluent and second-nature on a socio-material level; i.e., just as I thought “Frederick Douglas,” and instantly remembered so many other thinkers I have previously assembled in other books through holistic recall, so do I revive all of the artists they remediate: through their combined writing and artwork extending to all media on all registers across time and space, onstage and off. The synapses develop not just between the neurons in my brain, but expand cybernetically into society at large. Eat your heart out, Mary Shelley!  

In turn, nothing terrifies the elite more than intersectional solidarity synthesizing universal liberation from an early age at the cost of profit. Through the banality of evil, they sell monsters as armies to buy and consume, but also extend into daily life; but they cannot monopolize such things through violence, terror or morphological expression. Instead, profit is desk murder tied to terror language as “the kissing cousin of force” [re: Asprey]. By taking control of ourselves, the state will respond with violence in ways that break Capitalism Realism as often as not: we are not alone, and we can fight back against mask-off abusers using what we got; re: our bodies and our Gothic reinvention as something capital desperately wants to perpetuate itself. The longer it tries, and the more we camp and leave behind our own derelicts in its wake, the weaker it becomes through exposure: “Draw your sword on a woman?”

Domestic abuse is the extension of colonial models [and police abuse] bleeding into a homely space; i.e., when Imperialism comes home to empire, we whores camp the idea to stop genocide at home and abroad [my friends, for example, protesting the state of Israel as much as I do, but also Pax Americana at large]. We don’t have to “deepthroat” knife dick to put up with state bullshit, but rather can speak in such Numinous doublings to camp our own rape and reclaim the psychosexual aesthetic of power and death; i.e., to aid in rebellion by putting “rape” in quotes, thereby camping the canon by sucking cock in ways that paradoxically don’t destroy us despite the vaso vagal, “sword swallowing” elements. We whores thrive in such confusion, offering forbidden sight to the next in line—by reclaiming state icons of war [e.g., Aragorn’s sword, below] much like the Vietcong used French and American ordinance against America’s own soldiers invading liberated land [re: GDF’s “How the Viet Cong Smoked American Soldiers,” 2024]: “No pasarán!”

[artist: lilbatzz]

While criticisms vary per author—and beauty [as much as fear] sits in the eye of the beholder/scope of the critique being levied during dialectical-material scrutiny—Gothic Communism is intersectional and holistic/composed of inkblots, meaning its fetishes and clichés [coded monster behaviors] can’t reduce to class, cultural or race; i.e., class warfare is culture and race warfare, thus subject to the same betrayals by cuckoo operatives weaponizing sex, drugs and rock ‘n rock [thus all Gothic poetics] speaking to war inside-outside themselves. Like subversive Amazons, subversive demons more broadly live in Hell as not relegated to other places, but expanding the state of exception as a forbidden lens exposing state cannibalization in spite of state mimicry and assimilation; re: Marx’s “capital is dead labor feeding on living labor”; i.e., to poetically reclaim and interrogate the etiologies of trauma as historical-material symptoms of Capitalism concealing itself in Gothic pastiche.

Commonly mocked as dubiously dirty and profane, then, the iconoclastic authors of demons can subvert the canonical orderings of them by helping others [and themselves] conceptualize, hence value power as something to summon and play with towards unknown pleasures; i.e., that of the flesh as having grown alienated and fetishized under capital, hence needing to be reunited under scandalous linguo-material circumstances and frameworks; e.g., Lewis’ The Monk expressing dark desires that upend capital by speaking truth to power through Gothic fakeries—to change Capitalism through the whore’s revenge. Sex is power and knowledge, of which status is expressed through the body’s sizeable assets and aesthetic] during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., nature-as-whore per the usual monstrous-feminine articulations; e.g., the mommy dom from Hell to demand, “I was called here by humans who wished to pay me tribute!”

Bitches love tribute! State hornets defend their nest, we defend ours, and both exist in the same space, chasing a palliative Numinous with Communist or fascist potential. There’s no dividing them so much as we convert others to our cause using a hybrid of theories, polities, catchphrases and multimedia; e.g., “It’s the deep breath before the plunge!” but also, “No one laughs at a master of quack fu!” The weirder we are, the more they’ll try to colonize us through tokenization. Repetition, mid-concealment [the hiding and showing of apocalypse], is kind of the point. So if any academics get “froggy” and turn their noses up at us, simply ask yourself, “What would Alan Rickman do?” “Hit it again,” of course! “Sack my ‘Nakatomi building’ with your ‘RV.’ Is it inside, yet?” *bats eyelashes innocently at the would-be penetrator[s] to embolden their assault*

So is camping the canon a dualistic exercise; i.e., weird canonical and iconoclastic nerds working with castles-in-the-flesh/walking castles, mise-en-abyme [and all their playful and popular hyphenations of sex and war, regardless of politics]: Alan Rickman—and his lovely part in a larger neoliberal story about fascism and imaginary ’80s banditti attacking neoliberalism[8]—is something we can camp; i.e., camping his men defending the Nakatomi building from police invasion during a diegetic siege of stolen private property/capital. I posit that, just as Die Hard translates easily enough to American Liberals [and actual Nazis]—dickishly trying to kick the “sand castles” of practicing leftists who love the same sand, on and offstage—such meta forms rape play demonopolize the canon for future endeavors! Richard Gobeille isn’t the only one using such one-liners; we can camp them, too, and openly to talk about capital’s hauntological [canceled-future] abuse—i.e., while revering those who rest in power versus peace: “Welcome to the party, pal!” [re: “Zombie Police States“]. One-of-a-kind, Rickman’s the motherfucking GOAT!

[source: Tom Leatham’s “The Hans Gruber Villain that Came before Die Hard,” 2024]

Gruber is a particular kind of sex demon—The Grinch Who Stole Christmas [1957]—and Die Hard was at least partially a Christmas movie [no matter what Thought Slime says, however tongue-in-cheek; re: “DIE HARD Is NOT a Christmas Movie!” 2022]. Just like Christmas—and the imaginary war on it that nonetheless occurs in between fiction and non-fiction, on and offstage, dualistically between givers and receivers of demonic sex and force—the state and its proponents cannot monopolize such things. Per Sarkeesian, we can enjoy and critique them, too.

In turn, dead language and metaphor become an anisotropic poetic instrument to resurrect rebellious forces: by using the language of good/evil and virtue/vice to challenge holier-than-thou police agents abusing the same devices; re: to move power towards workers, reclaim demonizing poetics and reverse the usual dichotomies associated with said poetics; i.e., through their various aesthetics [of power and death] and all-around struggles working in opposition, mid-exchange, protest, what-have-you; e.g., “terrorist” and “counterterrorist” but also “damsel” and “whore” or “detective” and “demon,” etc. God isn’t real, but the forces that dictate the state’s will through his likeness are. In turn, these are what our Satanic apostacy [and its uncanny avatars] convey. The gloves come off to break Capitalist Realism through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s calculated risk. Stare and tremble, nerds!)

Apart from bathroom hijinks and abject behaviors/bodily functions (the scent of sweat and fishy musk of such forbidden areas[9]), demons stress enormity (size difference) and power as alien, profane, unholy and wicked, bad, naughty cesspools, but also campy and fun: Hell as something whore-like to conjure up and play inside/with (which the state routinely wants to conquer). Girls (or enbies, in Cuwu’s case) go to the bathroom; they fuck! It’s not childish to acknowledge this, but childish to unironically demonize such matters; i.e., those who do so to control them in bad faith under state mechanisms (the bathroom being a source of female vulnerability and fear in Western households, Radcliffe onwards). I generally don’t exhibit bathroom play but it is incredibly common:

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, such demonic, “hysterical” shenanigans invite us joining in and looking at/playing with alien, fetishized things to humanize them; re: to humanize the harvest is to expose the state as inhumane, incompatible with life. Demonic essence and knowledge/power take on many forms of exchange, the, and we should invite all of them in sex-positive ways!

In doing so, Pinocchio (another golem type) is seen as violent and murderous because he is a slave, thus humanizing his motives: through the extant desire to be free that, in oppressed dialogs, express through the human condition as demonized. Despite what J.K. Rowling (a Radcliffe copycat, no honor among thieves) and other Tory apologists argue in their stories, no one wants to be a slave (re: Sheep in the Box’ “The Concerning Politics of Harry Potter,” 2020); but slavers will make arguments for the enslavement of nature, essentializing “darkness” as a casus beli that different groups realize is problematic at different points—i.e., a false flag to defame, demonize and dehumanize us on different registers of privilege and oppression; e.g., your average straight, token African American (of either sex or gender) will probably tell you Birth of a Nation (1915) is racist before they’ll admit Harry Potter is homophobic (the inverse is truth with token queer people). Such are the axes of oppression at play.

And we—treated like the state’s demonic punching clowns by alarmist nutjobs and hypocrites from any normativity—croon under token scrutiny and ridicule as much as white straight examples: “Don’t let me be misunderstood!” (Santa Esmerelda, 1977). Danger, you say? Danger disco, babes (remember your safe words; e.g., the traffic light system)! Our calculated risk—while at times transgressive in its torturous “death by Snu-Snu”—screams like a horny church organ; i.e., the house is the demon, the fat lady singing Medusa’s tortured, sweaty and wholly hysterical, thirsty swan song (e.g., the Nostromo)! She burns, going out, reading capital the riot act (and leaving them an upper decker)!

While demons are canonically the opposite of angels in modern supernatural argumentation, they are functionally the same kind of monster—the alien, specifically the virgin/whore alien (with militant Numinous forms classically going from Dante’s fearsome forms to more gentle, sexpot/pinup angelics[10]); i.e., morphologically complex agents of a superior power source (themselves, or in service of a god-like force; e.g., Mephistopheles).

In any event, I won’t focus on differentiating them. Certainly the binarization of “good” and “evil” is a more recent invention of Christianity—i.e., in the medieval period into the Protestant ethic under Capitalism—and isn’t especially useful during dialectical-material analysis. During said analysis, there is only socio-psychosexual and material conditions to change through demonic expression personifying a seditious crossing of boundaries as much as rarefied emotions. As the Creature from Frankenstein or David from Alien: Convent show us, doing so iconoclastically constitutes a form of self-expression—for the oppressed as made into their roles by those in power ahead of time. So when demons and monsters make their own art from their own point of view, this means they tend to embody trauma as a kind of postcolonial/posthuman code repressed by the state. We can deliberate our stances through our own clay-like flesh: what to wear and how to wear it. We make it look good, camping our own rapes by putting them in quotes (with angels and devils also being likenesses of those in life transported to spectral realms/glorious afterlives).

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

In colonial-patriarchal terms, fear is codified in ways that pacify onlookers, pushing them to fear and persecute demons (thus whores) through legitimized violence framing them as Black Penitents across the board. Reversing the position amounts to a kind of slave revolt—of historically demonized, undead and animal/robotic chattel workers speaking out; i.e., by deliberately making art to express themselves in relative language, thereby transforming the world from the monster’s perspective as demonized, zombified and enslaved: the reclaiming of the animal side as much as the human, vying to witness their survival and treat them humanely in lieu of state atrocities.

Their mere existence as fearful—when turned back on the viewer using the Aegis—can demonstrate different hard truths: the experience of the demonized “living in fear” as objects of fear—to be made into something automatically regarded with fear, fascination and lust by a “chaser’s” xenophobic status quo: a giant, undead guilt looming over them like a bad dream. As are whores, and demons are the same way—essence being the act of looking on giant animate-inanimate forces tied to larger and smaller abstractions; i.e., God and the state, of course, but also Capitalism and other hyperobjects, on high, and smaller forms “on low” that contain and yield their own secrets. “What is a man?” indeed!

(artist: Shame Ballard)

Gothic Communism isn’t a chimera or hydra, alone, but a colossus, too. To show the viewer their own fear as such—their supersized xenophobic shame, disgust, shock, awe, etc, as literally viewed through those they have been conditioned to demonize in fetishistic language—can be traumatic, but also transformative; i.e., to replace status-quo fear with xenophilic freedom and pleasure by demonstrating the supernatural demon: as harmless and the state as a violent fearmonger that exploits workers, mid-witch-hunt, pimping symbols of the oppressed through symbols of violence (the Statue of Liberty is both); re: “Who needs chicks when you got demons!”

The proletarian moral is to present oneself as a target in the usual occult symbols (exhibit 45c1)—i.e., often expressing human biology beyond what is normalized; e.g., female genitalia as gynodiverse (Gynodiversity’s “Classification of the Anatomical Variation in Female External Genitalia,” 2023), hence something that exists in relation to occult artistic expression—only to discourage state persecution by shaming its proponents for shaming demonic sluts and their bodies during gender trouble: as a heteronormative, boot/ass licking defense mechanism. People out here rimming Lady Liberty sans irony!

This makes any queer person presenting as a sex-positive demon something of a detective, themselves, but also someone who “plays god” in an iconoclastic, poetic sense. To be queer as such is to investigate our own humiliation/persecution; i.e., as something to ironically express through gender trouble and parody as inevitable, but also within our power to create as whores during supernaturally Faustian dialogs. It becomes part of our existence as demonized through heteronormative bias.

So while gender trouble and parody can be a fun activity for queer people to express, this irony becomes something to appreciate through countercultural art as a means of communicating a serious issue across racial lines: the queer struggle to exist when straight people (of any class, religion, or race) feel threatened by the proverbial “thing that should not be”; i.e., subverting canonical sodomy fears and straight myopia of queer people through colonized language tokenizing different chattelized minorities—to camp that canon’s potential to instill blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts against various oppressed groups punching down, and all by using our own non-gender-conforming bodies, performances, labor and identities, etc, as countercultural xenophilia.

(artist: Rachel Storms)

As things to create and sexually describe in opposition to state poetics and settler-colonial histories, demons deserve inclusion, love and acceptance for not being the groomers, murderers and tyrants that state proponents and moral panics describe us as: whores to collar and euthanize but also trade in; i.e., their flesh, doing so much how slavery and prostitution have done for thousands of years, albeit evolving under and into neoliberal Capitalism tokenizing such things—from white to black, foreign and exotic to dungeon and domestic! It’s a spectrum, nature-as-monstrous-feminine having a female side popularized through prostitute as something to summon, shame and farm for its melon-like qualities; i.e., by empire, afraid of and fascinated with nature through colony romances, slumming and Orientalism/dark, vengeful continents, etc: queens of the damned, of Western racism eroticizing far-off jungles, deserts and other half-real frontiers, but also traveling queers from “Transylvania” making the help eat each other. Double standards abound, as do intersections of privilege and oppression, canon and camp, mid-morphological expression (far too many to go over here; e.g., internalized and intersectional bigotry).

Simply put, our surveys of grander territories must routinely fight for equal rights, including the morphological/artistic (thus demonic) freedom to express ourselves however we want. Basic human rights provide defense from state abuse; equal rights for all grant those defenses to everyone under intersectional solidarity. All colonized parties must unite to be free, or none are. To avoid tokenism under an equality of convenience policing the whore, all normativities must be shirked. We camp our survival, our abuse, and let others do the same for theirs. Sin isn’t singular!

(artist: Romantic Rose)

We’ve already explored how “playing god” and the Promethean Quest play out for the status quo or against it during oppositional praxis; re: historically the invented, arbitrary hubris of men like Victor Frankenstein lies in their sincere exploitation of others, while our “hubris” of merely wanting to exist isn’t harming anyone despite being completely invented. The takeaway of Shelley’s Frankenstein (and similar stories) is that those seeking to harm us as “bad demons” have engineered a system for doing so, all while posturing as benevolent in bad-faith.

The same goes for Faust as a man of vanity who, in his case, admittedly fucked himself over more than anyone else; i.e., he thought he knew all there was to know and literally ignored the “better angels of his nature” to appeal to the devil on his shoulder, Mephistopheles (the whore working for the Devil, mid-psychomachy). In tempting fate, Faust is basically a sophomore (“wise fool”) faced with sex (forbidden knowledge) for the first time, then doing some really unethical/dumb shit—a didactic trend that would carry into future caricature; e.g., Tom Hulce’s “Pinto” from Landis’ Animal House debating to rape the thirteen-year-old virgin, Clorette, at a college frat party in classic Faustian style: temptation and admonishment, but also apologia (“he didn’t know any better”). The whole point of the psychomachy is speaking to outward versions of internal angels and demons; i.e., moral dilemmas acted out in medieval language for an increasingly modernized world alienated from such things.

“Fuck her! Fuck her brains out! You know you want to!” says Pinto’s demonic side, calling him “a homo” when he decides to ignore his intrusive thoughts. Such matters don’t come ex nihilo, of course but speak to larger dialectical-material problems the director (John Landis, a man known for exploiting his actors—eventually causing the deaths of two undocumented migrant children, and The Twilight Zone‘s [1983] lead actor[11]) was self-reporting on. So was Christopher Marlowe (who, apart from Doctor Faustus, in 1592 based on older German stories, also wrote 1590’s Jew of Malta—basically a meaner and even more anti-Semitic version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice); i.e., if you want to know what bigots think, watch what they make/summon and how they debate themselves demonically/angelically.

So as much as I think Charles Matthews is 100% right when he opines

There are things in it, however, that wouldn’t pass muster today, including the blatant objectification of the young women, especially in the scene in which Bluto spies on them undressing. And would any reputable filmmaker today dare to include the scene in which Pinto debates whether to rape the unconscious Clorette, abetted by a roguish devil and a prissy-voiced angel? There are touches of unchecked homophobia throughout [not to mention the whole bar scene being mega-racist] (source: “Animal House (1978,” 2017).

there’s still something telling about all of the movie’s unchecked bigotry and subtler dislike for anyone who isn’t a white, privileged, drunken, frat boy asshole.

This isn’t me agreeing with the clearly unlikeable Dean (whose admittedly sick burn “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son” apes Bolingbroke’s critique of Falstaff to Prince Harry in Henry VI, except they’re all acting like that), but to play devil’s advocate, nor are the heroes of the movie above reproach; i.e., they’re white, smug and princely “man whores” but the worst sort, and the kind that slashers in the ’80s might want dead not to discourage sex, but rape (the revenge of the abused against their nerdy abusers given a pass, as Landis does: “Knowledge is good; boys will be boys, girls will be mothers”). Landis’ debut is, by its own admission, a “futile and stupid gesture done on somebody’s part” (and one that Belushi—the Falstaff’s Falstaff[12]—would not survive).

To it, the state thrives on rape to survive, including such slaps on the wrist extending to bad jokes; i.e., Landis’ jokes are rape, the dilapidated old house a site of conquest for men and trauma for women surviving men stealing women’s innocence. All the more unfortunate, then, given the movie’s performances are undeniably colorful and energetic—spunk that would’ve been better spent towards humanizing college life in a sex-positive way (the sex life of activists is still a riot, if Shelley or myself are anything to go by). Furthermore, this wasn’t the work of down-on-their-luck blue-collar types, Kristi Turnquist writes, but gentrified, upper-crust nerds “raising Cain” and gentrifying sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to get their rape fantasies in:

Sure, the movie was sold as slobs vs snobs. But the snobbery was actually baked into the supposed “slob” side. The full title, let’s not forget, is National Lampoon’s Animal House. That’s National Lampoon, as in the magazine spinoff of the Harvard Lampoon, the humor publication created by students at Harvard University, known more for its big-deal Ivy League alumni (Conan O’Brien, Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live,” “Spy” magazine cofounder Kurt Andersen, etc.) than its lovable losers (source: “40 Years Later, Can We Sill Stomach Animal House?” 2018).

That being said, the movie is still a period piece of sorts that—through the writers—provides a highly illustrative window into the partially imaginary past. This includes a lovely (and accurate) critique of Milton’s Paradise Lost (with Sutherland’s professor making a cameo in my book, several times), but also that of the Vietnam War/Civil Rights period:

Animal House is a period piece twice over. It’s set in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was president, and since it was filmed in 1977, it offers a window through which we see attitudes about what was funny back then, even if they make us raise our eyebrows now (ibid.).

In short, the old boys club who wrote Animal House (and similar stories) thought they knew everything/excluded everything for everyone but their target audience; re: like Marlowe’s Faustus (with Nietzsche’s 1888 Ecce Homo often being paraphrased as, “all fiction is inherently auto-biographical” from “Hear me! For I am such and such a person”).

Taking all of this into account, the good-vs-evil, virtue-vs-vice argument is still quite useful for “reading the room” of latter-day Faust revivals; i.e., it’s not delivered quite the same way as Halloween was, for example (also 1978), but you still can see the neo-conservatism at work: ‘fraidy-cat Doctor Loomis and faceless killing machine Michael Myers running around like headless chickens, mid-moral-panic, while poor Laurie Strode thinks about fucking Ben Tramer (or not).

In turn, the recursive desire to curiously and savagely punch up at men would be coopted by said men to triangulate the same women against other marginalized groups again (e.g., Sleepaway Camp punching down against trans women as much as Friday the 13th demonized mental illness and bereavement, and Halloween antagonized mental disorders in children; i.e., according to the same Freudian garbage Hitchcock espoused in 1960’s Psycho, abjecting cis-het domestic abuse once more onto a crossdressing impostor invading white women’s spaces).

This means since well before the ’70s Final Girl and back a hundred years during the 1870s; i.e., when white women were granted property and fascist feminists appeared, but also in the 1790s when Radcliffe wrote her Gothic novels alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women[13]. “Fate never changes,” Carpenter’s teacher character opines; for him—but also Landis and Marlowe before them—such things are “stuck” as a matter of argument playing out, on and offstage. In a world where Nazis openly try to shout and hide their arguments, then, anytime they self-report is an opportunity to dissect and pick their admittedly small brains. It behooves us to study their arguments, because they think themselves immune to demonic reprisals. So did Faust.

Fascism is garbage, so build from that to parse the hieroglyphics/cryptonymy as useful; or as Porpentine writes in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015)”: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all I have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms” (source). So cryptomimesis, then.

To that, when the self-righteous demonize/police the whore, we whores punch up from Hell to remind them we’re human, and they’re about as cool as “Pinto” was. Hit ’em where it hurts—i.e., the female castration fantasy being to fuck men with genitals both sides treat unironically as swords and sheaths—the difference between them being the “phallic” female party makes a hole where one doesn’t exist, and generally to avenge past abuse inflicted on her because she’s a woman (e.g., Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 Battle Royale, below); it’s supposed to make men in the audience go “ouch-ouch-ouch” and cross their legs: “If you won’t listen to us being polite, try this on for size!”

Let’s unpack that (twelve pages plus footnotes), if only because genital mutilation, unironic rape and full-throated torture porn make up such a huge part of the canonical torture scheme our own media is tackling (to which we’ll be subverting canon, as we go). Our target for this critique won’t be Radcliffe or Faust, but someone after both of them who is and isn’t Landis: Roger Ebert and his weird blind spot/obsession with geek shows, torture porn, whores, and demon lovers (male, intersex or female). The man was a sex pest of unusual excess and extraordinary camouflage, pimping Medusa through the soundbite length of old-school movie reviews apologizing for rape yet bashing exploitation media seeking to take things outside the profit motive.

Sadly he’s not the only one. For starters, such “Iron Women” having their revenge predate Medusa, but reducing them to primordial Antiquity is a Freudian trick, and one that does little good, here in the present. Tracing that palimpsestuous lineage into Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth or Elisabetta Sirani’s various vengeful paintings surviving her own rape (and humiliating trial and torture-by-thumbscrews), we’re left with a historical-material trend of rape performance that more privileged people will puzzle over and arbitrate as they see fit.

Alas, such is Ebert, who readily decries I Spit on Your Grave (1978) for being revenge porn (which it is) in so many words

A vile bag of garbage named I Spit on Your Grave is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable [emphasis, me] theaters, such as Plitt’s United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life (source: 1980 review).

yet arbitrarily celebrates The Last House on the Left (1972) as “a tough, bitter little sleeper of a movie that’s about four times as good as you’d expect” (source: 1972 review).

Of course, we could look at the directors for a clue—the Israeli-American Meir Zarchi versus Wes Craven as a white, status-quo homeboy—but I think it’s much more telling, quick and germane to Faust if we note Ebert’s double standard; i.e., there’s a class character to his attitudes, which become much less critical, in terms of critical thought, and much more reactionary when faced with things he doesn’t approve of: “This is ok to talk about if I find it artful.”

To that, Ebert (and those like Ebert) approve of vengeance they can understand—with Ebert himself siding with Craven’s vengeful middle-class parents versus Zarchi’s single white girl with a mean streak:

This movie covers the same philosophical territory as Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), and is more hard-nosed about it: Sure, a man’s home is his castle, but who wants to be left with nothing but a castle and a lifetime memory of horror? (ibid.)

For Ebert, then, rape scenes are tolerable not if they have a substantial message (nihilism is literally the opposite of substance), but as long as they comment on the futility of revenge/destruction of the nuclear home, or have some deeper thematic purpose that strokes his middle-class sense of values letting him decide what is acceptable and what isn’t for all peoples; re: the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection for the middle class (what Freud calls the Superego).

These are all markers for American Liberalism decaying into fascism (which America pioneered, not the Germans), and Ebert’s literally qualifying rape provided it offends his values the way he—as a paying customer and a Pulitzer-prize-winning critic—wants them to; i.e., he wants to be entertained, first and foremost, by a peep show, not a geek show as “Goldilocks rape.” Except doing so only obscures abuse, and doesn’t diminish it. It’s a Faustian bargain made with Hollywood, Ebert policing the medium in ways that, again, are largely reactionary much of the time but dressed up in white moderacy.

In short, Ebert likes things to be “meaningful” if they aren’t sanitized, but honestly prefers the Radcliffean sanitization, most of all:

I have seen four films inspired by the same 13th century folk ballad: Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), David DeFalco’s Chaos (2005) and now Dennis Iliadis‘ remake of the 1972 film, also titled The Last House on the Left. / What I know for sure is that the Bergman film is the best (source: 2009 review).

Ebert’s job, then, is similar to Radcliffe’s: to assign value as “critique,” thus operate as a cop taking state payment (his reviews span over four decades); i.e., his work is full of arbitrary white superiority moralizing and abject value judgements according to how that offends his simultaneously delicate and insensible moral code: while simultaneously condoning violence that befits an American liberal like himself (the same qualities apply to Faust and Radcliffe). Anything he can’t stomach, he abjects, on par with Coleridge winging about Matthew Lewis; re: “We stare and tremble!” (as well as Leonard Maltin, but less choosy than him; e.g., Ebert liked Alien (review, 2003) and Maltin did not[14]).

But during the rape scene of Zarchi’s protagonist, an ugly truth remains, regardless of what Ebert thinks: women do desire revenge against the men who rape them (or who rape those they love, including a shared sisterhood among women they don’t personally know); i.e., as a half-real matter of trauma they cannot escape, only live with: its liminal-but-nonetheless-true confusions of predator/prey and pleasure/pain, whereupon rape as a theatrical and everyday device (weapon of terror) happens in ways that frankly shouldn’t be sanitized/abjected, subjective or not; re: “Do you know what the most terrifying thing in the world is? It’s fear!” The difference between Hitchcock and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is the latter’s voyeurism tries to humanize the process (and its German-coded villain) while holding Faustian men of science accountable (versus letting them testify as expert witnesses; re: Psycho).

In other words, why should a rich white American man like Ebert get to decide what is or isn’t acceptable during horror vis-à-vis women who, all things considered, probably have survived rape (and which Hollywood exploits in stories like Grave, Alien or Psycho). If something sickens him, it is simply “wrong” and deserves “low marks” extending to the other people in the venue he thinks he’s better than (by “actually protecting women” with his stupid review system); all these things are pointless to him, despite the fact they’re pointedly talking about rape in ways that challenge Ebert’s constitution—i.e., by making him run away because he didn’t get his money’s worth or have his pre-existing views validated by a like-minded crowd. God, forbid right? Fragile Faust, freaky Freud. Fuck face.

And not to defend tasteless, straight-male-authored exploitation porn too much, but I struggle to think what someone like Ebert might say about angry art that isn’t overtly punching down at disabled people; i.e., regarding media that makes him as uncomfortable as Radcliffe once was with Matthew Lewis:

I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie’s heroine. I wanted to ask If she’d been appalled by the movie’s hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film’s end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.

This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. I Spit on Your Grave does not. It is a geek show (re: “I Spit on Your Grave,” 1980).

Ebert’s own moral outrage suggests he “knows better” than the feminist does, his gut (and instinct to tuck tail and run) betraying his stoic veneer (re: Victor Frankenstein).

It’s precisely this kind of unchecked hubris that Zarchi’s woman seeks to castrate; re: Creed’s revenge being not just the refusing of victimhood, but of subversive, even exploitative/transgressive reclamation of the Medusa, during the abjection process; i.e., as a victim of rape discredited by male know-it-alls (whose sex-positive universal liberation, I argue, has the whore’s revenge against profit in all its forms: Ebert as having opinions he conflates as “correct,” vis-à-vis Weber’s Protestant ethic, because they’ve made his formerly unlucrative position into an illustrious, well-paying  career). Ebert says much and little about Grave, keeping mum about the quiet part because he feels guilty in ways he—a privileged, white, straight and ultimately self-important asshole—can’t process.

Then again, I know what Ebert would say if he could, because something like The Penguin‘s (2024) Sofia Falcone blowing out Johnny Viti’s brains (an offer he couldn’t refuse) is perfectly acceptable for Ebert’s ilk because violence is fine if it’s dressed up as not grotesque; i.e., on par with Ebert salivating over The Godfather films (source: 1997 review) despite them largely being the glorification of immigrant violence and Jacobean theatre for its own sake (as long as it’s shot nice, right?). But anything that veers off into abject freakshow territory is automatically “without merit,” for Ebert. It’s a huge blind spot, but also one he picks-and-chooses regarding those patrolling the freakshow runways. These are not gods, but vain, stupid pimps passing judgement on whores in chains; the worst jailors are the ones who believe they’re right and who pity you as “reprobate” (re: Jadis, a genderfluid neoliberal, torturing me, a queer an-Com).

Follow the leader is a fool’s errand, and Faust is the biggest idiot of them all (though men like Ebert aping him are even dumber in hindsight). Again, this comes from privilege, which for Ebert is white, American, middle-class and male: a selective diet, eating his victims served to him in ways he deems “palatable.” There’s probably tons of exceptions—e.g., Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989; source: “The New Geek Cinema[15],” 2012), Cameron’s Aliens (source: 1986 review[16]), or Re-Animator (1985; source: 1985 review[17])—but those exceptions also prove the rule. So did Radcliffe uphold the status quo by being the proverbial “rare exception” (all the more ironic, in her case, given she was so moderate. Pot, meet Kettle). So does Ebert administer “criticism” in short, pithy reviews that pass themselves off as Eternal Wisdom; i.e., like God giving Moses those clay tablets (re: the storage device of the ancient world). Except Ebert, like Moses and God, is king of Fuck Mountain; i.e., dogma is dogma, meaning we can camp his ghost’s secular demonic gibberish as much as we (and our Satanic apostacy) want. God is dead, so is Roger Ebert, and we can dance on their graves together:

More to the point, Ebert’s balancing act becomes the thing to worship, also known as centrism. Anything that “tips the scales” in one direction or the other turns Ebert’s stomach and we can’t have that… which conveniently ignores what doesn’t turn his stomach, mid-abjection, but instead offends other people[18] reversing abjection in ways he cannot let stand (e.g., the woman in the movie theatre during I Spit on Your Grave).

While white moderates are, on their face, seemingly harder to critique on account of their polished façade qualifying rape media (which the Gothic largely concerns), the fact remains: centrists love to arbitrate in ways that not only dictate their essentialized place in the world, but remind them how clever they think they are. Dude’s literally marketing his opinion as “better” than others[19] (and using the Roman gladiatorial signal for “spare him/kill him” to further qualify his statements to his audience). White straight people, like Faust, need to feel important; i.e., “Who has two thumbs and a bottomless ego? This guy!” (another weird canonical nerd with a weird smile): the shit-eating grin of a man who made it big and thinks he’s untouchable/the emperor having no clothes (not even death can save you from me, old man. I have exactly zero reservations when vandalizing your dubious legacy).

Of course, such anti-geek-show arguments also predate Ebert and even William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946); i.e., dating back to Radcliffe, herself; re: missing the point of her rival’s own scandalous works and valorizing her own, with “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” “Terror” is superior for Radcliffe and Ebert because it hides rape while still parading it inside a restless labyrinth. This is their privilege talking, not their oppression. It’s profoundly unsexy in ways we queer sex workers have to intersectionally camp and do better than, mid-exquisite-“torture.”

So far be it from me to discount either literary technique—and I certainly don’t think I Spit on Your Grave (or any geek show) is High Art (which geek shows upend on purpose, from Walpole onwards; re: Baldrick[20])—but I likewise don’t think one is better than the other (nor do I condone putting anything on a pedestal; re: the idea of High Art essentially amounts to canon). Furthermore, High Art so very often apologizes for rape by “weeding the jury” and doctoring the testimony to a select few of special victims and expert witnesses; i.e., that get special say in what happens “exclusively” to them, thus leant special credence by Ebert going down on Radcliffe (now there’s an image I can’t unsee).

Admittedly this happens through Hitchcock’s own mastery of suspense (and only if neither man actually knew who Radcliffe was). All the same, Ebert’s idea of value—i.e., as a judgement to administer—is tied to art, which for him includes gangster films and Hitchcockian torture porn; e.g., the rape scenes from Once Upon a Time in America (1980) or Frenzy[21] are “fit for viewing” as long as they tug on his heartstrings[22] and/or “play him like a piano” (a comment he’s made about Hitchcock from the director describing his own work; e.g., his 2002 Signs review): Hitchcock torturing women is a necessary sacrifice provided it doesn’t feel “too real” and tickles Ebert’s “ivories.” But behind any illusion is systemic hard if unaddressed.

Torture porn is torture porn, and no matter how “suspenseful” the movie is, or “black” its humor finds itself, Hitchcock is polishing the turd of exceptionally terrible BDSM practices that Ebert is peering voyeuristically at without guilt: “ahegao before it was cool.” Except, women have been tortured in cinema since cinema existed, Ebert staring hypnotically at Maria Falconetti’s “eyes that will never leave you” (source: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928),” 1997 review). I guess Barbara Leigh-Hunt (from Frenzy, pulling a Jubba the Hutt, below) is just the “flavor of the week,” because she’s “trashy” instead of Numinous—or more to the point, Ebert doesn’t realize Hitchcock’s work is garbage despite its fancy photography because he’s blinded by his own bias (and hand in things): unironic hero worship, class character and white male fragility/privilege. He’s literally ranking rape as “art,” his reviews literally telling the reader to spend money on rape, too: “go consume.” What a sleaze.

Yet, Ebert thinks he knows better and courts his own devils through people he really shouldn’t; re: like Faust, writing from privilege about things he knows fuck-all about; i.e., by saying what is or isn’t acceptable rape testimony by tone-policing not just Grave‘s director (whose disgust against—if it doesn’t warrant a total gag order like Ebert wants—is arguably understandable), but also the feminist in the audience he didn’t approve of cheering for vigilante justice: in an apocryphal movie because the film… had rape scenes in it? Furthermore, why do those have to be “dressed up” for Ebert to value the legitimate feelings of anger and release the woman undoubtedly had? One explanation is consumption and pickiness; i.e., he wants his whores to be high-class when they’re strangled, the man poo-pooing trash despite his own hypocritical trashiness dressed up; re: the spell of the Great Enchantress, Ebert huffing the farts of a women who glorified British—and by extension, American—Imperialism nearly two centuries before he was spilling ink!

A second more thesis-prone argument is because, for Ebert, exploitation and liberation don’t exist in the same place; they have to be segregated into something “palatable”—i.e., despite the whore’s desire for revenge (and socio-material change), at the very least, involving her unpalatable desire to commit acts of phallic violence against one’s oppressors (whose rioting Ebert, of course, discourages).

The same criticism, then, can be made of Radcliffe and all unironic “Faustians” (demon lovers) and critics and consumers of such things, not just Ebert refusing to make useful ideas of trash/things from trash about rape. I only picked him because a) so many view him as some kind of Opinion God, when—to be completely frank—a lot of the man’s opinions are frankly gentrified and asinine (“Videogames Can Never Be Art” [2012], anyone? Puh-lease); and b) he, like Radcliffe, can only opine positively or productively on things about rape that are wrapped up in a nice little bow for him. It’s not the rape that’s a problem, but that it’s not his kind of rape. “Irony,” then, is merely a selective boundary for Ebert to misuse while policing the whore as Faust would do (and holding her down when she tries to fight back). It’s arbitrary, not some transcendental signified; i.e., we can camp it through our own “rape” in quotes (which is what Grave ultimately was).

To conclude, Ebert can’t enjoy or even think critically about something unless it is packaged in a highly specific way. This is called “conditioning.” Except Ebert can’t think about trash regarding harmful depictions of whores, rape victims and sex “having merit” unless they’re framed a particular way according to his class and political standing as allergic to degeneracy. This is called “American Liberalism,” known a bit less positively by me as “menticide” and “praxial inertia,” but also “pimping.” Even if it comes from “good intentions” (whatever that means), the road to Hell (the harmful sort) is paved all the same; i.e., with Faustian hubris apologizing for rape as junk food: Ebert can opine about movies till the cows come home, but he can’t speak to things outside of that with any degree of authority worth mentioning. He’s a grifter and a hack of the cheapest order.

Of course, this doesn’t preclude heartfelt empathy with colonized peoples; e.g., at a glance, his heart seems to have basically been in the right place with the Palestinian cause—though not without him critiquing protestors before quickly and graciously changing his mind (starting with “The protest is misguided and destructive,” regarding Palestinian protests of the Toronto Film Festival; source: Adam Horowitz, 2009)—but in truth, Ebert was nowhere near aggressive enough towards Biden, Obama, Bush, or any other American president being the obvious root cause to all this suffering. He’s a giant nerd, like Bill Gates or Musk, but less enterprising and more principled than either were (enough to make him dangerous); i.e., awards of merit handed down from on high/graciously handed out by the current Wizard of Oz to show people the Scarecrow has brains. The contents of his skull remain useless straw passing for gold (and whose clout I’d trade for a handful of practicing leftists in a heartbeat): “murderers come to you in smiles”; so do rapists and their apologists, and Ebert was a sex pest. You can print that.

(source: Britannica)

Yet, weird canonical nerds are so often white, and use their effigial achievements to whitewash themselves (e.g., S.T. Joshi pissing and moaning over the World Fantasy Convention’s 2015 decision to remodel their awards not in Lovecraft’s likeness[23]). As a consequence, Ebert is posthumously worshipped for being “a good man” and specifically for his liberal politics, which—if you haven’t noticed by now—only further the abjection process while ogling rape (assigning stars to things, not unlike Dr. Seuss’ Star Belly Sneetches, but pointedly to art through weaponized gatekeeper criticism). He was a card-carrying Democrat, which makes him a moderate Republic in practice, and a man literally celebrated for his pointedly liberal politics:

Ebert grew up in “a liberal household” and “remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948,” according to an obituary in the Sun-Times [with Truman literally being a nuclear murderer]. At the University of Illinois, he started writing as a freshman by publishing a journal of “politics and opinion.” Those interests never waned, and publicly picked up especially in his later years, as he took to the Internet (source: Joe Coscarelli’s “The Political Writings of Roger Ebert,” 2013).

This wasn’t a source of contention, but open pride celebrating his legacy after his death. If only Ebert had lived lucidly into his 80s; i.e., watching Gamergate followed by Trump, Biden and Trump again; I have to wonder if his pride—which was arguably Faust’s Achille’s Heel—might have taken a much-needed blow…

Not that it would matter! Activism is what we do while we’re alive, and have the power to affect change (however great or small). The problem is, any moderate—not just Ebert fetishizing colonial victims in his movie reviews—is a Nazi waiting to decay into itself. The same goes for Radcliffe, Marlowe and anyone else abusing demonic poetics; i.e., for their own selfish gain (cops suck), making hay while furthering abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit. While Ebert was a multimillionaire by the time he died, Radcliffe herself—though paid far less for her own work—was still the highest paid author of Gothic fiction at the time (source: Victoria DeHart’s “The Enchanting Ann Radcliffe,” 2020—more on this, deeper into the subchapter). Predation is predation, “a predator often blind to its own peril” (to quote another blind old man praying on the local populace); all of these individuals thought themselves “all-knowing” similar to Faust, yet were blinded by the pursuit of decadent knowledge warding off the reality of their own inheritance and isolation: to die in darkness, alone, their own Faustian bargain ceasing to sparkle as the world around them decays. They don’t fiddle as Rome Burns, they scribble.

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

Sweet god, enough about Ebert and unironic torture porn apologia (seriously, I feel like I need a shower)! As we’ll see in Volume Three, then, the entirety of sex-positive artistic expression serves as a demonic iconoclast—of subverted demonic essence or knowledge as a sight increasingly forbidden to the Western world by those in power. Visible, sex-positive queerness is ironic because it uses creativity to demonstrate descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation as a poetic challenge to canonical norms that historically-materially treat anything beyond the status quo as alien, unknowable, abject; in the eyes of the status quo, the xenophilic bearers of such knowledge and dark, creative power must be evil: lookouts for Satan.

I beg to differ. Queer people aren’t “evil”; we’re simply “gods” in the sense that we—through dark poetics as a pedagogy of the oppressed—can author our own fates in pandemonic solidarity against the state based on what we, as workers, have the power to create ourselves like magic (and endure the shadow of police abuse all the while). As argued in our thesis statement, canon deifies poetics in defense of a patriarchal status quo that historically-materially privatizes and polices said process and demonizes anything else as a dark god, a false idol or mother of demons. But the xenophilic power to create and subvert a xenophobic status quo is still there (to this, Ghostbusters had it backward: the Ghostbusters should have asked Gozer if it was a god. The answer would have been, according to the movie’s own logic, yes; re: “If someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!” Fuckin’ A).

(exhibit 45c1: Model and artist: Itzel and Persephone van der Waard. As a transmasc, genderfluid person, Itzel has cultivated a xenophilic demonic identity with their own demonic sigil. This expression is not separate from their daily life, wherein they partake in Pride as a lifestyle to befriend others with during seminal events—those meant to be shared by like-minded persons: friends, lovers and fellow sex workers united under the same banner using demonic xenophilia as a popular means of spearheading the movement; i.e., by giving it personality and humanity mid-struggle.)

(exhibit 45c2a: Artist: Blxxd Bunny. If the self-fashioned sigil emblematizes the demon as changing shape, but also assigning emblems to this process, the tattoo is the means to apply this iconography directly to the artist’s own body. While it’s certainly unusual to take this process directly into one’s own hands, Bunny is living proof. As the canvas that literally paints itself, their body art makes them feel cute and proud—so much so that they delight in showing off not just their tattoos and piercings, but their entire, naked body as tattooed/pierced. By their own admission, they add, “I by no means condone any of the actions I show in these videos; I’m experienced, but I’m also reckless and practices like these are incredibly unsafe and I would never recommend anyone do these things to themselves. I am not a professional.”

The idea extends beyond solo BDSM depicted during pornographic performance art and public nudism, and extends into relationships between the artist and other artists [often swapping roles; re: module and muse]. And despite what SSC [“Safe Sane and Consensual“] argues, there’s no such thing as “total safety” for anyone, let alone queer people utilizing demonic expression in sex-positive ways [the alternative being RACK, which I prefer[24]]. But Bunny’s devotion to their own craft is impressive, demonstrating a steady hand and resilience to pain, but also capable know-how as they ink their own skin. In doing so, it tells the story that Bunny has in mind: themselves as a person they can be proud of, only adding to their beautiful frame over time as they continue their nudist displays becoming increasingly inked [thus demonic[25]].)

However muddled Gothic inheritance may seem, just remember one basic idea: whores are the classic keepers of secrets and granters of wishes (only growing strong as people become more alienated from sex), and generally do so through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., its wide-and-storied array of titillating costumes, flexible genders and “torturous” roleplay/crossdress[26] that are, unto themselves, haunted by historical trauma and linguo-material abuse (re: by hypocrites like Beeman, Burton, Landis, Ebert, and Marlowe). By extension, the Gothic connects little whores to big ones that—in the right or wrong hands, depending on how you frame it—threaten the world as we know it with something beyond its inhabitants’ wildest dreams. The game is one big tightrope/runway strip/cat walk, and involves TMI as much as profaning the sacred; e.g., I’m a girl, and I just had the world’s most explosive shit before writing this exact passage on account that I was trying to hold it in until I finished my thoughts; i.e., inspiration works much the same way and sometimes you just gotta let it out (and the longer you spend with other people, the more you’re going to encounter their various bodily functions).

That being said, I’m not going to fetishize that particular kink, but I will normalize a lack of censorship in the broader consensus (re: Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing) to give people who find power in that kind of thing a place to play with unspeakable things in “unspeakable” ways, mid-cryptonymy. I gotta yuck that yum, but as long everyone’s able to consent and actually gives consent within the venue, then no harm, no foul; re: diversity is strength and just because Archie Wilcox from Inglorious Basterds (2009) found Hugo Stiglitz to be a man of few words, he also learned that Stiglitz’ actions spoke louder than words when the pivotal moment came: “Now about this pickle we’re in; it would seem there’s only one thing left for you to do!” / “And what is that?” / “Stiglitz.” / “Say ‘auf wiedersehen[27]‘ to your Nazi balls!”

The point isn’t to “own” Nazis in the Free Marketplace of Ideas (since when has that stopped fascism?), but to camp the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM and break Capitalist Realism, thus stop the historical-material cycle of violence that reactionaries and moderates both depend on and defend in bad faith/centrist language; i.e., by pointedly confronting and controlling the conduit of messages speaking about/on/with taboo subjects normally used to torture us, sans irony. Girls shit, for example; some girls do more than that with their shit (cringes slightly while writing that clause)! Others get raped and do more with their rape than please opportunistic men (speaking from experience, with that one); i.e., “There are more thing between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”

Furthermore, such things—as elements to exploit or liberate and work with, mid-praxis—allude to hypermassive warring forces; i.e., the warring Communist Big Whore, Medusa, conveyed concentrically in smaller doubles, mid-belly-of-the-beast, grappling with state doubles of the capitalist Big Pimp: cops and victims, the former criminalizing the latter for profit, thus rape. All monsters—even that repulsive shit demon from Dogma (1999)—need love, and provided mutual consent is respected, mid-praxis, by punching up against Capitalism and profit (thus rape) as something to dismantle, mid-synthesis, then more power to us! As usual the facilitator is a whore (or muse, in Kevin Smith’s arguments. Same difference):

(exhibit 45c2b1: Older feminists/SWERFs tend to knock the topos of power of women[28], but it’s something that neo-medieval argument can broach from a variety of sources; e.g., Smith’s “angelicizing” of the formerly demonic Selma Hayek [above] from an exotified “other” wrought with vampire tropes punching down at Mexico from America, and attacking sex workers; i.e., with Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’ From Dusk ‘Til Dawn [1996] presenting the vampires as bloodsucking fodder the bar full of combat vets, bikers and runaway criminals must kill to survive; re: black penitents being one-upped by older more experienced black penitents, but also the assimilative myth [for Rodriguez] of a savage Mexico: a “bad” bloodline threatening a white American hostage virgin[29], and who Clooney’s suitably gruff, swarth-and-sexy antihero must protect from out-and-out whores [which is what a Neo-Gothic demon, out from the medieval past, ultimately is: an illegitimate claim to power through sex and force]. In his own words, Clooney’s “a bastard, not a fucking bastard.”

The takeaway with Smith’s Dogma is that he—a practicing or at least born Catholic—is showcasing a bidding war between two rival groups over Serendipity: an angelic-but-slutty muse, played by Hayek, while Linda Fiorentino’s sex-repressed heroine looks in on with begrudging respect [and previously herself played the awesome seductress moll, Bridgette/Wendy Croy, in John Dahl’s 1994 The Last Seduction—an early ’90s neo-noir with a very transphobic ending that castrates Bill Pullman and Peter Berg during coerced rape play]. And while it might seem like Smith is reining these ladies in, he’s also showcasing an interracial bid for attention: orchestrated by a non-white actress playing an otherworldly actress pitting men vampirically against each other using vampiric charms that have an infantilized, baby-pink “glow up” to them. It’s the Catholic schoolboy fascinated with the whore while pimping her/telling her what to wear!

Meta-wise, the subversion is there—and despite the biologically essentialized treatment of the foxy she-devil, having “gone over” to God’s side to fleece Smith’s sinning Jay and Silent Bob [echoes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz] stone blind [doing so to the Jackson Five’s “ABC,” 1970; i.e., a fool and his money are parted soon]—it’s an effective [and playful, fun] illustration of the topos of power of women in small being used, however ineffectually by Smith in the long run, to try and critique Catholic dogma and Capitalism under a Protestant ethic; e.g., his megachurch cardinal and author of the “Buddy Christ” stand-in being played by none other than George Carlin. It’s not not wrong.

The problem, here, is the film is still Smith’s idea of Capitalism, one he uses to biologically essentialize muses/sex workers; i.e., his own “den of scum and villainy” built on top of Tarantino and Rodriguez’ going all the way back to Matthew Lewis’ cabin of bandits-in-disguise, from The Monk—a novel Tarantino would ape, with his racist, profoundly misogynistic revival of Verhoeven’s already problematic 1985 Flesh and Blood satirizing Western hero culture. Neither director [nor Smith] could critique capital without reducing women to cis-het aliens whose only demonstrably “useful” role is to enchant men and steal their power [and wealth] through sex and sex alone.

Of course, there’s a kernel of truth to the cryptomimetic reenactments, but it’s possible to be essentially correct and still sexist while aping other sexist men in the process; i.e., Verhoeven filmed Sharon Stone’s flashing scene in 1992’s Basic Instinct without her consent, Tarantino is a rape apologist[30], and Smith is certainly no stranger to problematic belief systems [ultimately apologizing for the Catholic deity in Dogma but also falling into Milton and Tolkien’s Star Wars trap by aggrandizing He-Man and hiring Mark Hamill (an open Zionist) to voice Skeletor in his 2021 reboot, He-Man: Revelation]. Moreover, all of these men come from the same destructive system, Hollywood, whereas Matthew Lewis was a twenty-year old gay man/member of Parliament who wrote The Monk to deliberately critique the status quo [a reputation that would haunt him for the rest of his life, his nickname eventually becoming “Monk” Lewis. We should all be so lucky].

[artist: H.W., Pickersgill]

Campy patronymics aside, Lewis was a gay man who camped the canon to invert problematic ideas like Original Sin and Faustian bargains; re: Broadmoor’s 2021 “Camping the Canon” vis-à-vis Milton and Lewis, followed by me as inspired by Broadmoor’s title when writing my 2023 PhD; e.g., the shapeshifting Matilda first disguising as the male Rosario, then admitting after she is caught that she has actually modeled herself after Ambrosio’s portrait of the Madonna on his abbey wall, before seducing him through a reenacting of the Fall [of Adam and Eve] inside “an artificial wilderness.” Everything is fake as fuck.

So whereas Lewis’ revolutionary cryptonymy was profoundly anti-capitalist and anti-establishment—in effect empowering women like Matilda to gut Ambrosia like the incestuous pig/rapist he was—I can’t help but feel Smith [and by extension older auteurs like Verhoeven and Tarantino] have sucked much of the satire out of camp. I don’t care if Smith is a King Diamond fan; it’s still blind satire, as is their own choir they’re preaching to—with them closer to Radcliffe than they’d like to admit; i.e., posturing as Lewis’ famous rebel to enjoy the straight man’s idea of a queer bad boy[31] rocking the boat, but actually “super straight” neo-conservative con men, failing to put pearls before swine [or pearl-clutching for swine, take your pick]: pulling a Radcliffe-in-disguise! “We stare and tremble!” indeed! They’re frauds who uphold capital, not tear it down.

[source: Lila Shapiro’s “There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades,” 2025]

Simply put, function determines function, not appearance—with the aesthetics of Faustian devilry something that sex liberators and sex pests can embellish in service to workers or profit. It’s why you can have someone as devilish [and handsome] as Rickman—playing a variety of dashing lotharios, unscrupulous bandits and ravishing sexual predators onscreen, but be a total sweetheart offscreen [see: Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries[32], 2022]—versus someone like Neil Gaiman, playing the part “to the hilt” and passing himself off as some kind of rebel with a cause; i.e., as a genuine sex pest posturing as a Gothic bad boy auteur to access women’s spaces and actually rape them[33].

Furthermore, while cis gay men classically are known to tokenize—re: Foucault, Spacey and Dahmer—the problem is heteronormative, thus straight because the state and its cops are straight; i.e., as a systematic problem—the kind Matthew Lewis was highlighting to expose the queer pogroms happening in his own time, versus the straight men aping him/using his rockstar status to pass themselves off as “activists” while actually being crusaders-in-disguise [and imitating a woman imitating straight bigoted men, oddly enough]!

From the silver screen to Netflix, Hollywood is the Church, giving shelter to Black Penitents like Radcliffe did—her 1796 Italian‘s full title being The Confessional of the Back Penitents and cashing in on Lewis’ 1794 Monk‘s signature cryptonymy and perfidy: a straight person aping a queer man to drain his camp of iconoclastic value, cashing in on cheap doubles; i.e., despite being called in some circles “the Mother of Gothic literature” [source: Women’s Museum of California, 2017] and hero worshipped for it [sorry, Dale[34], but if the shoe fits…], Radcliffe came after Clara Reeve and aped not one but two gay men, Lewis and Walpole; Smith and company aped Radcliffe aping Lewis to fall on her side of the camp, praxially speaking. Blind camp is blind camp, and all of these people fit the bill. Per capital, such things also work in pairs and go in cycles that span centuries; re: Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern.

[artist: Black Salander]

To that, be like Lewis or myself when making your own demons, not Radcliffe or her functionally comparable doppelgangers; i.e., the Sphinx’ riddle, let your tortures mean something by challenging the status quo [and crippling Divine Right; re: Oedipus Rex].)

Now that we’ve covered whores-as-demonic through the Faustian angle as something to involve amongst ourselves (as whores), let’s examine demons as summoned through magic! “Lay on, Macduff, and damned be he who cries ‘Hold, enough!'”

Onto “The Road to Hell: Summoning the Whore, Ourselves (opening and part one – Showing Jadis’ Face while Doubling Them)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Per Radcliffe’s own Black Veil and demon BDSM (as borrowed from ecclesiastical circles; e.g., the naughty nun), the language of summoning demons generally involves summoning a kind of sex demon that reintroduces a convulsionnaire’s latter-day jouissance trembling before a reimagined Numinous; e.g., Barker’s Cenobites, but really any demon you could think of when dealing with the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection: the whore as a sex demon vice character who refuses to repent/owns the neo-medieval aesthetic for canon and camp, alike.

Except, whereas Lewis’ fakeries critiqued the status quo through an imaginary Church using overtly demon language, the fractal recursion begot from Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural” opted for more modest, Female-Gothic (re: Moers) inventions that later demanded TERF-style police violence punching down in bad faith “against”: the banditti-as-false-preacher robbing the faithful blind/turning them mad against vulnerable groups.

As I shall demonstrate in “Summoning Demons” as a whole, the black penitent can take on qualities of either author during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., when pointedly camped by us to put Lewis’ black magic and Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture” (and other demonic devices) to good use—when developing Gothic Communism by infiltrating and stealing from the imaginary past! Raid Radcliffe’s liquor cabinet; drag out her corpse and beat it with sticks!

[2] A NWOTHM band similar in political bite to Queensrÿche’s excellent Operation Mindcrime (1988).

[3] Whose mythical warriors aren’t just invincible barbarians who can transform into demons when looking at the moon, but who have a palingenetic “Nazi werewolf” flavor to them avenging Frieza’s destruction of their homeworld after they did his dirty work (the backstabbing Jew trope); i.e., one that goes back to the Third Reich. For more details on this idea and its revenge argument—strictly that of reclaiming one’s lost home from a legendary past wrong during the Imperial Boomerang (and cartographic refrain)—refer to my writeup on similar demons in Bungie’s Myth franchise (source: “‘Hell Hath No Fury’; or, Soulblighter’s Token Gay Nazi Revenge (and Giants/Female Characters) in Myth II: Soulblighter” (2024).

Furthermore, it’s a common military recruitment tactic when the state decays, one based on ahistorical, monomythic likenesses of our world; i.e., often through an element of performative victimhood and revenge assigned to real-world groups by people who are not those groups; re: DARVO and obscurantism (e.g., Braveheart, 1995) that promise mates, military glory/accolades, manhood, revenge, and shelter in times of manufactured crisis… if only you participate in a little tournament! And like all fascist pigs, it’s an abattoir for the animal farmers to harvest and enslave those young and dumb enough to buy what the state is selling.

Such media is routinely haunted by our aforementioned “Star Wars problem” (thus KISS, Paradise Lost, etc)—i.e., the rebels aren’t Communists fighting for a new world beyond the past one, en medias res (Communism); they and the Jedi are fighting for the Old Republic and a previous centrist ordering that decayed into fascism (their paradise lost). The problem with Lucas, Tolkien and Milton, etc, is their refrains are ethnocentric, and constructed cartographically/geopolitically along regressive arguments of “rebellion for us” (redlining ghettos). It’s American Liberalism/white (and token) centrist bullshit, feeding into Capitalist Realism; i.e., Americanized media since WWII essentializing Western orderings of the world, which it then defends through theatres of war personifying said war and its copagandistic values. Per Howard Zinn, these appeal to American exceptionalism—and exclusive revolution defending the status quo through Superman-level comic book theatres—as something to import to American imitators, overseas; e.g., Japan, post-occupation and -assimilation.

In turn, the Z fighters fight fire with fire, assimilating to defend the realm for the elite, not prevent crime/rape (they like to fight); i.e., by performing Westernized ideas of strength and beauty standards, while whitewashing fascism/tokenizing Socialism to defend Earth from external demonic threats—namely a goblin/queer clown vice character (Frieza), an invincible barbarian/demon warrior (Broly), a mad science experiment (Cell) and a witch’s evil creation (Buu). It’s kayfabe vaudeville with Faustian and Promethean elements, the various devils and throwback supermen apologizing for fascism, mid-Red-Scare, and loaded to shonen excess through nonstop battles of will versus degeneracy to protect a Japanese neoliberal view of the Earth; i.e., through Beowulf-grade momentum shifts and wish fulfillment directed at chosen saviors getting the girls, then spending all their time with other men; e.g., Goku likes fighting and food, extending conflict to the detriment of others. He’s not a good hero, but is an excellent cop. Vegeta assimilates, but in truth is married more to Goku (his first love) than Bulma (his beard); re: “No one kills Kakarot but me!” It’s all very macho/warrior hero cult of death.

In other words, cops are queernormative through a homosocial lens, and queernormativity is heteronormativity. To that, betrayal is betrayal, rape is rape, banishment is banishment, etc. The real villain of the show is Goku—playing dumb and reaping the rewards of raping planet Earth without end (famously sending his victims, Radcliffe-style, “into the next dimension” because Cartoon Network didn’t want to say “Hell” or even “shadow realm”). He’s judge, jury and executioner towing the Thin Blue Line, just like Superman did against Zod.

[4] I only ever had one person—a trans man—ask to have their poster/written involvement be entirely removed from the project, post hoc, and they were working in bad faith with another trans person, a trans woman, who—recently separated from one of my partners—sought to discredit my work and turn past actors against me; re (from Persephone van der Waard’s “Policing the Whore”):

Such preferential mistreatment translates to real life and the ways a witch hunt normally play out: turning society against those who aren’t normally believed by other members of the prison population.

For example, JDPlaysMoth accused me of abuse based on my testimony of older transmisogyny committed against me (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th 2024), doing so after refusing to transvestigate my own partner because I didn’t take Jade at their word that [my partner] Crow was a Nazi “fake trans” preying on “real trans people”:

Crow is racist, lied about being trans to me and you, is abusive, steals money, intentionally asks trans people they’re acquainted with if they can write fiction of them detransitioned, and lies about being single and friendless to get new partners. They also aren’t trans. They lie about being trans because they have a fetish for trans women. They also are a chronic narcissist who uses abuse to try and control people who want to help them (source).

and then adding, “If you want to know more, that’s fine, but I’m out of the situation, and this is just information” before running a smear campaign on me because they were “just trying to help” and I refused to listen. They then deadnamed/misgendered Crow, saying that they didn’t “want to transition, doesn’t want surgery, and as another partner of hers has confirmed, she only does it because she thinks it’ll make trans women like her more” (ibid.). Jade’s actions— cloak-like though they are—still speak for themselves.

Furthermore, all of this is done by Jade while swanning and showing off their outward appearance to their fans (source tweet: June 26th, 2024)—in short, while kissing up and punching down as a byproduct of their own lived abuse. Acknowledging that abuse is valid, but more important is understanding that Jade is presently an abuser weaponizing their own lived experiences against others. They’re the impostor in love with themselves, a mirror that reflects their false nature onto their victims in order to makes others feel threatened; doing so is meant to alienate Jade’s victims, presenting them as false, illegitimate outsiders Jade’s flash mob can string up in association with their usual inequity under police rule: the scapegoat, witch whore inside more earthly and less fantastical prisons. Fantastical or not, there’s always some orc to lynch, some whole to fill through revenge; re: the givers and receivers of state violence inside the state of exception, moving money through nature.

Free from scrutiny and indeed, venerated for having exposed a perceived menace through the usual bigotries leveled at the marginalized struggling for in group status, Jade is the fascist ringleader free to feed on her victims with impunity! She’s a witch hunter played by the witch—a feeding frenzy conducted by those commonly dehumanized by systemic abuse seeking empowerment through said system; i.e., the policing of others through a matter of dogma, fear and revenge, abjecting members of the same community by triangulating against them for the state: robots policing robots, slaves policing slaves, those of nature policing those of nature as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine (source).

Note: In case my source tweets are removed/Twitter melts completely down, you can find the entire tweet threads and screencaps in this Google Doc; re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023 [updated 11/13/2024].” Such redundant storage is a data preservation strategy I have performed multiple times, learning it from my mother/other sex workers and allowing me to compile and consequently share my abuse in quick, easy-to-digest forms; e.g., “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim_August 30th, 2022” and “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022.” In keeping with the revolutionary cryptonymy process, if you’re transparent, you take away accusations that only work under opaque conditions; and if they still attack you, they’re outing themselves. Win-win, loves.

In short, token whores police whores, while being and not being undercover!

I’m an expert not just in researching tokenism, then, but in surviving it where it most commonly occurs. Always document your own genocide; receipts protect us from cops, official or de facto, during witch hunts; e.g., from white moderates who otherwise might turn a blind eye*, but also marginalized groups who might otherwise tokenize openly and punch down (the fencer-sitters). So often, we practicing leftists have to document our own abuse—and not just from status-quo people, but those from out-groups wanting to betray their own (all oppressed people); i.e., to assimilate/triangulate against universal labor. A bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and people acting in bad faith tend not to fuck with you if you can document their abuse and show it to the world while also protecting yourself. We must blow the whistle and be smart about it, because canon deifies its dead as sacred!

*Persephone’s Metroidvania Series #6: Reading My Transphobic Hate Comments (re: Doom Eternal)” (2025) from “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025).

[5] Re: Persephone van der Waard’s “A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards” (2024).

[6] E.g., Nex Benedict (from “Remember the Fallen”):

Nex went to the “correct” bathroom only to be killed anyways by those the rule was supposed to “protect”: teenage girls (in truth, the rules are coding behaviors that condition cis-het people [and token agents] to attack “incorrect” persons). The three attackers used the rule to isolate Nex, then entered the bathroom in bad faith to execute them (the rule and the person). In turn, the state’s ipso facto sanctioning of selective punishment has been demonstrated by their shielding of Nex’ hangmen (or rather, in this case, hang women) [source].

[7] Dick Nelson, played by Jeffery Jones—a man who first pleaded guilty in 2003 to hiring a fourteen-year-old boy to pose naked in photos for him, then refused to update his sex offender registry in 2010:

Jeffrey Jones, best known for playing the bumbling Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Tuesday to a felony charge of failing to update his sex offender registry info. / The 64-year-old actor escaped a possible 3-year jail sentence in state prison, but must now serve three years of probation and perform 250 hours of roadside clean-up, TMZ first reported. / In July 2003, Jones pleaded no contest to hiring a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit photos, according to City News Service.

“I’m sorry that this incident was allowed to occur. Such an event has never happened before and it will never happen again,” Jones reportedly said then. / As a result of the case, he was sentenced to five years’ probation and was required to register annually as a sex offender. / Jones was arrested June 23 after failing to update his registration for 2009. / He has appeared in more than 60 roles on the silver and small screens (source).

In other words, Jones got a slap on the wrist more than once; i.e., painfully reminiscent since Radcliffe’s The Italian, showing how the system—since Antiquity and the medieval period into the Neo-Gothic period and beyond—repeatedly serves the needs of status-quo men by design: not to prevent crime, but let those with power abuse their power to keep harming those the system normally exploits. As we’ll see with Radcliffe, the exposure must be total and universal; otherwise, the detectives being lionized are merely cops-in-disguise!

However ignorant or aware of the tropes someone is, the monomyth is rape apologia. In Beeman’s case, his movie calls “Mr. Everyman*” “Earth Dick”; i.e., while camping Star Wars and Flash Gordon before it—all the way back to Frankenstein, Udolpho, Paradise Lost and Beowulf—to instill praxial inertia for profit, with a smaller risk/allegory of the historical-material facts: as an inside (and sadly prophetic) joke—a family patriarch/authority figure who extends his whitewashed persona (and rapacious cock) astronoetically into outer space, on and offstage! The paradox of Dick Nelson is the whore is canonically someone who endangers the nuclear family through imposturous scandals; i.e., Dick Nelson the character endangers his family through sheer ineptitude, while his real-life double (the actor) threatens to break the entire spell by acting the canonical idea of a male harlot/sodomite. It’s like a really sobering version of Captain Kirk. Furthermore, the quotidian upstart upstaging Captain Crunch is, himself, an impostor getting paid for his time (though probably not well, considering the movie absolutely bombed**).

*Re: Natalie Stechyson, writing on Gisele Pelicot exposing her rapists.

**Its total gross was reportedly two million dollars; by comparison, T2—then the highest-grossing movie of all time—made $517 million (despite this, the production costs were so high, Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted his payment in the form of a jet). And despite claims to the contrary about Jones not getting paid for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice [2024], the makers still used his likeness to some extent [versus writing him out of the story altogether]. So the odds that he got paid something by Burton [who worked with him for years] aren’t zero [similar to Crispin Glover in Back to the Future 2]. That being said, this is pure conjecture, so it can go either way [see: r/Beetlejuice 2‘s “Jeffery Jones,” 2024].

“The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” So does Beeman extend/apologize for rape (to some extent) by blindly camping those stories, but also The Simpsons‘ 1989 debut (and The Jetsons/Flintstones‘ [1962/1960] own unironic endorsements of The Honeymooners, Leave It to Beaver [1955/1957] and a million other sitcoms and cartoons oscillating between blind camp and perceptive parody/pastiche attacking the nuclear family model; e.g., The Stepford Wives, 1972); i.e., as juxtaposed alongside the early ’90s thinning of the membrane, vis-à-vis Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, Butler’s Gender Trouble, Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, Jameson’s Postmodernism, and Warner’s “heteronormativity.”

It’s certainly a response to all of these things, but as Radcliffe shows us, familiarity with cliché isn’t the same thing as endorsing universal liberation. We must do better than all peoples who came  before; i.e., by revisiting and updating as many times as needed what has since become dated and harmful; re (from the Poetry Module citing Volume Zero):

Again, “kill your darlings”; i.e., even if everyone in Gothic academic quotes Angela Carter, she’s still a second wave feminist, thus has major problems we must critique. As I write in Volume Zero: Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992— one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.

To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn (source: “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m,” 2024)

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

We must critique our heroes when they disappoint us, and hold ourselves and them to the same level of scrutiny we would our enemies while making media showing us being “tortured.” Anyone can combine anything to say anything they need for any argument; in turn, anyone can tokenize, and many are—far from walking the tightrope or sitting on the fence—either betraying us in bad faith or unaware that they’re limiting the scope of their critics to effectively critique capital vis-à-vis Gothic poetics: “We are human, so respect our boundaries and honor our demands as we honor yours; e.g., ‘It’s my turn, so cleave my beaver like a good little slave!'”

To that, I wrote Sex Positivity‘s first book, Volume Zero (2023), to critique Creed’s Amazonomachia further than she dared (my readings deliberately going from movies into videogames while taking the former and Gothic novels into consideration); i.e., scrutinizing her work, but also Derrida and any other author mentioned from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s (and really from any time period I feel like). Nothing is sacred but universal basic human, animal and environmental rights; the state—and anyone who defends them directly or indirectly—is a cop. And say the line, Bart: “ACAB! ASAB! AHAB! ABAB” The state is straight; we’re here and we’re queer! Furthermore, “trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are valid; sex work is work; free Palestine!” And so on…

[8] Originally from Volume Zero, but later cited in “A Note about Canonical Essentialism” (2024):

 

(exhibit 1a1a1h2a1: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer*.” Videogames are war simulators; in them, maps are built not merely to be charted and explored, but conquered through war simulations. The land is an endless site of conquest, war, rape and profit carefully dressed up as “treasure,” “liberation” and “adventure,” but in truth, brutalizing nature during endless wars of extermination borrowed from the historical and imaginary past as presently intertwined:

• top-left: Tolkien’s refrain, “Thror’s Map” from The Hobbit, 1937—source: Weta Workshop
• top-right: Thomas Happ’s map of Sudra from Axiom Verge, 2015—source: magicofgames
• bottom-left: Team Cherry’s map of Hallownest, from Hollow Knight 2017—source: tuppkam1
• bottom-right: Bungie’s map of the West from Myth: the Fallen Lords, 1997—source: Ben’s Nerdery

Though certainly not unique to Tolkien, and popularized in the shooter genre vis-à-vis Cameron, Tolkien near-single-handedly popularized the idea of “world-building” in fantasy by making a mappable world full of languages he invented, but which he tied to the larger process of world war that has been replicated countless times since; i.e., the idea of the map as a space for conquest that paralleled the elite raping Earth repeatedly as translated to the videogame format; e.g., Myth, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, above [our focus, in the next subchapter, will be on Metroidvania, not the RTS]. Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earthlike double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force. 

In short, Tolkien’s inventions (or Cameron’s) were the same kinds of us-versus-them ethnocentric arguments made by men of reason out of the historical past, onstage and offstage, to justify real-world invasions proceeded by imaginary ones (and vice versa).

*For added fun, here is the footnote on Gruber and Die Hard this quote is referring to/cited from:

A canonical misunderstanding/misquoting of Plutarch written by neoliberals needing an evil bad guy to chew the fat. As Anthony Madrid writes in “And Alexander Wept” (2020):

Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” [that’s a misquote]. Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: “Benefits of a classical education.” / Yeah. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. […]

A few facts. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. […] It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century [e.g., Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655 …] The quote is a hash of three passages in Plutarch, first century CE. Two of the passages were made available to English speakers (most notably Shakespeare) in 1579, in the translation by Thomas North. […] Look at this rather nicer version [of Plutarch’s “On Tranquillity of Mind”] by everybody’s favorite courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt [for Catherine of Aragon]: Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: “Is it nat to be wept for,” quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”

[…] Alexander is not weeping in sorrow that there are no more throats to cut. This is not a picture of a man at the end of a career of world conquest; he’s at the beginning. “Look at all these throats—and I haven’t even cut one!”

[…] And therfore, seing that his fathers dominions and Empire increased dayly more and more, perceiving all occasion taken from him to do any great attempt: he desired no riches nor pleasure but warres and battells, and aspired to a signory, where he might win honor. Now that’s from Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. No tears, but definitely the guy Gruber had in mind, the Godzilla he’d heard about in German day camp. Here’s a prince who wants to conquer for the sake of conquering; he doesn’t care whether Macedon comes out on top or not, except insofar as it’s compatible  with his personal glory (source).

In short, Gruber’s misquoting of classical history is a kind of bad education that invites the fash-coded baddie in a neoliberal copaganda to steal from the fictional elite, while the real-world elite rewrite the past along these historical-material lines; i.e., neoliberal apologia regarding war as essentialized through men just like Gruber.

And if movie directors can do it to tokenize Irish cops (McClane)—i.e., in service to a Japanese company on American soil (while scapegoating the FBI in the process)—then we wacky fags can camp all of their ghosts in service to all the generations of peoples capital has exploited; re: Ward Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Some People Push Back” (2005).

[9] This is as much a bodily function as a choice; e.g., swamp ass part of the time versus mega ripe 24/7!

[10] The hero’s sexual reward, reviving Valhalla during state decay—what C.S. Lewis would call “a teatable paradise”:

In the plastic arts these symbols [of power] have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, “There, there” (source: C.S. Lewis’ 1961 preface to The Screwtape Letters featured in Jordan Poss’ “C.S. on Angels in Art,” 2020).

Such poetics convey nostalgias to pine for in regards to angels and godly ordainment; i.e., “Make Heaven Great Again.” Gothic Communism can camp this, making C.S. Lewis clutch his pearls by reminding them that power and its Numinous statements are half-real, plastic, and prone to change. Fuck God, hahaha! Do sacrilege, kids!

[11] Unlike Marlowe’s previous The Jew of Malta, the Faust legend speaks to white Germanic male vanity and hubris; i.e., similar to what Shelley would satirize in Frankenstein with her own mad science polemic—the difference being Marlowe’s story was designed for the stage, not novelized, but still critiques Man’s reach exceeding his grasp: through a morality tale of “pride cometh before the Fall” (a theme borrowed from Greek tragedies into Marlowe, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley and so on). The science presents as “magical”; i.e., one whose rituals of fatal pursuit speak to the abuse of alchemic technology (re: the Philosopher’s Stone): summoning a demon from Hell who sends Faust down a heavy-handed path of self-destruction/towards the Big Man downstairs (an excommunication). To it, the Good Doctor has every chance to stop, but doesn’t because he has white male fragility and privilege (which includes scientific, celebrity-status privilege). In turn, the store frames everything in medieval theatre language (the Deadly Sin of Pride). It’s silly and serious, the “tragedy” unfolding as an argument concerning self-aggrandizement that doesn’t pass muster.

Regarding the many others who followed in Faust’s footsteps, Landis couldn’t help himself. Bolstered by the success of Animal House, Blues Brothers (1980), and An American Werewolf in London (1981), his attempts to capture fresh “lightning in a bottle” success by pushing the envelop led to a totally avoidable tragedy—one just like Faust except it affected people other than Faust (all speaking to the “pity me” self-centered quality of the original story that—among others—Shelley was making fun of in her own revival not just of Prometheus, but Marlowe’s morality tale); re: starring American actor Vic Morrow and 7-year old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, the latter two hired in deliberate violation of California labor laws and used in a white savior ghost story returning to the Vietnam War to rescue victims of American Genocide (colonial guilt, and turning a profit at colonizer and colonized expense—all very Walpolean, considering Morrow and his “chosen princes” are crushed/decapitated by a falling helicopter, similar to the giant helmet crushing Lord Manfred’s son: cutting them and their greatness short).

While I wish I could say the exposure of these workplace violations had any demonstrable effect regarding systemic change, the system exists to protect powerful men, not cancel them; and being white, straight, male and powerful, Landis not only survived the case intact, he went on to direct dozens of films afterwards (slowly shifting to producing movies and TV shows, in the 2010s). While people less vain would be absolutely chuffed to have any career close to that, Landis—like Faust before him—can’t help himself, can never stop, always wants. Furthermore, he took the wrong lessons away from Twilight—mainly that he was the main character in and outside his own production; re: “Impunity is the apex of privilege,” I write, in “Valorizing the Idiot Hero” (source, 2020).

And while that piece focused on Ashley Williams from the Evil Dead franchise, my argument effectively speaks to the same kind of unchecked, publicly endorsed/enabled male privilege that Faust enjoyed until his tragic, completely avoidable death; i.e., a story about an idiot (Quixotic) hero who ignores everyone around him until it either kills him, or at least blows up in his face—the same kind of carte blanche entitlement enjoyed by half-real Great Men of the imaginary past (all history is somewhat fictional) leading to Landis and later on, Trump’s two presidencies (and all American executives “playing Faust”). Monsters are made, and the Faustian hubris Marlowe made famous was, itself, a historical result of systemic issues that only crystalized after his play summon them.

As such, Landis and future assholes like him are symptoms of a larger historical-material cycle bleeding collateral damage in furtherance to bourgeois triage; i.e., one developing a rash of personality disorders (such as narcissism) menticiding them into Quixotic numbskulls causing other workers great harm (and forcing these victims into fractally recursive Faustian bargains, on and on). Reflecting on the disaster afterwards, Landis only thought about himself and what could have been regarding his own wasted potential and movie-magic success (thus profit/rape unfetter/undeterred by consequence): “There was absolutely no good aspect about this whole story. The tragedy, which I think about every day, had an enormous impact on my career from which I may possibly never recover (emphasis, me; source: Nigel Andrews’s “Golden Boy Howls at the Moon: John Landis was feted in Hollywood for his comedies – then it all changed,” 1996). In other words, “Me, me, me!”

(photographer: Rick Meyer)

Faust is only a sympathetic tragedy if the hero actually dies and learns something valuable at the end; i.e., to help others, not pity himself. In real life, Landis does neither of those things, but invokes Great Men of the past to valorize his own giant mistakes harming other people in great numbers; re, Marx: “History repeats first in tragedy and then in farce.” Faust—as a parable about self-destructive vanity in pursuit of glory through demonic magic—shines a light on human failings when given no barriers; i.e., on the path towards total power in pursuit of fatal knowledge (or vice versa): faced with any such device (wish, want or desire) as something to gain, the Great Man of History self-destructs to take others with him—doing in ways we can learn from and use to survive and prevent (through systemic change by raising awareness): people like Landis from harming us in our own lives.

Such things might seem wholly silly and serious; i.e., like Raimi’s serious-to-spoof movies, the original Beowulf (or the Welsh Arthurian cycle from the same pre-to-Old-English period, the 700s), Marlowe’s idiotic Faust, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) or Shakespeare’s Macbeth and its own dire conclusion: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Told by idiots or about them, stories following the Faustian tradition and its seminal tragedy speak to historical-material problems that can only change by recognizing these stories as they exist and unfold; i.e., in between fiction and nonfiction, onstage and off, for workers or against them, using demonic language in either case during liminal expression.

“To critique power, you must go where it is.” The Faustian past is a wealth of fatal knowledge we inquisitors must learn from when hearing demons and angels talk to us (to torture out of us and vice versa). We must, lest we make the same mistakes that Faust did: refusing to listen to others while acting like a fragile, privileged white male. And to those of you who might insist he had it good, remember that, while the system protects powerful men, it ultimately preys on them, then self-destructs on loop; re: Faust didn’t just die at the end, he died an ignominious death—Hell’s “angels” (demons) tearing him literally limb from limb. Such duality would seem to prophesize labor punching up, but it also speaks to state cops punching down, inside the Capitalocene (criminogenic conditions/immiseration), and to state shift sitting on the cusp of final planetary defeat (whose Capitalist Realism they will exploit, as always, to maintain themselves and their own Faustian positions; e.g., Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, etc).

The Shadow of Pygmalion, then, is also the Shadow of Faust/Cycle of Kings, and the bad bargains he made with state devils constitute Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern: a proto-fascist cryptonymy (false power) demonstrating the myriad ways in which the state ultimately cannibalizes “Faust” to keep itself alive, then blame that on “the Devil” (classic Red Scare translating anti-Semitic myth to anti-Marxist dogma; i.e., Cultural Bolshevism and Marxism espoused by bad state actors policing demonology during future class, culture and race wars—with those involving shifting scapegoats and spearheaded by Faustian useful idiots and short-term benefactors; e.g., Zionism).

[12] From top to bottom, the movie’s “heroes” are a bunch of entitled drunks who aren’t college freshmen; the old crowd have been in school for seven years (making them at least twenty-five, when the movie starts). They simultaneously use collage to belittle those actually working—stealing and cheating every chance they get—fear people of color they nonetheless hire for basement concerts, evoke a Dionysian orgy (“toga party”) that sees them getting women drunk and then presumably raping them (no one in the movie is shown drunk during these scenes except Belushi, and he’s too cool for sex), and then joke about all of this being “pointless” in ways that conveniently benefit them (the pre-credits eulogies celebrate the various characters’ accomplishments, failing up).

(artist: Rick Meyerowitz; source)

National Lampoon—and by extension, SNL—has always been a white moderate “Faustus factory”; i.e., the screenwriters making the “snobs vs slobs” story self-important and uncommitted save it being about fascist American youth and moderate fascist American youth: a pack of privileged scoundrels who use and abuse everyone around them, stand for nothing but their own personal gain (“Might as well have joined the fucking Peace Corps.!”), dodge the draft (which is valid) but also accountability for abusing others (which isn’t valid), invent an internal conspiracy about it (“double-secret probation,” which does critique neoliberal abuse but only as it affects them), host luxurious, expensive and recklessly self-indulgent “Roman” revivals/debauches through frat-house fraternity cults of masculinity (“the Deltas”), and basically whitewash every bigotry under the sun while infiltrating the Free Love movement/corrupt genuine activism with American Liberalist hogwash: “It’s all one big party “so we might as well have a good time!” The movie is nostalgic about rape as something to get away with, washing it all down with a good false-rebellion story. Well played, pigs.

I grew up watching Animal House on VHS, remembering Meyerowitz’ Sunday-newspaper approach to the cover art (above). I didn’t fully grasp as a little girl just how awful all of these guys were/are. That came later—meaning when I actually went to school and learned something about literature and sex (and having my fair share of each re: Constance, Zeuhl, Jadis and Cuwu). The Deltas clearly suck, then, but are the Faustian brainchildren of Landis and company’s own comorbid hubris, first and foremost; i.e., as Meyerowitz explains, the stories about Delta were autobiographical: “In 2006, Chris Miller, whose short stories in the Lampoon were the inspiration for the Animal House movie, which he co-wrote, published The Real Animal House. […] Chris is a great guy. Buy his book!” (ibid.)

In true Faustian tradition, then, everyone acts like it was just “harmless fun”—devaluing genuine academic achievement/activism that would dismantle the system that privileges them, then pimping their way through school and valorizing it afterwards while presenting themselves as something they’re not (actual scientists or great thinkers). American liberals are truly the worst/epitome of privilege for the cruel and the mediocre (and don’t get me started on SNL; e.g., Will Farrell and similar actors endorsing the War on Terror [“Osama’s Pep Talk,” 12/01/01] yet whitewashing themselves with token friends [Will and Harper, 2024]. I hate that guy).

[13] Whose consensus on “women” leans away from abstract and arguably towards a limiting of the category to her own experiences as white; i.e., as No Fly on the WALL writes,

When Mary [Wollstonecraft] published her polemic on Feminist Philosophy in 1792, against the tumultuous background of the French Revolution, she concerned herself with the rights afforded to “woman” – an abstract category. However, in [Wollstonecraft’s] world, there was seemingly something in the body social that drew all women together and merged their experiences. In today’s society, the difference in the female experience because of intersections such as race and class have become increasingly more apparent and in the case of black women – as men and women of other ethnicities – try to define who we are for us (source: “A Vindication of the Rights of Black Women: A Contribution to a Discourse,” 2013).

In short, Mary’s work—like her daughter’s—makes for an excellent start, but needs to be built upon and harvested for parts, not taken at face value. Academics tend to write from privilege; we must intersect all of these, regardless of our privilege or register of discourse: using academic ideas for commonplace solutions, including camping Marlowe’s ghost.

[14] “I never thought about the film reflecting societal issues of the late 1970s,” Maltin writes in 2019; “after all, Star Wars came out a year earlier and offered total escape to a huge and responsive audience [emphasis, me]. Looking back, however, it makes perfect sense that Alien can now be seen as a reflection of its time period” (source: “Memory: the Origins of Alien“). Like, no shit, dude; it only took your forty years to figure that out? Alien was always a reflection of its time period. “Jesus wept,” capital well and truly breeds idiots to whitewash its offenses; i.e., trying to conceal said offenses with glittering Hollywood stupidity and calling anything outside of that “the darkness of human nature” (re: Freud abjecting spectres of Marx and Marx’ historical materialism). “Get fucked, nerd!” Also, is it just me, or does Maltin smile weird?

I say this as a weird iconoclastic nerd; show me a weird canonical nerd like Maltin or Ebert and I will show you an idiot stuck in the Man Box. Just like Faust, Maltin’s ignorance was willful and paid; i.e., he and Ebert choosing to view stories as “pure escapism” for a paycheck capital found useful. They’re basically blind to allegory and coasting by on a system where allegory isn’t useful to them (and which they’ll abject anything that comes in, from outside Plato’s cave); theft is useful to them, thus rape inside a system where their Faustian ignorance helps preserve the status quo through escapist fantasies built on rape inside-outside themselves. Shame on you both!

[15] Aping Susan Sontag, Ebert writes, “There is no indication that the boy is horrified by the man’s Nazi past; he is more like a fascinated voyeur.” He continues:

I should add that Very Bad Things is intended as a comedy. Apt Pupil, based on a Stephen King novella, plays as a horror film. Happiness cannot easily be categorized, but I think it stands above the other films, not with them. (Two other new films that are superficially similar, Clay Pigeons and Home Fries, are more traditional character-driven comedy thrillers that contain a lot of gore but stay within generally acceptable boundaries.)

All of these films owe something to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), an enormous success that suggested a way into Hollywood for unknown young directors. If you don’t have major stars and you don’t have a big budget, then the genre itself can be your selling point. Horror films, like sex films, do not depend on marquee names. The content itself is the star.

Horror as a genre has been expanded, in some of these films, by a mean streak of cruelty, masked as irony. Once horror films sympathized with victims who were being threatened. Then they started using point-of-view shots to identify with the slashers instead of the victims. In recent years there are two more refinements: (1) a single victim is not enough, and most of the movies string together killing scenes like an all-hit radio format; and (2) there is a fascination with bizarre kinds of pain and torture not seen since the Marquis de Sade on a good day.

Combine these ingredients with the two most easily assimilated trademarks of Quentin Tarantino (colorfully arcane and vulgar dialogue, and labyrinthine plotting) and you have the elements that the New Geeks are exultantly recycling (source).

(source: Ann Casano’s “The Most Obvious Quentin Tarantino Foot Fetish Scenes,” 2024)

Then, in the greatest of ironies, Ebert has the utter temerity to apologize for a racist, sexist pig like Tarantino of all people—all while insisting there is “no irony” in the other examples he gives. And maybe there isn’t among the directors he mentions. I don’t know them; but also it goes beyond them, Derrida’s “inside of the text” speaking to other people in the room besides Ebert. They don’t count, in his eyes, because his gut is ultimately his guide for the rest of the world, and that has already been coded; i.e., by his hopelessly Faustian brain, its opinions informed by the socio-material conditions around him. Furthermore, Ebert’s fetishizing of women may not be as overt as Tarantino (above), but he still apologizes for a Hollywood predator while doing so. To apologize for a predator is to be one, yourself.

[16] “The ads for Aliens claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have,” Ebert writes, “and, for once, the ads don’t lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy? It has been a week since I saw it, so the emotions have faded a little, leaving with me an appreciation of the movie’s technical qualities. But when I walked out of the theater, there were knots in my stomach from the film’s roller-coaster ride of violence. This is not the kind of movie where it means anything to say you ‘enjoyed’ it” (source).

As usual, Ebert is the Frankenstein man of feeling repressing his emotions, but also, like Faust, ignores them and keeps going back for more; i.e., to torture himself and miss the point. The fact that someone could do this for over forty years is frankly impressive.

[17] “One of the most boring experiences on Earth is a trash movie without the courage of its lack of convictions,” Ebert writes. He continues:

If it only wants to be cynical, it becomes lifeless in every moment – a bad dream on the screen. One of the pleasures of the movies, however, is to find a movie that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird.

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a pleasure like that, a frankly gory horror movie that finds a rhythm and a style that make it work in a cockeyed, offbeat sort of way. It’s charged up by the tension between the director’s desire to make a good movie, and his realization that few movies about mad scientists and dead body parts are ever likely to be very good. The temptation is to take a camp approach to the material, to mock it, as Paul Morrissey did in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. Gordon resists that temptation, and creates a livid, bloody, deadpan exercise in the theater of the undead (source).

Except, Frankenstein was always camp (and Warhol was a dick). Ebert’s simultaneously parroting Frederic Jameson’s “that boring and exhausted paradigm” and Zizek’s “the return of the living dead being the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (re: Castricano). It takes a certain amount of vanity to punch up at gods, even false gods and their idols; I’ve always been a little vain, and found doing so useful as a matter of self-preservation helping all workers.

[18] E.g., A Fish Called Wanda (1988):

And then there is the matter of the three murdered dogs. One friend of mine already says she won’t see A Fish Called Wanda because she has heard that dogs die in it (she is never, of course, reluctant to attend movies where people die). I tried to explain to her that the death of a pet is, of course, a tragic thing. But when the object is to inspire a heart attack in a little old lady who is a key prosecution witness, and when her little darling is crushed by a falling safe, well, you’ve just got to make a few sacrifices in the name of comedy (source).

Ebert is happy to draw his own lines in the sand, provided he thinks something is funny. In short, for him there are deserving victims and undeserving victims—a concept, once again, informed by his privilege (thus ignorance) and hypocrisy.

[19] E.g., Your Movie Sucks (2007) being a classic example of self-appointed elitism, in-group snobbery and monumental self-deception. This being said, I agree with Ebert when he says that Deuce Bigalow: American Gigolo (2005) sucks:

After watching Deuce Bigalow: American Gigolo himself, Ebert published a zero-star review of the film, describing it as “aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes.” After this, he then directly addressed Schneider’s poor response to Goldstein’s review and petty bickering after the actor had questioned the validity of the critic’s response due to the fact that he hadn’t won a Pulitzer prize.

Ebert responded to this in his review by saying, “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” Interestingly enough, Ebert’s 2007 book Your Movie Sucks was inspired by this damning statement, a compilation of his most scathing reviews.

Despite the public back-and-forth and wave of creative insults, the pair found a peaceful equilibrium in 2007 after Ebert’s cancer diagnosis. The critic revealed that he had received a touching level of support and well wishes, with flowers being sent to him from Schneider himself, along with a note wishing him a speedy recovery signed “his least favourite movie star.”

This gesture moved Ebert, and later revisited his controversial 2005 film, offering a written truce in which he referred to the flowers sent by Schneider and said they “were a reminder, if I needed one, that although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man, and no doubt tried to make a wonderful movie, and hopes to again. I hope so, too.” (source: Emily Ruuskanen’s “The Feud between Roger Ebert and Rob Schneider,” 2024).

While it’s not difficult to discount Schneider (whose only good movie is Surf Ninjas, 1993), it’s also not untrue that people who use their credentials (however sarcastically) to settle a quick beef are demonstrably petty—and I am not above this; re (from the Poetry Module’s “Spilling Tea“):

In regards to the further reading I supplied, I don’t wish to “flash my badge” needlessly. All the same, I did write my MA (“Lost in Necropolis“) and PhD (my thesis volume, aka Volume Zero, 2023) on Metroidvania, and have several more books in the works including this volume (written when the sample was live, but the volume was not)—a reality that is often questioned by Dunning-Kruger types who project/transfer their own inadequacies onto experts such as myself. This isn’t hypothetical; I once had someone on Reddit (there’s a surprise) attack me for writing about Garfield and the Gothic (Persephone van der Waard’s “Is Garfield (1978-present) Gothic?” 2019), requiring me to essentially tell them, “I’m not your dad.”

To joust and argue about silly things/debates is something that people (educated or not) simply do. “Water under a bridge,” and all that.

That being said, this doesn’t change the fact that Ebert can’t explain why Schneider’s movie sucks in dialectical-material ways (thus in ways useful to active, conscious rebellion). Nor does he actually realize that Rob Schneider is quite awful, actually (source: Ed Dickson’s “The Red-Pilling of Rob Schneider,” 2023). Ebert is blind to this because he a) doesn’t view this world outside his own dogma, thus endless privilege and status, and b) Schneider bribed him with Christian charity functioning as capital (re: Weber). Greed is greed, and Ebert’s such a massive whore for recognition that he’ll overlook Schneider’s boundless flaws through the cheapest of gestures, then call it “good.” People who reflect that kind of selective vanity—and who defend the elite (versus using cryptonymy to systemically help workers)—are giant pieces of shit. Ebert is (or was) a giant piece of shit.

Furthermore, as both men categorically demonstrate, good deeds do not outweigh bad ones unless you choose to let them; i.e., it’s possible to do charity and still be giant pieces of shit—a fact compounded by Ebert turning a blind eye! And if his aforementioned cancer diagnosis might help explain that (softening in his old age/impending doom), it doesn’t change the fact that Ebert the person sucks. Cancer isn’t a cure-all for American exceptionalism/centrism. That’s just Ebert belonging to the “good team” and administering “goodness” to those he deems “worthy.” It’s bourgeois.

That’s my dialectical-material critique of the man as Faustian, living as he died (and someone I used to respect, and previously handle with more “kid gloves”; e.g., Persephone van der Waard’s “Ebert’s Folly: “Elevating” Horror Movies with Suspense, part 1,” 2019): as a piece of shit. And frankly I don’t care who that offends; only cowards (who deserve criticism) hide behind their fans or their family (with Neil Gaiman hiding behind all of the above; source: Lila Shapiro).

[20] Re: From his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009): “A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages” (source).

[21] Ebert’s double standard for Hitchcock (a famously sexist man who tortured his actresses) is plain:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.

The only 1970s details are the violence and the nudity (both approached with a certain grisly abandon that has us imagining Psycho without the shower curtain [and Hayes Code). It’s almost as if Hitchcock, at seventy-three, was consciously attempting to do once again what he did better than anyone else. His films since Psycho (1960) struck out into unfamiliar territory and even got him involved in the Cold War (Torn Curtain) and the fringes of fantasy (The Birds). Here he’s back at his old stand. (source: 1972 review).

Ebert’s apathy is wholly astounding, his relish at what is literally torture porn (the strangulation BDSM scene in Frenzy going on for nearly two minutes*) is completely gross, and his repeated giving of Alfred-fucking-Hitchcock a pass is utterly telling: “boundaries for me, not for thee.” Fuck you and Hitchcock! God, you’re both weird, and not in a good way!

*By extension, Hitchcock’s entire canon—like Radcliffe’s before him—is thoroughly dedicated to feminine desire, vis-à-vis Wolff, as attached unironically to mutilative harm. Where’s the irony, Ebert?

[22] Ebert doesn’t even mention the graphic and extended rape scene in his 1984 review of the extended (220-minute) cut for Leone’s film. It “just doesn’t come up,” for him; i.e., versus John Larsen, who writes,

And yet Leone—whose spaghetti-Western poetry (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West) was spun under the hot glare of the desert sun—still gives Once Upon a Time in America a warm glow. The sequences from Noodles’ youth (where he’s played by Scott Tiler) are a playful mixture of Our Gang shorts and The 400 Blows. And there’s a sexiness to the Prohibition segments—a titillating combination of girls and gunplay—that belies the pain and suffering on the screen. Even the sequences set in the 1960s are less of a reckoning (which is how you could describe Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, also with De Niro) and more of a wistful remembrance of the good old days. Add a gorgeous Ennio Morricone score that softens the brutality, making it fuzzy, and you have an epic of blinkered nostalgia.

That “sexiness” is worth spending more time on. There is a disturbing, virgin-whore dynamic at play in Once Upon a Time in America, with Elizabeth McGovern—as Noodles’ childhood crush-turned-Hollywood-starlet—on one end and Tuesday Weld—as a rape victim-turned-willing-plaything—on the other. Every other woman we meet is somewhere in between those two (although most fall in Weld’s direction). If a female character isn’t a sexual object in this story, then she’s a victim of violence. And in the two rape scenes those elements are queasily mixed (reminiscent of the way Leone treated Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West) [source].

Silence is rape, and apologizing for it by keeping quiet in ways that Ebert enjoys. Such men are in love with their idea of past, much like Radcliffe (a woman chasing a patriarchal heteronormative profit motive) was, and Ebert doing so in ways that “keep mum” about rape (practically holding a finger to his lips [and a hand over the woman’s mouth] before going “Shh…”). They like gagging it, kettling and abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit while capitalizing on her eternal abuse. Virgin or whore, she’s their Omelas victim (also, there’s the anti-Semitic element—with Leone’s entire movie literally being about a “backstabbing Jew”: Noodles is played by De Niro, a career Italian-American bandit, onscreen, this time playing a Jewish gangster who betrayed all his friends. Eat your heart out, Mussolini!): to fetishize the power imbalance advancing patriarchal narratives, then keeping quiet when you could have spoken out. Faced with it in trashy ways (or rather what Ebert calls trash, given Leone’s movies are trashy in ways he calls art*), he just pulls a Dennis from Always Sunny and shouts at the screen: “Sickness, be gone!” He’s the Golden God!

*The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but Ebert treats them like they are when it suits his rapacious, patriarchal worldview.

[23] When asked about the decision, Joshi angrily replied, “Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me. / I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues” (source: Jackson Kuhl’s “Joshi Is Mad as Hell,” 2015). Chief among those friends being Lovecraft’s ghost (whose shadow Joshi is forever stuck in). Way to cut your nose off to spite your own face, dude.

[24] “Risk-Aware Consensual Kink,” or informed consent/calculated risk/rape play. I call this ludo-Gothic BDSM, which preaches tolerance amid activism as, to some degree, inherently unsanitary and dangerous. SSC is older and more elitist, as Bay and I discuss:

Bay: As long as people are operating on informed consent and stuff, it super doesn’t matter what they’re doin’ together. It’s why I like RACK over SSC. SSC feels so outdated but there’s so many BDSM practitioners who ascribe to it and I get why but “augh.” Whereas RACK actually acknowledges that not everything in BSDM CAN be safe/sane necessarily—not 100% anyway.

Persephone: For real! Some stuff is “hard” for a reason. Yeah, choking is always risky. Or knife play. Even if the risk is small. Any aggressive sadism/pain administration, really. Shit, even just rough sex/accelerated heart beat and raised BP carry risk, if you’re older. Or have congenital/comorbid health issues. Not to mention STIs. And pregnancy. And social stigmas and judgement. I’m generally of the RACK idea, I suppose, because ludo-Gothic BDSM and revolutionary cryptonymy is about doing rebellion, but as safely as one can, given the circumstances.

Bay: Same here. I think it’s more holistic and considers people’s needs. And it doesn’t have a weird gatekeeping aspect to it in the name of “safety.” Or “sanity,” ew. Talk about giving shit a weird vibe.

Persephone: Like, better SSC than Radcliffe’s school of knife dick, but still…

Bay: YEAH, LMAO! Like it’s a fine practice, I just think it’s prudish.

Birds of a feather fuck together!

[25] The idea of a walking codex extends not just to golems imitating people, then, but vice versa; e.g., Vinculus in Suzanna Clarke’s superb Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), an otherwise naked homeless man (the elderly village idiot, sleeping under Rip van Winkle’s tree, below) being covered in woad-style tattoos speaking to the return of the King of the North, the ultimately magician, John Uskglass, aka The Raven King. “Made with real crow eggs. I drink it every morning so I can fight like a crow!”

[26] With gender-swapping being an effective iconoclastic device since Lewis’ The Monk, his own monstrous-feminine imposters camping the canon during the cryptonymy process, and which my PhD’s thesis paragraph generously borrowed from:

(artist: Brian Miroglio and Jessica Nigri)

This book wasn’t written/illustrated for Academia, but if it were and I was seriously treating it as my PhD to defend, I would argue that it addresses a knowledge gap regarding the synthesis of Gothic theory with anarcho-Communism, gender studies, ludology and Marxist argumentation: “Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end; i.e., developing anarcho-Communism, hence a post-scarcity world without nation-states and their built-in, thus historical-material, genocide and exploitation of workers. My teaching approach stresses oppositional praxis according to sex positivity vs sex coercion when reclaiming the harmful language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate from our colonizers (capitalists), but also power exchange and resistance as a cultural means of social-sexual catharsis and theatrical disguise; i.e., cultivating emotional and Gothic intelligence through a reclaimed Gothic mode of artistic, thus political collective/self-expression (monstrous poetics and applied Gothic theories). Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism; i.e., the Shadow of Pygmalion‘s monomyth/Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern: unironic rape and war are everywhere because Capitalism rapes everything for profit, including people’s minds, according to a profit motive that synonymizes all of these things. Utilized deliberately by Gothic Communism, subversive Amazonomachia‘s ‘dark forces’—its famous, Miltonian paradoxes* and manifesto coordinates: the tenets, theories, and means and materials of expression, fetishes and clichés, etc—can revert Capitalist Realism’s doomed narrative of the crypt by putting “rape” and “war” in quotes, recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base during class/culture war’s camping of canon. The asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare obviously covers of an extremely wide range of artistic possibilities, but generally focuses on sex work and its canonical, dimorphic sexualization, or work in general as similarly sexualized, and heteronormative enforcement/the colonial binary established through regressive Amazonomachia as something to camp; i.e., through ironic kink, fetishization, and BDSM rituals/aesthetics (of psychosexual power and death, stigma and revenge, but also catharsis and transformation, etc) with demonic/undead poetics synthesized through the ‘creative successes’ of proletarian praxis as a class-conscious, ready-for-war response to/critique of capital” (my thesis paragraph) [source: Volume Zero, “Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything,” 2023].

*Gothic doubles but also theatrical perceptions of power (“darkness visible”) as liminal expressions/elaborate strategies of misdirection/”archaeologies.” For example, not everything that is black and red is a fascist, but is treated like a fascist (and various other things at once) until the level of decay affords the usual centrist compromises between white knights and black knights against the Communist variant of the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the pedagogy of the oppressed coming out the same Gothic imagination’s shadow zone.

Confused? The rest of the PhD unpacks this. Still confused? Five more books unpack it even more! In short, everything after that has been a concentric holistic addressal; i.e., in hundreds of exhibits and thousands of images; e.g., the very next exhibit; re, also from Volume Zero (after rehashing “heteronormativity”):

(exhibit 0a2b1b1a: Artist, left: Devilhs; middle: Pat Benatar; top-right: Doruk Golcu; bottom-right: Angel Witch. Hysteria [also called “the wandering womb,” exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1] is commonly portrayed in the monstrous-feminine “Medusa” hairstyle* as immodest; i.e., lacking decency or virtue by being visually “loud” [making unironic admonishment of such descriptive sexuality/gender a form of tone-policing: “Hush, darling!”]. But in the same breath, anxiety more broadly is a symptom of society whereupon women [or beings perceived as women] are made by men into what men want to see: a damsel who is sexy by disempowered, or “threatening” in ways they can “kettle” [to surround and attack, a police anti-protestor tactic]. This nuts-and-bolts approach gives little space for the woman to classically voice her concerns, so it surges forth from her Frankensteinian body like ghosts and lightning—a tall, imposing, undead passion of suggestibly orgasmic release that men classically view as “weakness” [which they then sexualize]. Losing control isn’t just a symptom, then, but a means to addressing larger historical-material concerns in the self-same language hijacked for proletarian dialogs: “Fuckin’ metal!”)

*Classically the entirety of the female form—its sexuality, gender identity/performance, emotions, etc—is sexualized by men for men. As such, Medusa’s big hair synonymizes with her “phallic” snakes; i.e., her “dickhead” literally as a headful of penises or symbolic of a phallic, masculine foil to traditional male heroes’ own power source: their singular penises (though the head and the hair are classically seen as a storing site for potency—e.g., Samson from the Bible). The idea of female body hair as “phallic” is certainly not out of the blue, either—with the pubic area (especially its unkempt versions) being synonymized with “incorrect masculinity”/an extension of the clitoris as “phallic-like”; i.e., an offshoot of the “correct” penis’s legitimate violence, thus violent in a delegitimized, rebellious counterterror form. Keeping in this spirit, I jokingly in the past referred to Zeuhl’s pubic hair (which was especially full and thick) as a “hair penis.” Heteronormativity would treat these “exceptions” to the Vitruvian, European standard as anathema, but in truth, they are incredibly common; they’ve just been abjected into a state of exception that weird canonical (art) nerds can police with impunity.

I.e., I feel like so many academics write their PhD, only to have it collect dust in some neoliberal vault owned by university bureaucrats keeping gnosis under lock and key. Like Shelley showed us—but also hopefully me—you have to make something that not only escapes into the world to speak on its fractal recursions, but becomes something that endlessly grows back into itself in service to workers by altering said recursions’ historical materialism; re: liberating sex work (thus all work) through iconoclastic art hugging the alien! This includes Bone Mommies vis-à-vis graveyard sex speaking to capital lending us strange appetites while it gentrifies and decays (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024), but also any monster type you could think of, in the larger aesthetic; i.e., through a dark intuition that sex-positive forces will still “get” even if the theory eludes them, whereas sex-coercive forms are more estranged (thus sweating nervously inside their masks).

[27] All the more ironic since that phrase literally means, “See you again”—a lesson Tarantino imparted with Django Unchained (2012), a movie starring the same German-speaking actor from Basterds playing a German-speaking character while stealing the show from the protagonists and waxing hauntological nostalgic; i.e., about Wagner’s Das Rheingold/Ring Opera and its anti-Semitic* introducing of the German opera staples, Siegfried and Brunhilde, into popular media (the opera was written after the Civil War, in 1869, whereas Django ostensibly took place during the Civil War). Tarantino was hardly the first person to do this (re: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but also Henry Giardina’s “Hitler’s Favorite Movie Was Super Gay, Actually,” 2023).

*Re: Cooke: “That Wagner harboured anti-Semitic sentiments is both well-known and uncontested within the realm of musicological inquiry. The composer openly articulated his views in a number of publications, most notably Judaism in Music (Das Judentum in der Musik; 1850), in which he identified Jewish musicians as the ultimate source of what he perceived as substanceless music and misplaced values in the arts as a whole. What has remained a controversy, however, is the extent to which Wagner’s anti-Semitism informed his musical compositions” (source: Britannica); i.e., Wagner was anti-Semitic and—like Lovecraft or Howard (from Weird Magazine) were used by fascist authors then and now to be anti-Semitic not just towards Jews, but all marginalized peoples. What a shocker!

More to the point—and despite Django feeling like just another reason for a sexist, pedophilic foot fetishist to say the N-word and have his actors (white or black) say it, too—the lesson of Basterds makes Stiglitz’s sick burn to the SS officer feel oddly surreal: “Say ‘I’ll see you again’ to your Nazi balls!” before blasting them to paste (a special effects trend stuck with by Tarantino since 2007’s Grindhouse). The guy think’s he’s Matthew Lewis, but he’s a straight lead acting rebellious in bad faith (and apologized for by Ebert’s own white superiority)!

[28] E.g., Christine Neufeld—a medievalist professor at EMU (she taught me Chaucer and Frankenstein) rolling her eyes at the phrase, saying “some power” in a haughty tone, and later critiquing me for my “weird sexual metaphors” in “Born to Fall?” but also signing off on my Award Letter that helped me continue my education. She gave me an A for the paper but a C+ for the class, telling me I should use that as a lesson in future encounters (presumably with tenured assholes like her, but I digress).

[29] Played by Juliette Lewis—originally the Bonnie-and-Clyde female serial killer in Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers—but no stranger to playing damsels, too; e.g., not just Dawn but also Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear remake. So often, such stories vicariously threaten modest middle-class white women with “pure violence-as-sex” they can then wish to be spared from through police rescues, but not before flirting with it, Radcliffe-style. They get excited by being rescued on the opposite end of White/Black Knight Syndrome: the virgin/whore needing a minority to be demonized; re: pimping the help to punch down and maintain their tradwife positions.

[30] Quentin Tarantino once defended Roman Polanski in 2003: “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape… he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape” (source: Callum Russell’s “When Quentin Tarantino Defended Roman Polanski in an Interview with Howard Stern,” 2022).

[31] With Kevin Smith arguably styling his beard in the same tradition as Rickman (who starred in Dogma as the Metatron, minus his signature goatee. The plot thickens).

[32] Edited by Alan Taylor and, as my friend Mira (from the tokophobia interview in “Spilling Tea” but also a massive Alan Rickman fan) points out:

Great book. There’s a foreword by Emma Thompson and an afterword by his widow, Rima, that were both really good. Pretty sure there are YouTube versions of both/interviews with both of them (also, see: Waterstone’s 2023 “Emma Thompson’s Moving Tribute to Alan Rickman” and Alan Rickman Fans’ 2021 “Galaxy Quest – Alexander Dane/Dr. Lazarus“). Honestly they were “couple goals.” Met in school, stayed together their whole lives, never had kids even though he wanted to because Rima had phobias and only got married in the year before he died. There’s a lot of diary entries where he’s been filming something and been really frustrated or stressed but then Rima visits the set and they just chill out, binge watch TV shows and calm each other down.

[33] The gaslight extends to Gaiman’s fictions presenting his victims as “hysterical”; e.g., Gaiman’s incredibly queerphobic dreamstone*/wish fulfillment scene, in The Sandman live adaptation; i.e., depicting queer desires as, no bullshit, an honest-to-God threat to Things As They Are—an incredibly problematic argument, unto itself, but also one written by the battered-son-of-a-Scientology-master-turned-accused rapist (re: Shapiro): people can’t be queer because they’ll “all kill each other.” I wish I was kidding. It’s like Edward Hopper’s “Night Hawks” (1942) and Ronald Reagan had a baby (the Netflix adaptation was in 2022; the original was written by Gaiman and illustrated by DC Comics in 1989).

*Which is red for—you guessed it—the Red goddamn Pill. Gaiman coopted Morpheus before the openly MGTOW types had a chance to recuperate the Wachowski sisters’ own 1999 Morpheus, in The Matrix. Quite the red flag/dogwhistle! Gothic Romance isn’t just to lie about the past, but revive it in ways that speak to buried atrocities—a point Gaiman less commits to and more abuses to commit ongoing atrocities directly in front of us [re: bury your gays]!

[34] As in Dale Townshend, one of my MA supervisors (for “Lost in Necropolis,” 2018) and a bit of a Radcliffe academic “fanboy”; i.e., not just teaching me Radcliffe for MMU’s “Rise of the Gothic” module, but also writing about her quite a bit; e.g., being one of the editors for Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (2016):

This book offers unique and fresh perspectives upon the literary productions of one of the most highly remunerated and widely admired authors of the Romantic period, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). While drawing upon, consolidating and enriching the critical impulses reflected in Radcliffe scholarship to date, this collection of essays, composed by a range of renowned scholars of the Romantic period, also foregrounds the hitherto neglected aspects of the author’s work. Radcliffe’s relations to Romantic-era travel writing; the complex political ideologies that lie behind her historiographic endeavours; her poetry and its relation to institutionalised forms of Romanticism; and her literary connections to eighteenth-century women’s writing are all examined in this collection. Offering fresh considerations of the well-known Gothic fictions and extending the appreciation of Radcliffe in new critical directions, the collection reappraises Radcliffe’s full oeuvre within the wider literary and political contexts of her time (source).

I really don’t wish to bust Dale’s chops, here (as he was kind to me in school and I learned a lot from him), but it’s not him I’m critiquing so much as the author he’s shining a big happy light onto! All the easier for me to beat her with a stick! “Kill you darlings, including your teacher’s darlings!”