This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That 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). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). 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 “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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Bad Dreams, part three: the Monomyth and Cycle of Kings; or, “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs”: Paralyzing Zombie Tyrants with Reverse Abjection (and Other Gothic Theories)

“And now I, Skeletor, am Master of the Universe!”

—Skeletor, Masters of the Universe (1987)

(exhibit 40a1a1: Frank Langella camps up the skeleton lord with the performance of a lifetime, doing so in a doomed production that barely got finished—and all to make his child [who loved the He-Man toys and cartoons[1]] happy. Similar to Dracula, Skeletor’s top priority is moody Shakespearean theatrics that steal the show from the boring male stoic: a queer death clown hamming it up as best he can. But his appetite knows no bounds, driving the story to repeat itself through a trademark, ghoulish hunger emblematic of the monomyth-as-zombie.)

Picking up from where “Escaping Jadis” left off…

Per the process of abjection, the middle class canonize the raping of nature, treating it as monstrous-feminine through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as something to punch, doing so in monomythic language that moves money through nature (repeating the grim harvest). As such, the undead become things to do battle with in some shape or form, as monomythic. Be that doll or dollhouse, castle or tyrant, they reify in magical, poetic forms that never quite existed, but whose rapacious, faux-medieval histories increasingly exist between reality and imagination, onstage and off: childhood as something to revisit in service to profit. The monomyth is the zombie “Bad Dreams,” part three will be looking at.

For all the usual size difference (next page) and Numinous elements, such things are canonically summoned to ultimately conquer by returning things to order—but not before teasing Radcliffe’s naughty-naughty demon lovers unto a ready-and-waiting (classically white female) readership: “rape” as a theatrical, highly creative means of playing with such mechanisms of desire as historical-material byproducts of genuine exploitation. It’s a disco, a monster party that hyphenates castle and occupant as divided into various binaries that must then be rejoined during Gothic Communism; i.e., abjuring rape through bad, Lewis-style echoes of itself, camping the nuclear-family-as-castle (the tyrannical husband as site of rape forecast by his oversized house) normally prone to the concealment of genocide (thus rape). If there’s a castle, there’s cryptonymy as a matter of rape, of genocide, of police abuse, etc.

To reclaim the cryptonymy process, we must camp it. To that, Persephone (the deity or me) likes being “raped”; i.e., as a campy means of Gothic play that challenges state edicts through paradoxical attractions thwarting abjection. “Don’t fear the reaper“; dance in the ruins, because big castle equals big “rape,” pointing ever and always to capital under Pax Americana (the state) as the true and ultimate rapist.

(artist: Sabine Esmeray)

So far, parts one and two of “Bad Dreams” have focused on the apocalypse; i.e., in accordance with the Imperial Boomerang and worker rememory as a forgotten humanizing process: the return of the living dead to devour the present inside itself, regarding the “mingling” of far-off places and interpersonal relationships across space-time. Part three shall now consider the monomyth and its tyrants extending the historical-material framework backwards and forwards.

The usual dualities persist, of course, involving canon as something to parry and iconoclastically subvert inside the usual grandiose stories—of the state-as-undead vs undead workers. One fundamentally searches for “victory” as a matter of total, blind revenge (“an eye for an eye”) against nature and death as a natural event, going the way of Caesar as a ghost thereof. The other offers “blindness” as paradoxically more perceptive; i.e., it becomes a question of zombie eyeballs that, far from being the kinds of “blank parody” that uphold capital (re: Jameson), freeze the cycles of return inside the same theatres, performances, and “rapes.” Placed in quotes, these offer a playful means of yielding more empathetic ways of looking at the world, having already been divided for conquest by capital: as undead, which in turn, freeze the mechanisms of capital—its tyrants forever coming home to roost—in place.

For the next six pages, we’ll go over some basic historical points about camping rape to challenge the monomyth with; then, we’ll provide the subchapter synopsis per section (with links).

To that, there’s far too many devices at play during the monomyth to focus simply on one of them. Instead, I want to combine the previous ideas (and to a lesser extent, ludo-Gothic BDSM[2]) while focusing on the poetic history of reversing abjection (and Athena’s Aegis): as a matter of monomythic theatre that also includes chronotopes (castles), revolutionary cryptonymy and emancipatory hauntologies (spectres of Marx).

Our aim is to catalog different poetic devices (e.g., the chronotope during the liminal hauntology of war as a cryptonymic feature to subvert state revivals with) that have already chilled the process of abjection and its kings, accounting for their ongoing creative histories’ complex (class-to-culture war) matter of interplay touching on the usual ultimatums: of undead heroes constantly coming home to roost under capital; i.e., as a matter of historical materialism being a half-real enterprise, one whose legendary returns—of the old, undead kings or nightly emperors—normally operate as a matter of prophecy integral to the canonical monomyth: “all our yesterdays” making the elite bank, inside the Torment Nexus raping workers and nature till the cows come home.

Such hellish recursions and regression always yield some kind of damned patriarchal wraith inside the Cycle of Kings, all while Cartesian thought preys on nature-as-food and monstrous-feminine[3] through police forces and bread-and-circus-style distractions; i.e., raping nature behind the usual half-veils. The world becomes an oyster to pry apart, a peach to slice. In turn, pro-state workers pacify through menticide, the eyes growing empathetically blind, the brain increasingly dead and the body increasingly numb to state tortures. Following this, state servants (and victims that give or receive state harm) sight the usual portals for destruction as sown into the land, the flesh, the work as things to personify and reap (thus rape) all over again.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Camping said rape is always a juggling act, and arbitration is always, to some degree, a random ordeal. For one, said history and its ritualized “solving” (through monomythic violence) discuss/argue a matter of return in imaginary territories that thrust upon the actual as altered through iconoclastic performance; i.e., a subversion of rape through a pedagogy of the oppressed that lies entirely in how you look at and with it, during liminal expression—zombie eyeballs as blind or perceptive regarding the state’s resurrecting of undead torments set on new territories: inside old, colonized lands, bodies (and parts of bodies) or any other representations of the colonized at large! The normalized outcome, then, is unironic exploitation: the land and its inhabitants becoming the usual peach to harvest (above), raping Medusa (from any angle, the front or the back) by the same old hauntological copies of Caesar/fascism, whose eyes are blind inside neoliberal treatments of those spectres[4]! Camping said rape is a planetary struggle, then, one whose reclamation is performed in small through our bodies and labor during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., as something to see, but also see with between stories: “We have been raped (and lied to) over and over again.”

In doing so onstage, such calculated risks showcase liberation as liminal offstage as well; i.e., something to conceptualize through abstractions of rape that yield sex-positive lessons informed by older histories we’re acting out once more: possible worlds starting as imaginary sites that threaten change as a furious ordeal, a death rattle that refuses to stop, but breathes into dead things fresh, impossible life! “Come and see. Let the scales fall from your eyes.”

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Model and artist, top-middle: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Harmony and I camp rape, leaning into the raping of nature as something to subvert through ourselves and our labor. Its materials work towards revolution; i.e., as a matter of rape play the world can learn from for the better! Trauma is acknowledged, but then stalled in future iterations by freezing the usual harvesters of nature by humanizing the victim [the harvest] and expressing the rapist as the monster who cannot stand the exposed reality to their crimes. “Rape” becomes a story to put into quotes, telling per piece what happened, once-upon-a-time, but also how it can change through later retellings of itself that yield new poetic histories build upon older ones [re: Lewis’ bad echoes].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

For Harmony and myself, medievalism becomes a forward-facing regression, one whose 21st century Neo-Gothic yields cryptonymy as a revolutionary device: showing and hiding to challenge manufactured scarcity as the usual historical-material effect. “Rape,” then, becomes a paradoxical means of retelling our own destruction; i.e., as a taboo voice for psychosexual healing from police violence, developing good praxis through a pedagogy of the oppressed, one whose poetic excursions into a given “castle” synthesize new, oft-substantial forms thereof. All occur if to say to the audience, “Open wide!” with that fat zombie ass: “Rape me. ‘Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!'” Such theatrical sodomies unto Medusa is not actually ass rape, but touch on the Numinous terror such threats might normally supply to victims like her by the state; i.e., yet-another-thing to achieve liberation with using ludo-Gothic BDSM, exposing our abuse while playing with bad copies of it on the edge, so to speak, of our seats [to achieve systemic catharsis]: the mystery of a Numinous destroyer ravishing Medusa, the latter pushing the “rape me” button to call upon her strong-thighed lancer.

Any Gothicist should live through their vocations, we doing our gold-star  best to escape the text as a mere instrument of capital, thus Capitalist Realism [e.g., The Modern Martial Artist perpetually trapped inside the boxing ring as a source for profit, not critique[5]]. In doing so, the usual confusion of the senses, selective absorption, and magical assembly give rise to a Song of Infinity whose Aegis becomes something to stare into but also with; i.e., in both directions, reconciling old pains as a matter of fresh history through unspeakable things. These, in turn, become undeniably tangible during the rememory process: Milton’s darkness visible an enormous, thundering and shapely mise-en-abyme that becomes the data to yield, time and time again! Its delicious corruptions sit adjacent to harm, camping our survival while honoring those who didn’t as commodified by the state. When illustrating mutual consent, then, linguo-material elements of ambiguity always endure, and whose skillful, intuitive [second-nature] parsing must be raised across society’s understanding of the imaginary past—its rape a new Wisdom of the Ancients to learn and learn from.

This isn’t always the wail of the banshee in total agony absent of pleasure or brains [the madwoman in the attic], but something of a curious mixture of the two that seeks to challenge profit, thus rape, as historically administered by the state: through half-veiled threats of the tyrant coming back around. Like “Rome,” “Caesar” is the end of history as something to reinvent in so many doubles of the original, so many counterfeits furthering the process of abjection in service to a scared middle class. We find catharsis camping those, Persephone-style, to grow rebellious again; i.e., as princesses who have been raped, thus find our power where it normally resides: within fiction speaking to non-fiction. “We’re living in Gothic times.”

To critique power thus reclaim it, you must go where it is; reclamation is always, to some degree, a matter of rape play through Gothic poetics making arguments for liberation using violent aesthetics; e.g., the castle: a half-real chronotope to walk around inside, and one whose buried, dialectical-material aspects of power [rape under Capitalism rarefied cryptonymically as “castle” or “knight”] become monomythically dream-like. Once dispersed, such particles discharge to float around, bouncing back and forth like Walpole’s animated curios. Inadequacy and disempowerment become, as usual, a means of empowerment during ludo-Gothic BDSM: topping from below, like Milton’s Satan. “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!” Or maybe the darkness is more fun [such play is often a byproduct of emergent play as intended by the text’s composers, architects to the structure as something to explore in ways they cannot predict, thus police].)

Like any zombie, the problem of state predation is one of canon-induced “bad sight”; i.e., a fundamental question of dream-like resurrection, one where sight becomes faulty by monomythical illusions that encourage police violence as a matter of regulating sex, terror and force, morphological expression, etc. Such monopolies always promise the tyrant’s return to resurrect itself—of seeing the thing upon which to feed and transfer power towards the state as a matter of canon: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” It’s all a lie, tribute boiling down to protection rackets by the imperium preying on the local benefactors (the middle-class nightmare of state collapse): orderly disposal per settler colonialism’s war of extermination turned in on itself.

(source: Bungie)

Luckily for us, such problems concern the reversing of abjection (and other Gothic theories) through zombie eyeballs that—far from divorcing themselves from their blind brethren—must engage with them in order to break the myopia of Capitalist Realism: a blindness the state normally relies on, which for workers constitutes a kind of reawakening through the undead as taking Hell back. Our “rape” onstage becomes something to consume, waking workers up to far-off realities that can be felt easily enough at home, mid-cryptonymy. There is always a castle to interrogate, a tyrant to dethrone, a queen to crown herself through the poetic catharsis of “rape,” of speaking out; the secret lies in what we consume as a matter of playing with rape to transform it: camping canon as a matter of profit, of rape, of the state’s usual flowing of power in the usual directions (always up, with lulls through decay raking profit back into the state’s troves, post-regeneration: a war chest)!

As shall hopefully become obvious, the methods to reversing abjection use Gothic theory as a matter of history-in-the-making party to a forever process: camping the monomyth. Older poetics like Milton or Blake (with Harmony reading Songs of Innocence and Experience, next page) continue to seize upon these thresholds to open the doors of perception; i.e., as a matter of zombie eyeballs, where said doors have become increasingly pacifying as a matter of Capitalist Realism. This means we must camp our own rapes as the old poets did, but under conditions that have developed for the worse in ways they only predicted using the language of their times borrowed from older and older poets.

To that, the Wisdom of the Ancients is a continuation of that thieving poetic trend, one that borrows liberally from the past as yielding different kinds of undead for different purposes; i.e., using the same old histories and historical elements once transformed, including the human body (and its social-sexual labor) as the almighty authors of such things! There’s an element of raw, naked bravery to such rebellion—an assistant to an artist going hand-in-hand towards a better future built on past “rapes” (as much as rapes without the quotes); the courage lies in facing its exposure, clapping back to challenge state tyranny in canonical poetic histories, the latter fatally doubling our Aegises—i.e., in the mirror state as one of endless conflict: between each mask, costume or veil as looking back and forth. It’s how we roll, bitches!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Medusa cannot be killed, any more than the state can—only driven to submission in either direction inside the usual shadow zones (until state shift, that is). The camping (and regained perception) of zombies (and their eyeballs), then, has a long history to it, one we shall now catalog and (to a lesser extent) camp in this subchapter (this emphasis will shift, in Volume Three) regarding monomythic zombies (and because we’re talking about tyrants, castles).

As such, we’re essentially talking about Gothic theatre, including kayfabe, as a matter of performative, imaginary history to look at/with (marrying the language of war and death, rape and love, food and refuse, etc); i.e., reviving fascist leaders that point to older instances of the same monomyth revivals elsewhere before and after the Third Reich; e.g., M. Bison (next page) being yet-another Nazi king zombie merged with Melmoth the Wandering Jew as the very backstabber Germany’s fascists warned against: themselves projected onto their victims, mid-Red-Scare. Per canon, this undead element of capital becomes something to revive, Frankenstein-style; i.e., in service to profit, vis-à-vis pre-fascist, fascist, and post-fascist forms inside neoliberal markets (videogames)!

(source: StreetFighter.com)

In turn, this cannibalism’s cycle of conquest loops in on itself, becoming something ouroborotic to expose like a black mirror. This happens less through overt comedy/camp (or “true camp,” per Jean Claude Van Damme and the truly amazing 1994 movie) and more through serious theatre with the power to camp canon in subtler ways; i.e., whose performances of death and disaster seem cyclically harmful, but actually have the subversive, non-harmful power to paralyze, thus pause and eventually transform, Cartesian dogma (and its tokenized elements): into actual stewards of nature, of workers, of either as monstrous-feminine food that Capitalism, once frozen, can no longer eat.

This being said, horror is a serial affair and introduces or removes irony per entry even without numbers. The zombie genre is certainly known for its comedies and spoofs—every tired genre is, requiring comedy to inject life into dead things; i.e., from Matthew Lewis onwards; e.g., Shaun of the Dead and Dead-Alive[6] (1992). Part zero (included in this post) briefly examines Mandy (2018) as monomythic pastiche par excellence (with elements of camp) married to Lovecraftian homophobia, futile revenge and substance abuse. The remainder of the subchapter examines the function of sight as a Promethean, reverse-abjecting factor in against three zombie monomyth tyrant types in three primary texts over two parts

• Part one covers the Cartesian hero/man-of-reason in Forbidden Planet and its Metroidvania[7] offshoots (all stemming from Frankenstein): the decayed man of reason versus the Archaic Mother during movement through the hauntological castle; i.e., castle-narratives.
• Part two features the crime lord in The Crow (1994) and the Caesar-style warlord/fascist cult of death, in Myth: the Fallen Lords.

(artist: Els)

After those, part three concludes the entire section; i.e., discussing how Capitalism is the great zombie, one that through its endless undead wars and decayed power fantasies haunting Capitalist Realism! Regardless of what form the tyrant takes when we freeze them in place, it’s always an undead extravaganza, a monomyth monster party to make the old mattress squeak as postcolonial (fucking to metal, to disco, to rock ‘n roll, as turbulent, taboo, “rapacious” and fun); i.e., decolonizing the Gothic through seasons in the abyss that challenge profit using our own “beauteous orbs” (next page), but really anything that gives off the Medusa’s trademark “big” vibes: undead and monstrous-feminine in ways that resist censorship, but also transgress[8] it in all the usual places of monomythic rape. As I write in Volume Zero:

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like 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 (source).

Per the monomyth, a hero is classically incentivized by rape as the prize—to boldly go into “Hell” as place on Earth, then execute the state’s will; i.e., settler-colonial violence dressed up as “past”; e.g., a carrot-like princess in exchange for killing Medusa (the monstrous-feminine) to, per Cartesian thought, prey on nature-as-food but also themselves. Regardless of the giver or recipient, all present an opportunity to move money through nature.

But even if all capitalists were dead as a matter of proposal, the warzone and its derelict ordinance would still remain: the Gothic castle as an undead mind prison. Stuck cannibalizing itself, we’ll pointedly examine this curiosity with Metroidvania, but also open battlefields when looking at different monomythic undead (the crime lord, and warlords aping Zombie Caesar). Whatever the form, wherever the field (open or closed space), such actions are generally guided by inheritance anxiety feeling the fears of self-made extinction; i.e., insofar as the buffer of settler-colonial walls and projections (of ample “treasure,” below) become false (thus fruitless) harvests that, suitably grim, cannot fully conceal or disguise the state’s usual operations.

In short, Medusa must always “pay rent,” but the “cake” (the waifu, next page, or wheyfu, below[9]) is always a lie: the illusory promise of marital sex. Such dreams are woefully common under Capitalism, insofar as capital foists the conditions necessarily for wanting them (the manufacture trifecta) onto workers; i.e., as a matter of Gothic history in service to the state, scaring you with cataclysm, then offering the cure: a mommy equipped with the god-like goods to even out such nightmares (whatever the audience wants those to be, but generally under a Male, heteronormative/tokenized gaze).

Although reversing abjection is our goal when camping the monomyth, it cannot happen without revolutionary cryptonymy. So let’s unpack that concept a little more (about six pages) before moving onto Mandy and part zero.

(artist, left: Zaloran; right: Romantic Rose)

Canonical rewards promise big things to weird canonical nerds as a matter of cryptonymy (from Dark Soul’s “Amazing Chest Ahead” with Princess Gwynevere, left, to Resident Evil Village‘s Lady Dimitrescu announced by her own fabulous “home,” exhibit 49). The problem is, they—like Gwynevere’s huge, melon-sized knockers (synonymized with crops, but also treasure as a phallic container’s “soccer goal” of sorts: chest, booty or box, etc, as belonging to a chattelized virgin/whore)—are cruel, intentionally misleading illusions that trap the ravenous hero-as-undead[10] inside an infernal concentric pattern (oscillating between the woman as castle, or vice versa); i.e., where they’re always eating dead things (the princess is a sex object of courtly pursuit for the hero’s massive “lance,” a sacrifice but also an illusion, a ghost).

As such, the narrative of the crypt is literally an illusion inside an illusion, per Hogle’s acknowledgment of Radcliffe’s concentric enchantments in Udolpho (re: “The Restless Labyrinth”): “a crypt that is, in fact, only an illusion of a crypt,” one whose “double operation of revealing to conceal” speaks to the heart of classic Gothic stories. There’s always a princess in another castle—a big-ass fake “castle.” The devil is in the details, but also on their surface as frankly discussing things (through medievalized poetics) that capital has alienated us from: sex and rape as tied to and expressed with our labor and our bodies.

More to the point, such fantastic de rigeur is always dualistic, but canonically raised by persons cognitively estranged from reality (accommodated intellectuals) who project/abject their fictions onto real atrocities dressed up; e.g., Radcliffe; i.e., to say the quiet part in a theatrical, dissident, and wackily “medieval” loudness: the ghost of the counterfeit as “thicc,” buxom, zaftig. Doing so was (and is), in the Humanist tradition, speaking truth (or something resembling its opposite that inverts easily enough) through bizarre creative activities: gigantic, corporal-to-architectural abstraction. The map of said pattern is hyperreal but still conducts genocide as part of capital through Pavlovian, thus blind, monomythic eyes—the hero’s and what they’re looking at (from tits to ass, castle to landscape).

State conditioning, then, is very much like a broken bone that has healed wrongly. Insofar as state education amounts to physical, mental and emotional abuse (rape, menticide), monomythic dogma calls fearfully upon state soldiers to defend, thus police, a pearly castle fallen upon hard times (re: ACAB—castles and cops) during capital’s usual cycles of gentrification and decay to serve profit. It’s a vampiric function that feeds on all parties—an Omelas, or city of happiness, that becomes abominable even when the total hapless victim is reduced to a single person; i.e., happiness at the expense of others, which is what settler colonialism ultimately is. To fix the problem, you generally have to break what’s in place on the surface of itself: a dark, operatic reflection that exposes the tyrant in self-destructive ways that, contrary to popular thought (and state monomyths), can then be rewritten. The harvest is humanized through orchards that cut themselves up as adjacent to rape and exploitation—with irony as a cryptonymic matter of camping medieval poetics!

First, we show the tyrant that their destiny is not invincibility through infinite conquest, but the same doom that all men share as one where nature and death overcome them and their fatal bloodline. In turn, the reflection of the hero and castle as fatal is projected ignominiously back onto the audience; i.e., rendering them the dupe, a sacrifice to kill once-feral to apologize for (and hide) the overarching structure: a black knight returning from Hell, a Zombie Caesar’s ghost of “Rome” to try and revive, fail, then behead in an endless series thereof. Per ancient warrior culture, the taking of the head constitutes the taking of one’s adversary by force—oneself; for Medusa, this signifies “castration” as a crude cryptonymic metaphor that places the power of the man at his head, except he has two: the enemy is weak and strong!

(source: Snapchipper’s “Myth II: Soulblighter – Intro (AI Upscaled),” 2020).

Speaking of two, and keeping things in line with the metaphor of sight (and taking a leaf from Sophocles), we have to dig out the eyes of the would-be hero (us) and replace them with undead eyes that can actually see through cryptonymy’s fatal illusion while inside Plato’s cave. Except the surgery isn’t a literal operation on our eyes, but the very thing which causes our eyes, both figurative and literal, to see “badly” in relation to the world around us: the monomyth, and its usual benefactors and agents, as things to freeze, thus liberate ourselves from as conditioning devices; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy challenging profit to garner post-scarcity as a matter of sentiment, first and foremost: hearts and minds.

This sea change happens by adopting a pre-capitalist frankness using “ancient” medieval language like Athena’s Aegis (the power of the Medusa—her fat ass, but also her cryptonymic cover to operate behind and with). Such cryptonymy challenges Cartesian thought and Capitalist Realism’s usual seeing and hiding of the world; i.e., the hellish place to conquer and rape: a disco-style monster party to escape exploitation through calculated risk subverting genocide. You want it to slap, to fuck, to hurt after it heals as a matter of emulation to our still-aching scars.

Castle or cop, ACAB. Person or place, then, the monomyth is baked into capital’s cycles of crisis and return, one whose inevitable decay brings Imperialism home to empire as something to whisper of, then profit in service to Capitalist Realism; i.e., profit as rape, but specifically undead rape, when castle and conqueror emerge from Hell and go back where it all began (exposing paradise as inverted, its mendacious pastoral a gruesome and fallen cite of rape and abuse, built on genocide from the start).

As we’ll see through the rest of the subchapter, then, there’s an element not just of hubris, but Icarian grandeur to such heroes; i.e., a rise-and-fall cycle of gentrification and decay to giant-like Caesars, but also their fortresses as they fend off imaginary barbarians (and big ladies) to eventually return from Hell as fascist undead conquerors (slaves to death as a hauntological matter of capital that hijacks their corpses); i.e., the Imperial Boomerang during the Cycle of Kings, whose rapists of “Rome” emerge as kayfabe-style heels during the liminal hauntology of war to bring Imperialism (conqueror and castle) home to a weakened empire. In turn, Capitalist Realism abuses the ghost of the counterfeit (the ritual sacrifice of Medusa as matter of the undead patriarch’s petty revenge) to try and maintain the structure, whose sorry game of “follow the leader” must be subsequently camped through Galatean forces; i.e., with perceptive zombie eyeballs employing an aesthetic of power and death—anything tied to or extending from their bodies and labor as exploited by the state’s usual exceptions, abuses, and jurisdictions (re: cops, castles, tokens).

(artist: VG Yum)

There’s great jouissance, not nihilism, in the restless labyrinth. But, as always is the case when reversing abjection, revolutionary cryptonymy’s subversion of the monomyth, martyr and Medusa cannot pass without exposing some inconvenient and uncomfortable truths; i.e., about the home and hero, namely those behind the map of empire as decayed, but also an instrument of our own demise routinely dressed up as heroism-made-gigantic. You have to freeze the process by showing it as it really is through liminal expression, confronting death then cutting off its head; i.e., freezing can cause rape but also prevent it (and other abuses/elements of risk) when applied correctly against the usual villains. Whatever their flavor/outward appearance, a zombie warlord is functionally no different than a mad scientist, god king or slum lord. All operate through revenge as a matter of capital raping Medusa per the dialectic of shelter/the alien. Their unhoused discomfort, then, is our liberation, the clown queen set free to “rape” the world (transing your kids, making the frogs gay and so on) by dismantling its rapacious, stately elements.

Except, that’s only half the battle. The question remains, what is done with the giant’s head afterwards? The classic approach is nothing. In Myth: the Fallen Lords, for example, Balor embodies the Leveler (a symbol of death in medieval thought); once severed, his head is hurled into the Great Devoid, constituting a deliberate and unstable act of forgetting and sacrifice—i.e., a volcano akin to Mount Doom, whose expensive, monomythic band-aid sits on a mortal wound that only leads the Leveler to one day return. We must not only cut the head off, but prevent its inevitable return by breaking the historical-material cycle of growing such heads to begin with; i.e., remaking war-as-undead, the liminal hauntology thereof per the monomyth hero starting off innocent, only to become corrupted inside Hell through a franchise that, itself, sees many rebirths along the same track; e.g., Contra: Operation Galuga[11] (2024).

In terms of sight, this postcolonial reckoning must occur using a powerful-but-Gothic healing process: facing the settler-colonial trauma that these legends’ undead cryptonymies (their castles) orbit around and announce through warlike hunger and hauntological decay run amok. Trapped between the past and present, it becomes as much something to see with as look at, and has many poetic and cryptonymic iterations: blindfolds to see with as a matter of complicated power exchange per the cryptonymy process.

As we proceed, then, remember two things: that healing hurts—is a continuation that we consciously contribute towards—and pain isn’t bad, including the hero’s ignominious death provided it leads to systemic healing. Except the Hero’s Journey classically doesn’t. As such, the Promethean Quest unites with Medusa as thoroughly un-Cartesian by using her Aegis (through the Metroidvania and similar stories) to transform the very illusions at work, breaking Capitalist Realism to bits, thus helping workers imagine a better world inside the ruin (re: the caterpillar and the wasp).

As we shall see, this requires surrendering harmful illusions of power through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a palliative-Numinous affair—a date with a Dark Mother (mommy dom, below) generally invoked in everyday people speaking of such a reunion through their own art’s fruitful angles, ample body parts and dark dimensions: someone to woo and wow us while mastering and molesting us (consensually)—to fuck our brains out and say, “There, there!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“Death,” then, isn’t something to fear because, when done right, it announces the beginning of a wonderful friendship: a monstress “mommy” as mistress, muse and mentor leading us towards something better than the routine, essentialized, and habitual rape of nature-as-alien; but, as a blindfolded[12] person, speaks to a revelation through cryptonymy as concealed and exposed—i.e., by the mother as one of a monstrous-feminine force, sitting her cushy bum on a dark secret that can set us free beyond the Imperium’s blinding sights: “Mommy’s got a secret, but what?”

Whatever that is, the mother-in-question grapples with rape and death as things to playfully learn from and pass vital information along special conduits; i.e., ostensibly dated and blind, but in truth more perceptive through ludo-Gothic BDSM as “past.”

As a matter of canonical enchantments, it’s a place for the usual monomythic plunderers and white-to-black knights to come back from: Hell, from which to rape empire back at home again, and again, and again. By comparison, Medusa loves to be “raped” in order to make herself (and the paradoxical visions associated with her) more perceptive regarding the returning abusers. As poetic lens and argument, she’s the ultimate whore, packing power of a suitably awesome variety and scale to camp rape, mid-calculated-risk; i.e., as normally a matter of police violence serving capital by raping the whore sans irony! The greatest myth of Prometheus, then, is that the gods are gods at all, and that they have the power to contend with Medusa when she gets mad.

To this, there’s an architectural flavor we’ve discussed already (re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024) and will do so more when reexamining Metroidvania, in part two. Per Rudolph Otto, Manuel Aguirre and myself, these travelers frequently yield as a mysterium tremendum that merges resident and residence: a flying castle, vis-à-vis Dracula’s or the Nostromo, sailing oddly through outer space. To it, all the usual principles of cryptonymy (and its application, mid-castle-narrative) apply—to look at Medusa’s severed head—abstract and mixed-metaphor but still undeniably to-the-point—and suddenly “get it”: her vanity one of survival to spite her abusers (normally stabbing and shooting her as a matter of cartographic endeavors in service to profit; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain).

Except the city of death, when summoned by us, isn’t banished temporarily back to the great void of public memory. When explored and gotten to the bottom of, its monomyth can heal in ways that—while embarrassing and painful (“pride cometh before the fall”)—successfully prevent it and the state’s return, thus their raping of us; i.e., by permanently altering the settler-colonial conditions that bring such reunions about during Capitalist Realism: the return of Caesar and Medusa, the latter exposing the former as rapist and for which she has her revenge.

Doing so effectively ends said Realism by breaking the spell for good, yet the symbols remain, as do their sex-positive function through a learned act of reunion with trauma—again, what Toni Morrison would call “rememory”—that gathers us together to stand, brick-by-brick, against genocidal forces; i.e., by routinely performing ludo-Gothic BDSM as a counterterrorist, educational, iconoclastic means of worker defense against state trifectas, monopolies, canon, what-have-you.

Call the idea Satanic apostacy and the means to advocate for the devil as punished by the state—us. The fact remains, our mission operates at cross purposes with theirs—their mission and objectives of disguise, concealment and lies versus ours; the difference is, they’re shady and mendacious by virtue of what they dishonestly project onto us to better their own image while harming us. Except, just as monsters are anisotropic (flow determines function), cryptonymy is a revelation that conceals, but per Gothic irony allows us to hide within Capitalism’s daily operations while subverting their function with some degree of stealth and underestimation (that of the blind cripple)—a cloaked revolution achieved with Gothic poetics in opposition to the state; i.e., through a splendid mendax, a beautiful liar both a devil and undead, oft-animalized being that challenges the usual pro-state arrangements’ direction of power and force (might makes right).

The state, on the other hand, relies on complicit concealment through these same poetics, using their cryptonymy to blind us to the actual threat, and one which we must generally glean and prevent through a series of concentric illusions while blindfolded. Trussed up, the vision of the Oracle isn’t reliant entirely on organs of pure sight, which are easily deceived, but the power of seeing through harmful illusions with undead empathy (and eyeballs/vision) as cultivated inside medicinal double: a second-nature, collective intuition embodying Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and various devices: the Black Veil, demon lover and palliative Numinous, etc) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, reversing abjection now until the sun burns out.

 

(artist: the Maestro Noob)

Granted, that is our revenge. Capital is a means of profit tied to the monomyth as futile in preventing rape, because it requires it to perpetuate itself through revenge as doomed: raping Medusa until she snaps.

We’ll explore that madness next, with Mandy!

The Monomyth, part zero: Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge (feat. H.P. Lovecraft)

“So, what you huntin’?”

“Jesus freaks.”

“…I didn’t know they were in season, man.”

“Yeah, well… […] They lit her on FIRE! They were weirdo, hippie-types, whole bunch of ’em. And then there was some muscle – it didn’t make any sense. There were bikers, and gnarly psychos, and… crazy evil.”

—Caruthers and Red Miller, Mandy

Whereas zombies and the apocalypse have a predominantly dream-like function that struggles to recollect history under a presence of repressed trauma and death, abjection and reverse abjection more broadly are defined by sight; i.e., according to what is being viewed and how the viewer views themselves in relation to what they are looking at and with. In this case, both are affected by the delivery system—a black mirror or Aegis, in Gothic language—as a tool of rape; i.e., one committed by the middle class through their own bad dreams/rape play in service to the state: the monomyth raping Medusa (and the dragon lord, Nazi destroyer) to gatekeep workers inside canceled-future, neoliberal illusions. By extension, capital’s built-in entropy makes these decay—flying into particles that, pre-ejection, still vibrate menacingly (a death rattle). It’s a mood, a tone poem we can hijack.

Abjection, then, is to throw off that which the self is not, maintaining this Cartesian binary by continually rejecting the cast-off elements’ radiation (charged particles); Promethean narratives patently reverse this process (re: Aguirre), dooming the hero by patently revealing their own monstrous nature to them. This happens through a subversion of Campbell’s dubious monomyth; i.e., the infernal concentric pattern and the extinction of the hero’s hopes, dreams, possessions, etc, as bound at the hip to the fantastic spaces that reify them. It’s important, then, to acknowledge ourselves as both undead and spiraling down a path of self-destruction supplied to us by design; i.e., Capitalist Realism as built out of old bricks (or quasi-edible garbage, below). So, too, is our paradoxical liberation, our zombie eyeballs learning to become perceptive once more through less perceptive, unhealthy forms of undeath normally hungering for revenge like a bad drug. Gotta start somewhere. For us, that’s Mandy and H.P. Lovecraft:

Directed by Paul Cosmatos, I’m choosing Mandy because it a) makes fun of the heroic quest as a futile act of undead revenge, while b) crystalizing it inside a timeless nostalgia common to more serious (unironic) iterations; i.e., Lovecraft as a deeply homophobic man. We’ll start with Mandy by outlining its drug-like quest for revenge; i.e., as fueled by the kinds of us-versus-them fears that Lovecraft played with having gone onto inform and characterize Mandy‘s camp (and end with a small postscript/reminder about feeding and holistic expression).

To that, Mandy is campy to an extent, but showcases a bitter heteronormative truth: the hero of the classic monomyth is always a monster on a formulaic quest of revenge, one for which there is no return (and which queerness is dressed up as the psychosexual, monstrous-feminine catalyst). Sold and fed to us like cheap food (e.g., “Cheddar Goblin,” above—the secret star of the show as haunting Capitalism through its usual anti-Semitic conspiracies reduced to cheap, amazingly absurd, Camus-style gags), it’s a sure-fire descent into Hell, catalyzed by the presence of go-to heroes; grandiose, arguably gay villains; and helpless, doomed damsels.

(exhibit 40a1a2a: Artist, bottom-middle: Romantic Rose; bottom-right [source]: Patrick Zircher, Christian Rosado and Al Barrionuevo. In the presence of calamity as felt, we invent heroes to perform, thus achieve, catharsis. All at once completely trashy and deranged extravagance—of the senses, on par with Rimbaud; although we’ve called this device “confusion” instead of “derangement,” the eye-popping idea is identical—Mandy plays with nostalgia to highlight unconformable truths about our world; i.e., as projected onto an outlandish, fantasy one: not the princess being a slut [which the villain simultaneously craves and hates, Jim-Morrison-style], but that she arguably never existed [meaning her husband is trapped in a lie of revenge he cannot escape/drives him to endlessly commit further acts of undead violence towards new enemies]! Except, Mandy’s paradoxical haunting isn’t just a nation-creation myth birthing the wrathful tyrant, her bereaved, insane husband; it speaks to the usual disassociation and derealization of any rape victim, to which their significant others often feel alienated from [re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, with Cuwu and I working through such membranes vis-à-vis Gothic stories to find, however futile it might seem, similarity amid difference]: the family man seeking revenge against a queer, degenerate enemy for the death of his wife.

There’s an eerie-yet-beautiful unreality to the entire production, then, one that feels all in Cage’s head and poured out of said head into the world for us to occupy as well. Here, we see Persephone as the warrior through Cage, her denuded maidenesque precisely the kind of undead covering that Segewick describes in “Imagery of the Surface” [1981] as “the sexual function of veils” [source]. It’s something to look at and reveal/revel in sexual trauma as simultaneously hidden by a nostalgic, cartoon version of itself referred to backwards [with 1981’s Heavy Metal being a clear influence]. Mandy becomes something for Cage to seek but can never have [the only ones actually having sex in the movie are the Barker-style sex demons, Radcliffe’s demon lover with a new coat of paint on top of more coats]: the chaste knight’s great reward.

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

The modesty of the Neo-Gothic’s original, middle-class conservatism always teases the hero as “on the cusp” [the man, ready to penetrate, the woman ready to receive him]. Except, the Gothic communicates power on its surfaces to a mythical, androgynous degree that subverts just as easily. To that, a princess of the nocturnal, Persephone sort [which Mandy very much is] always features whore-like and virgin-esque qualities: something to look at. It’s not a position of weakness.

Rather, the princess’ intense sexual energies are charged, fruit-like, and swollen with a massive, giantess, phallic woman’s power that belies any seemingly delicate or small characteristics [e.g., Rose, above, her face hidden by fleshy softness as something to seek, but also asexually respect as a matter of cryptonymy’s usual barriers: to look and see the beauteous orbs[13] without touching them]. Said power is half-real, consuming the hero, Red, and speaking endlessly to Mandy’s abuse as that of a lived experience common to so many women/monstrous-feminine in and out of fiction.

Something of a Schrödinger’s “cat,” she phases in and out of existence, but feels utterly tangible and close to the hero; i.e., as a matter of flowing power anisotropically towards workers, the duality of the Gothic’s shadow zone using the same wardrobe—the medieval aesthetics, wacky performances, and playing with power [and sex] as a bad, thoroughly ace-level joke on purpose [from Chaucer’s Miller to Kevin Smith’s somewhat more obscure Pillow Pants addressing and manifesting the same basic concerns about sex and religion]: as something to transfer accordingly. It’s “almost holy”—a bad religion haunting the cathedral as remade into a joke of a thing that never quite existed [from Rome to the Goths to the medieval period to Walpole, on and on; re: Baldrick].

 In the Gothic, then, existence itself is always strained/a matter of endless struggle, and struggle is fraught with oscillation in and out of itself—what is, what could be, what has happened threatening the viewer all once through troubling comparison; they’re always on the cusp of something great, yearning to penetrate that greatness, but also daring to embody it: as something to explore and express because it cannot be penetrated. Ostensibly headless like Medusa, Rose’s whorish performance—when contained behind such revolutionary barriers by virtue of context—becomes impenetrable, but simultaneously able to express past harm [and future salvation] as a matter of paradoxical agency protected inside the illusory realm of fatal nostalgia, of calculated risk. So does Mandy.

To it, safety and “danger” [with or without quotes] are all part of the exhibit, the context; i.e., as something to play with on any register and showcase in totality [to illustrate mutual consent]: nothing is stronger than the submissive as having fostered mutual consent as a matter of social-sexual boundaries, of recultivating the Superstructure on all levels, but also reclaiming our bodies and labor for liberation as thoroughly Gothic-Communist. It’s what this book is all about!)

Thoroughly inundated in heady drugs and emphera—from the hag’s infernal, witch’s-brew eye drops and wasp “cherry on top” piercing Mandy’s neck; Cage’s bottomless whiskey and coke; the entire crucifixion scene and its sense of martyred rapture before and after Mandy dies; sodomy, gimp outfits and spiked blood spilled during thrill-kill BDSM; and the Black Skull’s bad LSD stored in mason jars like moonshine (a gift from the Chemist to Sand, who uses the drugs to motivate the Skulls to work for him as “muscle,” and which Cage later takes to become a Skull, in effect replacing them)—torture and illicit drug use permeate the entire film.

Cage, then, is the movie’s mule, failing sobriety mid-gang-war to climb to the top of the heap (said war suggested by the demon bikers, alluding to actual American highway gangs like the Hell’s Angels, routinely exporting hard drugs across state lines to become something of a neoliberal boogeyman when failing state illusions coincided more and more with the collapse that accompanied them). It’s the usual monomyth power fantasy (revenge-killing an evil ruler’s cronies, eventually dethroning the tyrant and replacing him) literally fueled by drugs.

It’s campy to some extent because the quest unravels inside of itself (and the mind of its unstable, vampiric hero); i.e., as a kind of madness integral to its continuation. The more Cage takes, the crazier (and bloodthirstier) he gets, reality flying apart until he becomes yet another tyrant. In the end, the constant torture and drugs bake the hero’s brain, leaving the viewer with the lingering, uneasy feeling that Mandy may have never been real. Instead, Cage basically smiles at the gods (as only Cage can), capitalists having trapped him in a drug-fueled, Sisyphean-style quest for revenge (which the monomyth essentially is: chasing Persephone as the princess in another castle, however virginal or whorish she appears).

Except, for all Mandy‘s posturing about final victory within fatal nostalgia, the monomyth remains as addictively harmful to the world (and workers) as that hellish goblin macaroni—a fact the movie delights in and stresses for its entire run time: heroism is a drug built on revenge to serve profit, a holy grail to chase ever onwards into the oblivion of late-stage Capitalism. Saying nothing of his endless body count, then, Cage is the movie’s central victim—a shell of a man hopelessly trapped inside the movie’s painfully consistent tightrope/recipe of paranoia; i.e., a bad batch on purpose, its product carefully cultivated through perceived loss as a driving force that catalyzes nonstop genocide. Instead of sheer delusion for its own sake, we’re given criminal indulgence inside a Lovecraftian homophobia gelling to the sort of fatal nostalgia Mandy returns to capitalize on; i.e., abjecting queer people as capital’s usual victims under Satanic panic. His drug is literally blood—the spilled blood of the innocent gays dressed up as sexual deviants crushed under Christofascist dogma.

In fact, as I write about Mandy in my 2018 review of the film, its procedure is so widespread, toxic and deadpan that many people replicate and parody the same basic code without seeing the homophobic elements; e.g., me (the review is quite germane to our continued examination of the Cycle of Kings and monomyth as things to critique, so I’d like to include a fair chunk of it to make my point: I didn’t notice the homophobia because I was in the closet when I wrote it):

Mandy is a fantasy tale of revenge that forces Cage into a largely mute role. The actor’s somewhat constrained delivery assists the narrative versus hijacking it; the story is at once a fairy tale and a Western, with horror themes: an old gunslinger working a menial job must return to a life of violence after his wife is killed. To do so, he must also return to drinking and meeting with old, bellicose friends. His bloody quest is two-fold, the villain tucked away in a tower, guarded by parallel agents who swear fealty to no one and delight in mayhem. They cannot be killed; Cage encounters them, first, only to learn what they are, later. These skirmishes feel parallel to the villain, Jeremiah Sand. The bikers push Cage towards Sand, similar to how Eric Draven is led towards Top Dollar by T-Bird and his pals.

The events onscreen are pastiche, understated (much how George Lucas retooled Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa for a new generation, with Star Wars). I recognized the nods to Mad Max, except the chase is through a black forest, not a desert, and with a Suburban, not a V8. The weapons are a crossbow with two bolts, and an ax straight out of Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian (1981) or Krull (1983). There’s even a slow, deliberate forging sequence John Milius might have used, in Conan. What’s important is that the story works as a fantasy and a Western and a revenge film, separately and together. Much of this has to do with the visuals, music and dialogue, which exist “as is,” unfolding in ways that allow us to sit back and watch. We remain uncertain as to where exactly it’s going even if the general idea is more or less straightforward. It feels familiar but fresh—a new combination of old parts that succeeds on multiple levels. The dialogue is both lite and abundant. It unfolds like a conversation, not as exposition.

During his quest, Cage goes from person to person, often meeting these individuals once and once only. They feel like part of the world, one that lives and breathes. We need not know who they are; we need only see what wisdom (or arms) they impart. It is what Bakhtin refers to as the Road, wherein the motif of meeting is employed. On it, Cage meets many different people, but in a larger world the movie can only suggest [amounting to a cult of drugs, Cage hijacking its supply from the Chemist to, in short, trip harder than Sand does]. Any sense of rapport or animosity is understated. All that matters is the quest. We’re simply along for the ride. The villain, Sand, monologues much how Little Bill, Top Dollar or Thulsa Doom do; their dialogue is to be heard in the moment, not pieced into a larger puzzle. It is an act of villainy to be viewed, not a mystery to solve. They are hypnotic, not cryptic.

We learn Sand is ruthless, not only a villain, but transparently so [in short, he’s a total dumbass; e.g., “Do you like the Carpenters? (I’m) like them, but better!”]. This same transparency applies to the heroes and side characters. Cage is implacable: his lover was killed; he’ll settle the score any way he can. He largely speaks through action, through facial expression (Cage’s strong suit). More often than not, he’s covered in blood, his nose rimmed with rings of dusty cocaine. He drinks, he cries; there’s little need for him to spell it out. We’ve seen it, firsthand, and he’s often alone. When he’s in the company of others, they know who he is. Bill Duke inquiries, but only just (Cage’s explanation is one of the movie’s funnier moments). Then Cage sets forth, armed to the teeth.

These stories involve terrible loss and resurrection, working in tandem. Cage’s darkest moment is fairly early on. Mandy is killed; Cage is strung up with barbed wire, wearing a halo of “thorns” like Jesus except as a gag. Sand even pierces Cage’s side with a spear. From the brink, Cage comes back to put the wrong things right. If this sounds familiar, it is. In The Crow, Eric Draven is killed before the movie even starts, his death revealed in flashback; when he revives, he is largely unstoppable… until Top Dollar injures Eric’s crow companion (“Lemme give you an impression: ‘Caw! Caw! Bang, fuck, I’m dead!'”). In Conan, the hero’s mother and family are killed; he is made a slave. Failing to kill Thulsa Doom, he is crucified. After being brought back from the dead, Conan must endure the death of his lover at Thulsa Doom’s hand. Continually driven, Conan finally kills his nemesis for good. Bereavement serves to strengthen the hero unto final victory [except there is no victory because his loved one is forever dead; all that remains is revenge, glory and hollow victory].

The point at which the lover is murdered can vary further still. In Unforgiven, William Munny’s wife dies of natural causes, with William standing over her grave during the opening prologue. Recruited for a hit, William is pummeled by Little Bill (not even his target). Later, William returns to kill Bill, but only after the other man kills William’s friend. Another hero—Max, from Mad Max—only kills Toe-Cutter and his minions after they kill his wife and child: there is no moment where Max is beaten, himself. He handily bests the Night-Rider, early on; Toe-Cutter and his men die just as easily. In the “sequel,” Max’s family is already gone. He is fed upon by Lord Humongous, whose army destroys Max’ car. Nursed back to health, he survives and, returned to full strength, deals with his enemies in a final, protracted chase sequence. In Mandy’s case, there is no stopping Cage once Mandy is killed. And that’s the point: he can kill as many of the demon bikers as he wants; they’ll laugh and tell him Mandy is “still burning” in hell [translation: still fucking sex demons instead of her husband]. How can one defeat someone with violence, if violence and dying are what they love? It’s a clever twist. Even if the movie is simply a variation of old parts, it’s done well. [He’s Achilles deprived of Patroclus, killing until everything is dead, including himself as “undead.”]

Cage’s reintegration to violence is gradual. Initially he and Mandy enjoy their pastoral home, announced by sparkling Disney font. Cage is almost gentle. Then, Sand’s toady summons the bikers, parallel to Cage’s own, inner killer. Driven to avenge his wife, his bloodlust mounts through constant battle. The bikers are less defeated so much as escaped from. Cage careens his Suburban off one, kneeling in the middle of the road. They capture him, relish in seeing the old killer (a biker, like them) regress. Covered in blood, he pounds whiskey and blow to see things through. By fighting actual demons, Cage confronts his own. Sand’s cohorts are all but obliterated, bested one by one. Some put up a fight. Some do not. Cage kills them all, insatiable death-dealer that he is.

The variations continue. Sand isn’t as scrappy as Top Dollar. The latter would lay traps and fight as dirty as possible; Sand uses the power of voice and little else. Unforgiven featured no seduction; Little Bill was simply overconfident, backed by a crew that outnumbered William many times over. In Conan, Thulsa Doom’s host fell at the battle of the mounds; all he had left was his voice. Like Doom, Sand’s men are reduced well before. His voice cannot stop Cage from crushing him to ignominious death (wonderful gore effects). Cage leaves, but not before burning the cultist’s temple to the ground, as Conan did with Thulsa Doom’s. There is no princess to rescue, this time around; the villain is dead, as is Cage’s bride. With nothing left to achieve, our hero rides off into the sunset, presumably onto other adventures (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Mandy (2018): Review,” 2019).

This all seems rather formulaic, right? The problem replicating the monomyth to camp it with “Nazi death sex” is that said code has a lot of poorly disguised homophobia to it; i.e., it doesn’t try to distinguish the queer from the Nazi; e.g., Sand as a serial killer whose sexuality is essentialized as queer by virtue of it being a disorder. He’s defined as violent and cruelty—lashing out the moment Mandy rejects his penis by sight. She laughs at him; he burns her alive.

The problem is, all of this is queer-coded in ways that don’t camp the 1980s. For example, when Sand is cornered, he begs Red to spare his life (“I’ll suck your dick, man!”)… only to shift back to the psychosexual tyrant butting heads with the straight man. Sand isn’t just a false preacher but a destroyer of women who uses his disposable flock to get what he wants. Why? Because he’s secretly gay!

At least, that’s how it’s coded, sadly. That’s precisely the sort of cliché, hateful bigotry that informs Mandy‘s camp, depriving the narrative of irony the likes of which Matthew Lewis wouldn’t have sacrificed on the altar. Simply put, commodifying struggle is generally done by straight men or tokenized elements, of which Lewis wasn’t. This makes Mandy’s camp something of a dated, backwards, and ultimately regressive character. As such, it furthers the process of abjection, raping the monstrous-feminine in service to capital, business-as-usual: the straight man’s revenge.

We’ll get to some of the origins of Mandy‘s homophobia when we look at Lovecraft, in just a moment. First, let’s examine the churchly structures the film raises (then razes); i.e., as a matter of scapegoating capital’s assigned victim: the monstrous-feminine (which is what being queer under Capitalism essentially is—anything that a white cis-het Christian person[14] isn’t). Someone decided to do that, but in doing so, like a church, was built on top of older things.

To that, Mandy is a film about the monomyth that disguises Satanic panic (code for “homosexuality” and by extension, queerness at large) as fear of the poor against the Good Husband as bad once-upon-a-time and Mandy alive once-upon-a-time (again, she’s reduced to a casus beli, the hero’s false flag when seeking out new fortunes, Conan-style); deprived and incensed of his good, nuclear home (minus the kids), Red seeks “reasonable vengeance” against an imaginary foe for the greatest taboo: the drug-addled hillbilly’s capture, rape and murder of the helpless damsel, becoming a demonic caricature of the free love movement (with evangelist ties). It’s the monomyth married to Wes Craven’s The Last House of the Left (1972) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) but with a hauntological stamp neither picture had; i.e., neither here nor there, but in between.

(exhibit 40a2: In the Church of Death, Nic Cage becomes a god through revenge. He beheads Sand’s Medusa-esque witch—like Conan beheading the perfidious snake god, Thulsa Doom—then crushes the head of the final snake [the blind eyes popping ignominiously and rapturously from their sockets—the martyr’s fate]. Very orgasmic in the crushing of the godhead, the joke seems to be, “It’s funny because Sand is gay!” As such, Mandy conflates sex and violence as “interwoven” in the medieval pastiche as homoerotic. In destroying Sand as the “poser” dark religion, though, Cage’s hero also replaces him as the next-in-line: the “true” dark god [through might makes right] whose fiery effigy imitates yet-another-sacrifice consigned to the endless, hungry blaze; i.e., within the text, but also across a series of similar imitations whose grand pattern the director is clearly aware of and challenging full-bore: through rape play with less irony than I would like. Cage becomes fixated with Mandy just like Sand did, becomes yet-another-demon biker strongman sodomizing whomever to stress his own fallen conqueror status: as reprobate. He’s an undead reaver stuck in a dream of futile heroic revenge [against imaginary endless enemies] that never ends. Like the Black Skulls, he only derives pleasure from raping others, revenge being a drug that he needs more and more of. In short, he’s an addict who thinks he’s a god, one tied to a death cult [the monomyth] centered around his dead “wife.” It’s Capitalism in small.)

All the while, Nic Cage is Zombie Jesus demanding his pound of flesh, but also “Hamlet” haunted by his wife’s false “ghost.” A king without a castle, a bride, a home, the crux of the Christ-like drama sits close to Dante’s Inferno as a rapturous cycle of torture; i.e., the futility of revenge trapped amid the Gothic fever dream as a burnt offering. “Blood for blood” is the executioner’s motto of the demon bikers[15] (the “Black Skulls” effectively a sodomic leather daddy cult tied to “bad” LSD [a little nod to Jacob’s Ladder and the CIA’s enforcing of homicidal “bad trips” onto American soldiers]: one to give false explanation to a seemingly supernatural threat that is, in fact, domestic abuse and homophobia when all’s said and done). Except, no blood sacrifice can bring the princess back. The hero’s panoply of great deeds only serve to bury him alive inside the inferno—all while turning him into what he used to be: a slave to his own cocaine-and drink-fueled vices.

Suitably enabled, Red kills Sand, a plural and ridiculous man who bites off more than he can chew by threatening the strong family man. Yet so has Red, descending into the Mandelbrot as Great Destroyer after burying the gay (dressed up as a homicidal Jesus freak, no less). There is no reprieve for being the hero, only madness and death everlasting (which the Black Skulls are drawn towards: “You have a death wish.”). Red becomes trapped in fragments of his own past brought imperfectly back to life, placing himself at the center of a story whose princess is, suitably enough, in another castle; she’s a grail beacon, divorced from Red pursuant to the nuclear family model as forever devastated by sexual deviancy and evil queens, avenging itself through the ritualistic “suicide by cop” of said queens (“failing upwards” while punching down). As such, Red is the black knight—a dragon without a princess, Lord Dracula—but remembers her as that once-upon-a-time that’s notably the title and truant. How Gothic.

(exhibit 40a3a: The story revolves around the ghost of Mandy per the infernal concentric pattern. These men are effectively doomed per their monomythic search for power and revenge, Sand’s being his envy of the straight man’s wife [a similar covetousness seen in David Fincher’s Se7en, exhibit 43b]. The queer elements feel dated in much the same way except they weren’t made in the ’80s; they regressed to them to tell an old, very tired joke: the priest is a rapist because he’s gay [and not because of the system he belongs to; re; Lewis, The Monk]. Under heteronormative thought, to be gay is to be false, to be murderous with bad intent as a matter of straight projection onto capital’s monstrous-feminine scapegoats threatening state-sanctioned brides.)

Mandy is, on one level then, a neo-conservative Viking’s boast about drunk Beowulf slaying demons and degenerates while reveling in the antiquated fetishes and gay-hating clichés, but it still narrowly reverses abjection regarding the heroic quest as reprobate: Mandy the girl is murdered to progress the hero’s story but his story is still eternal damnation once the gay man is six feet under (the Gibson-level Catholic martyrdom is also there, delighting at Cage’s masochistic exploits; but Cage’s irrefutable drive towards complete insanity makes the outcome much more of a mixed bag/acquired taste—I love it, but I’m a weirdo who appreciates queer history as tied up in self-flagellation/torture porn).

In the same vein, the primer has already covered reversing abjection; i.e., by merely proposing the (re)humanization of the zombie (and their assorted parts) inside the nightmare as “awake,” thus perceptive to traumas that are normally repressed by the state. To take this idea further is to actively reverse Cartesian dualism by reflecting on war and rape as a necromantic process similar to Mandy‘s; i.e., trapped in a zombifying death loop according to historical-material effects systemically produced by Capitalism (what Lovecraft, the Cartesian ‘fraidy cat, touched upon with his infamously gibberish, death cultist chant, Cthulhu fhtagn).

Of course, this includes its neoliberal forms; i.e., that prop abjection up as something to scare the public with over time, replicating itself not just through zombies, but many canonical monster types: vampires, ghosts, composites, and demons of various kinds (and combinations). This include the gigantic, xenophobic sort worshipped as dark gods by a curious-if-ignorant middle class; i.e., shamelessly and shamefully enthralled by the ghost of the counterfeit raping Medusa for capital to avenge the American dream (and nuclear family unit) as proper fucked. Capital decays; punch the fag as “Nazi.”

To that, Mandy is basically a mean-spirited Hero’s Journey about rape and revenge, one set to dated, hauntologically vice-like representations of queer sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It all feels like it’s happened before, too—our heroine causally reading about her own death in a cheap, dime store novel that speaks to the conditions outside of itself that, sure enough, walk up to the counter to size her up. Sand’s sacrifice something of a Catherine Morland, she feels dead, herself, emerging from the waters to approach Cage, who—clearly the story’s unreliable narrator—might be dreaming in the middle of a drug-fueled bender! The story is his attempt to remember after Mandy is dead and gone. Abjection kills Medusa, then teases the audience with her corpse to justify fascist violence (revenge built around a lie with a kernel of truth):

(exhibit 40a3b: “To the last syllable of recorded time” or “Never shake your gory locks at me,” Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” leaps to mind. There’s plenty of Jungian archetypes to observe, Mandy something of a good witch, her face scarred [and rocking something of a David Bowie vibe with her asymmetrical pupils]. This isn’t the stuff of total fiction [any more than those elements/stories are]: “I looked at him and he was dead,” my grandmother recalled, seeing my mom’s golden retriever, Prince, in his doghouse. “He wasn’t dead, but he was. And a day later, he died.” Turns out, he’d been poisoned by a jealous lover, seeking revenge against my then-teenage mother for breaking up with him because his dick didn’t work. Revenge is often petty.)

Moreover, this process of abjection reaches backwards—through fatal, monomythic nostalgia—to highlight sexually conservative authors belonging to a larger canonical (thus homophobic) trend: blame the fag by abjecting them from straight power structures (e.g., the Church) by suggesting that’s “just how we are”: like the evil-rapey hillbillies from Deliverance (1972).

To that, let’s quickly unpack some homophobic elements that Mandy weaves into its camping of the monomyth: its demon church yet another example of religion laid low by degenerate forces that, when irony is absent, becomes another “bury your gays” trope per said monomyth.

Of the aforementioned canonical trend, I could say “Radcliffe,” but we needn’t go that far back. I would rather stick to who was probably on the director’s mind when telling his story. For example, something akin to Stephen King’s literature briefly appears onscreen for a quick second (exhibit 40a3b, above), but I think the ’80s zeitgeist for which King dominated orbits around the pulpy fictions of older bigoted men like Lovecraft having already furthered said process towards King (and Mandy’s director looking back at such slashers with fondness); i.e.,  through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to pulp, then paywall.

Simply put, it’s the Shadow of Pygmalion per the Cycle of Kings upholding capital during middle class Gothic poetics (what I also call “white cis-het guy disease”). It’s hard not to shake the feelings of paranoia, psychosexuality and downright homophobia that permeate Mandy having come from strangely awful authors like Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a man who apparently fucked[16], oddly enough, but whose own steadfast views on love were warped with staunchly homophobic attitudes on par with the Cenobite rip-offs (no shame in it) that Mandy pointedly showcases; e.g., the knife dick scene (next page), whereupon subversion is largely a matter of context (the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture something we’ll devote much of Volume Three to):

(exhibit 40a3c: The home invasion scene, where the old helpless couple has been sodomized[17] by the demon bikers from Hell. This is both a shameless nod to Satanic panic, and an apt feeling for what it’s like to be queer in the historical period of the 1980s. Mandy’s chronotope jams it all into the same theatrical space, to which a part of me wants to groan and agree with Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm” barb about the Gothic, but also to embrace the psychosexual theatre as a great bit of campy fun. Indeed, the Titus-Andronicus levels of violence marry sex to war as something of a psychomachy that treats the home as a system in which “Red” and his other personalities duke it out. Out comes the knife dick, a rearing fang/greedy mouth struggling to sate itself [through all the usual hyphenations] even after a fresh kill and trying to “mate” with Cage. Both men are addicts, cruising and “forking” like vampires [an old gay metaphor we’ll explore in another chapter].

Rather than hate the fascist elements, though, I want to observe and understand why they exist/continue to revive in ways GNC people can use to our advantage; i.e., as part of an old problem to queer expression through the Gothic mode [and, by extension, real life]: alienation under homonormativity extending to all manner of queer forms. Matthew Lewis touched on this, but it’s something you can see well into the present as stuck grappling with dated conceptualizations of queerness we must reclaim.

This happens per a larger ongoing conversation between generations and personalities over space and time. The below comment, for example

It doesn’t matter to our oppressors that you don’t do drugs or have casual sex. You can have a white picket fence with 2.5 kids and a golden retriever and go to church every Sunday. But don’t forget – we’re still just faggots [source tweet, turnintoabat: June 12th, 2024].

when visually citing [several copy-and-pasted screenshots; reassembled, above] and writing in response to an older Tumblr post

That’s the part you don’t seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn’t even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died. […]

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us [source Tumblr post, Vaspider: June 21st, 2022].

Fucking oath, sisters! Exceptions lead to genocide, of which the queer is a regular casualty [and which they internalize bigotry as a matter of dogma-through-osmosis]. Capital is profit is us-versus-them is tokenism the likes of which becomes nostalgic, displaced, holy under stories like Mandy. Never forget, we’re living in Gothic times, cuties. We’re the aliens Red would kill to avenge his dead wife. Expressing the liminal nature of queerness-as-reprobate through criminal hauntology is certainly part of reclaiming our power under state duress [thus police violence]! This all but requires intersectional solidarity.)

As a dubious contributor to a larger queer pathos, Lovecraft only added to the stigmas and violent hero logic that Mandy plays with/adheres to (a scourge for the hero to purge). I think you get the point. He’s something of a spectre haunting such fictions’ revenges against queer aliens, a giant dick still fucking us fags over in the fictions that survived him: inventing worlds that explained his awful, American-Nazi bigotry (colonizing fantasy for those purposes—i.e., nobody is more scared, violent or Quixotic than a Nazi; they make everything up, are essentially weird canonical nerds who use LARPer-style DARVO/obscurantism to invent entire escapist, thoroughly callow worldviews to attack their boogey persons with, then call it “reason” [with a weird bent, in Lovecraft’s case]. It’s criminally insane, but also massively homophobic).

(artist: Matthew Childers)

To that, Mandy’s revenge is as much against stupid cartoons of gay people as it is the religious poors. In keeping with Lovecraft’s codified mythos, though (the Great Old Ones), such enormities like Mandy’s curiously homophobic, psychosexual church of death have since turned into a substantial-if-problematic conveyor of ghastly merchandise; i.e., one that skirts the line between canon and camp per the process of abjection by a closeted-to-homonormative middle class (something Matthew Lewis arguably did, but being far more GNC [out of the closet] and sex-positive in his camp than straight men tend to be):

Lovecraft had many faults, as a person and an author. David Barnett writes, “So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question; in the world of the university-appointed canonical author and the celebration of the politically-correct and the culturally-diverse, Lovecraft shouldn’t exist. But “‘Tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” and possessing things “rank and gross in nature,” Lovecraft flourishes. To this, Barnett cites Elizabeth Bear [who] freely admits that Lovecraft’s views are “revolting,” but she writes, “Lovecraft is successful because authors are read, beloved, and remembered, not for what they do wrong, but for what they do right, and what Lovecraft does right is so incredibly effective” (Persephone van der Waard’s “Method in His Madness,” 2017).

In short, “does right” within dialectical materialism is canonical propaganda dressed up as “gay” counterculture, to which Lovecraft offered a special blend of “rock and roll” fear and dogma to manipulate the wider public with: BDSM Nazis (a trend we’ll explore more when we look at the Countess from The Crimson Court [exhibit 41h] in the vampire subchapter).

By extension, Mandy is homophobic because the monomyth (and its futile revenge) are homophobic, making it stuck somewhat in the harmful, regressive past the likes of which an utter ghoul like Lovecraft ruled.

This isn’t too surprising. Profit is founded on division and rape, causing queerness to decay into bad cartoons of itself (of which the monomyth essentially is). Profit is heteronormative, thus homonormative: queerness tokenizing to help capital rape the queer as an extension of nature, thus capital’s assigned prey by design decaying into its expected role, mid-paradigm. The fag becomes the Nazi sans irony.

Furthermore, fascism and Communism as “queer aliens” exist in the same shadow zone, one that Sontag touched with “Fascinating Fascism” back in 1974. Except, it’s much older than that; i.e., has built up through centuries of genuine, heartfelt xenophobia/Cartesian superiority that leads to the Cycle of Kings as waiting to “wake up” not as the tyrant does over and over against the forces of good, but something worse that overshadows both (Cthulhu is both the zombie tyrant and the great Promethean disaster of Capitalism haunting its endless, hauntological hyperrealities) during monomyth pastiche; i.e, the same taboo naughty things Lovecraft played with as a bigot might:

[From] The Eldritch Influence—The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft, I’ll paraphrase Neil Gaiman, who being interviewed, essentially says,

Lovecraft is rock and roll. There is nobody else like him, then or now. Looking at H.G. Welles or Jules Verne, they did not give you a worldview. H.G. Welles wrote much scarier horror short stories than Lovecraft, and they are forgotten. Welles is a man, who, in his day experienced much more success—his works were filmed, and so on—but also a man who has nothing near the number of people reading his works on a daily basis, now. On some kind of primal level, Lovecraft has people believing (ibid.).

“Belief” speaks to myth—particular fascist myth—as something to capitalize on, during Pax Americana as conducive to fascism (thus rape) per bourgeois socio-material conditions. Lovecraft isn’t touching to anything “primal” (which would essentialize it), more than he’s hitting a fascist nerve tied to present structures that people are memorializing through his abject stories; it’s hero worship upholding the usual Cartesian nonsense (tut, tut, Gaiman).

Such is basically a long way of saying that queerness gentrifies and decays into heteronormative cartoons of itself, while also camping courtly love by making it gay in easily recognizable forms: a queer iconography that is alien, tentacle, from the stars (what Lovecraft lovingly calls “the unknown.” Bitch, please. Men like you always think you own the universe, always abject [thus fear] women/the monstrous-feminine). To Lovecraft (and so many drafting similar stories), we’re the unspeakable “thing that should not be” as a matter of abject dogma. But it’s patently absurd because anal sex (and other forms of queer love besides sex, such as emotional attraction) aren’t that scary unless you’re a stupid, hateful bigot like Lovecraft who thinks he’s smarter than he is; he’s not, he’s just a massive cunt (a pattern that will continue into other Cartesian men of reason, like Victor Frankenstein).

Such distinctions are seldom neat because exploitation and liberation exist in the same spaces of performance and play. Instead, it’s important to recognize them so we can camp them back with irony. Mandy doesn’t always have that, any more than Tim Curry and Rocky Horror did, fifty years ago (conservative straight people love that movie; i.e., by laughing at the fags’ expense—a clown in the king’s court)! I like both movies, but often prefer something a bit more friendly to queerness-as-alien (e.g., Nimona, exhibit 56d2). But stories like Mandy do speak to a time of transition leaving the closet. To avoid going back into it, we’ll have to ultimately leave that nostalgia behind, but can remember and recall it as a matter of history moving towards universal liberation out of heteronormative bondage.

(artist: Michael Whelan)

The simple fact is, not everyone wants to indulge in the reality that we fags are viewed not just as false, but as abject pieces of shit that practice sodomy as “unnatural” to “proper society.” To them, we’re literally scum, the likes of which Cage kills without a second thought and which Lovecraft relegated to the position of fearsome alien. We are awesomely powerful, but abject is abject and it needs irony to work… which Lovecraft’s stories don’t have.

Subverting canonical simulacra, then, is an act of conscious rebellion and playful interpretation of unironic bigotries; i.e., challenging Lovecraft and his ilk’s heteronormative monopoly on queer sex demons (from Barker to Cosmatos) in monomythic stories—burning their churches down while camping them as a matter of inserting irony where irony is absent. It’s something akin to fighting fire with fire to avoid the kinds of heteronormative undead revenge and blind sight that Mandy to some degree showcases: the martyred, idiotic hero/Roman fool stuck in a dogmatic hell of his own making (and turning Persephone into a ghost, frozen in time). It requires the informed examination of Gothic poetics as something to learn from and teach with inside our own mirror-like creations and what we, as workers, leave behind: “Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Except our rock and roll is a cycle of counter pulp fiction—of constant, dark reinvention and dreamlike rememory of undead monsters and demons, but also symbols of sex, status and power relative to these things. In short, it needs rockstars (a concept we’ll return to, again and again throughout the book, but cementing the notion as revolutionary praxis in Volume Three, Chapter Five) and vivid implements of power—monarchs and spaces—that don’t uphold the status-quo proliferation of unironic rape as Lovecraft did:

(exhibit 40a4: Artist, bottom-left: Frank Frazetta; bottom-left: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”; middle-left and top-right: Blxxd Bunny. Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. Sight is something that can go both ways—is anisotropic, but also able to gaze upon persons and places that go hand-in-hand; e.g., zombies in hauntological “graveyards.” This chiasmus also applies to the beholders of strange sights, who not only can see into potential worlds, but reflect those worlds back at canonical proponents in ways that freeze these viewers in their tracks. This needn’t be the classic Archaic Mother’s abject rage, but forms of social-[a]-sexual joy that are just as likely to petrify sex-coercive individuals. These can be from literal mirrors or cameras, or illustrations that “mirror” former artistic reflections on a hauntological past: Bonaparte doing his best to emulate Caesar or Alexander the Great by invading 19th century Egypt and gazing at the same colossal wreck backwards.)

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Instead, gazing upon these awesome beauties is to both look into an imaginary past that never was, currently is, and could be again in the future: a Promethean knowledge that destroys workers and the world so it may transform them (versus the Faustian bargain capitalists rely on, locking things in place). The Broadway ticket lies in facing things that terrify the usual actors of the monomyth: the Cartesian male as a mad scientist and/or warrior-detective conqueror bent on destruction. Their subsequent change-of-heart must happen inside a monstrous-feminine space that “castrates” them; i.e., takes away their sinister, undead desire (thus addiction) to rape the womb of nature for the umpteenth time. Depriving them of the means to prey on the vulnerable in service to profit, we can end Capitalist Realism (thus Capitalism) through a nightmarish ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasy that, when synthesized, informs reality as an ongoing exchange between the two.

Except, the ghost of the counterfeit only disarms the middle class of their bourgeois tendencies when abjection is reversed and all bigotries are actually confronted (through the usual monstrous aesthetics, abstractions, abbreviations) to challenge profit (not just homophobia, because homosexuality decays, too); i.e., regarding a group—the white, middle-class nuclear family and its members (example, above: “You’re scared of this? You kids must be from the suburbs!”)—that is normally threatened by, or at least afraid of, abject forces and normally relies on harmful counterfeit notions of state sovereignty relaid in such fictions (from Walpole onwards): the Promethean Quest inverting the unstoppable, mendacious and vengeful (thus frail, fallible, fearful, false) conqueror’s monomyth as normally extending and defending said group and its token outliers from evil forces (men with claws for hands, velociraptors, killer sharks, etc): “Don’t fuck with the lords of Hell!” “Don’t fuck with the babysitter!” However monstrous either side appears from a poetic standpoint, saber-rattling is saber-rattling.

During the dialectic of shelter and the alien, places and people engage to canonically further the process of abjection, punching the alien, the monstrous-feminine Medusa, per the ghost of the counterfeit (the spectre of genocide, of rebellion). Babysitter or badass, that’s basically what these assorted protectors are—some codified aspect of the nuclear family defending itself as a form of assimilation/replication (e.g., Elizabeth Shue, Sigourney Weaver or Jamie Lee Curtis, as “mother”) or avenging its destruction (e.g., Red, from Mandy, as “father,” etc)—but when tied to capital, they take on a false, predatory and incredibly xenophobic function: the white Indian, the exclusive victim against the wild, non-white world converging menacingly on women and children during societal decay and threatening them as such. Canon-wise, a woman may go wild, but only to protect the nuclear family from such slashers by being “the natural caregiver” (upholding said unit lest she become the irredeemable whore). Babysitting is dangerous!

Mandy is such a Quest, Red’s vampiric, strung-out, crossfading (drunk and high) fall from grace built on homophobic, undead nostalgia like Lovecraft’s after Red’s family is destroyed; i.e., trapping him in the monomyth’s endlessly dependent quest for revenge serving profit while illustrating its most harmful effects. Keeping Lovecraft in mind (though apart from him, the STEM fields are generally patriarchal and homophobic), part one shall examine the Promethean Quest through mad science; i.e., by examining it in Forbidden Planet, followed by the synthesizing of castle-narrative with the Metroidvania quest for the palliative Numinous (Otto’s mysterium tremendum) less as “female” and more as monstrous-feminine more broadly—a Gothic-Communist Numinous scaring evil male nerds acting like scared bullies (similar to sailors fearing mermaids; i.e., girls and gay people have cooties; re: Lovecraft hated the sea as chthonic, monstrous-feminine)!

*The original, unused title for Halloween (1978) was The Babysitter Murders.

Postscript

A small note/postscript before we proceed: this subchapter isn’t, as you’ve probably noticed, strictly about zombies. In fact, there’s really not much difference between the different undead, or even demons and undead (and animals); i.e., poetic exchange being holistic, dualistic, and socio-material, etc. Feeding is a form of exchange, but it isn’t strictly negative on its own (e.g., giving and receiving vitality through sex, vis-à-vis John Donne’s “Flea,” to regain lost knowledge/avoid alienation in modern times); instead, capital’s proponents (re: Lovecraft) make it that way as a matter of historical-material consequence: feeding to serve profit by being unable to stop during abjection—of fearing what you prey on, to ultimately exterminate it.

Red, for example, cannot stop taking power and never gives any back, his revenge built on shaky grounds (re: dead wife = false flag and creation myth) that invite future violence by a thoroughly alienized figure serving state interests. He cannot move on, taking more and more endlessly into the future while becoming frozen in time. An ironic lack of resolution makes him the next-in-line; i.e., to die when he kills someone else and the people who love them start looking for revenge. It’s Capitalism-in-action, expressed in small through blank parody (re: Jameson).

Dramatic theatrics aside, monsters embody poetic expression, which links to material factors and vice versa: the flow of power and knowledge (wealth, labor and anything else), whose function ultimately remains anisotropic; i.e., determined by the direction of that flow towards workers or the state.

Even if this seems theoretically confusing and visually ambiguous, the clue lies in the healthiness of the exchange, the vitality given and received, whatever the form. Capitalists take and never give back, inventing all manner of silly reasons/arguments for doing so; i.e., raping the monstrous-feminine through the process of abjection in monstrous language. We reify the same arguments to prevent harm in the future, reversing abjection and sparing the monstrous-feminine from profit as a matter of rape already survived; re (from “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” which sums all of this up, and to which I giving here again as to not have to repeat myself, moving forwards):

“rape” is an acquired taste; victims of rape (whatever the form) experience medieval-coded, regressive fantasies of “rape” they ideally want to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM to avoid actual rape (and overall harm) in the future. In turn, praxial catharsis occurs through iconoclasm while healing from rape in xenophilic ways that involve nature as monstrous-feminine in fetishized, cliché sites of death, damage, decay and rebirth. As such, exploitation and liberation occupy the same shadow zones’ theatrical spaces, the latter weaponized through the same linguo-material devices canonically waged against workers by traitorous forces; said workers reclaim these in public-to-private theatrical “danger disco”/rape-castle operatic spaces (and bodies) mapping trauma out: as something to immersively dance/party with (re: cryptomimesis, or fucking with the dead as a bad, Matthew-Lewis-style echo), adopting sex-positive strategies that resist capital/profit: by misbehaving as a matter of good sex education challenging profit as a matter of fact. […]

monsters aren’t just threats (“Alright you primitive screwheads! Listen up!”); they’re poetic lenses that concern power as something to paradoxically shift away from state forces, mid-struggle. They are, like power more broadly, something to interrogate by going where they are through performance and play. This concerns war and rape, decay and feeding, transformation and fatal knowledge. All exchange per various human tissues as poetic material—from brains, to flesh, to blood, to cum, and others things we won’t touch on as much (e.g., shit).

In turn, all overlap; all are modular and dualistic; all are psychosexually anisotropic insofar as power is concerned, because sex and force are power insofar as they are perceived through monsters as us-versus-them arguments—in short, how we function as monsters, how we feed, decay or transform, etc, mid-exchange. State power aggregates for profit to induce praxial inertia, and by extension a decrease in emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness. We must aggregate against all of these variables, thus the state’s trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as our castle-narrative to weave into the future regarding something we won’t live to see—a kind of “bucket list” to give back to future generations in very sexy-macabre ways; i.e., a “spit roast” that likes the very idea before the pole(s) go in—a piece of meat with agency and rights negotiating its own “rape” in ways that liberate all parties from profit and sexual harm, but play with the poetics, nonetheless; e.g., the captive fantasy with appreciative irony per ludo-Gothic BDSM. As such, the calculated risk should constitute a subversive act of illustrating mutual consent per intersectional solidarity between workers united against the state: to make “rape” impossible by putting it in quotes as a mutually consensual act!

I wouldn’t stress all this monomorphic playfulness, holism, salubrious irony and duality of exchange (all aspects of Gothic Communism that challenge capital’s singular, binarized alienation of things) if it wasn’t important. But it’s literally the thesis argument of this particular volume half. So please bear it in mind as we continue discussing the monomyth (and castles and conquerors); i.e., as poetically modular and intersecting extensions of the same basic principles, of which the undead factor a great deal into ludo-Gothic BDSM/castle-narrative (which will come up, next) but also aren’t separate from demons, nature and monstrous-feminine things at large.

From novels to movies to videogames, then, capital has their fakeries to further abjection by feeding on the monstrous-feminine abusing the ghost of the counterfeit to serve profit with; we reverse all of that using the same tools, to which—visibly undead and/or demonic—all function more or less the same: challenge profit’s recursive predation. From specialist research to casual hobbyist, all are chosen through preference for (and fondness towards) their individual histories, in this respect; i.e., to communicate trauma and contribute knowledge, feeding and transformation unto these histories: a tireless, back-to-the-drawing-board joy experienced through active play to better understand the world, thus pierce any and all bourgeois illusions. Vampire (demon) castle, zombie Caesar giant, mad scientist ghost puppet? Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, it’s all from Idaho!

Onto “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania (opening and part zero)“!

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Footnotes

[1] “A lot of people talk to me about Skeletor, which is one of my favorite parts. They always say, ‘Did you feel like you were slumming?’ And I say, absolutely not. My son was four years old. And I wanted him to see his father as Skeletor. And I loved playing it. It’s really one of my favorite parts, still” (source: Jenelle Riley’s “Frank Langella on Trial of the Chicago 7, Being Skeletor and His Legacy,” 2020).

[2] As previously stated, ludo-Gothic BDSM was something I coined after writing the majority of Volume Two, part two. It would be difficult to insert the idea into all of these pages without completely transforming their main purpose (cataloging poetic histories). So the term—a violent souvenir from my time with Jadis—will haunt these pages after the fact (or before the fact, if you consider I was always drawn to weird traumatic things); i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM will come up intermittently from here on out—will be on my mind as I proofread these older portions of the primer again—but won’t be forcefully integrated into these older historical writings beyond the degree I already have in “Bad Dreams,” parts two and part one (and the “Playing with Dead Things” chapter written for Volume Two, part one and its initial release).

Much of the primer from here on out, then, focuses on the history of poetics, not their poetic application (though we will try to include aspects of that as we move through the rest of the modules).

[3] From Volume One:

Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive (source).

[4] E.g., Tulpa from The Ronin Warriors (exhibit 41a) literally being a ghost of the Shogunate, which the show treats as something to exorcise in defense of capital in neoliberal Japan; i.e., Capitalist Realism.

[5] Which can eventually shift from canon to outright conspiracy as dancing between commodity and camp; i.e., a potential means of grift; e.g., the “birds aren’t real” movement (Vice, 2022), or flat-earth. Dogma, it generally goes, is applied to the masses by those who usually know better.

[6] Aka, Braindead. While certainly a hilarious movie (“Step aside, sonny. I kickass FOR THE LORD!” *organ music plays*), Peter Jackson’s penchant for slapstick black comedy is haunted by the usual ghost of the counterfeit, insofar as he remains unapologetic and afraid of the usual things amid a settler-colonial islander’s fortress mentality.

[7] Metroidvania is a topic from Volume Zero we’ll revisit repeatedly in part two of “Monomyth”: regarding the Numinous as monstrous-feminine, whose ghostly echo on maps-of-conquest involve Metroidvania as a cryptomimetic process (whose ghostly maps we’ll also reconsider in the “Seeing Dead People” subchapter).

[8] This book, for example, is basically impossible to advertise on official platforms; i.e., by virtue of its naked critical nature, but also bared-and-exposed approach to rape play challenging profit as normally raping the monstrous-feminine behind cryptonyms. We take those back and show them what they are.

[9] Medieval language and power fantasies are all fine and well to confront our troubles with, provided they don’t become a means of escape that, all too often, has tokenized potential; e.g., orc-style Amazons having an added racialized element to their traitorous status; re: Jadis and their bad BDSM, Amazon-style raping of me being emblematic of the same dualities we must struggle to reclaim in art. The subjugated Hippolyta sits on a herbo waifu’s tightrope, her greenface a kind of vaudeville when played or produced in bad faith (not that the artist below is, but simply that liberation and exploitation always and forever occupy the same poetic spaces).

(artist: M4rjinn)

[10] The hero in Dark Souls is undead, acknowledged as such by the princess herself: “O chosen Undead. I am Gwynevere. Daughter of Lord Gwyn; and Queen of Sunlight. Since the day Father his form did obscureth, I have await’d thee.” It’s a grail beacon made to force the hero to fight two of the games strongest guardians, only to realize the cake is a lie.

[11] In the neoliberal tradition, fatal nostalgia covers up genocide as a historical-material loop. This includes videogame copaganda like the Contra franchise as made “back in the day” and in the current moment: during problematic revivals banking on nostalgia, mid-genocide, to keep up appearances. This illusory procedure is a creative one, generally assisted by various fans in love with the imaginary colonial past; e.g., RichaadEB, who writes glowingly in his own cover video, “Contra: Operation Galuga – Alien Slayer” (2024):

Yo!! So last year I was approached by WayForward and Konami about the prospect of covering a few classic tunes from Contra for NES – the reason being that they wanted to include them in the REMAKE of Contra that they just released today. You can actually hear this cover in-game, which is extremely cool!! Very honored to contribute in some small way to a notable and beloved franchise like this (source).

It’s fatal nostalgia wedding rock ‘n roll to neoliberal shadow wars and theatre: a canonical battle anthem tied, as usual, to profit per white, cis-het men (and the middle class at large) as the usual benefactors, provided they learn the songs, but also the “prison sex” mentality behind them; re (from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“): “Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards.” Anything emergent/creative is roped into serving profit.

[12] Blindfolds can appear “blind” (a one-way mirror) but also be blind yet do extraordinary things; e.g., beating Mario 64 by collecting all 120 stars blindfolded (Bubzia’s “BLINDFOLDED 120 Star Speedrun of Super Mario 64 World Record,” 2023). This takes practice, devotion, normalization strategies (to reduce random events to replicable actions). While speedrunners are generally white cis-het men stuck in-text as refusing to apply their invention out-of-text yet gentrifying the profession, there’s potential to reverse this abjection and contribute to the same meta histories through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a holistic polity of expression; e.g., myself and my work solidarized with Harmony as I invigilate them talking about cryptonymy in regards to Dark Souls, but also something we can utilize in our own practices parallel, and often in relation to, all of these other things, but reversing the flow of power, mid-performance, towards workers. If you want to critique power, go where it is. Everything exists in duality—of the seemingly limitless abilities of the human imagination’s invention, memory (testified by the wearing of the blindfold, but also anything done while wearing it) and application—for or against the state to varying degrees, mid-liminal-expression; i.e., under the camera eye as something to fear and embrace to varying degrees of enthusiasm and reticence, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

[13] I want to go on a bit of a tangent, here, but one concerning tokenization vs subversion, which is germane: Just as Mandy camps the monomyth, Lewis camped Immaculate Conception in The Monk, turning the Madonna into a devil-in-disguise that tempts the rapey monk, Ambrosio; i.e., as part of the same oppressive system the devil is exposing in the book, and for which Lewis, a gay man, is using to comment on gay life in then-modern-day England. The difference between him and Cosmatos is irony in service to GNC peoples; i.e., as part of universal liberation through intersectional solidarity illustrating mutual consent (and informed labor exchanges raising class-cultural consciousness and emotional/Gothic intelligence) with iconoclastic art; re: synthesizing praxis, thus catharsis, on an individual-to-systemic level per ludo-Gothic BDSM (reclaim the Base, recultivate the Superstructure).

To that, we fags camp canon for own survival against the state pimping us (re: Broadmoor), not because we’re bored middle-class straight people obsessed with abject things; i.e., you can’t coercively fetishize a particular out-group and all it a day! Furthermore, the same asexual*power of the Gothic that Lewis used in good faith (the ability to speak about sexual things as a matter of violent, pornographic art) lets any whore camp her own abuse; i.e., through Gothic poetics, becoming a form of half-veiled activism passed off as “fake” (revolutionary cryptonymy in practice). It’s quite common for this to happen while working with those who aren’t going to harm you: gay people. We’re not the sex demons Cosmatos puts on a dark pedestal.

*Ace expression isn’t always a byproduct of trauma, but those who are traumatized generally fall into cop/victim and sexual/asexual. We’ll explore the neurodivergent/congenital side of aceness in Volume Three, part one.

Simply put, while reactive abuse does happen, fags more broadly aren’t the universal, alien (us-versus-them) bogeypersons capital depicts us as (we’re sex demons who sometimes self-destruct, but still aren’t the kind who tend to harm women and children; that’s your husbands, boyfriends, community leaders, etc, who actually have the privilege [and power] to abuse people they’ve been given control over). Instead, we’re relatively safe/aren’t going to automatically fly off the handle and berate someone else at the slightest inconvenience (tokenization being an exception of course, below); i.e., as a matter of capital and heteronormative dogma; e.g., during a difficult production, while we wait for things to fall into place. That’s just how working with others goes: setbacks happen, but the planets eventually align. And if they don’t, that’s no reason to attack others provided everyone’s acting in good faith. Things happen; you don’t use that as an excuse to endlessly take from the parties that are historically at a disadvantage!

By comparison, patience generally isn’t a virtue for straight men (or those normalizing to act, thus function* like straight men) because the state: conditions and expects them to abuse and control, thus rape women/anyone else, who isn’t them (the monstrous-feminine), then throw blame onto others to obscure the reality of capital working by design; i.e., moral panic; e.g., Satanic panic, Red Scare, Yellow Menace, etc, as monopolizing sex, force (violence), terror and morphological expression, etc, as a matter of compelled labor and artistic expression (canon). All is done to serve and maintain profit as settler-colonial, heteronormative, Cartesian, hence rapacious. As my PhD argued, Capitalism sexualizes everything around men as pimps and police, who their victims either serve or emulate.

*I.e., as tied to the nuclear family unit/somehow upholding it as status-quo; e.g., homonormativity, like all normativities, emulating heteronormativity from a marginalized position, playing the part of the dutiful servant or fearsome outsider/predator, etc (the subversion of these, onstage, is entirely possible, but that takes irony and awareness, which token agents lack).

To be blunt, all these effects/divisions are historical-material; i.e., a looping matter of social conditions (dogma) predicated on material conditions and vice versa (re: Marx)—of the state treating white cis-het Christian men as it has and always will: as the most privileged group, whose privileges peel off like union layers, but whose basic function is universal. Rape, profit, repeat. All are pimps to police other workers towards this aim, but especially anything monstrous-feminine as things to rape for profit (often in “efficient,” messy forms). In turn, said victims are a spectrum existing on descending rungs of selective punishment, relative privilege and marginalized convenience/entitlement (“Haven’t I suffered enough?”); re, a concept I call “preferential mistreatment” (from Volume One*):

…heteronormativity leads to [double standards]. Female servitude under Capitalism is different to male servitude, the latter of which tends to receive preferential mistreatment as the universal clientele. Both are raped under Capitalism, but differently through Man Box culture. Women (or beings forced to act and appear as women) are raped through figurative and literal labor theft and wage slavery—sold to male clients like useful animals or chattel slaves, but also as highly cultivated products that “beastly” men are likewise conditioned to rape, kill, or otherwise eat like gruel: […] Intersectionality extends this relationship to overlapping axes of oppression within the same basic pedagogy (and its complicated traumas) as perpetually contested under state mechanisms; e.g., people of color or GNC persons as corrupt, monstrous-feminine and correct-incorrect. An oppressed pedagogy will account for these complexities, synthesizing them in practical ways, including parody and irony as an unfolding, ambiguous proposition; a state pedagogy (and its own means of instruction) will not (source).

*See also, the glossary definitions for tokenism and white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility (accessible in my available volumes).

That’s where tokenism and Man Box come in. As Volume Three shall explore (which focuses entirely on tokenism vs good praxis), capital extends the abuser’s privileges (the coercion trifecta: gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss) to women and other marginalized groups provided they tokenize, hence betray their class, culture, and race interests in service to the elite; i.e., become cops (often with a Gothic flavor in pop culture; re: weird canonical nerds acting like “minority police/witch cops,” something we’ll unpack in Volume Three). Like anything, the monstrous-feminine is susceptible to betrayal and decay; i.e., whose tokenized “onion” historically-materially fosters marginalized in-fighting as a matter of “prison sex” and fortress mentality: tokenized groups from increasing privilege (but less than those above them) kissing up and punching down towards groups more marginalized then they are. The global consequence is assimilation—of women, people of color or queer persons, Indigenous peoples, etc, acting like white, cis-het men as a matter of tokenized representation.

[14] Originally just men, but extending to women as members of a growing middle class; re: the decay of feminism punching down against queer minorities (as Radcliffe did to Lewis). As we’ll see, this also extends to gay Nazis and punks, etc.

[15] I.e., Faust, but gayer (the love that dare not speak its name). The pleasure and pain of Mandy‘s monsters exist in the same place as a trademark of ’70s BDSM, wherein trauma and catharsis but also resistance and power occupy the same territory using the same language. The liminality sits between realism and folklore; violence, hard kinks, drugs and heavy metal (as a bizarre “don’t do drugs, kids!” narrative that still celebrates the whole practice); the Numinous and the ordinary as a site of abject exploitation/forbidden fruit tied to fatal penance, flagellation and circuitous trials by fire. Reverence and dark worship, then, laud the ghost of the counterfeit as penned in, but also a liminal space to move around inside; i.e., the blurring of the line between pulp fiction and daily life as trapped in how Steve Huey describes Megadeth’s Peace Sells: “The lines between hell and earth are blurred throughout…” (source, Allmusic). It’s The Cell or Jacob’s Ladder as darkly indulgent, a kind of aberrant, haunted-house escape into total oblivion—the guilty pleasure of the privileged going to the dark gods.

[16] I love that Lovecraft.com is like, “But wait, he fucked women!”

The facts that Lovecraft had little success with women and had many male friends have led people to believe that he was a homosexual. However, it must be remembered that he was married (briefly) and his wife described him as an “adequately excellent lover” (Sonia H. Davis, “Memories of Lovecraft: I,” The Arkham Collector, No. 4, Winter 1969) [source].

God help me, the stupid shit people choose to remember in order to memorialize assholes! So, gay people can’t fuck, apparently? Annoyed inferences aside, it’s also rather telling of homophobia on the writers of this myth bust. Beards are a thing. Moreover, it’s just as common to call someone “asexual” to avoid calling them homosexual:

[…] But, this is not to say that his heterosexual inclinations were especially strong, either. Lovecraft, like many intellectuals, focused his attentions and efforts on mental, rather than physical, pursuits, and simply didn’t have very strong sexual interests at all [ibid.].

This “they’re not gay, they’re…” trend has haunted the Gothic since its inception and before; i.e., extending from Shakespeare (who was married with kids, but still probably gay anyways) to Walpole (not married, no kids, also probably gay by modern standards); re:

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal— sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

[17] A nod to the Nightstalker killer, Richard Ramirez, who would home invade the elderly middle class, then rape and murder them. He leaned into abject “Satanic” theatrics, and killers like him were generally framed as “gay” similar to Ed Gein, but also fictional counterparts like Hannibal Lecter, Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, and countless others. It’s the process of abjection scapegoating queer people [which historically would have been homosexual men recognized as citizens in England and elsewhere*] while apologizing for capital’s raping workers and nature at home and abroad.

*More on this when we look at vampires and Foucault’s A History of Sexuality.