Antonio Gramsci rolls in his lasagna-filled grave.
Now is the time of monsters. The monstrous and the depraved of the world bubble and pop under our very noses. It’s everywhere. It’s the talk of your typical Discord call and your therian rave club. As petty and increasingly irrelevant old fools squabble and bicker over resources that will dry within the century, we exist in a liminal space between beginning and end: The Present. I call this a liminal space because, ultimately, this time is entirely transitional as is most time. It is the moving of the era of man into the era of monster.
I’ve always had a fascination with monsters. My family was fortunate enough to afford better cable packages when I was younger in between the beatings, less-than-appropriate fondling, and neglect. I watched so much of the Godzilla franchise on shit like HBO. It would probably be faster to tell you which films in the franchise I haven’t seen. The idea of a completely alien force of nature descending down onto the largely defenseless masses made far smaller problems less uncomfortable for me. I was always so annoyed by the little things too. I needed the relief for damn sure. One thing that always struck me was the sheer contrast in visions for each film. The first is quite the meditation and post-traumatic reflection on the absolute horrors of war. Most equate it quite heavily with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Japanese civilians were struck on multiple occasions by a variety of different ordinances. Anyway, 1954’s Godzilla was a serious piece of media that was attempting to piece together the shattered remains of a war weary populace.
1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon is a schlock-y, goofy mess with reused footage from previous films and some of the most widely mocked special effects in cinema history. I mean the differing vision here is quite stark. Tokusatsu films, which owe quite a few staples from the original Godzilla movie, had generated a positive feedback loop of tropes that had worked their way back into their very originator at this point. Characters like Jet Jaguar are introduced in the film who bear more of a resemblance to something out of 1971’s Kamen Rider than what would have fit in the atomic horror of the first film. For all of its obvious smoke and mirrors and complete utter lack of deference to previous material, I love this movie. It represents such a fascinating shift in culture from the cheap, yet surprisingly gross and dark sci-fi horror of the 1950s into the Saturday morning action cartoons and over-the-top, colorful comic book blockbusters of the 1970s onward.
The thing is, the melting, oozing, bubbling horror of the 1950s never truly died. The slow and methodical approach, the sheer build up of dread cresting into the most elaborate and thoughtful manifestations of real world problems as disgusting and extra-limbed monsters. If anything, in many cases, it grew smarter. It learned. It watched as society turned into this dull hum of rise and grind and accepted servility. It saw the inequalities that remained. It took on the very monstrous nature of the human itself. To be monster? That is the ideal now. Being a monster means unburdening yourself from the sheer chaotic and existentially dreadful nature of being human. The roles have completely reversed.
I feel as though I become less human as I transition gender; not even in just the sense of how outsiders view me, but also in a sense of how my very biological being has been altered in different ways since I started down this path. A lot of trans women like to call the idea of “horror in transition” a bad thing and, to a large extent, there are grains of truth there, but I think this is a position that accepts the fascizing logic of horror as a net negative here. The sci-fi horror of altering your body is not inherently a negative thing. There is freedom that comes from embracing monstrosity especially in the time of monsters. Embracing humanity? That can get you killed in these desperate times.
Spoilers ahead for the 2013 film, Under the Skin.
Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is an excellent film that explores the dehumanizing experience of being an outsider in a world where white, straight, cissexual, non-migrant men are accepted as dominant. The middle to end of the film strikes me the most, however. For much of the movie up to the point of the main character, an alien creature that has taken the form of a woman played by Scarlett Johansson, running into a facially deformed man, there is a droning sense of dread. As the Female picks up man after man from the streets to clubs to straight up kidnapping a man from a beach, they each die in such a surreal and dull manner. They are lured into a void with the promise of a sexual encounter and then have their insides sucked out and consumed with a very quiet, machine-like precision. An obvious role-reversal between sexual relationship of men and women in a patriarchic society, the movie starts as cold, rainy, and mundane. The Female acts with an indifference much akin to that of patriarchy and the non-men it lines up to slaughter and enslave. It takes an Outsider to reach an Outsider. The deformed man changes her. He, in his own acceptance of his difference, opens up the Female to a more empathetic existence. This is where I begin to disagree with the film a bit. From this point onward, the Female tries to mimic humanity. She attempts to eat, but cannot consume human food without vomiting. She attempts to have a sexual relationship with a human man, but lacks the organs to do so. The lesson learned was the wrong one. The movie ends with the most chilling representation of a trans panic murder I have ever seen that is definite push back against the Female’s conclusions about humanity. The point of the meeting with the deformed man was not to endear humanity, but to embrace monstrosity in human clothing: a dialectic unity of positions.
There isn’t a path forward for humanity. The human experience is a hypocritical one. We are simultaneous supposed to be defined by our sociality and our empathy yet we engage in the most brutal and cruel behaviors towards each other on a whim. We are greedy and arrogant, but we also love and cherish each other many times over. At our cores, we are petty. Human pettiness is what defines us. Empathy is a reasonable goal to strive for, but it is one that cannot coexist in a world where such pettiness drags down nations. It is pettiness that drives the man in the woods to light the Female on fire. He sees who she really is beneath her skin and chooses to let pettiness over his own disgust claim a life that just wanted to belong.
At the end of the day, to really belong is also paradoxical. It means belonging in a sense that is an abandonment over shame and disgust, things we often will bond over. To be empathetic, to truly belong in a sense of real community is to cast off humanity and the weight of its cues and mandates. It is to accept your place in a nature that doesn’t care about any of this and takes you as whatever you really are regardless of what so-called humans think of you. The transphobe often says that in accordance with nature the trans woman cannot exist as herself. The reality is the opposite. Trans women existing IS nature. We are transcending the unnatural and disgusting human and they’re jealous as fuck.