The Way of All Flesh
Cronenberg, Lynch and Theology of the Body (Horror)
I expend a lot of mental energy trying to reconcile my love of horror with my Catholic faith. If you are Catholic yourself, or Christian of any stripe, you can probably appreciate the problem. If not, let me spell it out real quick: Christianity (broadly speaking) advocates faith, hope and love, and extols us to foster such virtues within ourselves, at least in part, by focusing our attention on them and their objects. And horror, at least superficially, is pretty antithetical to such wholesome food for thought.
Perhaps my attempt at reconciling the two is a fool’s errand. But I keep bumping into unexpected harmonies that I at least find compelling, and so I’m keeping at it for now. All of which is to say — this post is another instance of me finding some such harmonies, and trying to sort them out. Specifically, trying to sort out how the subgenre of body horror can speak to Catholicism’s contentious system of sexual ethics, known to many Catholics today via Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. There are a couple movies in particular that I want to use as case studies.
Although I didn’t deliberately set out to do so, a little before Halloween I watched two mid-70s horror films that were the feature-length debuts of their respective directors. Both directors would go on to become icons in the worlds of horror and art cinema, and both of them are named David. In case you didn’t already put it together (because you’re not a huge nerd), I’m speaking of David Cronenberg’s Shivers and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Mild spoiler warning for both of these movies, by the way.
Along with all their incidental similarities, and despite their stylistic differences, both films share a preoccupation with sex. And they explore that preoccupation rather gruesomely, earning themselves a place in the canon of body horror. Shivers follows the occupants of a luxury apartment complex as, one by one, they fall victim to a parasite that makes them indiscriminately horny and violent. And Eraserhead focuses on a hapless young everyman who knocks up a girl, then struggles to care for the slimy and amorphous creature that said girl gives birth to instead of a baby.
Both movies use their respective settings to trap audience and protagonist alike: Shivers in its trendy and antiseptic apartment high-rise, and Eraserhead in a dark, dingy tenement that could exist anywhere between the turn of last century and present day. Both movies use economic class as an important framing device. And (I just keep discovering more similarities the more I think about it), both movies use a scuzzy piece of creature effects to embody their respective hangups about sex.
However, the real juicy stuff lies not in the films’ similarities but rather their differences — differences that turn out to be strangely complementary, in fact. In Eraserhead, the “baby” is a noisy and noisome reminder of the biological purpose of sex; namely, to produce another living thing. A living thing that is needy and foreign and burdensome, sometimes extremely so. In Shivers, the wriggling parasite latches onto flesh and burrows in and out of orifices (not as graphic as it sounds, actually). It gets inside of people and drives them to atrocities, basically serving as an image of libido itself: creeping, mindless, relentless, obsessive.
Put another way, while Shivers examines the subjective experience of sex, Eraserhead examines its objective result. Or, more accurately, each film shows us the dark side of one of these aspects of sex. Where sex can be an intimate and unifying expression of love, Shivers shows it as an impersonal, even zombifying kind of consumption. And while child-rearing is one of the most fulfilling parts of many people’s lives, Eraserhead shows us a version of it that is fearsome, repulsive, exhausting and even doomed.
By the way, it’s no coincidence that the former movie focuses on affluent characters and the latter on impoverished ones. Those who have the luxury of readily-available contraception are, after all, the ones most likely to detach sex from its object and turn it into just another form of private recreation. Meanwhile, the poor are those most likely to end up with an unplanned pregnancy, and to see the resultant child as a curse rather than a blessing (sure, these are sweeping generalizations, but the widely available data seem to confirm them (and sure, said data is likely underwritten by parties that are far from impartial on the issue, but in these horrendously fractious times we all have to make do with data that is compromised at best and outright falsified at worst, and anyway, I’m not about to dig through Google for hours on end to try and find something that’s adequately vetted and objective, because reading abortion stats gets me depressed real fast, and if you have a problem with that attitude, I’m sorry, you’re just reading the wrong blog and I promise you can find plenty of other writers on Medium who are more your speed). So anyway…where was I?).
In short, when we compare and contrast the sexual themes of these two movies, we stumble upon a kind of apophatic theology of the body. That is, they give us an indication of what sex should be by showing us — in blood-curdling detail — what can happen when it gets twisted.
At the risk of oversimplifying, Pope John Paul II articulates the Catholic view of sexuality by describing it as a gift of self. Humans are not merely animals driven by fancier-than-average instincts, nor are we ghosty soul-thingies that pilot meat machines. Rather, we are a mysterious fusion of body and soul: a material thing animated by reason and free will, and a spiritual thing that exists and expresses itself through the physical world. The body and soul, together, form the self. So our physical actions have spiritual consequences, and our spiritual actions (thoughts, words, choices, etc) have physical ones.
And yes, this is just as true of sex as it is of everything else. Sex is an activity of body and soul alike: deeply personal, with profound implications both physical and spiritual. In view of this, then, Catholicism sees sex as having two equally important and inseparable aspects — it is both unitive and procreative.
In short, it is designed to bring two people together in mutual self-gift, and for that gift itself to bring the additional gift of new life, new personhood. It is a very concrete manifestation of the truth expressed by Jesus when he says, “give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap” (Luke 6:38). Two selves give themselves to each other and receive another “self” in addition to each other. 1+1=3, you could say.
(Note, btw, that the reason the world’s sexual mores are so often at odds with those of the Church is not that the world is too crass and materialistic in its approach to these issues, but rather the opposite. The world tries to spiritualize sex — to make it a purely emotional or psychological act that is not conditioned by physical reality, by such troublesome things as genitalia or hormones or childbirth. The Church refuses that attempted division, which is why she’s been such a pain in everyone’s ass about abortion and gay marriage and condoms. Hopefully this distinction clears the air a bit, though of course it doesn’t solve the fundamental conflict.)
Davids Lynch and Cronenberg show us things that are quite the opposite of the Catholic vision of sex. But as horror filmmakers, they portray these alternative visions not to glamorize them, but rather to cross-examine them. Shivers portrays a version of intercourse that is rabid and grasping, and Eraserhead shows a version of procreation that is cursed rather than blessed. They ask different but symmetrical questions — how does sex come to be violence, and how does a baby come to be a scourge?
Both films, perhaps unconsciously, set up their horrific events within the context of extramarital trysts. The parasite in Shivers bursts into the population at large through a girl with multiple partners, at least one of whom is a married man (and yeah, the movie is more than a little misogynistic about it). Eraserhead, for its part, is about, well, a baby daddy.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. It’s the same place that teen slasher movies like to go with their campy morality tales. The lesson sounds simplistic, old-fashioned and puritan, but it keeps emerging in all different forms of popular culture, from horror to sitcoms to steamy dramas. To wit: things get ugly when sex is separated from commitment. When it is anything less than a full gift of self — when it is merely an occasion for recreation or self-expression or a power play — it implodes. It becomes an occasion for manifold horrors, which both Shivers and Eraserhead seem to intuit.
Historically, women have borne the brunt of nature’s wrath for our species’ failure to understand this. All a man has to do in order to avoid the consequences of his libido is either 1) wrap his dick in rubber or 2) disappear the morning after. A woman, on the other hand, has to subject her body to the trauma of either 1) pregnancy and labor, 2) abortion, 3) physically and/or chemically invasive contraceptives. So it turns out that the cultural norm of monogamy — treating sex as a morally binding commitment — is pretty effective at ensuring that otherwise-polygamous human males will keep it in their pants and finish what they start. Who’da thunk?
This brings me to a major deficiency of these films — and of horror in general, at least until recently—in their treatment of sexual ethics. Namely, the conspicuous lack of an authentically female perspective. It’s pretty self-evident that the genre as a whole has historically treated women as either demonic femmes fatales, or screaming damsels in distress whose sole purpose is to be tormented, violated and/or corrupted in endlessly gruesome ways. And these two films also demonstrate this tendency in their examination of the act and/or effect of sex.
As an ensemble piece that isn’t exclusively focused on a male protagonist, Shivers has more squandered opportunity in this regard. Although it primarily follows the young (male) doctor who discovers the parasite’s true nature and attempts to stop it, it also pivots to a variety of supporting characters, including several female ones. These women, however, are either seductresses from the beginning, or damsels in distress who are eventually corrupted. And for a movie so heavily concerned with sex, there is a notable lack of nudity — except for that of the frontal female variety.
Eraserhead has several female characters in close orbit around its hero, but they serve purely narrative functions as 1) the emotionally fragile shrill who gives birth to his abominable child; 2) the temptress living across the hall who affords him temporary escape from his troubles; 3) a hallucinatory figure who embodies his antipathy toward both his child and himself. Since the movie is a dreamlike exploration of its hero’s subjective experience, the use of these caricatures makes sense. But if nothing else, it’s still weird that a film so deeply concerned with issues of childbirth and parenting would be as dismissive of its mother figure as this one is.
“Now wait,” you may complain, “you can’t accuse pop culture of dehumanizing women and then turn a blind eye to the misogyny that’s baked into Catholic sexual morality. After all, just look at Amy Coney Barrett — a devout Catholic that Trump squeezed into the Supreme Court at the last second just because she’s the convenient product of Handmaid’s Tale-esque female brainwashing.”
Ok, hopefully you won’t include that last part, because I like to think you’re more intelligent than that. If you do, I’ll ignore it. To your first point, however, I would protest that misogyny is not baked into Catholic sexual morality, despite the mistakes and outright abuses perpetrated by many who claim to ascribe to that morality.
In fact, just the opposite: the function of of a true “Theology of the Body” is to enable men and women both to realize their full, individual personhood, within the context of the unique aspects of human experience that they respectively embody as male and female. In short, what you have between your legs is a crucial aspect of your identity, but it does not and should not impede your freedom and dignity as a unique human person.
Thankfully, the horror genre has made big strides recently in bringing greater agency and identity to its female characters. Within the past decade films such as It Follows, The Babadook, A Quiet Place, Midsommar and mother! have made a harrowing exploration of the female experience of sex, relationships and parenthood. Like Shiver and Eraserhead, they gesture at the ideal of human sexuality by forcing us to look at its corruption, much like how a walk in the winter cold gives you a greater appreciation for the warmth of your home.
But as I’ve indicated throughout this post, theology of the body lives and dies on the notion of complementarity, opposites juxtaposed to give a fuller picture of the truth. There are many examples of this, but the most obvious is the complementarity of male and female.
For horror — or any other medium, for that matter — to fully engage with sexual morality, it must first engage with both sexes. So I wish that David Cronenberg and David Lynch, when making their debut features, hadn’t been hampered by a blithe acceptance of misogyny that was (then) characteristic of horror films. But they achieved something remarkable with their work nonetheless, weaving heady questions about human nature into a genre that is usually dismissed as sensationalist schlock.
And to return to the question that I started with: I dunno, maybe horror is just sensationalist schlock. But Cronenberg and Lynch went a long way toward challenging that idea, and there are many twisted yet insightful filmmakers such as Jennifer Kent, Robert Eggers and Ari Aster who are imitating and improving upon their work today. So the question keeps getting tossed back up in the air, at least for me. Good thing I like a mystery.
