Making Sense of My Mutations: Personal Reflections on Body Horror
Afew weeks back, I finished David Huckvale’s Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film (2020). I’m always interested in the intersection of philosophy and horror, but I was particularly curious about the implications of body horror.
Why? Well, on the one hand, my tastes have unexpectedly come to skew heavily towards body horror, which itself presents an interesting puzzle. Beyond that, the body is both old and new ground for me a basis for theorizing, and it continues to strike me as fertile ground for reflection. The question then becomes what body horror might have to tell us about the human experience — in this case, for me, spontaneous and unwilled bodily change (mutation).
What is “body horror”? I’m far from an authority, but a quick definition would see it as a sub-genre of horror that specifically focuses on disturbing changes of the human body (e.g., mutilation, transformation, and the like). Good representative films might include Society, Eraserhead, The Fly, and Re-animator.
I’m new to body horror but not new to “the body” as a theorized subject (though certainly have some acquaintance with the body as a corporeal reality — you could even say I use (am) it every day).
Indeed, “the body” was a hugely popular topic in the threads of continental philosophy in which I dwelled. The emphases were endless: the body as the locus of perception (Merleau-Ponty), the body as gender-socialized performance (Butler; Iris Marion Young), the body as racialized embodiment (Fanon), the body as reflecting social class (Bourdieu), the body as the object of power/resistance (Foucault), the body as weirdly absent (Heidegger), etc.
When I delivered a (now very embarrassing) commentary on Heidegger at a conference I’d organized as an undergrad, I put forward my theme of how the body contained echoes of history (which I dubbed the “invested body” in my adolescent attempt at academic jargon — hey, I tried, right?).
So, the body as a starting point for understanding human experience wasn’t new to me, and body horror naturally starts with that insight. The master himself, David Cronenberg, put it admirably in a 1997 interview:
For me, the human body is the first fact of human existence. I do feel that death is the end, there is no afterlife, and therefore the existence of the body is the existence of the individual; and therefore the focus of the films on the body, as a way of exploring the various aspects of life as a human, seems obvious. … I’m saying that there is no morality or ethics that is other than what we create; there are no absolutes that come from outer space or from God or religion, or whatever — that in fact we create them and therefore they are very changeable, and very malleable (Huckvale 9).
I was certainly with Cronenberg on this, but I guess I was all bodied out after a certain point. Doubtless the fact that I was an able-bodied white guy had quite a bit to do with not having to think about it.
But it went beyond decadent apathy: for all of my interest in “the body” as a topic of discussion, I was actually fairly disgusted by the body in its lived, physical form. Body horror of course gleefully aspires to feed that disgust, so I largely rolled my eyes and kept my distance.
One wonders: did this haughty disdain reflect a certain contempt for human experience? A bourgeois ethics of decorum fed by social class anxiety? The tedious fear of death we’re all tired of hearing about but can’t stop thinking about?
In short, it’s distinctly possible that all of my blather about “the body” was a way to not think about the host of anxieties that were coming through my shoddy attempt at escape.
In this sense, appropriately, it was physical pain much more than Merleau-Ponty that brought me back to the body. This seems common: Huckvale mentions he found his way to body horror after witnessing the deaths of his parents (10), and in that way he followed Cronenberg’s example of turning to body horror after observing his father’s physical decline and subsequent death (7–8). Feminist writer Anne Elizabeth Moore has suggested that it was the changes in her body stemming from an autoimmune disease that brought her to body horror.
There’s no shortage of ways our bodies can change or fail us, and for that reason, Terrors of the Flesh is organized by type of bodily process/transformation (e.g., copulation, digestion, infection). Cute, right? The chapter on “extinction” was interesting, but it was the one on “mutation” that stood out to me.
I’ll be turning 40 this year and have been thinking a lot about the mid-point of my life. In a certain symbolic sense, I suppose it’s fitting that I’m kicking off the second half of my life (assuming I live to average life expectancy) with rapid bodily mutation given that the start of the first half of my life was characterized by the rapid bodily change of puberty.
When I say that, I’m not thinking of the normal changes of increased weight gain or graying hair. I’m almost entirely gray now, though that started when I was 18, which made it particularly irritating but also took some of the sting out of it.
Instead, I’m thinking about things that are a little more enduring. Three big mutations come to mind: twitching, nerve pain, and a new personal science of digestion.
One of the interesting things about these mutations is that from the start, I experienced them as carrying inherent meaning. Anne Elizabeth Moore reports that her autoimmune disease made her feel like a “monster.” My mutations were a little different, so my reaction was a little different, but I similarly did not experience my bodily changes in purely mechanical terms. They always had an interpretation woven into them.
One wonders: does pain ever come to us as a matter of raw physicality? Or is pain more like sound in the sense that I never experience raw, unmediated sound — I always hear something (e.g., I don’t hear random wails but rather perceive police sirens; I don’t hear undistinguishable roars but rather a dog barking). We rarely if ever hear the sound itself. Similarly, does pain always come to us with a built-in interpretation (even if rendered as blandly tedious, as in the torture scenes of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat).
Of my mutations, the twitch is an interesting one. I first took on a nervous twitch when I was writing my undergrad thesis. It was weird having my body suddenly start doing a new thing, and I remember at first wondering if I was hallucinating. It passed for a good number of years and then came back in my early thirties.
The twitch is one of those odd experiences that exists at the threshold of both active and passive action — in some ways, it feels like I’m the one making it happen and in other ways it feels like something that is happening to me. It reminds me of how Jonathan Lethem describes the feeling of having Tourette’s Syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn.
Even now, I have the sense that the twitch was releasing stress or anxiety in a way that seemed healing. It feels like an escape valve. I’m not sure how much better it has ever made me feel, but I have the sense that it is venting repressed feelings that I often imagine as a type of sickness.
I still occasionally twitch, but only when sitting quietly in a theatre for a movie or concert. I don’t know why.
Chronic pain stands out as my second mutation. This one is the result of nerve damage stemming from poorly implanted hernia mesh (or inherent difficulties stemming from the mesh technology, depending on who you ask).
Of my mutations, this one has had the most enduring psychological impact. Chronic pain really is world-destroying (I believe that’s Elaine Scarry riffing on Sontag?). The only thing I’ve experienced that was even close to that style of utterly alienating discomfort is extreme anxiety.
The ambiguity of the pain stands out to me. One morning, I woke to notice what looked to be shingles marks on my abdomen above where I’d had my hernia repaired. Those passed quickly enough and didn’t scab over in the way a shingles infection usually does (I still remember from when I had shingles in 2013). What followed was a long period of disabling pain that only got better after the nerves in my abdomen were cut.
The faux-shingles marks (if they were faux) were just the start of what became a long series of confusing coincidences (or not). The specialist who performed my surgery, one of the world’s foremost experts in the area and who made my pain (largely) go away, later politely dismissed the idea of the marks as having anything to do with my nerve damage.
Of itself that’s fine, but then I find myself wondering what those marks were and why their onset seemed to coincide almost perfectly with that of my pain. A lot of odd coincidences like that turned up during that time.
Our crunchier, hippier friends might love to talk about the power of synchronicity, but when it comes to synchronicity, I’m more likely to think of the awkwardness and ambiguity of failed signals and thwarted coincidences. Jim Jarmusch’s movies nicely explore that, and the unexplained associations I experienced around the onset of chronic pain remind me of the scenes in Broken Flowers where Bill Murray’s character glimpses what may or may not be significant coincidences all through the film as he searches for his lost son.
My final mutation was a complete overhaul of what I can and can’t eat: oddly, out of the blue at 38 years old, I suddenly had a profound transformation in what I was able to properly digest. Things I had eaten my entire life made me overwhelmingly sick. Despite being squeamish, I’d had never had a sensitive stomach, but one day I woke up embodied in such a way that a single dietary misstep could generate non-trivial stomach pain.
The weird thing about this one isn’t that it happened — I have a very firm suspicion it’s a result of antibiotics I took around the time of my surgery, along with stress and a few other things. Rather, what’s odd about it is how predictable and systemized it is. I’ve developed an entire science of the self around what I can and can’t eat. It’s idiosyncratic and bizarre. This doubtless makes me look crazy and probably feeds the troubling Howard Hughes temperament I’ve developed the last few years, but the science works, and I seem to be getting better.
Returning to Huckvale from what can only seem like a very odd and perhaps overly personal detour, I think my mutations brought me back to the body precisely in a way that theorizing had helped me escape.
Of course, I didn’t consciously become attuned to body horror to make sense of all of this. I think I subconsciously developed an appetite for what could help me straighten out the anxiety that resulted from the most profound period of bodily transformation I’d experienced since puberty.
What’s come from all of this (aside from an appreciation of horror movies that center on bodily disfigurement)? I can’t be sure, but I do think there’s been a change in my standpoint that has made the body seem both less foreign but also less reliable, and, in that regard, more a source of fear than ever before.
It would be a convenient though saccharine explanation to say the gross-out horrors of body horror contributed to this change in perspective, but, as my mutations have made clear, the embodied world is full of meaningless serendipities and unquenched yearnings.