El sector del lujo

However, as culture has shifted from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optimism to a deeper suspicion of traditional universal values, horror’s function as a medium for reflection has (to some degree) changed. Where the Enlightenment placed great confidence in our ability to understand and organize the world according to overarching “meta-narratives” (big stories), postmodern thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) have described

our current condition as defined by “incredulity towards meta-narratives.”9

For Lyotard, postmodernism represented the failure of all large-scale sys- tems to adequately explain the world. Where once Christian theology or Enlightenment rationalism attempted to understand everything (reality, morality, and aesthetics), we now get by with smaller narratives specific to our own contexts.

Often this incredulity toward meta-narratives shows itself in our casual attitude toward moral objectivity. Moral relativism, the view that moral evaluations are not universally true, is often found in public discourse. “To each his own,” we find ourselves saying, trying not to pass judgment on the behavior of others. Tolerance, always a virtue for humans, has now become

Through a Mirror, Darkly 39

one of our highest virtues as we try to live peacefully in a broadly pluralistic society. Relativism is also seen regarding aesthetics. As we divide sharply over musical interests or favorite movies, our cultural “To each his own” philosophy expresses itself in phrases like “There is no accounting for taste” or “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Yet there seems to be, despite the widespread trend toward relativism in morality and aesthetics, a deep human desire for bedrock order. Moral and aesthetic judgments, if much more difficult to make about many matters involving beauty or goodness, are still much easier to make about evil or ugliness, especially as they are taken to their extreme in horror. Philosophers like Cynthia Freeland have pointed out that horror involves a severe viola- tion of our sense of moral, natural, and social order. Think of just about any horror film and you will find that it works upon us by tearing down some boundary we had in place, but perhaps forgot was there. Freeland writes that “monsters [are] beings that raise the specter of evil by overturning the natural order, whether it be an order concerning death, the body, God’s

laws, natural laws, or ordinary human values.”10 _{The key element is a sense}

of violation. Thus horror is often rooted in what feels most safe and secure: the home (The Haunting or The Sixth Sense), the family (The Exorcist or The

Shining), or innocent and mundane activities such as checking into a motel or

babysitting (Psycho or Halloween). So recent works of horror, from Halloween and Psycho to The Birds on to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all depend for their effect on an intuitive sense of order to the world. This is a discomfort- ing aspect to horror, but there is also a desirable quality to it. It terrifies us

and gives us a sense of moral, social, and aesthetic stability. Recently, sitting

in a movie theater watching a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic film Psycho, I was struck with how the audience all startled at the same mo- ments of surprising violence. The experience was communal in a way that few other experiences are: we all jumped together at the sudden appearance of “Mother” wielding a butcher knife. As a nation, of course, we have never been closer in recent memory than after the horrors of 9-11. Despite the divisions and problems that have followed in its wake, 9-11 itself provided a strong sense of national identity and purpose. Part of having moral order in the world necessitates having a real understanding of evil.

This is nowhere clearer in fiction, perhaps, than in Stephen King’s modern retelling of Dracula, ’Salem’s Lot. Where Bram Stoker’s 1897 clas- sic assumed much more easily the idea that there could be evil forces at work in the world, Stephen King’s comfortable, peaceful twentieth-century Americans struggle to grasp that the nice new man who moved to town, Mr. Straker, could actually be a monster. Even the town priest must struggle to

40 Philip Tallon

come to grips with the reality of absolute evil as represented by the town’s vampire visitor. Yet in an extended passage, we hear in the priest’s effort to accept the idea of evil the need for some rock-bottom reality: “He was being forced to the conclusion that there was no evil in the world at all but only evil—or perhaps (evil). At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor—the kind that finds feeding firecrackers

wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.”11

This view of the world, however, the priest finds unutterably dull. In- stead, as King writes, “[The priest] wanted to see evil with its cerements of deception cast aside. . . . He wanted to slug it out toe to toe with evil, like

Muhummad Ali and Joe Frazier.”12 _{Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending}

on how you look at it), the priest does get a chance to face this evil, as does the rest of the town of ’Salem’s Lot, and it destroys most of them. These days we often find ourselves in the position of the priest in King’s novel, desiring to find a deeper meaning to our lives. Horror attempts, in the crudest and cruelest way possible, to give our world a shared sense of order.