In memoriam David Prothero, editor of Bloody Hell: The Flesh and Blood Fanzine with a Brain in Its Head. My roommate of old, Blake scholar, horror fan. Taught me everything.
My friend Donora and I were talking about horror. Margaret Thatcher had a good reaction when she saw her first copy of Fangoria: "Horrifying. It should be banned."
Horror is horrifying. When I cut you, you bleed. What is perhaps more horrifying is the vicarious use of horror as metaphor, and worse still, the cutting a censor does in the name of not wanting to corrupt the youth.
When in an action flick there is a stabbing, you don't see it. There is a cut away. It becomes metaphorical for the hero's machismo, or whatever. This is the true desensitization.
There is a literality in horror that is very precious. It gets lost when we see The Thing as a metaphor for AIDS or Alien as a metaphor for capitalism.
There is also the horror of inner space: how could someone--could someone--want to do that?
British censorship is worse than US censorship. With admirable pragmatism, the US has a list of actionable shots: add them up, assign a certificate.
The Brits get some appointed guy to sit in a room and wonder whether what he is seeing might deprave others. See the problem with that?
If you do then you have a little bit of the reason I am a horror fan.
At a time of maximum textuality, when bodies were metaphors for everything else, David Prothero stood for a kind of realism. Not the realism that kicks stones to make a point (even that is metaphor), but a weird realism that he called "the determinacy of the body." When I cut you, you bleed.
David said that to me in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library. (Appropriately known as The Bod.) In 1989. I can never forget it.
1 comment:
Thanks for the inspiring words on censorship. I would say that in most cases, the US doesn't need many censorship laws because the population's dominant culture is descended from whom your Parliament appointee is probably derived, namely English Puritans, and are so afraid of anything not strictly "appropriate" (who decides what this word means?) that they'd strangle their own children to protect them from it. In England, you can also sue people who say things about you in public that aren't true and they have to prove they didn't. There are a lot of people here whose behavior would be improved by that, I think, the whole McLibel thing notwithstanding; I hope I'm not romanticizing.
Your friend sounds similar to the few people I actually could talk to while in college, for related reasons.
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