The Saline Avenger (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 18 September 2015.

Jason Voorhees drowns in Crystal Lake

I'm taking notes and then writing when I have a spare moment. This is unrelated to Liza's newest batch of illuminated texts (thanks for keeping the lights on Liza!).

I wanted to take up Will's thread of morality plays.

In particular, I wanted to spend a little time within the American tradition, which is alive and well. In recent years, this tradition has largely taken the form of horror movies.

Unlike Japanese horror, which just involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time, American horror has to do with strict Puritan notions sin and punishment.

Perhaps the best emblem of this tradition is that of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th franchise. Jason, a mentally disabled, deformed child, drowns when two camp counselors go off to have sex. In Friday the 13th, it's Jason's mom who does the killing, but the stage is set for the archetypal vengeful angel who—in his unassailable innocence—returns to punish these transgressions. It's telling that Alice, who fends off the sexual advances of a male camp counselor earlier in the film, is the heroine and only survivor of the first movie (she is summarily dispatched by Jason himself at the beginning of the second).

I don't have the Jung that I've been reading with me, but I love how he issues this total smack down of the Enlightenment and its supposed exorcism of spiritual realities. Modern man is sorely mistaken when he thinks he has exchanged centuries of darkness for the bright light of positivistic, optimistic, empirical thought. All he has done is suppressed the underlying realities, which means they inevitably return, only this time in neurotic or psychotic forms.

I love that Jung explains that the only therapy required for Catholics suffering from modern malaise is to get them connected back up with the Church. The path is much more difficult for Protestants, who initiated the whole de-mystification project culminating in the Enlightenment. Of course, Nietzsche and Wagner and Jung and others had plenty to say in opposition to this wholesale sellout to rationalistic, Apollonian, Alexandrian, Socratic thought, but the celebration has mostly continued unabated down to the present day.

The total banishment of religion from the public square is just one symptom of the larger problem. Again, the Jungian axiom: anything banished returns, only this time in neurotic or psychotic form. What returns feels no guilt. What returns is unabashed, undaunted, intractable, incorrigible. What returns cannot be reasoned with. In the best horror movies, what returns doesn't speak: Jason, Michael Myers, all the various entities in It Follows.

The premise of It Follows is particularly interesting. By having sex with someone you take on the curse: an entity will pursue you at a walking pace until it catches up and brutally mutilates you. This entity is inexorable in its pursuit and invisible to everyone else. Guilt and punishment cannot be mitigated by reference to the consensus loose morality of our times, staying within the brightly lit public square so to speak. Inevitably, you are flushed from your rationalistic hiding place into the dark, inarticulate, isolating, intimate, collapsed world of your guilt.

Long story short, I've been thinking along these lines with regard to the End of Arthur White. If this is a morality tale—and an American morality tale at that—by what instrument, by what mechanism is the justice administered? In Dante, the sin is inextricably bound up in the punishment; there is no separation between the two. This is probably the more accurate, more mature view. But inside the puerile Puritan tradition that is our heritage, we've needed to embody the punishment as something outside ourselves.

I'm thinking of a resolution akin to the one that occurs in Geek Love, where the telekinetic Chick destroys the entire Fabulon camp in a firestorm.