On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  The sociologist Jack Katz, who masterfully analyzes the criminal mind in Seductions of Crime, points out that many murderers see themselves, at least at the moment of slaughter, as righteous avengers. “What is the logic of rage,” Katz asks, “such that it can grow so smoothly and quickly from humiliation and lead to righteous slaughter as its perfectly sensible (if only momentarily convincing) end?”15 When an individual feels either humiliation or rage he simultaneously has a feeling of powerlessness, as though something or someone has forced or compelled him. He feels victimized by forces outside himself in the case of humiliation, and by forces inside himself in the case of rage. The spouse who feels repeatedly humiliated by her partner may feel, according to Katz, as though her very identity is being broken and degraded by the other person. Rage promises to rebalance the situation.

  The logic Katz discovered is more topographic than syllogistic, but it is evidenced in ordinary language. Humiliation lowers one; it makes one feel small. Humiliation reduces, diminishes, lessens, shrinks, dispirits, depresses, and casts down. Rage reverses this downward trajectory: rage rises up, blows up. “It may start in the pit of the stomach,” Katz explains, “and soon threaten to burst out of the top of your head.” The rageful are cautioned to keep their lids on and not to blow their tops. In response to humiliation, rage might be said to be a psychological ascent (with terrible consequences).

  Two people, both dead, really know whether or not O. J. Simpson killed his wife and her friend in that other famous “trial of the century.”16 Simpson was acquitted in his criminal case in 1995 but found guilty in his civil trial in 1997. The popular and even academic discussions of the Simpson murder case were remarkable in their avoidance of the issue of monstrous rage at the heart of the case. Questions of racial justice and injustice expanded geometrically and crowded out any real reflection on the more mysterious question: How angry do you have to be to cut off somebody’s head? Whether or not Simpson committed the murders, such rageful acts usually betray monstrous levels of frustration and fury.17 The forensic psychologist Stephen Diamond goes so far as to say that, although anxiety is a strong facet of neurotic modernity, rage is the major problem of our times: “The preeminent problem in contemporary psychopathology is not anxiety, but repressed anger and rage.”18

  Rage is only one aspect of the aggressive Id. The Freudian view of crime is similar to Plato’s description in the Republic. As we saw in part I, we are all capable of the most disturbing deviance, and evidence of our innate depravity can be found in our sadistic and forbidden dream life. The criminal monster is just the waking dream, the nightmare realized. The psychopath is simply acting out all the taboo fantasies that the rest of us have learned to control. Plato says that the deranged man has lost his powers of self-discipline and let loose the inner beast: “You know there is nothing [this beast] won’t dare to do at such a time, free of all control by shame or reason. It doesn’t shrink from trying to have sex with a mother, as it supposes, or anyone else at all, whether man, god, or beast.”19 Incest is one of the monstrous, albeit primordial, urges that must, according to Freud, be subjugated and transformed into more socially healthy expressions of libido. Like violent rage, lust for one’s own family members must be chained by socialization on a very short leash. Freudian monsters come into being when those chains are poorly fashioned, become too slack, or break altogether.

  MONSTROUS DESIRE REVISITED

  One of the most imaginative artistic representations of Id forces unchained from the fetters of socialization and sublimation is the classic 1956 Hollywood film Forbidden Planet. This science fiction film is an allegorical meditation on a world wherein our natural pleasure-principle narcissism is given free rein, unchecked and unrestrained by the social greater good. We may want to overcome our repressive constraints, but we must be careful about what we wish for. Our naïve quest to attain happiness through greater power and libidinal expression is tantamount to the opening of Pandora’s box.

  Loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Forbidden Planet gives us a desolate “island” in the form of planet Altair IV, sixteen light-years from earth. Instead of Prospero and Miranda, we have Dr. Morbius and his daughter, Altaira, who are the only surviving members of the earlier Bellerophon expedition. A new spacecraft and crew, led by Commander John Adams, arrive on the forbidden planet to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the Bellerophon. They find Morbius and his daughter living in a kind of paradise, aided by Robby the Robot. After repeated warnings and attempts to turn back the new crew, Dr. Morbius reveals that all his colleagues from the Bellerophon were vaporized years ago and he now spends his time researching the long lost indigenous civilization of Altair IV, the Krell.

  While a romance begins to heat up between the innocent beauty Altaira and the commander, the overly protective Morbius grudgingly reveals amazing technologies of the extinct Krell. A brain-boosting machine, called the “plastic educator,” proved highly dangerous, but after brief usage it increased Morbius’s IQ significantly. Gradually it comes to light that the plastic educator is somehow connected to a massive underground machine, a twenty-mile cube powered by thousands of nuclear reactors. This vast and ancient machine, originally built by the Krell, has been mysteriously maintaining itself and generating power for hundreds of thousands of years. Despite all this advanced technology, the Krell, Morbius explains, perished long ago in one violent night of devastation.

  The plot thickens when Chief Engineer Quinn, from the new crew, is mysteriously murdered, ripped limb from limb, by an invisible monster. Despite its invisibility the new crew is able to infer some of the creature’s physical properties and determine that it is a horrific chimerical beast.20 When the monster returns the following night to wreak havoc, it disappears at the precise moment that Dr. Morbius awakens from a nightmare, clueing us in on the connection between the good doctor’s dream life and the prowling beast that threatens the crew, especially the love interest of his sheltered daughter.

  In light of these threats, Commander Adams and his crewmate Dr. Ostrow decide to explore the mysterious Krell technology more thoroughly. Despite the warnings, Ostrow tries on the brain-boosting plastic educator and learns the secret connection between the machine, Dr. Morbius, and the invisible monster. The knowledge is too much for him, however, and Ostrow perishes in the experiment, but not before he reveals the truth. The Krell had originally built the powerful machinery as a wish-granting technology: if the Krell could but think it, the machine would realize it. The advanced intellectual sophistication of the Krell, however, merely veiled the deeper and darker instinctual realities. “But the Krell forgot one thing,” Dr. Ostrow cries to the commander. “Monsters, John! Monsters from the Id!” Their own internal monsters were unleashed that fateful night thousands of years ago, and the entire race was wiped out by those fearsome incarnations.

  Forbidden Planet (MGM), made in 1956, capitalized on Freudian ideas about the monstrous Id. Image courtesy of Photofest.

  The commander realizes that Dr. Morbius, through his much earlier experiments with the plastic educator, now has the Krell technology wired into his own Id. Every disaster, from the original destruction of the Bellerophon to the new attacks, has been a manifestation of Morbius’s own subconscious desires. When Altaira confesses her love for Commander Adams and her desire to leave her father, Morbius’s monstrous Id attacks the crew again. In a sequence that demonstrates the estranged or foreign nature of the unconscious, the doctor does not recognize the monster as his own. But when he comes to fully grasp the truth, he throws himself at the monster, saving his daughter, redeeming himself, and destroying the monster and himself in the process.

  In his later writings Freud reified the Id drives even further, eventually reducing the myriad human impulses to two major forces: Eros and Thanatos, the love and death drives.21 More than just romantic attraction, Eros is a metaphysical principle of centripetal force. Eros gathers disparate things together, seeking unity and wholeness, and human l
ove is just one example of its fusion activity. Thanatos is not just a drive for human death, but also a centrifugal force of destruction. Thanatos seeks to break down living holistic unities into inanimate broken bits. Eros builds up, Thanatos tears down.

  Erotic relations, according to Freud, are always mixed with some share of Thanatos, either in the explicit aggression of mastery and sadism or in the unconscious pursuit of le petit mort (the little death) of orgasm. One could argue that monsters in literature and film are, among other things, personifications of Thanatos, artistic expressions of subconscious psychological impulses. Perhaps the pleasure we receive from artistic monster violence is more than just a holiday for our own aggression; perhaps it is also an expression of our Shiva-like desire to obliterate and annihilate order and coherence.

  Another, less metaphysical but no less Freudian explanation of monsters is tied to the issue of homosexuality. In the twentieth century both fictional monsters and real criminal pathologies found a new explanatory framework in the form of repressed sexual orientation. Freud argues that the sexual life of civilized man is tragically impaired because the socially sanctioned heterosexual relation is only a fraction of our actual sexual urges. “Man is an animal organism,” Freud explains, “with an unmistakable bisexual disposition.” But society, and more so in Freud’s day, frowns on any sexuality that breaches the parameters of heterosexual monogamy, leaving some people in painful conditions of frustration and stress. Freud writes, “Every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.”22

  Using this prism of repressed sexuality, some theorists of heinous crime have argued that monstrous acts result from the final explosion of long contained homosexual frustrations.23 Repression and abuse of gay teens, the journalist Anthony Chase argues, is largely responsible for some of the school massacres that have been on the rise since the 1990s.

  I recall the feelings of hatred and fantasies of revenge I harbored as a teenager in the rural Hudson Valley, where certain classmates tormented me because they thought I was gay. The arrival of my adolescence was urgently convincing me that when bullies called me faggot, they were right. My good grades, the leads I got in plays, and the encouragement I received for artistic ability could not compensate for the fear I felt as my sexuality became more and more real. Those memories return to me each time I hear that yet another teenage boy has taken a gun into a high school and opened fire, leaving his community terrorized and bewildered. I do not feel bewildered. The memory of my own revenge fantasies, Bosch-like in their terror, return to me vividly, even now, 30 years after my days at Van Wyck Junior High School.24

  Chase marshals a surprising list of massacres from the late 1990s in which the murderers were boys who had been regularly teased and labeled gay. He points out that media representations of the murderers as monsters only closes off attempts to understand the troubled boys, implying that monsters cannot really be explained. Extrapolating on Chase’s point, we notice that such labeling of criminals as monsters leads us away from recognizing neurotic and intolerant aspects of our larger culture, aspects that might be implicated in the causal story of monstrous crime. Obviously most people somehow manage to survive being called gay in high school, and they don’t decide to send a cadre of school jocks to their doom. But these factors of sexual orientation frustration, abusive stigmatizing, and the surge of adolescent libido clearly need to be added to the other causal ingredients (e.g., easily accessible guns, bad parenting, drugs) when trying to understand these recent massacres.

  In addition to power struggles and repression, we have the demonization of ethnicity and religion. The religion scholar Judith Taylor Gold uses an interesting Freudian logic to connect sexual repression to the anti-Semitic treatment of Jews as monsters.25 She argues that both the horror monster genre and pornography (enjoyment of which cuts across all economic and social classes) suspend or violate normal moral conventions. The fantasies of horror and porn place us in a world outside (or before) normal laws of nature and society. They are breaks from civilization, from law and order, and they symbolically recreate primitivism, including our primitive sexuality, incest; the older Count Dracula drinks the blood of his younger female victims, for example, and the porno industry recreates countless explicit and symbolic incest fantasies. Following Freud, Gold speculates that incest was the original primitive sexuality, but then, as humans “multiplied and diversified into groups—tribes and families—incest became anathema …to the very foundations of social structure and order.”26 Like other tempting impulses that must be inverted into abominations through repression, incest must be rejected. The urge to incest is a monster inside us, always threatening to reassert itself. In horror and pornography we allow a brief, symbolic, and benign reassertion of that primitive monster because we allow alien forces to break down order. But anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia are attempts to regain order. They are psychological projections of our own fears (of incest) onto external agents. Foreigners and outsiders are symbols of freedom and primitive, precivilized reality. So, psychoanalytic logic goes, the outsider, in this case the Jew, must be persecuted as a surrogate for our own internal depravity. Anti-Semitism, according to Gold, seeks to “purge the monster within [incest] by murdering the monster without.”27

  In spite of its ingenuity, I confess that this Oedipal aspect of Freudian logic is simply too sly for me. The links in the argument are a bit too tenuous and the evidence seems truant, but more important the phenomenon of prejudice that “incest repression” purports to explain is better explained by another, more empirically grounded Freudian mechanism, the one I’ve already articulated: aggression. The “convenient other” of anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice are understandable as expressions of the human tendency to carve the world into friends and enemies. “Nothing seems more natural,” says the Freud scholar Peter Gay, “than the ease with which humans claim superiority over a collective Other. It is an immensely serviceable alibi for aggression.”28 The drive for power over others seems to me more intuitively clear, although (to give the Oedipal theorists their due) that might be because incest is at a lower, more socially repugnant level of the subconscious.

  In any case, this returns us to the question of criminal monsters like Leopold and Loeb. The emotions and behaviors I have been discussing—rage, sadism, revenge, homophobia—all share the unifying nucleus of power. Losing control and being victim to inner Id powers is readily recognized as monstrous, from Medea to Morbius. But obsessive pursuit of greater power and control is equally monstrous, leading to megalomania. When Nathan Leopold, referring to his and Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks, asked “What was the motive for the crime then?” he had to admit that Loeb had some charismatic power over him: “My motive, so far as I can be said to have had one, was to please Dick. Just that—incredible as it sounds. I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything—even commit murder—if he wanted it bad enough. And he wanted to do this—very badly indeed.”29 When he tries to articulate Loeb’s motives he admits that no simple reductionist explanation will suffice, but he turns generally, like a good Freudian, to Loeb’s childhood. He claims that Loeb was raised by an intensely strict and critical governess who gave him an inferiority complex and led him to pursue later power trips. Loeb, according to Leopold, had an exaggerated need to prove himself, to demonstrate his own power.

  COLD DETACHMENT

  The idea that monsters of the Id lurch out from repressed inner depths makes sense of certain kinds of narcissistic personality disorder, but it also bears a lineage with earlier Romantic views of evil. Criminal monsters, in this view, have a Sturm und Drang dr
ama to them and seem like secularized versions of the earlier, theologically grounded evildoers. Despite all these ways that the Id might be responsible for violent crime, we must now turn to another psychological version of the twentieth-century monster. It is true that rage and other uncontrollable emotions lead to monstrous crimes, but a new kind of monster emerges in the twentieth century, one that, on the contrary, doesn’t seem to feel any emotions at all.30

  This emotionless robotic deviance was in fact the more dominant characterization of Leopold and Loeb, in part because Clarence Darrow’s defense proffered such a picture. In his trial summation, Darrow referred to Nathan Loeb as “an intellectual machine, going without balance.” Erle Stanley Gardner said that the detached boys lacked some important “moral vitamins.”31 Leopold, in his autobiography, described his accomplice as utterly without scruples: “He wasn’t immoral; he was just plain amoral—unmoral, that is. Right and wrong didn’t exist. He’d do anything—anything. And it was all a game to him.”32 Under the constant scrutiny of the press and detectives, Leopold confessed to feeling like a laboratory experiment. “I suppose,” he recalled telling reporters, “you can justify this as easily as an entomologist can justify sticking a bug on a pin. Or a bacteriologist putting a microbe under his microscope.” But this badly expressed quip was taken to be a reference to the murder itself, so the legend of Leopold and Loeb as unfeeling experimenters became even stronger.33 I am more interested in the large-scale and changing cultural meanings of “monster” than I am in Leopold and Loeb proper, so I take it as significant (regardless of its accuracy) that the concept of robotic unemotional deviance played so successfully in the public media and imagination.