Did I ever tell you that I've been dead for weeks?

In the infancy of the Internet as we know it today it was afloat with weirdoes and strange things, and it was social. At a chat forum I used at the time I found myself chatting with a young, obviously disturbed and strangely fascinating young man. One day he intimated to me that he had in fact been dead for some time. He had stopped breathing, and had since found himself moving about in a state of living death. It was a condition he found puzzling, and he didn't dare telling his mother about it. There is of course no way to know whether he was pulling my leg or if he actually believed himself to be dead, but of all the strange ideas he entertained this was the only one he seemed to return to and not joke about. He didn't respond well to any assumptions that he was still alive, or joking.



You'd think the belief that you are dead while still living is beyond any semi rational being. Interestingly however it is not. While the disorder, known as Cotard's syndrome is exceptionally rare it has been described several times since its initial discovery in 1788: An elderly woman who had suffered a stroke believed that the stroke had indeed been fatal, and that she was physically dead. Supposedly she used a great deal of her post-mortem existence to plan her own rites of burial.

The syndrome is named after the French neurologist Jules Cotard who classified the condition as délire des negations (since identified as a different disorder from what is now known as Cotard's syndrome). While not the first to describe the condition he was one of the first to identify it as a disease. He described two cases in 1880 and 1882. He also quoted a great deal of earlier cases, described by a variety of psychological pioneers, Krafft-Ebing among them. Since then several hundred cases have been described, wherein the patients believe themselves to be dead, missing body parts, undergoing putrefaction, being immortal or simply not existing. Wikipedia lists a case where a fourteen year old at times believed himself and others to be dead, and also speculates that Per Yngve Ohlin, otherwise known as Dead - the most famous vocalist of Mayhem, suffered from Cotard's Syndrome. Sounds plausible to me. Another described case involved a 59 year old woman who had been bedridden for two years, under the delusion that she was paralyzed, or actually didn't exist at all.



My Internet chat buddy logically concluded that he had for unknown reasons become a zombie. A more bizarre case was described as recently as 2004, in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica: A young man believed himself not only to be dead, but also suffered from clinical lycanthropy. Specifically he believed himself to periodically transform into a dog. Presumably he also believed that the natural behaviour of undead dogs is to engage in sexual molestation of sheep, and he expressed a great deal of guilt over having porked a sheep in a state of psychosis. (He must be from Hedmark or something.)

Cotard's syndrome is not entirely understood. There is certainly a link to severe depression, and there may also be connections to anorexia, body dysmorphic disorder and other mental disorders. Possibly it could also be an extreme type of hypochondria, as Cotard himself theorized. Regardless of how it works let's hope the middle of the road nerds currently obsessed with sub par zombie entertaintment succumb to collective Cotard's, and the fad goes away with them. ;)

Good enough to eat, part two

In my previous post on Italian cannibal films, a favorite subject of mine I mentioned in passing how the films portrayed primitive practices. I didn't really take on that particular subject in any real way though. Despite the fact that the notion of something primitive is a powerful psychological factor and an important trope in these films. It's time to tackle the myth complex of the primitive in relation to horror films. (Warning: several spoilers below.)

As usual I don't mean myth in the way Mythbusters use the term. While I am in many ways a cultural relativist I'm much interested in the power and function of a myth than I am in cultural relativism. When I say myth I mean a tale with emotional truth by which we order our perceptions of reality. Primitive is such a myth.

In my first post on the subject I mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I was quite young my parents bought me a collection of nine Tarzan books. Several more had been written but if I am not mistaken these were the ones that had been translated to Norwegian. I loved these books, for many reasons. One of the reasons that has stayed with me is the idea of lost civilizations and advanced cultures surrounded by jungles and cannibalistic savages or similar. It's an idea equally important in Burroughs's Barsoom series, where the noble red martians are surrounded by primitive barbarian green Martians. The idea of the primitive is the central core of the Tarzan books. Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, himself is a white man reared by a tribe of apes (who stand in for the most primitive humans) and rises to be their king and the lord of the Jungle. His naked body and sharp steel knife are contrasts symbolic of his primitive surroundings and the noble astuteness of his mind and character. I'm not going to claim that Tarzan is great literature. It's inherently racist and formulaic but read with the right mindset it can be both entertaining and enlightening as a source to knowledge about the society that fostered the books. I could write a whole post about Tarzan, but I won't. At least not today.



These ideas of exotic locations filled with less sophisticated people are fundamental to cannibal films, as well as a whole array of other exploitation, sexploitation and horror films. A potent and lovely example is the french film Gwendoline with its S&M fueled fantasies of a lost realm of white amazonian women surrounded by savage cannibals - and a shit ton of nudity! This film displays not only the idea of the primitive as a scary and hostile other, but also what constitutes the idea of the primitive. They are tribalistic, they occasionally eat people and they like to ravage white women. This of course is the very pattern of both Tarzan and cannibal films. However there is an interesting duality to be found here, which is even more explicitly present in Cannibal Holocaust: civilization is just as wicked, just more ingenious and twisted in its wickedness.

In Cannibal Holocaust this very twisted wickedness is shown as western documentarians out to make a film about primitive people in the jungle. They find their primitiveness to be a disappointing in its lack of true savagery and go about provoking them in a cruel way. It's a beautiful inversion of the common conceptions found in so many other cannibal films. It's no longer enough to venture into the jungle and have blonde hair to be cruelly tortured, slain and eaten. (Without condiments, cleaning nor preparation. Even this vegetarian knows that they're begging for salmonella or something.) While it's not entirely the noble savage it certainly is a viable post colonial critique of our freudian fear of and fascination with primitives. And as post colonial critiques go I personally prefer mine with a touch of brutality and nudity.

When I say touch I mean "a lot".

Defining the primitive is not easy. I use the term vaguely, as it is a vague notion we have. Part psychology and part cultural trope. The primitive is usually, but not always, "the other" and a threat. In horror films we usually see the primitive either as a location where brutal savages live, and where the protagonists end up in a nearly Robinsonian manner - by accident or design. This is usually the case in the cannibal films. In La Montagna del dio cannibale and Cannibal Holocaust the victims go the land of the primitives knowingly, looking for glory and riches. In other films a plane crashes, an outpost is attacked or the protagonists simply didn't realize where they were heading and the dangers that were there.

Sometimes we encounter the primtive as an atavism in our own backward communities. The sausages in the gas station are actually composed of human flesh, and those inbred people might be great with a banjo, but they also like it when you squeal. The primitive is a source of fear whether it's presented as the xenophobic other, or the more jungian atavistic type. In many ways the primitive as trope or archetype or myth or whatever represents our fear of what lies beneath when modern industrial society is shaved away. This is particularly evident in the already alluded to Texas Chain Saw Massacre: the jobs disappeared and the family was left to fend for themselves in whatever way they could. Quite interestingly the mother of the family is as dead as the industry that kept them prosperous and the males turn savage. Women are usually either revered as maternal enforcers of order, or victims of sexual aggression (raped, being eaten, tied to stakes or tortured with phallic implements) in depictions of the primitive in horror, and when the maternal principle is missing the need to bludgeon women in the head with hammers, or such, arises.

A fascinating contrast to this type of depiction of the primitive can be found in what is possibly the best novel ever written: Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. In the aforementioned Tarzan the protagonist is a noble surrounded by primitives, and ends up as their master due to his biological breeding and background. A lord he was born, a lord he must be. In Frankenstein a creature is created with no background and no breeding. He is a primitive in his lack of civilized traits, surrounded by cultured society. The tragedy and horror lies in the fact that he is noble and highly intelligent, but shunned by his creator and the modern world. In fact he is probably undone by it as he drifts off on an ice flake carrying his dead progenitor and the latter's funeral pyre.

Frankenstein and Tarzan were written in different eras embodying two very distinct concepts of the primitive. Burroughs wrote in a time very much in line with Kipling's White Man's Burden, and is obviously even inspired by his Jungle Book. The primitive is something that was to be tamed, and the noble white man was the one who could do it. Frankenstein however was written a century earlier and in a time where the noble savage had strong influence on the romantic ideals. The untouched, or unblemished, was superior to the sinful and complicated ways of the modern world. Even more so the book carries very strongly the idea that science can go too far in its ambitions and turn the world into a horrible place.

Personally I love both of these depictions, while neither agrees with me in terms of ideology. But that is a whole different continent, and we're not going there. Interestingly however it deserves mention that in most Frankenstein screen adaptations the tables are turned, and the hulking, primitive creation becomes a monster, whether by flawed design or by circumstance. An exception is Kenneth Branagh's honest attempt at a more loyal adaptation. While his film falls short in many respects it manages to capture the tragic promethean element of the novel, unlike its predecessors. Interestingly it also turns up the sexuality of the book to 11, or even 12. God knows why. I still prefer the 1931 film any day, despite being less true to the book. In part because it doesn't have Kenny B groping at Helena Bonham Carter's crotch.

That makes me sound so prudish, and I feel a need to return to tittie flashing cannibal films for a final remark on the subject. Imagine yourself deep in the jungles of new guinnea, surrounded by crocodiles, snakes and barely clad, whig bearing, underpayed, drunk philipinos, errr, I mean local cannibals. There is only one way to escape their anthropophagous wrath. You must become as primal as they are. Partake in their rituals and dine on your friends with them. In both Cannibal Holocaust and Il Paese del sesso selvaggio we see that this is the only possible option. The latter is of course a nudity infused remake of A man called horse, and follows the same pattern: go through terrible and visceral rituals, cast off civilization and you will live.

This in turn takes us to modern primitivism, but that is something I would have to tackle in the future. Or maybe not. We'll see.