Bloodsuckers and perversity? Sign me up!

As a culture, no one can say we aren’t attracted to the occult.  Whether its rip your throat out werewolves or hard core guts and gore blood suckers, we love creatures of the night even though if we really met one in a dark alley, rather than throw ourselves at it, we’d probably piss ourselves and cry for our Mommies.  But it’s not just these classic monsters we run towards – look at movies like ‘Saw’ or ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.  What do these have in common, besides the fact that they both have the capacity to make us pee our pants in fear?  It all comes down to two words:  perversity and darkness.

Perversity seems to be Edgar Allen Poe’s stomping ground.  If there’s a norm to our society, Poe probably found a way to turn it on its head in a piece of fiction or a poem.  Cruelty is a facet of human existence, and yet as long as you don’t step over a certain line, we usually accept cruelty.  For example, an older brother can beat on a younger brother, but if we hurt an animal people consider that crossing a line.  I’m not saying either is acceptable, but that I find it strange we have rules on how much and what kinds of cruelty come with certain results.  For example, there’s a difference between manslaughter and attempted manslaughter.  In the first case, you were outright evil and took someone’s life, but in the second since you only attempted it but didn’t succeed, there’s a less severe punishment.  Personally, in this case, I want the punishment to be the same.  Even if you didn’t succeed, you tried to take someone’s life and that’s just unacceptable.  Poe thought everyone was capable of cruelty, and I think he’s right.  There’s a certain thrill or adrenaline rush that comes from being bad or doing something you know is wrong.  In this way human beings are perverse.  We as a society have a set of morays or laws that tell us what we can and can’t do, but we get a primal urge and pleasure out of doing wrong to others or to animals.  In The Black Cat, the narrator says he hung the cat “because I knew I was committing a deadly sin” (Poe 205).  As a general rule, human beings try not to commit such deadly sins “that would so jeopardize my immortal soul” where it would be “beyond the reach of infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (Poe 205).  Here, the narrator does wrong just to do wrong, because he can.  If that’s not perverse, I don’t know what is!

Now I’ll offer you up a song as a modern retelling of The Black Cat:

The first verse sets up the story just like the original version does: Close up camera one/The hero sings in this scene/The boy that gets the girl gets to go home where they get married/But stop the tape,/The sunset still looks fake to me/The hero looks like he can't breathe.  In the beginning of The Black Cat, everything looks normal and happy for the couple.  They’re married, living together in their own little world.  As we read on we realize he’s a drinker, and cruel to animals, not the perfect hero of the story we’d been hoping for – although if you looked for a hero in Poe’s writing, you’re bound to be disappointed.  The first two lines of the chorus are meant directly for Pluto: You're like a black cat with a black back pack full of fireworks/And you're gonna burn the city down right now.  The house of the narrator in the story catches fire after he hangs the cat, and the narrator suspects the cat of having some supernatural hand in everything that happened, including the “figure of a gigantic cat” burned into the wall that didn’t cave in (Poe 205).  In this way, he feels Pluto was trying to sabotage and haunt him.  Next comes the words: Oh close up camera two/ Cause the hero dies in this scene/ Your inspiration is the loss of absolutely everything/ And flashback on the girl/As we montage every memory.  Going back to the beginning of the short story, the narrator says “to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul” after which he flashes back to everything that happens to him, starting at infancy and ending with the reason he’s made to die (Poe 203).  If you ask me, Mayday Parade must have had one strong love for Edgar Allen Poe to write this song they way they did.

As a culture we submit to darkness, whether that is real or something fictional.  We often link love with violence, romance with danger, just like the narrator in The Black Cat does when he hangs the cat he professed he loved.  Creatures of the night like Dracula (including most of his retellings and reinventions) are portrayed as being suave and sexy, as well as powerful and terrifying.  We want him to bite us, to sink fangs into us and make the ecstasy we feel watching him come true.  He doesn’t even need magical or supernatural powers to draw him to us anymore – we’ve romanticized and sexualized him so much all he has to do is offer his hand and he’d have an entire room full of woman fighting to be the one he takes.  Look for a second at the film ‘Dracula 2000’ starring Gerard Butler – whom I might interject is my favorite portrayal of Dracula yet, and damn fine while he does it.  The tagline to the movie on the cover of the VHS – yes, it’s that old – says ‘The Most Seductive Evil of All Time Has Now Been Unleashed in Ours’.  And even though that should be terrifying, I have no doubt in my mind millions of women who went to see the movie were practically begging to be his next victim.

In the background of all I’ve said, the thought of free will has been floating waiting to be confronted.  Why do we as a society love what can be worst for us?  Why do we enjoy the perverse?  Because we have free will, and in doing so tend to abuse it.  Look at addictions of any kind.  We have the free will to start using heroin or meth like Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe did.  For now, he’ll be my example while I talk about free will, addiction, and degrees of addiction.  A while back, I read a book by Nikki Sixx called The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of Rock Star which was basically his diary from when his band was big chronicling his usage of drugs and what that did to him.  A lot of the things we talked about in class were in the book, including the degrees of addiction and how that affects how much of continued use of a drug is free will as opposed to addiction taking the choice away from you.  In the beginning of the book, Nikki talks about how he could stop using drugs if he wanted to, and that he wasn’t using the top ones like heroin because he knew they could really fuck a person up.  Yet, the longer he does drugs, the more desperate he becomes, and the worse drugs he’ll try. 

By the time he starts using heroin, he’s given up trying to say he’s in control of his addiction.  Instead of being for recreational use, he relied on the drugs just to get through the day without having to feel the pains of withdrawals.  How much of his addiction was really his fault?  While he chose to do drugs, as a celebrity he had them shoved in his face at all times, and when on tour needed to keep using so he could keep playing well for his fans rather than try to go clean on the road.  For an addict, rehab is illogical, while to the rest of us it makes sense.  For them, their lives can rely heavily on getting that next hit to get through the day, celebrity or no.  As an addict the drug becomes who you are, like a twisted identity you can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try – the drugs are in control.  It takes someone else stepping in most times for an addict to seek help of any kind, because stuck in their monomania they never realize just how bad the drugs are for them.  All they feel is the high they can’t imagine living without, hiding behind their rose colored glasses.  I’m glad Nikki Sixx got his glasses knocked off – he’s quite a great lyricist and musician if you ask me, regardless of how fucked up I think his choices were.

The ramblings of heroin addicts and other addicts seems crazy to me, and yet, crazy is yet another facet of our society we can’t escape.  How many of us have said something along the lines of “I must be going crazy” when things don’t seem to add up in our heads the way we once thought they did?  I know I’ve said that very sentence and questioned my sanity on many different occasions personally.  Just the other day I made a huge mistake, and in overreacting in the midst of a panic attack I almost lost my very best friend – if you’re reading this, which I’m sure you are, I totally love you babe J.  In a fit of emotion, I told my best friend that I was leaving him, because I thought that was what he wanted and needed me to do.  Obviously, he freaked out about it, and a very confusing few days followed.  While we managed to patch things back up with minimal hurt feelings and a lot of learning about each other between the two of us, the entire time we were talking rationally to each other about what had happened and what had been said, all I could think about was how crazy I must have been to have thought he wanted me out of his life.  Now that things are cleared up I can look back and roll my eyes at myself, but then what I had done seemed rational.  Is that the real core of insanity then – does there have to be a rational basis at the center for all the crazy to manifest itself around?  What do you think?  Have you ever been in a situation that at the time seemed rational but upon reflection didn’t anymore?

In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator isn’t shown to us as the other one is in The Black Cat.  Instead of trying to justify his crimes, the narrator in this tale is more preoccupied with assuring us that he was sane.  At the beginning of the tale, the narrator questions “why will you say that I am mad” like there’s a big miscommunication on our parts (Poe 199).  Maybe it’s just me, but no one that can kill a man purely because he has a glass eye can be anything but crazy.  For the rest of the story he tried to put up a good argument to make us think he’s not crazy.  For me, I saw his craziest moment to be his sudden confession.  I can’t help but wonder what this says about me as a person – that I could look passed how insane his reasons were for killing the old man and the murder itself to say that his nuttiest moment was turning himself in unexpectedly.  Maybe Poe was right when he said there was cruelty and insanity inside all of us - just a little food for thought.