The monster is “the other,” something marked out as fundamentally different and separate from ourselves. The difference is what makes the monster useful. By claiming that this is “not us,” we can hang all our least desirable attributes and traits upon it. So in this sense, it doesn’t matter what the monster does—it’s not defined by its actions or intentions—what matters is that difference. All its actions and intentions, by being those of the monster, become sinister and inimical.
This vision of the monster is useful because it offers constant absolution for those who invoke it. Even with our modern stories of sympathizing with the monster or even monsterfucking, the label of “the monster” gets transferred. These stories always have the twist of who the “real monster” was all along—usually someone marked as being like the protagonist or the audience, someone the world of the story values and elevates. The turn comes when the protagonist/audience realizes they have more in common with “the monster” than the hero or when the hero reveals they’ve been behind the threats facing the characters all along.
In this the monster is the familiar rendered corrupt, ideally meant to indicate our own fallibility or potential for failure, but really only shifting the definition of difference. We thought you were like us, but now see that you’re not, that you are “the other” and thus we are absolved both of responsibility for any action you take—after all, we’re not monsters like you—as well as any action we take against you—for how can we be faulted for killing monsters?
“The monster” then is a tool, a means of justifying a kind of ennobling violence, a means of maintaining purity—a goal pursued to convince ourselves that we are ourselves holy. We are only ever the victims of circumstance and conspiracy, the better life we deserve forever denied us by the effects of monsters. It is an ideology that absolves us of responsibility for what our world is and erases the work that needs to be done to make the world what it could be.
Our current space of sympathizing with the monster does mark an important change, though. Early monsters of folk tales and religion are supernatural explanations for the state of an unknowable world. When we hit the Gothic period, we get a different kind of monster—the human made wrong: Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde. Attraction is corrupted and our desires undo us. Then the 30’s/40’s/50’s introduce monster movies and the monster as metaphor for the atomic age and colonialism: the deadly product of the atom or alien races far in advance of us or the creature from a lost land white people have never visited before, all hostile to the imposition of “civilization” and destroyed by that same civilization once integration is attempted.
Now we sympathize with the monster. We sympathize with these creatures being harried for being different. The monstrous figures and desires are the “normal,” the ones insisting that there is a way you’re supposed to be, a way we’re all supposed to be, and that deviation deserves death. But the order they have to militantly enforce and which will treat us peacefully if we submit literally kills us regardless. From fascist crackdowns on dissent to climate collapse, it’s a system that mandates slavery and suffering unto the early grave, and the responses to criticisms of that system are, “If you stopped pointing out the problems, you wouldn’t suffer.” (Pointing out racism is the real racism) Submission to this system, surrender to conformity, still means immiseration and death. It is through difference and the implicit dissent of existing differently that hope is generated. In the modern moment, the monster is a hopeful figure, an aspirational one, a revolutionary one because it suggests there’s a way past this necrotic culture.
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