We Live in Lovecraft Country Now
(Or: It’s Morning in Post-Soviet America)
In 1972, the Soviet Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published a science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic. The basic premise of the novel is that a group of aliens have taken a little pit-stop on our world – the ‘roadside picnic’ of the title – and left behind a light scattering of what might be thought of, from their perspective, as litter. Inane garbage.
But from the human perspective, this leftover detritus is bizarre, dangerous, contaminating. It creates around it a forbidden area, a place where physics do not behave as expected, where sound is dangerous and fire bathes the sky. A zone of exclusion and a zone of exception. Both Roadside Picnic and the legendary film adapted from it by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 focus on the figures who brave the Zone and its dangers – сто́кер. The Stalker.
In 2016, the political/comedy podcast Chapo Trap House latched on to the Zone as a descriptor of American politics and social life with the election of Donald Trump. As in the permuted Zone of the Strugatskies, it is a world where very little can be relied on to make sense or behave the same way twice. Yet for all its strangeness it is mundane, forgettable, banal.
Chapo was also drawing on the ideas of Adam Curtis, the documentary filmmaker whose 2016 film Hypernormalization focused on the specific anxiety of a world where everything seems broken, yet politics itself has been drained of any concept of making things better. Where bizarre cruelties of a sort that would be dreamed up by Pinhead and the Cenobites are simply regarded as the due process of business.
But there was a tension in the application of the Zone concept to Trump’s America. Curtis’ documentary traces this subtle shattering of society back to the 1970s and financialization. He sees the turn towards market solutions and deregulation as an attempt to abstract all politics into the pure signifier of money, which is also, clearly, the shared DNA of both major U.S. political parties of the last half-century.
The Chapo boys played this rather loosely, broadly saying that, of course, now that Donald Trump has been elected, NOW we’re in the Zone. It’s just so CRAZY, here where a reality-show clown is President, this is the madhouse, this is the Zone.
But no. The Zone is not the madhouse. The Zone is the dreary bleakness of everyday life twisted into a quiet nightmare. The Zone, to pull from Curtis’ film, is Henry Kissinger’s belief in a delicate geopolitical balance that preserved stability and was worth committing mass murder in the name of. The Zone is a “world without power,” or at least where power obsessively hides itself. As Curtis put it in 2016, “you just sort of feel slightly jittery.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel “kind of jittery.” I think we’re beyond that now.
The Zone, for Tarkofsky and the Strugatskies, was a barren wasteland, a quiet and profoundly bleak realm where nothing was good and nothing could be relied on. But you could maybe still survive with a certain wit and resourcefulness, and there were, after all, wonders. The goodness of the ‘90s consensus at its height was real, in the sense that a placebo works – there is a certain degree to which, even if you’re having a rough time, you can share in the collective sense that you’ve turned a corner, that a new era of peace and prosperity has dawned, that maybe the market really is the way that everybody will be able to be rich and happy and safe.
The slow realization that none of that was going to happen, which began creeping up the backs of our necks even as we indulged in the enjoyable distraction of the War on Terror, is the defining feeling of the Zone of a faltering politics and society. It is the same feeling that marked the last days of Soviet Russia, a feeling of going through the motions to maintain a fiction of normality as everything clearly fell apart.
The election of Donald Trump wasn’t the moment we entered the Zone. It was the moment the spell of the Zone was broken, because the underlying contradictions of what we were being told and what we felt became too acute.
And I don’t mean that in the sense that his followers represent some honest uprising against liberal-technocratic elites. A huge part of the discomfort of life in the Zone of post-Cold War America were the variety of evasions, glosses, and other gentle fictions hiding America’s racial wounds. From roughly the early 1990s until 2016, we had a professional-managerial class so committed to meritocracy as a synonym for justice that they believe it reasonable to offer market-structured paths out of the legacy of racial enslavement and ideological denigration. Those paths of course offered better conditions to only a very few chosen redeemed. For instance, the increased media visibility for people of color, the in-itself genuinely joyful diversification of the most prominent and dynamic people in our society, concealed a vastly darker continuation of the status quo of casual violence and malignant hatred in less obvious places.
On the other side, we have had a group of ‘fiscal conservatives’ (who are distinguishable on that score from the other side only in that they don’t even want to spend the money to make sure people are fighting fair) who are themselves not just by habit but by feeling repulsed by anyone who isn’t a carbon copy of them, including their own children. But they compromised on the bone-deep hatred that they, and especially their voters, carried. Essentially the entire country adopted Atlanta’s city motto and became “the land too busy to hate.” Racism was bad because it was bad for business, but where it wasn’t bad for business, it didn’t really matter.
The election of Donald Trump was in part a decision by one of the parties to this deal to back out of it. Outright racists really were fought back into their caves during the 1990s and 2000s, and conservative politics was using that retreat to go in some genuinely optimistic directions – prison reform, immigration reform – again, relatively speaking. But the people pulling the strings here mistook the relationship, they thought they could really lead that wing of the party away from racism. But there were more of them than anyone quite suspected, and they wanted hate, and so we got Trump.
Curtis has said that the market-driven ethos that he equates with the Zone is “a picture of a world without power.” It is also a world in which values and beliefs are swept aside as organizers of power. The technocratic liberal cannot comprehend the ethos of the tribe. It is not an ethos built on truth or logic, and that’s the real root of what’s going on right now.
And the tribe, like reality itself in all its inconvenient excess, keeps coming back into the picture. The tribe, and the history of the tribe, because the tribe is the history of the tribe. And to the tribe, nothing is numb, nothing is “slightly jittery,” and geopolitical structural balance and marketization are bizarre, foreign, useless exercises. The tribe simply DOES, or is prevented from doing.
The election of Donald Trump, then, was not our entry to the Zone, but an exit from it. What was buried is now unearthed and splayed, like a grave robbery gone wrong. Lacan would call it The Return of the Repressed. The Trump Administration wants to ban the teaching of critical race theory or the New York Times’ 1619 project using public funds. The adage about history not even being past could not be more true. What was comfortably forgotten is now loudly, sometimes violently, battled about. The memory hole is refusing to comply.
But if we don’t live in the Zone anymore, where do we live? We live, of course, in Lovecraft Country.
Here, horrors walk the earth, storms blot out the sky, and that is not dead which can eternal lie. This is not the realm of the quiet Stalker, who has memorized a single peaceful path through chaos. Now is a time of battle against dark forces that are happy to show themselves.
And those dark forces are ourselves, and those close to us, and those who came before. This is the element of Lovecraft himself that has always most fascinated me, and is thankfully carried into the new HBO series: Lovecraft’s protagonists and his monsters were about 75% of the time related to one another by blood. This virulent racist played with blood and its mutability constantly as narrative devices, he was obsessed with biological and genetic variation, or perhaps contamination. But to be the thing that was within yourself was the greatest horror of all, because Lovecraft never imagined race-memory as a source of purity. His characters’ family trees held only the worst secrets. The blood will tell, you will become what you are, horror.
To look back on history is to face madness, for all racists, to an extent for all white people. There is the horror of what has been done, but also the horror of knowing that our own fiction of racial purity is just that, unsustainable, a feeble foundation for a self.
Lovecraft is the absolute apotheosis of white supremacists because his work worried these two points to death. Half the time the results were a near-paean to the people who were threatened by whiteness – in his world, the metaphorical Others of Innsmouth or stranger realms. And of course, because it’s Horror, most of the time Lovecraft’s monsters win. The few survivors are only alive to help the author tell the tale.
I’m not an accelerationist. We could, in a perfect world, have brought all of this to the surface without Trump’s policies and moral messaging - slamming shut immigration, pulling the rug out from under refugees, enabling white supremacist violence. We could have used a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, during the Clinton, Obama, or even Bush years. It might have cut the tension, showed us the monster in some controlled and manageable way. Or maybe I’m fantasizing and we were always going to have to fight our way past it, painfully, sweating, anxious, unsure whether we would win or lose.
The Next Theranos?
Last week saw the release of a bombshell research report drawing together long-simmering allegations of fraud at the electric vehicle startup Nikola. Much remains to play out, but Nikola could turn out to be a fraud on the level of Elizabeth Holmes’ fake blood-testing startup, Theranos. Keep an eye on this one.
Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son In Law
And finally, something a lot more fun.
Rudy Ray Moore’s third feature is now on Amazon Prime, and holy shit you gotta watch it. I was blown away by Eddie Murphy’s biopic of Moore last year, but I’d only seen Dolemite and kind of bought into an image of Moore as a journeyman, a guy who churned out funny but slightly clumsy and pretty ramshackle productions. But this ain’t that. It is absolutely manic and unrelenting and totally unchecked by id from start to finish. It’s a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon, with the sex left in.
It’s also incredibly honest and real, in part because it’s still a low-budget production, so you’re seeing a very real world on screen. Except for the part where every street tough in Detroit has a black belt in jeet kun do, and concert promoters will gun down an entire funeral worth of potential customers to stop legendary comic Petey Wheatstraw from opening his show the night before theirs and ruining them. And except for the Devil himself offering Petey a deal to bring them all back from the dead.
It’s that kind of movie – everyone’s response to everything is wildly elevated, and everything makes sense not because it makes sense, but because the movie around the plot is 100% convinced that this is all happening.
This is also notable as a movie by black people, and pretty clearly for black people, including in ways that can require some blinders for white viewers like myself. There are a lot of watermelon jokes here, which is an in-group talking to itself. It’s just not there for white people to participate in. It’s a good example of how social media has degraded art - these moments today would be pulled out of context and turned into ammunition against, well, somebody.
At the same time, there are parts of this that the figureheads of black respectability politics decried at the time as degrading or harmful to the black community, and you can see where that comes from – this is a movie with no shame. There are things here that you would never see in a movie made today with anything like an equivalent budget (this one is made very well on an extra-long shoestring). As Patrick Stewart once put it, I’ve seen everything.