You’ve gone wrong around the eyes like one of those crabs at the dump

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The Question in Bodies #49: When the Aliens Won

I guess recent news in the UK reminded me of this.

In John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, beginning in 1967 with The White Mountains and serialised incompletely by the BBC in 1984 and 1985, the earth has been enslaved by an alien race who pilot three-legged war machines; it’s similar if not exactly the same as “what if War of the Worlds, only the Martians won?”

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 9: Health and Horror, Dignity and Disgust, with Dr. Catherine Belling

It's always somehow nastier when the gore isn't red.

Bioethicist, expert in medical humanities, horror fan and Jeopardy runner-up Dr. Catherine Belling joins me in this week's episode to talk about why horror and health are inextricably linked. Starting with the throughline between Dr. Pimple Popper and the early work of Ridley Scott, we examine a whole casebook of media – including hereditary possessions, anti-Hippocratic oaths, verminous transformations and infested Mayan ruins – and touch on dissection, infestation, plastination, cancerification and death. 

There's some pretty grim stuff mentioned in this one, so content warnings for discussion of suicide, eugenics, ablism, and that white goopy stuff that comes out of pimples and cysts. 

By the way, the anthropological text neither of us could think of the name of was Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.

You can hear me interrogate The Question in Bodies on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet (like Apple, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, Google Podcasts and others) or find the archive at The Question in Bodies Podbean site. 

Want to hear episodes early? Back my Patreon. It's just one of those American dollars a month for all the stuff.

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 8: The Death of the Mid-Budget Movie, with Raquel S. Benedict

The exception that proves the rule: John Wick

In episode 8, Raquel S. Benedict, most dangerous woman in speculative fiction, joins me to talk about what a mid-budget movie is, what's great about them and why they're an endangered species. Expect a discussion of the magic of The First Wive's Club, the deadly influence of the Thinkpiece-Industrial Complex, and how James Gunn became a victim of his own blob. 

Go check out Raquel's own podcast, Rite Gud (Patreon here) and here's Raquel's most recent contribution to BloodKnife.

You can hear me interrogate The Question in Bodies on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet (like Apple, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, Google Podcasts and others) or find the archive at The Question in Bodies Podbean site. 

Want to hear episodes early? Back my Patreon. It's just one of those American dollars a month for all the stuff.

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 7: Horror on Screen vs Horror on the Page, with Montilee Stormer

Contentious adaptations of books you say?

In episode 7, horror writer, movie critic and troublemaker Montilee Stormer is here to talk about the difference between horror on the page and horror on the screen. Join us for an invigorating chat about final girls, the ascendance of the TikTok Moment, how green bubble wrap is better than crap CGI, whether the current crop of horror novels could even be novelised (and how many words of text Midsommar might actually amount to), why we all need Bad Decisions, and what makes an unfilmable book unfilmable. 

Check out this interview with Montilee at the GLAHW here and then make sure to subscribe to Movie Reelist for Montilee's regular movie reviews. 

You can listen on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet ( like Apple, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, Google Podcasts and others) or find the archive at The Question in Bodies Podbean site. Want to hear episodes early? Back my Patreon. It's just one of those American dollars.  

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 6: We Appreciate Power, with Tamsin Davis-Langley

(Grimes and Poppy, not me and Tamsin as you might have thought)

This episode, I'm joined by queersoteric hero Tamsin Davis-Langley to talk about one of the Great Questions of our era: Grimes or Poppy? 

That's where we start, anyway. But it gives us an inroad to talking about billionaire Singularity enthusiasts, whether consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, the shocking history of sideburns and sandwiches, and how you get a banging pop tune inspired by the sort of people who want us dead. 

Stick around for the discourse, and then go and find Tamsin's book (writing as Misha Magdalene) Outside the Charmed Circle. 

You can listen on the fancy widget below, subscribe via your favourite podcast outlet ( like Apple, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, Google Podcasts and others) or find the archive at The Question in Bodies Podbean site. Want to hear episodes early? Back my Patreon. It's just one of those American dollars.

Oh, we might as well have some of the music, I suppose. Here's a playlist.

The Question in Bodies #48: Rainbow Flags, Painted on the Sides of Missiles

[I wrote this piece, which juxtaposes little-seen British sitcom Hyperdrive and Isabel Fall's short story "I sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" back in February this year, and you can see the original version of it on my Patreon. It's just my luck that the very week I choose to make it public is the week that the Helicopter Controversy gets a rather revealing and depressing coda. I've had to do a little rejigging because of that. But nothing's been toned down. If there's a content warning, it's for unvarnished rage.]

Commencify

Few people commented, even at the time, on Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley’s BBC sitcom Hyperdrive (2006-2007), but weirdly, it reads better now than it did back when it was broadcast. The basic concept was straightforward. Britain, a couple of centuries in the future, a nation which has not, contrary to more optimistic space operas we could name, sorted out its issues with the rest of the world, protects its interests in the stars. The show follows the HMS Camden Lock as they engage in interplanetary diplomacy in a changing galaxy. The comedy comes from the simple idea that a British space navy would still behave under the delusion that it mattered on the international stage and that it was competent and compassionate. 

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 5: Neurodiversity and Horror, with Joanna Swan

Annalynne McCord in Excision; Angela Bettis in May.

It's Monday, and it's another instalment in Season 1 of the Question in Bodies Podcast. In episode 5, I'm joined by actor Joanna Swan to talk about the horror of being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world, why the best depictions of neurodiversity in cinema are in horror, and to do some deep dives into the movies Excision (2012) and May (2002).

Check it out on your favourite podcast outlet (and maybe you know, subscribe), or just listen on the handy widget below. Or if you want to get episodes early, back me on my Patreon.

The Question in Bodies #47: What say of it? What say of CONSCIENCE grim?

Alain Delon as William Wilson in Spirits of the Dead (1968)

“What say of it? What say of CONSCIENCE grim, that spectre in my path?” – Chamberlaine’s Pharronida – Poe, “William Wilson”

I have never quite nailed down in my head whether I think Edgar Allan Poe misremembered the spurious epigrammatic quotes that pepper his work or if he just made them up. It doesn’t matter, in the end, but the effect is the same: an epigram offers up your text to be commented on by the world that already exists. It places it in a space, a context. But Poe’s epigrams all too often enhance the unreality of his worlds, the dreamlike nature of his stories. The footnotes in the editions of Poe I have – I have several – pretty much always say of the epigrams at the start of his stories and poems something like “this quote does not appear in the source it’s attributed to”.

The one at the start of “William Wilson”, my favourite of all Poe’s stories, might be the best example.

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 4: Return to the House of Psychotic Women, feat. Kier-La Janisse

Emma Roberts in The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015)

In this episode I talk with festival programmer, writer and editor, and award-winning director of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror Kier-La Janisse, about the imminently released new edition of her hugely influential book House of Psychotic Women. We talk about how Kier-La created a genre, her favourites of the films that have been made since, and just how much bigger the new edition is – which you can order at fabpress.com/hopw-expanded-edition-hardcover.html

The Question in Bodies #46: Transeverything Identity in the Films of Julia Ducournau

(Spoilers, all of them)

people are just not good to each other

A little girl mucks about in the back of a car. Her behaviour gets worse and worse; eventually she takes off her seatbelt, and her dad, his attention now thoroughly distracted, crashes the car. To reconstruct her smashed skull, a titanium plate is implanted, which leaves her with a distinctive spiral scar on the side of her head. Leaving the hospital, the child ignores her parents, running to the car, which she embraces, and kisses.

Cut to her adult life: now she is a bisexual, genderfluid adult dancer. She is also a casual serial killer, whose lack of care attracts police attention. She has sex with a fancy custom car, and gets pregnant by it. As her body experiences the changes that might come from bearing a semi-mechanical mutant made of flesh, metal and engine oil, she goes on the run.

Look. All that is probably enough to be getting on with, but really that doesn’t even get you past the first half of Julia Ducorneau’s stunning 2021 film Titane (simply, “Titanium”). And you really need to have seen this movie before you read this next part. I mean, you can read this and you’ll be fine, it won’t ruin your life, so perhaps rather than tell you that you need to have seen it maybe it is better to say that I want you to have seen it. I think it’s a film that travels in directions that are better seen than talked about. And I'm going to be breaking down scenes in detail.

Now, while “Spoiler” discourse is usually toxic and stupid, a way to strangle discussion and thought in the crib, some films are simply better experienced without you knowing anything about them. And there’s a reason a film that looks on paper like a fairly direct piece of New French Extremity wound up winning the 2021 Palme d’Or (and a reason that, quite frankly, if I’d been on that jury at Cannes, I’d have voted to give it the Palme d’Or as well). Because what happens next turns a film with a bit of body horror and some quirky and gory murders into something entirely different. It becomes something smaller, stranger, and oddly, dysfunctionally beautiful.

But calling it dysfunctional isn’t right either. Like the highly polished custom that fathers Alexia’s child, Titane hides precision engineering under its shining bodywork, and its unique quirks a signifier of a surprising amount of passion, and even love.

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 3: Bodies in Space, with Gwendolyn Kiste

It's episode 3! I'm super honoured to have with me multiple award winning author, Perky Goth style icon and official Nicest Person in Horror Gwendolyn Kiste. I talk with Gwendolyn – writer of The Rust Maidens, Boneset and Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe and others – about the modern Gothic, the relationship of the human body to its environment and some other stuff, because we like digressions, like what an ambry is.

You should totally go and look at gwendolynkiste.com: her new novel, Reluctant Immortals, has just come out, so make sure you get on that. 

Listen on your favourite podcast outlet, or visit thequestioninbodies.podbean.com for all the episodes. 

The Question in Bodies #45: That Haunting Sense of Unexpressed Deformity

Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.
– Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case”

Living with duality is something that I think most people do to some extent; we compartmentalise our selves, we communicate in different ways in different contexts. And it’s a survival technique, a thing we do naturally to maintain social discourse and our place in it.

But what if you’re autistic and you don’t know you’re autistic, and these changes of tone and etiquette don’t come naturally to you? This isn’t theoretical. In the house where I spent my childhood, sex and gender weren’t just taboo subjects, they were active subjects of revulsion and shame. I learned about bodily differences embarrassingly late. No positive depictions or discussions of sexuality were tolerated at home; and my mother particularly responded to scenes of people enjoying the act of kissing or canoodling with disgust and revulsion. 

(Footnote: I clearly remember the moment of the first same-sex kiss on British TV, between Colin and Guido on the episode of Eastenders broadcast 24th January 1989. I remember my parents’ seething outrage at it, having known in advance from the newspaper that this would be the episode where that happened, and having made absolutely sure that they tuned in and did not miss it.) 

The result of it was that very early on I developed a private imaginary space where I could escape the constant surveillance under which I was kept. And actually, my imaginary scenes weren’t really anything to be ashamed of – they certainly weren’t the twisted evil I was scared that everyone would think they were, and in later life I’ve actually become proud of the unique and odd fantasy world I made, and I have even used it in my work. But it didn’t matter. An internal Demiurge in my brain had brought into existence a fantastical world where my sexuality and imagination lived, separate from the world I presented to those about me, and the result was that I fractured.

The Question in Bodies Podcast, Episode 2: The Good For Her Cinematic Universe, with Eve Elizabeth Moriarty

We got as far as episode 2!

In this week's episode, I'm joined in a flurry of tripartite author names by my pal Eve Elizabeth Moriarty, to talk about the Good For Her Cinematic Universe: the "girl bossification" of horror, bad takes about The Witch (2015), Midsommar (2019) and Promising Young Woman (2020), and how all these things reflect more than just dodgy critique. 

Eve's take on Midsommar can be found here.

The podcast is gradually populating the usual podcast venues – Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Spotify, Audible and others – but you can find the podcast site here.

Want to get episodes a couple of weeks early? Back my Patreon. It's literally only one American dollar a month. 

The Question in Bodies #44: Roko's Modern Basilisk

 We appreciate power (we appreciate power)

Transhumanism, as a response to the Question in Bodies, isn’t monolithic, any more than any other apocalyptic worldview; it has its schisms, its alternative approaches. There’s the benevolent version that posits simply that we simply have to let our children survive and change into something we won’t recognise – see “Low-Flying Aircraft” for this version, but also, see the joyous pansexual genderblend of Sense8 (2015-2018), where the evolution of humanity into clusters of linked consciousness is, although at the risk of exploitation (the main conflict of the series), the key to a coming age of empathy and hope.

The Question in Bodies podcast, Episode 1: Hope, Joy and Storytelling, with Dr Monique Lacoste

 

(But what sort of Doctor are you?)

It's the beginning, and the moment has been prepared for. 

For the next nine weeks, we're going to be putting out Season One of the Question in Bodies podcast, a catalogue of inconclusive conversations about culture, gender, bodies, literature, movies and horror. In this first episode I'm joined by the first of a wide cast of friends, colleagues and co-conspirators, Dr. Monique Lacoste, to talk about what representation looks like, whether we can imagine a different world, and whether or not we can find genuine hope and joy in a storytelling environment saturated with capitalist realism. When the only show in town is the MCU, where is the genuine chance to have hope, joy and, dare we say it, love? 

Expect lots of questions, and few answers, but the getting there is entertaining.

We shout out to Raquel Benedict at Rite Gud in the course of this, which is our favourite podcast right now. Raquel is going to guest in a future episode (spoilers). 

Over the next few days, you'll be able to find The Question on the usual podcast sources – it's already gone to Spotify and Amazon; Google and Apple are soon to follow. 

Thanks to Steve Horry for our logo, and the banging theme tune.

The Question in Bodies #43: F*** the Future (iv)

A cold and stylised rapacity
Is it messed up to admit you understand why the characters in a book like Crash find their fetishes as hot as they do (even if it’s not exactly your fetish)? It’s a rhetorical question, and you don't need to answer it, but Ballard wanted us, I think, to know that he did, for he named the first-person narrator of Crash James Ballard. Ballard the protagonist, a producer of television adverts, is not Ballard the author. All they really have in common is a name, and those of you who have names you are attached to will understand what a powerful thing that is.

The Question in Bodies #42: F*** the Future (iii)

(A digression concerning low-flying aircraft)
In Ballard's story “Low-Flying Aircraft”, a couple, Forrester and Judith, travel north to Sweden to have a baby. While there, they see the odd behaviour of a local doctor, who flies back and forth across the landscape, spraying lines in silvery paint. The world’s population has plummeted, due to most babies being born apparently deformed. In fact, we find out, human fertility has skyrocketed, and the supposedly deformed children – although blind they can sense their environment and communicate in ways “able bodied” people cannot – are the next step in human evolution, delayed by a desperate desire for eugenic purity. “Mutant” children are routinely aborted the moment they are identified in the womb, or summarily killed when they are born. Except sometimes they aren’t.

The Question in Bodies #41: F*** the Future (ii)

Welcoming them into the future

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within his huge apartment building during the previous three months."
– Ballard, High-Rise, Chapter 1.

I’ve had a history, going back to my time in academia, of deconstructing first pages of fiction and let me tell you, as opening lines go, that's an absolute banger. First lines are programmatic things, carrying in them the full weight of the story to come, or, alternatively, sometimes acting as lies or traps. This opener does both in some really interesting ways. It introduces one of the (it turns out three) point of view characters. It suggests languor and thoughtfulness, and a character with time and space and the privilege to reflect (he’s a doctor, so you think he would). And also it suggests, in a single word, something that is, to the intended audience – literate, English-speaking – something terrible, some breakdown of the normal order of things, and more so because of what it suggests about the kind of man Laing is by the time it has happened, that he has the time to sit on a balcony and reflect on what happened here, but is still very much OK with eating someone’s pet.

The Question in Bodies #40: F*** the Future (i)

(This, first in a four-part look at the key works of J.G. Ballard and their film adaptations, first appeared on my Patreon, about a year ago. Want to see stuff miles in advance and a bunch of stuff you wouldn't see otherwise? You know what to do.)

The Sexual Counter-Revolution
I think that the general consensus is that we are now more or less resigned to the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies having been subject to a lengthy and successful counter-revolution, with the result that society is right now less openly sexual than it has been for a long time. And certainly, while steps have been made since that time to support people with sexualities other than the hetero and genders other than the cis, the keys of power are working harder than ever to wind the clock backwards. A decade ago, many would have found it unthinkable that the UK would be listed alongside Turkey, Russia, Poland and Hungary as one of the worst places to be LGBTQ+ in the so-called developed world. The fact that in the USA there’s even a debate as to whether anti-gay conversion therapy should be outlawed is really quite a telling indicator of the way that the wind is blowing. For those of us who identify as queer, these are frightening times.

But while from the top of our societies down our identities and sexualities seem more at risk than ever, in the everyday traffic of our lives, it isn’t really like that. In fact, our passions have balkanised, divided into any number of communities, subcommunities and infracommunities, where we can talk about these things, where we can remain radicalised against the mainstream norms. We have whole samizdat spaces existing within the social media, entire languages. In a way this is how it's always been for most of history. The liberalisation of the media, and the bringing of us into the mainstream, was an enterprise of only a few decades. As media branched off and splintered, the multiplicities of human identity split off into entire phyla, leaving commodified, acceptable versions behind in the mainstream, husks of the human self, there for the hand of power to ram itself into and manipulate like a rainbow cavalcade of Muppets (and let's not even get to what happened to the actual Muppets). Multinational corporations – sociopathic and rapacious by definition – adding rainbow flags to their logos one month a year isn't actually progress.

The flip side of this, the good side of this, is that the communities on the new margins have networks that they never had before. It's easier than ever to find your tribe, no matter how esoteric its concerns might once have been. Our closets are conditional now, furnished with WiFi. We can functionally be different people in different spaces for good or ill.

When our sexualities have been balkanised, so have our selves.