playing with the undead

Monster High is a popular mash up doll set, combining elements of Barbie, Bratz, and Boris.

Boris Karloff.

By my own personal experience of the dual process of maturation and matriculation through various institutions I understand an aesthetic embrace of the melancholy. While not necessarily a sociopathic adolescent lifestyle orientation it is inescapably a reactive stance to a set of presumptions held by this maturing youth as a form of group discipline through mimicry and followership. One possible way out, and sometimes perhaps an expression of a 'variance' in one's mental health, is to dress apart, stand apart, and ultimately be apart. And in a social setting framed in so many ways by group affiliation to be without one is not only a reactionary stance to the presumed arbitrary and self-perceived 'unfair' pressures to join but is itself, as a result, a way of being. Because the outcome of group affiliation is a group identity, which informs, enables, but disables the way members act and interact, thus producing the evidence of one's identity for others and oneself.

All that gobbledygook was required to tell you that dressing 'gothic' or oriented around an aesthetic cue to funerary culture, melancholy, or the macabre is and is not a symptom of institutional forces acting upon and forming self-identity. It is because the turn to identifying through outward signs of dress and behavior is an attempt to break set, to divert in some way from the norm. And second, it is not simply in that this gothic aesthetic is a collection of choices appropriated to establish an outward appearance, which appeals to the individual engaging in it. It's greater significance is an effect of others, from their standpoints, judging what one's "gothic" dress means. In other words, it is not because human motivations and values are enigmatic, multifaceted, and quite often hidden from the conscious choices that people make all the time. Ask yourself for example, "why do some men bend their ball caps and others do not?" Some reasons may be as plain as seeing that someone else is doing it, but the origin of these kinds of choices in how we present our clothing are beyond the scope of individual practitioners of a ball cap bill bend. And even more plainly, people can and do chose to bend or not to bend based upon his/her impression of what's most popular and either following along, doing the exact opposite, or making an informed decision in front of the mirror.

Clothing choices are quite arcane yet so damn ubiquitous that you can ask anyone, anyone--prisoners, children, elderly--and most will have some kind of pragmatic rules that they follow and can explain. That being said, let's move on, and back to the subject at hand without getting too mired in the minutiae of everyday style.

The choice to appear dead or simply fixated upon death, dying, melancholy, sadness, or being alone is, if we widen the frame, a way to strike against a culture and the forms of expression it makes readily available and sanctions through group affiliation. The one inescapable irony to a style choice is the inescapable association to a larger group with similar tastes. In one sense, we can never be apart from groups. Even rogue shooters belong to a group of mass murderers using guns that has grown its ranks in the last decade.Let's get back on task. Black metal, death metal, and other forms of heavy metal music as well as industrial music and 'dark' music in general are recognized by people who study them as a way to express power in a world that seemingly has reduced all initiative choices made as a consumer to follow to scripted lives and model behavior.

With all this said, we have to return to a context in which this death-orientation in style choices would be 'taboo' and one place where that occurs is in the suburban school classroom. Suburbs are many things to many people. Generically speaking, they represent a retreat from the problems of density, diversity, and decay. So the suburbs, as new housing developments, fresh communities, represent both freshly rooted lives, new starts, a solution to social ills, and so on. Suburbs have a normative, positive, life-affirming valence, or they should. But their foundation is economic, which encourages countless selfish ownership-oriented behaviors. And what the suburbs often become are nascent sites of arbitrary cultural patterns, which get questioned, overturned, and reacted against in ways that recreate the social ills that the suburbs were set up as a refuge from: drug abuse, crime, youth in revolt, and so on. But more than all these factors the condition of being or becoming an isolated consumer, an "atom of consumption" as Noam Chomsky would say, has the greatest effect upon people, their fears, affiliations, and ultimately their pathologies. And these pathologies are ubiquitous and become normalized by the economic system that supports this dominant form of living. What results are various forms of cultural malaise orbiting an economic nexus. With money and accumulation of material goods comes the fear of losing them to thievery or circumstances. Out of this spins fear of others, retreat and defense from others, paranoia and suspicion of others. Most importantly one stands always and evidently near the precipice of an existential threat as simply as losing power, losing water, losing internet, losing cable tv--a set of first-world problems with grave consequences. What it results in are any number of home defense or surveillance products to allay fears and reclaim a sense of safety. Insurance and supplementary insurance industries cater to this fear, this sense of risk, and when most conveniences are centrally provided and controlled those risks are quite evident and often too real.

But a complete host of behaviors, a lifestyle, and a living situation all revolve around a model of 'essential consumption.' 'Essential consumption' is reliance upon municipal systems for power, sewer, and water as well as food, drink, and a large amount of leisure choices. These activities secure the legitimacy of the system and frame the practically experienced reality. With access to services essential to life paid for by money made doing labor that is abstracted from everyday life patterns, we find that this monetary or economic system-based living offers nothing substantial to nourish the soul outside that which can be bought. Sadly enough, labor and everyday crisis are essential companions to forming a satisfying existence. In a system where most of these get relegated by the practical reality and institutionalized norms to outlier behavior, we are left living in a wasteland of effort. Everything races infinitely toward meaninglessness lapping up the milk nestled in the bosom of a static lifestyle afforded by modern convenience. And from this empty life, where parents toil away the days, children move from one scripted activity to another, and intimacy gets soiled by so many modern distractions that humanity is left unformed by constant human direction and companionship. Without crucial family bonding the next generation pathologically clings to childhood companion objects replete with comic and cartoon narratives, action figures, games, candy, books, folders, clothing, backpacks, and movies bearing its likeness. Being raised by a screen leads to life before the screen.

What the Monster High doll represents, aside from any specific cultural pattern, is the unique ability of capitalism to take any reactionary movement and subsume it under its rubric and turn expressions of revolt and alternative living into lifestyles fit for consumption. Better yet, it shows how humans living within capitalists systems produce societal 'tumors' fit for capitalist appropriation and consumption once again. In this ouroboros culture of capitalism people function as livestock, input, and product. The living literally consume culture, pollute irreversibly, and revolt against society's rules. And every expression of this consumer culture reflects the cult of the consumed, and so what society shits out it eventually eats.

After all, aren't pet rocks something that cave men first acquired?