Eldritch Milkshake Ducks: H.P. Lovecraft's Bigotry

Greetings, fellow nerds! So good to see you. We're doing a heavy topic today. One might even say it's vast, squamous and unknowable!!

Today's guest is a writer who's famous now, but died alone and unappreciated. We've coddled him, made excuses for him and struggled to come to terms with his flagrant misbehaviors for a hundred years. No more! Today we're getting in deep with the weirdest writer of the twenties and thirties: Howard Philips Lovecraft, the man himself!

You know this guy. He invented Cthulhu! Cthulhu's fun, right? Drives people crazy in their dreams, lives in sunken R'Lyeh, his neighbor is the Bloop. But there's plenty you may not know about Lovecraft. Namely, that he was--in the words of Stephen King, who's not known to mince words--a "galloping" racist, conspiracy theorist, and basically the original 4channer.

Mr. King is making an understatement here. Lovecraft was a titanic bigot, his paranoia fueled by Puritanism and self-induced isolation. His views run parallel to the "alt-right" movements of today, but with less subtlety. If Lovecraft had been born in 1990 instead of 1890, he wouldn't have had time for writing--he'd be too busy rampaging across Twitter, dumping isolationist, xenophobic rhetoric on everyone. This man was terrified by people of color--despite never having met any. On top of this, he was a conspiracy theorist before that was even a thing you did--he was convinced Irish Catholic immigrants were conspiring to control America.

Pictured: Lovecraft's distant relative (no, not really--calm down, Lovecraft Estate.)

What I aim to do here is answer how this came about--how a guy nicknamed "The Old Man" for his charming fussiness became filled with irrational fears of people he never even met. I will not make excuses for Lovecraft, here--the dude was a genius, but geniuses can also be assholes. What interests me more than absolving Lovecraft is understanding him. All bigotry comes from somewhere, and once you find out where it comes from, it becomes one step easier to handle.

I've said before on this very blog that we need to take steps to understand today's young men and why they're so goddamn crazy misogynist and violent, and I think Lovecraft is one of the keys to the whole thing. Because... well... Just LOOK at this guy.

Voted "Most Punchable Face of the 20th Century."

Just... just look at that face. This is one of the few, rare pictures of Howard smiling, and it's awful. You just want to smack the smugness off him, or maybe write him a manual on how to smile without looking like you've inhaled a pineapple. He looks ridiculous, nerdy in his clothing choice and, if his biography The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft is to be believed, in his attitude. He was an insufferable jackass even to his friends, boasting of his "British" descent (neither of his parents had any connection to England) and refusing to edit any of his works--not because he thought they were perfect, but because he was so insecure he couldn't bear to look at a page once it had been written. Come on, H.P., you could've at least spell-checked your work.

Since every bigot is informed by their upbringing, let's look at Lovecraft's childhood. Jerkhood doesn't develop in a vacuum, and Howard's youth informed his attitude throughout his life. So let's see how he started... oh man.

Oh. Oh, dear.

Yep, that's baby Howard, wearing a dress. According to his biography, his mother--who later died in an insane asylum just like his father, both of them victims of mental illness--dressed him as a girl for most of his childhood, to simulate the daughter she'd never had.

Okay, not a great start. If a kid wants to wear a dress, fine, whatever--but I highly doubt Mini-Howard had a choice here. It's a classic case of bad parenting, and it left marks on Howard. He had issues with women for the rest of his life, from his fear of sex to his cold, calculating relationship with his wife. (They separated before his death--shockingly, the guy who wrote about "morbid, clammy slabs of Cyclopean marble" wasn't a warm and loving husband.)

"Honey, want me to draw us a sexy bubble bath?" "No thanks, dear, I'm busy doodling squamous, UNWHOLESOME horrors!"

Again, we're not making excuses for Howard. However, we can see how his early life jump-started inside him the burning core of bigotry: insecurity. His mother's erratic behavior and death terrified him, and he was forevermore a sensitive and delicate person. Someone so easily ruffled would have jumped at the chance to feel strong, about anything. And tragically, Howard felt strongly about just two things: weird fiction... and eugenics.

Pictured: The summary of HPL's entire writing career.

At many points in his life Howard engaged in racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, from his famously horrible poem about black people and his rumored shock when his wife reminded him he was Jewish, to which he responded, "No, you're not! You're a Lovecraft!"

Yeah... Not our best guy, over here. Once again, talent does not preclude someone from being a complete irresponsible fuckstick.

But already we're seeing parallels here. A quiet, insecure white guy with a real sore spot about race (and women, and immigration, and his precious "white identity") sounds just like the shit we're dealing with today. The internet has radicalized an entire army of young, insecure racists, pushing them out into the street to spread hateful views and engage in deadly violence. While Howard never punched anyone in his life, much less committed murder, he was still the same type of radicalized, secretly hateful young white male we see today. History repeats itself, and America hasn't changed.

At least we've never elected Cthulhu. Though it's not for lack of trying.

The strangest thing about Lovecraft's prejudice is that of all people, he should be the most capable of using imagination to understand the unknown. The guy penned hundreds of pages about cosmic, alien entities, and referred to his Elder Ones aliens as "scientists" and "men of reason." Lovecraft engaged in plenty of gross, imperialist thinking--one of the narrators in "Call of Cthulhu" is killed by a mysterious swarthy man from overseas, the implication being Cthulhu's human minions are all people of color and foreigners... for some reason? Yet at the same time, Lovecraft had enough self-awareness to write this:

"Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand..."

... Damn.

"Yeah, man! Worlds of life, energy and matter, duuude!"

Someone capable of thinking outside the box like this--outside the scope of normal human life, and normal human minds--should have been able to see through the bigotries of his time, at least a little. But racism is a system, not just an attitude. The quiet prejudices of his friends--Robert Howard, August Derleth, and others--buoyed Lovecraft's pre-existing views.

None of them put any checks on his suspicion of  immigrants, or questioned him when he set his stories in "exotic Egypt" and wrote about the dangers of race-mixing. Why would they? R. Howard, for his part, was busy writing Conan the Barbarian stories--in a Hyperborea full of tribal caricatures and scantily-clad women, to boot. The nerds of Lovecraft's time couldn't be expected to reign in his attitudes... or teach him how to be more accepting, kinder, and less girl-phobic.

"Mr. Howard, you're sure these stories don't come across... just a little overcompensating?" "WHAT NO, WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT!"

And so, we're stuck with Racist Lovecraft, rather than the idealized version we'd prefer. All we can do is enjoy the parts of his work we like the most--the cosmic terror of his creatures, the creeping dread of his prose. Instead of lamenting his regrettable, isolationist attitude, we should do more to erase those toxic views in our own society.

And we need to do it quickly. Because despite his talent, despite the mystery and beauty of his works, the last thing we need is a new generation of Lovecrafts.

In Defense of Cheesy Monster Movies

               Everybody hates thinkpieces. Periodically, the blogs and publications I follow get a bad case of the ol’ self-righteousness: some ancient evangelical urge bubbles up, and a navel-gazing pundit waddles onto a soapbox and announces This Is The Way It Is! Deal With It, Scrubs!!!! They’ve got the answer to Current Social Problem XYZ, you see, and if you just reblog their position enough, you too can be enlightened… Such intellectual monkey-spanking is endemic—when you run a blog, it’s very easy to go groping for that soapbox, and tell yourself the world just doesn’t get it, maaan. And your two-and-a-half followers might happily back you up with an echo chamber where you never have to be wrong or uncomfortable.

                I’d rather direct my energies towards something a less topical. We’re all sick of topical shit right now—even the supporters of His Oiliness the Cheeto (short may he reign, senile and debauched) are worn out from all their sieg-heiling. So let’s focus on something a little less current-events, and a little more ridiculous. I’m talking about cheesy, shitty monster movies. The absolute shittiest. I'm talking The Crawling Eyeball, Human Centipede XXVIII level stuff.

                The genre’s had a revival, recently. Godzilla and King Kong are lumbering slowly back into theaters, and Toho itself—the company who created Big G in the first place—has stretched its muscles with the excellent Shin-Gojira, 50% horror-Godzilla and 50% men in suits arguing over noodles. Legendary Pictures is brewing up a Pacific Rim sequel, and nerds like me couldn’t be happier. Meanwhile, my family and girlfriend remain totally confused by these schlock-fests. “They’re so juvenile,” a homemade straw-man hypothetically might say. “Why do you watch that junk?”

                Well, there’s nostalgia, to begin with. The things you enjoyed in childhood never quite go away, and men in rubber monster-suits beating the crap out of each other was one of my first passions. But I think there’s a deeper pull towards high-lactose thrills like “Matango” and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” There’s a dweebish joy to these movies, but also a cultural story, the evolution of the fireside tale into something new and strange. Once upon a time, these monsters scared the crap out of audiences: it seems impossible , but the original clay-motion “Lost World” adaptation convinced people the director had filmed real dinosaurs. And the famous “War of the Worlds” radio adaptation in the 30’s sent hysterical families rushing to lock their doors. We may laugh now, but in a world of “fake news” and paranoid travel bans, these reactions start to make a sort of sense. People jump when they see the boogeyman, and they even jump when they think there's a boogeyman. Or there might be. Our ape-like instinct runs deep, and it teaches us to keep out the menace, the outsider. The monster.

                Monsters have power. They stand in for things, neatly slipping into the role of the scapegoat, the Antichrist, the menacing foreigner. They take the slings and arrows of our natural xenophobia and terror of the unknown—and that's a good thing. If we didn’t have entertainment to soak up our fears and paranoia, the world would be a whole lot worse. We'd go to witch burnings instead of movie theaters, for starters. Even the original Godzilla film was a manifestation of fear: fear of atomic power. A beast rises from human mistakes, and burns mankind. If you go back further, you find the precursors--the werewolf who became Kong, the dragon who became Godzilla. Their power didn’t dry up and go away when we started telling our stories with film projectors—if anything, they got stronger.

                “Cheesy” monster movies are an inversion of this kind of fear. They take the unknown, the terrifying, the cosmic force that stomps buildings... and turn it endearing, almost goofy. They break down the invading evil into something digestible and sane. When Ultraman punches a bug-eyed alien, we cheer, or we laugh. (Or, if you're not me, you turn off the TV and wonder how that station stays in business doing Ultraman reruns. Which is a pretty legitimate question.) The dust settles, and the monster has been neutered by defeat. It can’t hurt us, and this is why B-movies will always make money. The plentiful fears of the modern world have been condensed in these films, locked away on the screen. The monster appears, terrorizes, but is then swiftly dealt with by the Army. Or wild-haired scientists. Or heroes in spandex.

                There is, of course, a dangerous flipside to this.

                When we take the monster and break it down to a punchline, we forget why we feared it. The werewolf has not gone away; in fact, he seems stronger than ever. The werewolf is the betrayer, the cannibal. He is mugger, the office shooter, the lurking terrorist. Each day we are told to See Something, Say Something, and yes—I’m returning to politics. Sorry, not sorry. The parallels are too strong. Our president practically postures with a silver revolver every day, insisting only he can save us from the werewolf among us. And people totally buy it. "Watch for the mutant!" he crows, shaking an orange fist. "Watch for the heretic! Keep those torches ready!" He defies the Other. And we eat that up. We always have.

                We’ve forgotten that the monstrous is fiction. People do horrible things, but not because they're inhuman: they do them because at some point the fragile network of human decency has failed them, and allows them to behave this way. But that level of responsibility as a species is too much for us: we much prefer to see evil as the face of the monster, the face of something alien, and therefore outside our responsibility. There is no longer a division between the xenophobia we direct at our screens, subconsciously, and the xenophobia raging in our own lives. The walls of unreality have been unable to contain the monster-hunters: they have stormed the voting booths, the online forums, the talk shows. Our rubber and CGI “cultural pinatas” have all been beaten to shit, and can take no more; they have failed us.

                But still I hunt for secondhand "Gamera" DVDs, stockpile the history of imaginary beasts in my brain, and write stories about the Creeping Brain-Eater from Venus. Why? Because the monster itself still provides a focus for fear, an escape, softening the blow of the real world’s monsters. And the cheesier the escape, the better. These stories also remind you to be cautious when real horror and fear creep in: once you are familiar with the fake monsters, it becomes easier to handle the real ones with logic and patience. "To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." I don't think Lao Tzu was talking about the comfortable sanity that comes from indulging in kitschy kaiju movies, but he might as well have been. And he's not wrong.

                We have to control the monster in some way, or he controls us.