the problems are bad, and their causes…their causes are also very, very bad
There is a lot going on in the world today, and though nearly tautological, it’s exactly the heart of this truism that needs to be considered: many interconnected things are playing out, simultaneously or in a cascading and fractal-izing manner, and that’s just inherently hard to track.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about existential horror, in part because of: periodic dips into depression; the impressive (if, at times, difficult to stomach) television show Lovecraft Country; and the mental block I think is going on for a lot of folks in the U.S. electorate and government, as well as around the world. I’m a huge fan of the horror genre, in books, movies, video games, and generally aesthetically. This goes back to my childhood, as I was gifted (traumatized by? inherited?) a love of horror media from my mother, along with both of my parents’ ‘80’s-inculcated nuclear-cum-environmental terror. Without edging into intellectual elitism, I think this sense of lurking dread combined with a worldview highly reinforced by engineering and physics (some might say ‘scientism’) gives me a predisposition to seek or attempt to discern ‘hyperobjects.’ Not having read the book (yet — still holding onto a copy loaned by a friend), I do think the underlying idea is worth parsing here: “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”
For any fans of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, or the Warhammer 40,000 game universe, hyperobjects should be familiar. I’ve personally been enchanted for a long time by what might be called the “interobjective” ‘footprints’ of hyperobjects: fossil evidence of bygone biological epochs; crystals and materials structures; black holes and quantum mechanics or other complex physics phenomena; or socio-political theories such as natural and individual rights, socialism, democracy, futurism, or fascism. In a way, history (or historiography) might be considered as hyperobject — the possibly-dubious idea that the times, places, people, and things that constitute our precedence can be described in any higher-level way, that an individual mind can parse. In the realm of fantasy generally and horror in particular, though, the hyperobject is often an immediate threat, the implied existence of which is the crux of the narrative and any conflict or tension therein.
Consider the 2014/2015 film It Follows (spoilers, of course, follow through the end of this paragraph): a seemingly supernatural force relentlessly pursues characters until either their destruction, or their ‘handing off’ of the threat to distant and hopefully unknown or anonymous others. In this world, the threat can at best be kept far away or at bay, and is in a way omnipresent, even if its shape or appearance changes. It has unknown strength and regenerative properties, and even seems to be invisible to others, despite having incontrovertible effects on the physical world. The conflict is only resolved when the main characters assemble a plan to attack the malevolent presence by manipulating its known phenomena: submerging it in water to limit its movement; damaging it with various tools or traps; and, maybe most significantly, actually agreeing that something is there to deal with in the first place.
For another, less familiar example (for most non-nerds), we can turn to the Warhammer 40,000 (‘40k’) universe. “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” is the classic tagline of the game and associated media, and that over-the-top phrase has even spawned the genre-moniker of ‘grimdark.’ In this grimdark future, the central conceit is that humankind has spread beyond Earth to most corners of the Milky Way galaxy, but is embroiled in apparently endless civil and external battles with truly innumerable threats, the greatest of which is a host of demons which are fueled by humanity’s own frailties. Due to genetic experiments along with natural evolution, ‘psykers’ or psychically-enhanced humans are frequently born all over the galaxy, but without rigorous suppression or training, their minds and essentially-magical powers are vulnerable to corruption by the energies of the demon realm, or ‘the Warp.’ The Warp is omnipresent, implied to be some sort of alternate dimension or physical field, and certainly would qualify as a hyperobject. Much of the 40k lore is based around the idea that the Warp and its effects (which, at worst, can lead to entire planets or sectors of space being destroyed or twisted beyond all recognition or redemption) are beyond the ability of most of humanity to comprehend, let alone address. Even literal god-like figures from among humankind or alien societies struggle to keep the Warp and its demonic inhabitants from overwhelming reality as we know it.
And of course, possibly the preeminent cultural touchstone to imply hyperobjects, to the point of having its own label like grimdark, is ‘Lovecraftian’ horror. Unlike 40k, and more in the vein of It Follows, Lovecraftian horror commonly pits ‘everyman’ characters against inter-dimensional or otherworldly beings and forces. ‘Elder Gods’ and mysterious societies steer the course of our world and other worlds from behind the scenes, and often witnessing this truth or directly confronting such forces sends characters into insanity, suicidal depression, or murderous rage. I’m very much enjoying, though also troubled and disturbed by, Lovecraft Country’s reinterpretation of this genre, especially given its blatantly racist and homophobic origins. I definitely am not the right person to delve into how this series is addressing that history, but others are and you should definitely read their thoughts (spoilers, naturally).
What, at this point you might reasonably ask, does any of this have to do with the world today? Frankly, I think we, the United States, as a country and also we, the human species collectively, are engaged with a few hyperobjects in the near-immediate and medium terms. A lot of ink and keyboards have been spent on supposedly-dire threats from, in-exhaustively: climate change; ‘cultural Marxism’; capitalism; communism; artificial intelligence/AI/automation; globalism/offshoring/free trade; Islam/‘Muslim extremism’; nuclear war; consumerism/obesity; Trumpism/fascism/’the far-/alt-right’; ‘antifa’/Black Lives Matter/anarchists; ‘the Internet’/cancel culture/screen time; implicit & explicit racism…the list obviously goes on. Essays and thinkpieces and Twitter threads document the reality or un-reality of each of these and tons more I’ve left off. I myself have written about some of them, but lately, I’ve struggled to even talk about most with my closest friends and relatives.
However, what struck me earlier in delving into horror media and trying to process the news and current events myself, is in my opinion most of the examples I gave are either ‘imprints’ of hyperobjects, or pieces/aspects of the same hyperobject. A lot is being said right now about the upcoming U.S. presidential election regarding the media’s role in transmitting election results, the current and future state of the U.S. Postal Service, the possibility of a contested result or ‘reluctant incumbent’ to hand over power lawfully or otherwise, and more. Simultaneously, historical fires, storms, droughts, and disease pummel much of our planet and country, and violence and property destruction on behalf of the state and average citizens seems to rise without a check or clear end in sight. It’s become my view over the last few years, but this year and last few months especially, that these and other problems are not isolated, nor merely are they just causative or correlative in simple ways. I think many of them are products or signals from the deeper, more existentially-horrifying hyperobjects at play in our lives and our history.
This may again seem tautological, and I hope you haven’t read this far expecting a simple answer. What I think I wanted to transmit by getting these thoughts down is that we may only be able to address and survive these ‘footprints’ by acknowledging the deeper intertwined threads that compose part if not all of the massive, invisible hyperobjects stomping around us. I find myself frequently returning to a somewhat glib favourite of a song lyric, from Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha:
And to save all our lives you’ve got to envision
The fiery crash
It’s just a formality
Why must I explain?
Just a nod to mortality
Before you get on a plane
To my mind, we have to consider the horror of our current reality in order to properly resolve it, or at least as much of it as we’re able. In the wake of the Kenosha, Portland, and Lacey shootings, and seemingly endless killings by police of Black and non-white people, it hit me: more people will die before the end of this year from political and state-sanctioned violence. In the midst of seeing friends’ photos of the occluded skies and soot-choked masks of the burning West, I realized: this is only 1°C of warming. These are examples of things currently outside of my personal zone of control, but are nonetheless real, and happening to people like me or those I care about. Even this admission still seems to be beyond the admission of folks I know; many seem to deny or shrink away from the basic facts of current events, let alone react to them or act. It seems taboo to call the shooting of Michael Reinoehl an execution, and yet, without a trial and being killed by agents of the state, there it remains, and will probably be allowed to slip away into history. It seems unwelcome to even bring up the irreversible melting and fracturing of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets outside of clinical scientific news reports. But these are obvious and alarming signs of our effects on the planet and the catastrophic sea level rise and human displacement to come.
Without personally acknowledging the real, traumatic horror of these events, I think we miss, as Andrew Bird puts it, the chance “to save all our lives.” We have to look over the edge at the Elder Gods of our real world: inequality and the structures that perpetuate it; the intentional historical project of ethnic and racial subjugation; and maybe most of all, the fear that paralyzes us into apathy or willful ignorance. We have to envision the fiery crash, while we’re still on the runway, or better, in the design lab or wind tunnel. We have to risk our sanity and look into the abyss, or else it will swallow us as dispassionately and hungrily, or worse, turn us too into monsters. We have to admit that the problems are bad, many getting worse, and respond accordingly.
How? Here is where the horror genre and concept of hyperobjects may assist us, too — by looking to the survivors of movies like Alien(s), or It Follows, or even 40k (which is sadly almost entirely co-opted by the far-right already). We need to reach deep into caring for our most vulnerable or least heard; we need to think ingeniously of new solutions instead of passing the b(f)uck; and we need to find ways to tell hopeful stories or elevate new heroes, when the old ones start to falter or tarnish. Most horror stories end on an ominous note — was the monster or villain truly vanquished, or will a parting shot leave us wondering what that twitching limb or looming shadow will do after the credits roll? By contrast, I sometimes think of a line from another film most wouldn’t consider horror, but grapples with hyperobjects and existential dread: Inception (minor spoilers for those of you still living in 2010). In the midst of a frantic dream-world firefight with the heroes are seemingly trapped and outmatched, Tom Hardy’s character conjures up a grenade launcher, and tells Joeseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” While possibly a cutesy throwaway line, I think it points to a deeper idea: by acknowledging the ‘reality’ of their situation, Hardy’s character is free to exercise power JGL’s didn’t even realize was possible, and deftly resolves the harrowing standoff.
To save all our lives, we’ve got to envision the fiery crash — but we also mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.
