There are several distinct modes of
political system under which the gothic in fiction and popular
culture operates. They act as a kind of backdrop onto which the tales
that explore themes of the suppressed, transgressive and inhumane can
be projected. But this do not simply act as a stage for tropes, but
they also feed into the form and content of gothic culture.
The most prominent political mode in
gothic literature and film is that of the 19th century,
central/east-European model of absolutist monarchy. It is the Europe
of the nobility, peasantry, princes, Burgermeisters and priests –
effectively, that of the Habsburgs. It is a vast realm, full of
ungoverned spaces punctuated by small pockets of arbitrary and brutal
autocracy; for every peasant farmhouse or hamlet there was a dungeon,
jail or fortress. The Emperor acts as a kind of absentee landlord,
generally disinterested in the events of much of the nation and
especially of the peripheral wastelands and spaces in which 'gothic'
events take place. This is the political backdrop to which nearly all of the
main gothic texts and their numerous celluloid offspring takes place.
Another mode, albeit less prominent, is
that of the war-torn province. The actual real-life history of the
Balkans and of Transylvania between and even during the wars features
many eerie intrusions of the gothic into political life, from the
psychodramatic theatrics of the Iron Guard fascists in Romania
including their strange pseudo-vampiric blood rituals to the blood
tests carried out on Transylvania peasants by the occupying Hungarian
troops; and this prototype mode of mob rule, violent disorder and
tyranny is another staple of the gothic. The tumults of the wars fed
directly into the work of James Whale, the acting of Ingrid Pitt and
Christopher Lee, and the renewed fascination with the horrors of
technology and mortality that became vivid in the televisual age.
The mode that was until recently most
prevalent in popular culture was that of the gothic of totalitarianism; during the era
of the cold war the image of the darkened depths of a divided Europe,
from beneath the Berlin Wall to the edges of the Carpathians, was a
form of gothic that resonated a kind of real-time political dread.
With this came the related fears of nuclear war, espionage, and
political dictatorship. The shadow of the police state hung over all
gothic terrain, and where it was not the decadence of a West Berlin
took on nihilistic and desperate tones, and the neo-vampiric rule of
Ceausescu represented a political nightmare that was all too real.
And finally there is the current
political mode of the gothic – that of the playground, the
nightclub, the holiday, the big city, of adventures in a crumbling
old and rising new world. The postmodern escapades of the
'Underworld', 'Blade', 'Hellraiser' and 'Saw' series are all in this
tradition of the contextless, modern rampage.
The interplay between political context
and the gothic is always linked to the conflict between monolithic
absolutism, in it's various forms, and the struggle of liberal
(and modern) forces against it. In effect, that contradiction has had
to become more fantastical (even ersatz) as the forces of real
tyranny have subsided.
So how can a new political mode be
created to fit the struggles of the modern world?
Now, that is an entirely different
matter....