Introduction
Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture
Catherine Spooner Lancaster University
Gothic has always, of course, been associated with the popular. From the magic
lantern shows of the eighteenth century, through the stage melodramas and
‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century, to the great black and white movies
produced by Universal Studios between the 1920s and 1940s, Gothic has always
been difficult to confine within narrow definitions of the ‘literary’, and has been
disseminated widely to popular audiences in a myriad of different ways. However,
the at-times uneasy relationship between the disciplines of English and Cultural
Studies has meant that the association between Gothic fiction and popular
twentieth-century discourses was relatively late to develop as an object of academic study. The dismissal of the entire genre as, at best, a literary curiosity, at worst,
popular trash, continues to shadow its academic reputation, even today, when
Gothic novels are taught widely on university syllabuses and a journal like Gothic
Studies exists solely for its exploration and analysis. Now, however, it is not
Radcliffe and her eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors who are dismissed by more traditionally-inclined colleagues, who generally respect the commitment of any undergraduate who manages to complete The Mysteries of
Udolpho during a busy semester. Rather, contemporary developments of Gothic
into the wider culture – whether the fiction of Anne Rice and Stephen King, or the
comics, music and subcultural styles that are most particularly imbued with a
contemporary Gothic sensibility – are still sometimes regarded as carrying less
academic weight.
A corrective to this tendency, however, was issued by a clutch of texts published
in the mid- to late 1990s, including Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire (1994),
Mark Edmundson’s Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the
Culture of the Gothic (1997), Christoph Grunenberg’s edited collection Gothic:
Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (1997), and numerous articles by Fred Botting (published in Gothic Studies among other places).1 Now,
Gothic in contemporary popular culture is a burgeoning area of research, as the
enthusiastic response to the Call for Papers for this special issue demonstrates. The
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general move towards understanding Gothic as a set of discourses rather than
simply as a genre has no doubt assisted in this development.
Gothic has arguably reached saturation point in contemporary popular culture.
Its imagery and narrative strategies are everywhere, deployed in haute couture
fashion shows and shoot-’em-up computer games. For Mark Edmundson, writing
in Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic narratives can even be discerned in American
chat shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer, in which individual tales of incest and
trauma are countered with a doctrine of facile transcendence. This omnipresence
is not necessarily a new phenomenon. The history of cinema has been, from the
beginning, bound up with the Gothic: one of the earliest films ever made, George
Méliès’ Le Manoir du Diable, from 1896, centred on the appearance of a vampire
bat. The close relationship between the history of the vampire and the history of
cinema, as Ken Gelder has argued in Reading the Vampire (1994), is reiterated in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a film that in its casting of
then Goth icon Winona Ryder seemed all too aware of its own contemporary
popular appeal. The existence of a ‘Goth’ subculture that draws its stylistic
influences from Gothic fiction, usually via cinema, has been noted for almost three
decades. Despite the frequent association of popular cultural Gothic with subcultural Goth, however, Gothic influences in popular culture are not just an underground phenomenon: by the early twenty-first century they can be found in high
street fashion, children’s toys, rap music, even advertising. Gothic in contemporary
popular culture is still recognisable as the Gothic of Walpole and Radcliffe, Shelley
and Stoker – but it has also changed, evolving new contexts and new meanings, and
requiring new forms of analysis and comment. The articles in this special issue
attempt to do precisely this.
These essays traverse multiple media, from literature and criticism to film,
music and new media. Many of them are defined by their refusal to be restricted
to one genre or medium in the conventional sense. Gothic artefacts of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries cannot be put into convenient boxes,
if indeed Gothic artefacts ever could. The interplay between film, TV series,
videogame, novelisation, comics, fan fiction, websites and merchandising found
in a site of the contemporary Gothic like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, is
arguably only a more accelerated version of the theatrical adaptations and semiplagiarised fictions that surrounded the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. New ways of conceptualising Gothic networks and
interactions are offered in this volume by Jason Whittaker, who redeploys the ageold Gothic trope of the web in the context of the Internet, and Trevor Holmes,
who explores Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a means of articulating the relationships between Gothic narrative, rock biography, the Goth
subject, and the disavowal or othering of Goths. It should be stressed that the distinction between literary Gothic and individual participants in Goth subculture,
which is touched on by several of the writers here, is by no means a clear or
straightforward one, and while the link between the two is implicit, different
configurations of Goth/Gothic emerge.
Introduction: Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture
3
Indeed, the problem with this accelerated age in which Gothic seems to bleed
across media and infect any number of other genres, is that it can become difficult
to distinguish what is not Gothic. At times it seems as if anything we wish may be
subsumed within its generous embrace; the category can be stretched to include
more or less anything with a smidgeon of the macabre, the haunted or the
grotesque. These articles all define Gothic in different ways, opening up the field
for debate, but they do not take it for granted. Alexandra Warwick in particular
takes up the polemical argument against too-easy application of the Gothic, in the
opening essay in this selection. She argues that Gothic has become over-exposed as
a critical concept, and is in danger of losing its meaning. Contemporary literary
critics participate in a cultural climate where ‘Feeling Gothicky’ is apparently
enough to justify the designation of any given text or object as Gothic: Gothic is no
longer marginal but rather ubiquitous. Moreover, for Warwick, contemporary
Gothic is produced in the shadow of psychoanalysis and its widespread bastardisation as the discourse of therapy. Thus the conditions of Gothic production are
changed: we no longer seek to repress trauma but rather seek it out: ‘the experience of trauma, and not the healing of it, is that which will make us whole.’ In our
desire to be haunted, we reverse the experience of repression that once marked our
understanding of what it meant to ‘feel Gothicky’.
In contrast, Emma McEvoy’s piece on Nick Cave investigates what it might
mean for an artist once firmly associated with both Goth subculture and literary
Gothic (Cave fronted underground bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds,
as well as authoring the highly-acclaimed 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel)
to repudiate this image. What does it mean, musically and lyrically, to stop being
Gothic? What might be gained, and what lost, in such an exchange of sensibilities? Interestingly, McEvoy’s essay is comparable with Holmes’s in that the
popular cultural subjects under discussion (Cave, the rock singer Courtney Love,
and the novelist Poppy Z. Brite) all seek to distance themselves from Goth, to relegate it to the past or displace it into a loathsome other. If, as Warwick argues,
certain kinds of contemporary criticism want everything to be Gothic, other
strands of popular discourse seem to want to disavow Goth, borrowing from
Gothic narrative to construct Goth itself as horrific anachronism disrupting a
more progressive present.
The relationship between Gothic and modernity is investigated at greater length
by Fred Botting in ‘Hypocrite Vampire . . .’, in which he explores the way that Rice
turns the familiar vampire tale into ‘an account of modernity . . . on the cusp of
the hypermodern’. Arguably, no single twentieth-century author has embodied the
popular Gothic as thoroughly as Anne Rice. Nevertheless Rice’s Vampire Chronicles
have been underserved by criticism. Botting offers a response to this by attempting to identify just why it is that Rice’s fictions, for all their popularity, give off an
air of exhaustion. Reading Rice’s vampires through Walter Benjamin’s discussion
of the flâneur, Botting argues that Rice’s vampires are inveterate consumers, not
only of blood but also of leisure, fashion and all the other pleasures of late capitalism, mired in the postmodern logic of simulation, nostalgia and pastiche.
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While for Botting, here and elsewhere, contemporary Gothic is characterised by
its redundancy, and by a waning of affect, for others Gothic continues to provide
more positive modes of construction and invention.2 The net.goths described by
Jason Whittaker, for example, are consumers but also producers of Goth identities,
using the tools, and languages, provided by new technologies to explore the potential of Gothic subcultures in cyberspace. For others in this volume, Gothic discourses enable a particular critical purchase on cultural objects, revealing fresh
insights into familiar themes. For Melissa Iocco and Michael A. Chaney and Jason
H. Lindquist, Gothic discourses shed new light on contemporary constructions of
white, western masculinity. Iocco examines the films Fight Club and Crash as
enabling a perverse masculinity through exploitation of Gothic tropes. Michael A.
Chaney and Jason H. Lindquist, on the other hand, discuss the hip hop artist
Eminem, not normally associated with a ‘Goth’ subculture, as drawing on Gothic
aesthetics. Concluding that the thinly-fictionalised film of Eminem’s life, 8 Mile,
revisits the tropes of the imperial Gothic, they demonstrate that Gothic discourses
continue to resonate with contemporary constructions of race, as well as gender.
This special issue is intended to signal a way forward: a diverse selection of
themes, subject-matter, arguments and theoretical approaches that can but gesture
towards the enormous research potential of Gothic in contemporary popular
culture. It should by no means be regarded as offering a comprehensive or even
fully representative account of the kinds of research now being done in this area:
rather, it indicates the rich fertility of the field, and offers directions for further
study.
Notes
1 Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London, Routledge, 1994); Mark Edmundson,
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Gothic (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 1997); Christoph Grunenberg, (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations
of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (London, MIT Press, 1997); Fred Botting, Gothic
(London, Routledge, 1996); Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (the Redundancy of Gothic)’,
Gothic Studies, 1/2 (December 1999), 139–55; Fred Botting, ‘Candygothic’, in Fred
Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer 2001), pp. 133–52.
2 See particularly Botting, ‘Future Gothic’.
Address for correspondence:
Catherine Spooner, Department of English and Creative Writing, Bowland College, Lancaster
University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, United Kingdom. Email: c.spooner@lancaster. ac.uk