Cringe and Unusual
On being faithful to monsters and being embarrassingly earnest.
Ram Dass said that when we meet someone and fall in love, we assume that the love is something to do with them. Actually, he says, the love was within us all along, and that person just acts as a portal for us to access the love we already had, we just experience it through them.
When I was 11, there was a boy in my swimming club. He was two years older than me. My friends described him as a ‘greebo’. He had long wavy hair and wore all black. I started listening to HIM because he (or perhaps one of his friends?) attached a Heartagram patch to his backpack. I spoke to him only a handful of times, attentively listening to him explain music to me. Mostly I watched him from across the swimming pool taking his shirt off to do life saving drills. But he opened a portal in heart for a love that I’ve had unbridled access to ever since: a love for the macabre.
Within a short span of seeing him, I threw out my sporty tomboy clothes and replaced them with all black. Black clothing is the longest love affair of my life. I bought tacky nail polish and black lipsticks from market stalls. I had a goth mentor who taught me make-up application and made me playlists burned onto CDs. Every halloween my mom would take me to the Disney store to shop the Nightmare Before Christmas collection, or to Claire’s Accessories for their spooky hair clips that I would wear all year round.
Now I’m an adult and haven’t stepped foot in a Claire’s Accessories in years, but the girl who buys ghoulish hair accessories grows into the woman who religiously buys “Witches Brew” themed candles from TK Maxx every October. I no longer sit in Pigeon Park, the graveyard turned goth hang out spot in Birmingham, but I still walk around cemeteries any chance I get. Gomez and Morticia are still my ideal couple. Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, Heathers, Dracula and Stranger Things is my beauty muse forever.
Most people, at some point, grow out of their teenage subcultures. My emo friends at high school had grown out of it before we’d even finished our GCSEs. Yet I linger on, haunting TK Maxx’s halloween aisle, wondering if I can convince my boyfriend to let me get shot glasses with anatomical drawings on them. Why is this? I often point to the fact that I have dark features and sickly pale skin. Pluto, the planet furthest from the light, is dominant in my birth chart as well. Lucy shares a meaning with Lucifer (also connected to Pluto), bearer of light in the darkness. In short, I was born into the gothic aesthetic.
But there’s a problem with aligning yourself with monsters and the FBI’s most unwanted. Black clothing treads a fine line where, if you play it right, you look like you could be a fashion editor. If you play it wrong, it can just be, well, cringe. Goth and emo are super cringe. Particularly if you’re over 25. The halloween section of TK Maxx is cringe. Vampires are cringe. Tim Burton movies are cringe. HIM is cringe. It’s all just really embarrassing. People in their forties with cobweb jewellery and New Rocks? Ultra cringe. The boy I fancied in swimming club? I looked him up on facebook and he’s still got long greasy hair and an Avenged Sevenfold Deathbat tattoo. It’s too embarrassing for me to show him to even my closest friends. Yet the urge to dress everything in black velvet persists. The pull to wield death and decay as an aesthetic for me never dies.
Holding death so close at all times could be seen as an attempt to befriend it: to ally oneself with the guarantee of one’s own destruction. But more often than not it’s a kitschy parade that points somewhere near death, but never actually looks it squarely in the face. Aestheticising death doesn’t tend to prepare anyone for it more than those who wear pastels.
We as a culture are grossly unprepared for death. A walk around a cemetery will show you what I mean. There tends to be two ways that graveyards demonstrate how we as a culture shrink away from death.
In a graveyard in Prague, I saw graves that were the most fantastical monuments to the eternal inhabitants within. Huge tombs and statues boast the containment of some rich Czech person, who has surely drifted from all memory by now, but whose grave stands as one last grab at worthiness. Looking at them hundreds of years on, it seems strange that anyone would spend this much money on their dying ego. Anything to not face the fact that they will become increasingly irrelevant each day after their passing.
The other way to smooth over the transition from living to departed is to put a trite rhyme or passage on the grave of the deceased. Usually something about how those we love are never truly gone. It’s the Hallmark branded version of death. At a graveyard in Sheffield, I noticed three headstones in a row had the same limerick on:
“Those we lost are never far away
When we remember them everyday.”
The graves had no relation to each other, except that the families of the deceased found comfort in the same sugarcoated passage. Both options are attempts to not face the fact that the person entombed is rotting and absolutely gone.
Guillermo Del Torro, the spokesperson for monsters everywhere, said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech that “I have always been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them. Monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection.”
This is the most astute look at why some of us are drawn to the haunted. It’s no coincidence that people who are attracted to such subcultures are usually already “othered” in society, and made to feel like monsters due to how they look or to any uncomfortable emotions they may have. Gothic subcultures often focus not on looking pretty but actively hide the facial features and the figure of the person wearing the clothes. There is comfort in having your hair hide your face and all genders wearing similar ill-fitting clothes.
Music of this aesthetic tends to be “is this for real?” levels of earnest, talking about all the emotions that one might feel (depression, fear of death, rejection, rage) but that are not generally spoken about. Look to the high camp emo of My Chemical Romance who wrote a concept album about dying of cancer, or another about two lovers separated by death only to be reunited if the survivor brought 1000 evil souls to the devil. At no point are these stories delivered with anything but pure earnest expression, no winking at the audience or breaking the fourth wall. Gerard Way was wheeled onto stage on a gurney for every show on The Black Parade world tour, proving that yes, this is for real.
Love stories between monsters (The Shape of Water, Edward Scissorhands, and, of course, The Addams Family) let those of us who are torn apart inside hope that one day someone will love us with all our ghastliness. The gross that is within me loves the gross that is within you. There’s nothing more romantic than that, except perhaps a shared coffin where the flesh will rot away from our hands and leave two skeletons forever entwined.
The macabre goes where the sun doesn’t shine, where there is no fresh air. The easy breezy mundane is gone and all that is left is the torment of being a meat sack with turbulent, uncontrollable emotions. Ghouls and monsters allow us to get in touch with the dark mulch inside us. Perhaps this is why some of us, particularly folk with an earnest depressive streak like mine, are drawn to the aesthetic of the macabre. Like Pluto and Nosferatu, we are banished from the light. We long, and fear, to flash the monster inside us, and hope someone will see us and love us anyway.
If we allow ourselves to sit with the yearning rather than just filling the hole with pumpkin scented candles, the strange and unusual can become our spiritual teachers. The leading edge of my current spiritual work is tapping into my unfelt rage. My feelings of rage and despair are so intense that usually I push them away, and end up feeling bored. When we curtail our ability to feel the depths of sadness, we also cannot feel the heights of happiness. Because I struggle to be faithful to my monsters, I struggle to be faithful with life.
But perhaps I can extend Del Torro’s quote and say: monsters also teach us that it’s okay to be cringe. Somewhere we decided that the most earnest expressions are embarrassing, and the only way to be is cooly detached or polite to the point of banality. In our life we can build monuments to our living egos in the form of careers, curated Instagram grids, perfect relationships, or however else we distract ourselves from our inner ghoulishness. All things that, like the grand graves of Prague, will only increase with irrelevance the further ahead we travel in time. Engaging with our inner monsters is hard work, and involves constantly letting the ego die, offered up on the alter of inner transformation. Only through this will we ever be truly ready for death.
But whilst we are building the capacity to embrace our own destruction, perhaps the only way to really live is to buy the shot glasses with skeletons on them. Embrace the fact that you’re actually cringe and not at all a fashion editor, and why does it matter anyway? No one will write about how embarrassing you were on your grave. Why not befriend your most embarrassing urges and flash your inner cringe to the world?
So for this holiday season where the veil between the mortal world and the cringe is at its thinnest, I challenge you to be your cringiest self for halloween this year, and long may you celebrate your ultimate irrelevance.
Things to contemplate:
In making a family that was opposite to the normal suburban household in every way, creator of The Addams Family made Morticia and Gomez passionately in love with each other long into marriage
When Billy Corgan sang, “we’ll crucify the insincere tonight”
Connect with your personal lineage by reclaiming a monster from your ancestral native homeland.
Ryan Gosling, Hollywood’s golden retriever with washboard abs, has released a full album of spooky horror themed songs
And some key watching:
Post-modern Prometheus S5E5 (trigger warning for sexual assault); Bad Blood S5E12 - The X Files
Funeral of Hearts - HIM
Helena - My Chemical Romance
Beautiful x