Horror and the Evil of Banality

 

Where was the belief that evil can wear a humdrum face codified? And does horror fiction provide an additional insight - an invitation to probe beneath the mundane and to acknowledge that the mundane has its own special horror?

Hannah Arendt is one of the greatest political theorists of the 20^th century. Arendt was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime in 1937, eventually landing in America. Her flight from her home country followed an arrest by the Gestapo. Two of Arendt’s books – 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem – are among the best ever written about Europe’s noxious fog of totalitarianism, the unspeakable horrors of Hitler’s regime, and what mechanism(s) brought him to power. Given her brilliance and her life experience, these were phenomena that she was uniquely qualified to analyze. Of course, this is an idea that Arendt, given her wry cynicism and existentialist bent, probably would have vigorously disputed.

The finer details of Arendt’s story are remarkable. Her teacher, mentor, and lover was Martin Heidegger, who eventually became a Nazi and who remained unapologetic and an advocate of German nationalism until the day he died (he is also widely considered one of modernity’s greatest philosophers, despite the opacity of his ideas and the obfuscatory prolixity of his prose). She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1937 but survived the experience. She lived in Paris before it was conquered, and then made the Atlantic passage to America. She lived at the hinge point of enormous historical forces, and was equipped with the awesome intellect, razor-sharp wit, and gallows humor to speak about them incisively.

Hannah Arendt, genius

Most people know Hannah Arendt for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her collection of reports from the 1961 – 1962 Israeli trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The court’s judicial panel convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang. Arendt’s Eichmann described the bland blend of meaningless cliches that constituted the mild-mannered monster’s last words. She wrote: "It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." [emphasis mine]

I am a keen student of power and evil (but I repeat myself), and Arendt is one of my favorite writers on the subject. She was a fearless explorer of the darkest reaches of human depravity, and helped a shocked and disbelieving world come to grips with the grey, bloodless bureaucracy that undergirded the baroque cruelty of Europe’s death factories.

For a thorough – and thoroughly fascinating – modern equivalent of this, *please* check out this episode and this episode of the NY Times’ podcast “Caliphate.” While one of Rukmini Callimachi’s sources turned out to be unreliable, that doesn’t bear on the two episodes I linked to, and no rational p-person would dispute Callimachi’s courageous efforts in Mosul. She followed behind US troops as they re-took the city. As a result, she was able to collect a mountain of something whose existence surprised me: ISIS’ huge bureaucracy and love of paperwork. As with Eichmann, don’t let the clerks and supervisors fool you. ISIS’ reputation for brutality and grotesque sadism is well-deserved.

ISIS recruitment and personnel performance records,
recovered from Mosul, Iraq after the Islamic State was driven out..

Like Arendt’s and Callimachi’s journalism, horror fiction has thoroughly explored the bloody shores of human inhumanity, often dressing the carnage up in ways that provide more exaggerated and easy-to-identify villains than reality offers (ISIS excluded). For the most part, horror sticks to the monstrous in human or inhuman form, or plays off of religious, scientific, or social terror. Some horror fiction, however, tries to strike at the heart of what Arendt was speaking to. It does so by focusing on the evil of banality, if you will: the horror of the bureaucrat of evil, the civil servant of darkness, and what they imply about our lives: the humanity-blunting and thus monstrous subtext of all such structures.

A perfect example of such banality horror is The Cabin in the Woods (mild spoilers ahead). Cabin’s conceit is brilliant. In one plotline, we see the on-its-face version of the titular cabin in the woods, with its collection of teenage archetypes and horror-movie ghouls. In another plotline, we discover that the events at the cabin are a horror story for those teens but just a day’s work for a gaggle of tie-wearing, bespectacled office drones. These grey souls are mid-level functionaries in a vast conspiracy that serves the elder gods – but requires paper-pushers. It’s a well-executed trick, one that allows cheeky commentary about horror movie tropes, but also encourages us to think about the nobodies who make all sorts of horrors function, from the oil industry to the foreclosure industry to the prison-industrial complex.

from The Cabin in the Woods

While it is less overtly concerned with “evil,” the vision of the afterlife presented in Beetlejuice by director Tim Burton is less overtly concerned with “evil.” Still, it presents the afterlife as a dreary limbo of endless paperwork, crowded waiting rooms and long lines, and, of course, psychopomp bureaucrats. Not just any bureaucrats: the kind who hand out helpful, cheerful, and politically correct literature:

from Beetlejuice

This is a tradition in horror-comedy that has long continued, with popular films like R.I.P.D. (based on the Dark Horse comic book of the same name) and less-appreciated offerings like Monkeybone (also based on a comic – Kaja Blackley’s Dark Town).

The prototypical exploration of the evil of banality is Franz Kafka’s The Trial (although I’d be willing to hear an argument for Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls). The Trial is not generally recognized as a horror novel, but Kafka’s bleak vision of inhuman legal forces and petty authoritarians is certainly tinged by horror. Kafka’s dissection of K.’s bourgeois entitlement and his skewering of a legal system top-heavy with unaccountable functionaries unfolds in an absurd and nightmarish atmosphere, and the story’s culmination is certainly terrifying.

“The system” as portrayed by Kafka is monstrous, a many-headed beast all-too-willing to crush citizens beneath its weight. Of course, such horror ultimately relies on the good-natured brutality of civil servants. In Kafka’s existentialist horror story, it’s not the mindless hunger of some slavering predator that consumes our protagonist. Nor is it the spiteful hatred of a masked slasher that brings ruin. Rather, innocents are swallowed alive by the State. They are dispatched by a man in a mask, to be sure. But the masked man is more Jack Ketch than Jason Voorhees: a duly-appointed executioner backed by the full force (and incomprehensible rules) of the legal system. In the view of State, law, and executioner, everything is going exactly as it should.

the File Room in Kafka's The Trial

For my money, this is a much more terrifying portrait of evil than some cackling, wild-eyed maniac or skulking boogeyman. One can outrun or fight a murderer or a monster. What recourse does one have against a government firmly established and with its roots deeply sunk? I suppose that Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta offers an optimistic and fiery answer to that question. I find the fate of poor Winston in George Orwell’s 1984 more realistic, unfortunately.

“The banality of evil” is a brilliant framing of political violence and the depravity that convulsed Europe in the 20th Century, and the community of political theorists rightly honors Arendt for its articulation. It may be equally important to rearrange the phrase as a way to reflect on how atrocities are made and remain palatable to the average citizen. Mass incarceration, concentration camps for immigrant children, a cruel and racist execution machine that often murders the innocent, and police who also murder the innocent (but Con brio). The everyday terrors of the system “working as it is supposed to” all too often blend into the background of American life.

In other words, it's not enough in the age of marketing, propaganda, buzz, bullshit, and "spin rooms" to acknowledge that many perpetrators of atrocities are boring, more-or-less empty folk "just doing their job" over the screams of victims. We need to examine the ubiquitous, the seemingly simple (or magical) objects and processes around us. 

FoxConn campus with "Suicide Nets" attached 

For example: I assume that the welfare of the natural world concerns you (and if it doesn't, well, try not to get in the way). I also assume you have a smartphone, and use a computer and/or tablet and/or TV and/or... I could go on. If you have such concerns and use such devices, I would encourage you to look into rare earth elements and how they are mined. In China or the US. Or, if you're one of those bleeding hearts who care about people more than our environment, you may consider the dire working conditions of those who manufacture such wonders. The above photo is from Foxconn's Shenzhen Longhua campus, where the workplace was so bad and the shifts so brutal that a flood of deaths by suicide led them to put up netting to avoid worker shortages. One of the brilliant ideas that made your iPhone goes by the colloquial sobriquet "suicide nets." Like so much that undergirds our convenient, socially mediated existence, such atrocities are tucked out of the way - in this instance (as in so, so many), they've been tucked away well out sight in foreign countries.

That’s no coincidence. Even a cursory examination of warfare, for example, will teach one that some horrors are designed to disappear, to become "just part of life" and banal. We would do well to meditate on the real-life horrors that live just beneath the surface of our supposedly-boring, supposedly-smoothly-run reality. Just as we have come to understand the banality of evil, we should contemplate the evil of banality, and never let atrocities become “normal.”