Much of my blogging these days aims to help me think through ideas for the final chapter of my dissertation. As I write, I have become quite intrigued by a phenomenon I call “systemic monstrosity” or “monstrous systems” – groups of people who are monstrous, or instances where the sum of all our monstrosity is greater than its individual parts. But what of those “parts?” There is, admittedly, a danger to labelling a human being a monster. As I discussed with Michael’s class today, and as has probably appeared myriad times on this blog, culture generally considers the monster the ultimate other, not only the “not-I” but the “not-us,” that which we define ourselves against. When any human being is placed in this category, treating that human humanely becomes less of a concern, and atrocity toward the individual becomes more “justifiable,” by our own otherizing, de-personalizing logic. And yet, monstrous individuals—individuals who serve the same function in the narrative as a literally inhuman monster—are abundant in horror films. But what about instances where the group becomes monstrous? We are innately social animals, and the frightening aspect of monstrous systems is that it distorts those links to other individuals that we depend on and turns them into agents of depravity and evil instead of good. That which Judith Butler calls our “bodily vulnerability”—our innate connection to and dependence on other people—is exploited, and that very vulnerability becomes a conduit for evil, instead of good.
But what about “systems” or groups of people in horror movies that are unusual, different, even unsettling sometimes, but without being completely monstrous? I’ve decided, thus far, that such examples, while they fall out of the purview of the exact phenomenon that I’m examining, at the same time, by providing a counterpoint, serve to further elucidate that definition of what I am studying. The people on the island in The Wicker Man, under the guard of Lord Summerisle, certainly have systems of practices and beliefs that we consider unusual. They also engage in a relatively disturbing human sacrifice by the end of the film. At the same time, they are not a group of exploitative, manipulative people—except toward intrusive outsiders, like the main character Howie, who flies to the island, scrutinizes its denizens’ practices, and forces his way into the life of an island he doesn’t want to know or understand (in the name of investigating a kidnapping).
Which is basically the plot of the Wicker Man, if you’ve not seen it already. A Christian Police officer, Howie, flies to a sequestered island after hearing a report of a missing child (from the island) named Rowan Morrison. The cinematic viewer gets multiple glimpses into the strange, often highly sexual practices of the island as Howie works his way from person to person, from pub owner to school teacher to island leader, both demanding answers that he believes will help him locate Rowan and heaping aspersions onto the islanders’ non-“normate” practices. Interestingly—significantly, even—Howie looks ridiculous throughout most of the film. The islanders are comfortable with their way of life, and each individual that Howie speaks to appears intelligent and unphased by his presence, which we learn, by the end of the film, that they were preparing for all along. Indeed, at the film’s conclusion, we learn that the island’s inhabitants sent a false missing child report to the mainland to attract Howie, a still virginal, Christian man in a position of significant authority who they estimated would make the perfect—perhaps the ultimate—human sacrifice to save their crops.
What interests me about The Wicker Man is that in a sense, the group of outsiders, since they have their own island and have power over the space that comprises it, are actually diegetically on the inside—not a marginalized group, at all. And the character who would usually have the most power in the movie, Howie, has, in a sense, very little power. All of which I’ll put in conversation with Butler’s theory, in a moment. In an abstract to her December 14th, 2023 article, “Organizing Vulnerability: Exploring Judith Butler’s Conceptualization of Vulnerability to Study Organizations,” in the journal “Gender, Work, and Organization,” Isabella Scheibmayr presents a concise but highly useful overview of Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability. Instead of putting into my own words what is so usefully stated already, I’ve provided Scheibmayr’s abstract below. While, yes, I’ve read excerpts of Butler’s book before and absolutely plan on re-reading it as I finish my dissertation, I admit I am hasty to finish this post, and as such, am utilizing sources that appear on google search right now instead of reading the original text. It is what it is. In any case, this is Scheibmayr’s abstract:
This paper argues that vulnerability as conceptualized by Judith Butler is a useful lens to study organizations. Judith Butler conceptualizes vulnerability as both universally shared human condition and individually experienced, thereby describes how vulnerability is both a bodily ontology (we are all vulnerable due to our human bodies being dependent on each other to support us), and an epistemic frame (through vulnerability we can know), resulting in an ethical response-ability (to not hurt one another). Vulnerability, though universally shared, is individually experienced and unequally distributed, because it depends on what Judith Butler calls “social infrastructures”. Organizations and their organizing practices constitute such social infrastructures and at the same time depend on them. Using a vulnerability lens makes it possible to study how organizations co-constitute vulnerability and the positionality that they inhabit toward vulnerability.
To Butler, then, it is our innate intersubjectivity that partially defines us, especially from an ontological standpoint, but also makes us vulnerable; our connectedness to one another, though perhaps a source of strength from the standpoint of proverbial wisdom, is also, in a sense, the opposite. In college one of my friends talked about a theory of “the spider web”—we are all connected, and we help or hurt one another, for better or worse, sometimes without meaning to—and Butler’s theory reminds me, in some sense, of that concept. No man is an island, so to speak, and even the so-called hermit indelibly lives in a “social infrastructure” of other vulnerable bodies and is affected by the existence of those bodies. This vulnerability is an “epistemic frame”—a way of knowing or understanding things—but also comes with an imperative similar to that of the medical field: do no harm. I haven’t read Butler enough to discuss what she considers “harm” and how possible, through her own theory, it actually is “not to hurt each other,” but I imagine the whole aim of the theory, and its use as a way of knowing and a moral imperative, is to help us hurt each other less—in the long run, and in the big picture.
Of course, Butler’s theory provides a brilliant argument for the problem with systemic injustice (the presence of which the theory also acknowledges—and implies is irrevocable to an extent—by asserting that different individuals in a given social infrastructure are vulnerable to different degrees), and it also provides a fascinating lens not only for looking at actual interpersonal organizations, but at imagined system (or, systemic monstrosity) in fictional narratives. In my mind, as I’ve stated already, a monstrous infrastructure exploits our innate and irrevocable vulnerability to no good end, precisely, in fact, by aiming to do harm instead of mitigating or eradicating it.
In the Wicker Man, conversely, the group of inhabitants on the sequestered island have managed to make themselves rather invulnerable to outsiders, without exploiting their vulnerability to one another. Undoubtedly interpersonal conflicts occur on Summmerisle, but they are not the features of the story, a story which depicts life on the island as one where infrastructure, though not necessarily resulting in equality among all citizens, does not make one section of the population significantly more vulnerable than the others. It is an island where, in a sense, everyone is cared for, which is perhaps an alarming observation since I’m discussing what is generally considered a horror film. Think about most of The Wicker Man, though: while the last scene, where the outsider, Howie, is burned in the wooden edifice is horrific, most of the film is not. There seems nothing monstrous, nothing horrific about the island denizens, and this is especially true when we learn that Rowan Morrison is alive, that her disappearance was a farcical phenomenon constructed by the islanders to lure Howie—to tempt the (almost exhaustingly) normate white, male, straight, cisgender, (virgin), Christian cop to come to them. Indeed, the whole lie of Rowan’s disappearance that the island inhabitants have constructed works so well because Howie believes that these “different,” non-Christian, non-normate people are inherently corrupt and would, indeed, sacrifice a child (from their own community, nonetheless). The denizens of Summer Isle then, perpetually and astonishingly clever, create a lie that utilizes their own vulnerability as outsiders in a broader (perhaps Scottish national) sociocultural system, while simultaneously utilizing this conceptual (but not physical) vulnerability to make them far less vulnerable.
If I’ve over-complicated elements of the theory in making such an observation, it is perhaps more straightforward, and more important, to discuss more about the island’s relationship to Howie. In this sense, and through the lens of vulnerability, the system in the Wicker Man, and the fictional narrative it creates, becomes a marked inversion of the day to day “normate” that one might find in a typical, patriarchal, capitalist sociocultural infrastructure. While on the Scottish mainland, the white, male, cisgender, Christian cop would, theoretically, be less “vulnerable” to others than, say, a young female child, an adolescent girl who is a member of a pagan religious group, the exact opposite is true in the Wicker Man. The interpersonal system in the Wicker Man, because the collective “non-normate,” the pagan “deviants,” find strength through their intersubjectivity, their bodily vulnerability, it is Howie, who, in part because he insists on bodily autonomy and freedom from the belief systems and practices that bind the group, becomes the most vulnerable member of the island—and who is eventually burned in a ritual. Rowan Morrison was never actually in danger—the whole time, she was protected by the society—while the white Christian cop, in the ceremony at the film’s conclusion, is visibly rendered the “fool” when he wears Punch the fool’s costume to disguise himself in the festival.
Howie has a level of bodily vulnerability on Summer Isle not equal to, but far greater than that of the so-called fool in most stories. The interpersonal system becomes the inversion, then—the source through which the normate is inverted and made the different, the deviant, the marginalized, the oppressed. And while killing another human being for ritual sacrifice is never—by Butler’s theory or my own estimation—morally sanctioned, it is precisely the island’s rejection of the normate, its embrace of the margins, its ability to invert typical levels of bodily vulnerability, that partially lessens its depiction as wholly monstrous, even if, by the end of the film, the islanders are, definitionally, murderers.
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