1. At the beginning of Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), a young couple walks into the woods in search of an object which recently flashed across the night sky, interrupting their make-out session. The object is a circus tent and they wander inside to find a futuristic funhouse decorated with dazzling lights, pastel stripes, and cotton candy cocoon pods shaped like punching bags. They rip one open to find a human body: suspended, pink, entrapped.
2. In an industrial and candy-coloured flashback, Suicide Squad (2016) feeds us glimpses of Harley Quinn’s backstory. As the therapist Dr. Harlene Quinzel, she falls in love with her patient, The Joker, and leaps into a vat of acid to prove it. The acid transmutes her—a corrosive and technicolor process—into Harley Quinn, a harlequin criminal. The Joker and Harley Quinn’s transformations reveal that costumes are not strictly coverings, personas, or masks as their disruptive bodies gothically and acrobatically perform what capitalist society—the upright world of those laws upheld by Batman—routinely casts out or subsumes: anarchic overflow, exaggeration, adornment, bodies turned inside out, reorganized chaos.
3. In “Four Your Unpleasure: The Hauteur-Couture of Goth,” Mark Fisher writes about modern culture’s tendency to “strip away all signs and rituals so as to reach the unadorned thing-in-itself.” Goth’s “trash-aristocratic” aesthetic works against this purification, overflowing the slick now’s lack of ritual, embellishment, and serious play by using “…dressing up as re-ritualization, a recovery of the surface of the body as the site for scarification and decoration.” The clown, joker, and harlequin divulge gothic delirium where behind every costume, more costume. As a therapist, Dr. Harlene Quinzel operated in the realm of psychological interiority. As Harley Quinn, she gets turned inside-out, privatized and interiorized psychology becoming immediately visible and social. The body, no longer a closed container, becomes porous, open, and excessive, exchanging information with its surroundings.
4. In Suicide Squad, the acid bath is magical-corrosive procedure that seems to turn her body inside-out, grotesque psychologies made public. Scary seductive, their madness is Gotham’s madness magnified. Acid bathed and flung from locked institutions into the streets to run amok, ROTTEN scrawled across a jawline. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han argues that current collective obsessions with individual psychology foster atomization and narcissism. Clowns, carnivals, magicians, and comedians are ambiguous, disruptive edge-dwellers (“Transgression is a general feature of celebratory ritual,” writes Han) with the potential to halt homogenized clock time and wake us communally to the absurdities of the present.
5. A circus that never ends becomes a tomb. In Clown (2016), a father saves his son’s birthday party after the hired clown cancels, finding a clown costume at a local antique shop and donning it himself. After the party when he tries to undress, it won’t budge. It’s fused to his body, transforming him into a killer clown from the outside-in. “It’s not a costume. It’s the skin and hair of a demon,” says the costume dealer.
6. In a section entitled “Celebration and Madness” in Newly Born Woman, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément write: “The mythology of the celebration contains the inversion of daily life in its development: feast, binge, drunkenness, dissolute ingestion of food, and regurgitation all demonstrate that it is not simply a matter of getting unusual pleasures but of pushing them to their very limit.” Celebration and feast, when stretched to their edges, circle the drain, become horror, limit-experience, vomitous.
7. Pennywise, the dancing, child-consuming clown in It (1990), the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, hypnotizes kids with his deadlights. His eyes turn into white lights which freeze you in place, stupefied. In Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, Anne Dufourmantelle claims that “enchantment cannot be organized. It is what can never become the object of power.” But enchantment does become the object of power, carnival becomes crypt and waking-up-to-the-world becomes oblivion, eyes lit-up, deadened, in some of these party horror films as Killer Klowns cocoon their victims in thick webs of cotton candy and Pennywise’s act bedazzles children from below: “Down here, we all float…”
8. Nietzsche: “To float! To err! To be mad!”
Heath Ledger’s Joker: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”
Nietzsche: “Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?”
9. The jester’s gallows humour is truth spoken from beneath, usually quickly, passing-through, opening up a channel, another variety of light, then gone. In the first episode of the TV series Carnivàle (2003-2005), a newcomer says he won’t be staying with the travelling carnival permanently because “I’m no carny,” Sofie, a tarot card reader, responds: “The people in these towns, they’re asleep. All day at work, at home. Sleepwalkers. We wake them up.” The process of waking up to a sacred instant via the disruption of ordinary routine: when the fair comes to town in The Funhouse, when the dad first puts on his clown costume in Clown, when the carnival rolls through various towns in Carnivàle, when Harley Quinn first wakes up in the acid vat, transmuted from psychologist to visible evidence of society’s psychological ills. What happens when the carnival rolls on and on, never stops, when we cannot leave or when we don’t know we’re there, when the lines between work and play, celebration and weekday, day and night, get erased?
10. “Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers and subterranean passages,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin in Carnival Ambivalence. The harlequin body, the body at the banquet or feast, disrupts, according to Bakhtin, social hierarchies through exaggeration and excess. A body ever in a state of becoming. A body as passage where passage is light, encryption, daze, trap, shock, deliverance, vivification, spillage… where horror and humor are electric twins spinning transmission, underpass, and drift. This everted body troubles the modern image of a body atomized, individualized, pathologized. A body at a limit: on a high wire, down a drain.
11. Carnival, from Medieval Latin’s carne vale (flesh, farewell!) where the candy-coloured line between liberatory release from daily life’s lights and laws and getting trapped, released from flesh, is flimsy.
Go to sleep! Wake up!
1. At the beginning of Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), a young couple walks into the woods in search of an object which recently flashed across the night sky, interrupting their make-out session. The object is a circus tent and they wander inside to find a futuristic funhouse decorated with dazzling lights, pastel stripes, and cotton candy cocoon pods shaped like punching bags. They rip one open to find a human body: suspended, pink, entrapped.
2. In an industrial and candy-coloured flashback, Suicide Squad (2016) feeds us glimpses of Harley Quinn’s backstory. As the therapist Dr. Harlene Quinzel, she falls in love with her patient, The Joker, and leaps into a vat of acid to prove it. The acid transmutes her—a corrosive and technicolor process—into Harley Quinn, a harlequin criminal. The Joker and Harley Quinn’s transformations reveal that costumes are not strictly coverings, personas, or masks as their disruptive bodies gothically and acrobatically perform what capitalist society—the upright world of those laws upheld by Batman—routinely casts out or subsumes: anarchic overflow, exaggeration, adornment, bodies turned inside out, reorganized chaos.
3. In “Four Your Unpleasure: The Hauteur-Couture of Goth,” Mark Fisher writes about modern culture’s tendency to “strip away all signs and rituals so as to reach the unadorned thing-in-itself.” Goth’s “trash-aristocratic” aesthetic works against this purification, overflowing the slick now’s lack of ritual, embellishment, and serious play by using “…dressing up as re-ritualization, a recovery of the surface of the body as the site for scarification and decoration.” The clown, joker, and harlequin divulge gothic delirium where behind every costume, more costume. As a therapist, Dr. Harlene Quinzel operated in the realm of psychological interiority. As Harley Quinn, she gets turned inside-out, privatized and interiorized psychology becoming immediately visible and social. The body, no longer a closed container, becomes porous, open, and excessive, exchanging information with its surroundings.
4. In Suicide Squad, the acid bath is magical-corrosive procedure that seems to turn her body inside-out, grotesque psychologies made public. Scary seductive, their madness is Gotham’s madness magnified. Acid bathed and flung from locked institutions into the streets to run amok, ROTTEN scrawled across a jawline. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han argues that current collective obsessions with individual psychology foster atomization and narcissism. Clowns, carnivals, magicians, and comedians are ambiguous, disruptive edge-dwellers (“Transgression is a general feature of celebratory ritual,” writes Han) with the potential to halt homogenized clock time and wake us communally to the absurdities of the present.
5. A circus that never ends becomes a tomb. In Clown (2016), a father saves his son’s birthday party after the hired clown cancels, finding a clown costume at a local antique shop and donning it himself. After the party when he tries to undress, it won’t budge. It’s fused to his body, transforming him into a killer clown from the outside-in. “It’s not a costume. It’s the skin and hair of a demon,” says the costume dealer.
6. In a section entitled “Celebration and Madness” in Newly Born Woman, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément write: “The mythology of the celebration contains the inversion of daily life in its development: feast, binge, drunkenness, dissolute ingestion of food, and regurgitation all demonstrate that it is not simply a matter of getting unusual pleasures but of pushing them to their very limit.” Celebration and feast, when stretched to their edges, circle the drain, become horror, limit-experience, vomitous.
7. Pennywise, the dancing, child-consuming clown in It (1990), the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, hypnotizes kids with his deadlights. His eyes turn into white lights which freeze you in place, stupefied. In Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, Anne Dufourmantelle claims that “enchantment cannot be organized. It is what can never become the object of power.” But enchantment does become the object of power, carnival becomes crypt and waking-up-to-the-world becomes oblivion, eyes lit-up, deadened, in some of these party horror films as Killer Klowns cocoon their victims in thick webs of cotton candy and Pennywise’s act bedazzles children from below: “Down here, we all float…”
8. Nietzsche: “To float! To err! To be mad!”
Heath Ledger’s Joker: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”
Nietzsche: “Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time?”
9. The jester’s gallows humour is truth spoken from beneath, usually quickly, passing-through, opening up a channel, another variety of light, then gone. In the first episode of the TV series Carnivàle (2003-2005), a newcomer says he won’t be staying with the travelling carnival permanently because “I’m no carny,” Sofie, a tarot card reader, responds: “The people in these towns, they’re asleep. All day at work, at home. Sleepwalkers. We wake them up.” The process of waking up to a sacred instant via the disruption of ordinary routine: when the fair comes to town in The Funhouse, when the dad first puts on his clown costume in Clown, when the carnival rolls through various towns in Carnivàle, when Harley Quinn first wakes up in the acid vat, transmuted from psychologist to visible evidence of society’s psychological ills. What happens when the carnival rolls on and on, never stops, when we cannot leave or when we don’t know we’re there, when the lines between work and play, celebration and weekday, day and night, get erased?
10. “Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers and subterranean passages,” writes Mikhail Bakhtin in Carnival Ambivalence. The harlequin body, the body at the banquet or feast, disrupts, according to Bakhtin, social hierarchies through exaggeration and excess. A body ever in a state of becoming. A body as passage where passage is light, encryption, daze, trap, shock, deliverance, vivification, spillage… where horror and humor are electric twins spinning transmission, underpass, and drift. This everted body troubles the modern image of a body atomized, individualized, pathologized. A body at a limit: on a high wire, down a drain.
11. Carnival, from Medieval Latin’s carne vale (flesh, farewell!) where the candy-coloured line between liberatory release from daily life’s lights and laws and getting trapped, released from flesh, is flimsy.
Go to sleep! Wake up!