Double Dialogues

Issue 12
Winter 2010
Interior Worlds Hidden Stories
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The Torture Chambers of Pleasure & All the Saints

of Hell
On Clive Barker’s Hellraiser
Leon Marvell

Deakin University

The title of this paper contains two pairs of apparent contradictions: pleasure tied to
pain, sinners turned into saints—but these are contradictions only if these dyadic
terms are taken too literally. Seen from another angle, the title presents two paradoxes
rather than contradictions, and it is from this angle that I will attempt to explore my
ideas. Paradox—para-doxa—literally means outside of accepted opinion, an
alternative route to pursuing knowledge. The paradoxical route I shall be taking is an
iconological examination of the ‘twilight language’ of Clive Barker’s directorial
debut, Hellraiser.

Two terms obviously need to be explained. The iconological method I will be

employing is derived from the project initiated in the early 20th century by Aby
Warburg and extended by such influential scholars as Erwin Panofsky and E. H.
Gombrich. The iconological method excavates the buried history beneath the surface
of certain images through an exploration of their connexions with literature,
philosophy and other arts (such as music for example). While iconology is not
traditionally a method used in the study of cinematographic texts, the study of images,
no matter how this study is pursued, is hardly controversial within cinema studies.
The notion of ‘twilight language’ however is not so uncontroversial.

The twilight language I am referring to is that which in Sanskrit is called sandha-

bhasa. Sandha–bhasa (literally ‘twilight language’) describes the kind of language in
which the texts of Hindu and early Buddhist tantric texts were written. Tantra (which
literally means text, thread or, by metonymic extension, tradition) is an initiatory
tradition. As such, the texts associated with this tradition carried two meanings: an
exoteric or literal (doxa) meaning, and an esoteric or obscure (para-doxical) meaning.
Traditionally this latter, hieratic, level of meaning could only be understood by an
initiate of the tantric tradition.

I should point out that while I have a long and abiding scholarly interest in the tantric
tradition, I am by no means a scholarly expert in the tradition of tantric twilight
language: I do not possess the secret keys to unravelling this hieratic language. What I
am proposing to do however is to try to describe the particular imaginary that one can
find in Barker’s film, as if it was a sort of cinematographic tantra. Perhaps even more
perversely, I am going to read Hellraiser as if it is aEuropean tantric text, and I will
be utilizing the iconological method to substantiate this reading.

But before I do this, I want to return for a moment to my opening gambit in which I
called attention to the coincidentia oppositorum of my title. I want to contrast this
approach with that of another scholar writing about the transcendental nature of the
modern horror film, Will H. Rockett in his book, Devouring Whirlwind.

Taking his initial cue from Aldous Huxley, Rockett notes three traditional vectors for
transcendence: upwards, sideways and downward. The first is by far the most difficult
path: the path of anchorites, celibates, Zen masters and Dalai lamas. Accordingly
Huxley notes our “very natural reluctance to take the hard ascending way” (Huxley,
in Rockett, 7). The second vector, the sideways path, is the one most often pursued in
the Modern period; it is the path of good works, a path which demands a certain
selflessness and a desire to contribute to the greater good. Rockett notes,

The sideward path is humanity’s most common recourse, and human beings are
encouraged to pursue it both by personal inclination and by social pressure, so long as
they work in moderation. (Rockett, 8)

I will add that it is this “sideward path”, the path of moderation, that one most often
sees represented in Hollywood cinema. The story-form of the greater number of
Hollywood productions explicates this socially acceptable form of transcendence
whereby the key protagonists are transformed into better, more—well, lets face it,
more bourgeois—creatures by the close of the story-arc. It is indeed a path of
moderation: Hollywood will brook no extremes in terms of its narratives or its
imagery.

The third path, that of downward transcendence, is the key idea in Rockett’s take on
the horror film. According to him it is a path “taken more often than the ascending
one”:

In the case of substance abuse and sexual obsession, the principal reason is that to
descend through such artificial means is easier than to climb without them. However,
recourse to the demonic has a more complex cause, found in humanity’s long-held
predilection for recognising the presence of evil in the world and for experiencing
demonic terror before recognising transcendent goodness and experiencing deific joy.
(Rockett, 9)

I want to briefly untangle the ideas encapsulated in these two sentences. For Rockett,
the common coinage of “substance abuse” and “sexual obsession” utilize a
descending movement that is “artificial” and “easy”. The clear implication is that the
use of drugs and sex to attain transcendence is somehow inauthentic when compared
with the other two vectors. Furthermore these two modalities are inferior to the
“recourse to the demonic” in contemporary horror films where, according to Rockett,
the experience of demonic terror (i.e., classical panic) is only a prelude to the
recognition of “transcendent goodness”, i.e. God. Rockett’s position could not be
clearer: transcendence via the downward path is bad, and if it really must be pursued,
it should only be seen as a precursor to the ultimate recognition of the Good. His
position is thus a modern version of Plato’s view of the aesthetic experience, where
contemplation of that which is base leads one inevitably to the realisation of that
which is highest, the Good—even if Rockett himself is unaware of this kindred
viewpoint.

There are a couple of other things I would like to note here. Rockett’s position vis a
vis the narrative structures in the films he examines can be recognised as that of
classical katabasis: the protagonist must go down, before s/he can go up. First the
terror, then the bliss. From my twilight language perspective, Rockett’s analysis is
simplistic and utterly conventional. One needs to recognise that the vectorial relation
that holds that God is up and Hell is down is purely a matter of (cultural) convention.
Up and down are relative terms, and in the most interesting horror films this
convention is outright challenged: up is down and down is up and what the hell is that
coming up behind us? Moreover for Rockett “sexual obsession”—by which I take it
that he means depictions of the extremes of sexuality—is an inauthentic approach to
transcendence. In contradiction to these ideas, a twilight language approach holds that
transcendence may well be immanent in any activity and not the result of a path taken
while having one’s eyes cast to heaven. It is not a case of polarity, of a tension, a path
set up between opposite poles, but rather the possibility of a what one might call a
fractalic, many-path immanence—at any rate, that is my contention with regard to
Barker’s Hellraiser.

To expedite matters, I will ignore the narrative of Hellraiser (except where it is

necessary to explicate my ideas) and concentrate, as I have said, on an iconological
examination of the film. That is to say, I will examine a class of images in isolation
from the narrative itself.

The class of images I will be examining are the images of the Cenobites, creatures
fromelsewhere (neither heaven or hell, but evidently just a stones throw away from
quotidian reality) who are summoned into the aforementioned quotidian reality
through the operation of an inter-dimensional key in the form of a puzzle box called
the Lament Configuration.

There are only seven total minutes of screen time devoted to the Cenobites in
Barker’sHellraiser, yet the force of their image is arresting enough to warrant a close
reading of their twilight significance. In an on-set interview during the making of the
film, Barker, possibly referring to the Cenobites themselves, stated that he wished that
the audience would be “stunned by the elegance of the images and at the same time
appalled by the subject matter” and that these images would provoke both “tension
and paradox” in the viewer (Barker, Hellraiser DVD commentary).

In Hellraiser, the apparent leader of the Cenobites (popularly known as Pinhead, for
obvious reasons) states, “We are explorers of the further regions of experience.
Demons to some, angels to others.”

The result of these explorations in the nether regions of experience is that they are
able to offer Frank, a person one might characterise as an “extreme sport” pleasure-
seeker and around whom the main narrative thread revolves, “…experience beyond
limits. Pain and pleasure indistinguishable.” It is this promise of an experience of the
infinite through the overcoming of opposites, this coincidentia oppositorum in
excelsus, that is the key to my iconological explorations of these figures.

When Barker says that he thought many people would be “stunned by the elegance of
the images” for many it would be unclear as to what he could possibly mean by this in
a film in which we observe a man torn apart in a netherworld torture chamber, a
woman driven to murder because of her overwhelming desire for a demonic lover and
the image of a bloody, flayed man desiccating helpless victims—unless, of course,
one adopts a twilight language approach to the iconography of the Cenobites, where
we can observe the equivalence of pleasure and pain, an excess that assures the
transcendence of mundane polarities.

But first let me address the denotative. The exoteric appearance of the Cenobites
marks them as curious “signs of the times.” Hellraiser was shot in 1986, with its
conception and design predating this by a few years. The look of the Cenobites is no
doubt the result of two sub-cultural aesthetic influences: “punk” and the rise of
“BDSM” (Bondage-Discipline-Sadism-Masochism) clubs. In fact these two
influences can be traced to one particular nexus: Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne
Westwood’s clothing shop, Seditionaires in Chelsea, London, in the late 1970s.
McClaren and Westwood stocked their shop with leather bondage gear imported from
the USA as well as their own, unique contributions to bas couture: torn clothing, dog
collars and DIY body-piercings in the form of safety pins and fish hooks. It is
inarguable that without McClaren and Westwood, the distinctive British punk look of
the late 1970s would never have manifested in the manner that it did. If we add to this
“look” the strap-and-stud leather of bondage gear associated with the increasingly
visible presence of the gay sub-culture of BDSM clubs, then we have the origins of
the appearance of the Cenobites. Each of the Cenobites is garbed in some sort of
post-industrial leather ensemble, a miscegenation that appears to be a combination of
a butcher’s outfit, the flight suit of a Nazi wing commander and a leather straight-
jacket. Their flesh is torn, scarred and sutured with hooks, pins and staples. The face
of one has been pulled so far back that all that is discernable is a gummy, chattering
wound of a mouth. Another reveals a vaginal gash in her throat, the wound held open
by surgical pins. And of course Pinhead himself has had his entire head sectioned and
gridded by a knife, each interstice marked by a nail driven into the skull. Such is their
appearance, but that is not all there is to be discovered.

The term “cenobite” means a member of a religious order living in a community of

similar members, as opposed to an anchorite, which is a member of a religious order
who lives in solitude. Barker’s name for his other-dimensional creatures is the first
key in tracing the twilight, iconological significance of these images. It immediately
calls to mind the idea of a world long gone, the medieval world of the monastery and
the convent, places of worship, discipline and learning. I am not talking, of course, of
the actual medieval world, nor actual monastic orders, but rather of the “shaggy
Medieval” (as Umberto Eco called it): the medieval world as evoked in our popular
imaginary, an alien world of penitents, martyrs, saints and sinners. Here is also the
wheel and the gibbet, the fires of Hell and the streaming light from the hand of God. It
is a world of radical alterity, a world which we have imagined and then utilised to
distinguish all that is Modern from that which went before.
Our popular medieval imaginary is singularly imbued with a terrifying cruelty. This
cruelty is depicted in medieval manuscripts, in court records and in the descriptions of
the deprivations of monks and nuns and the abasement of the body undergone in
monasteries and convents. There is little doubt that in their time the visual excess of
certain forms of medieval imagery performed a normative function, keeping the
people in line and maintaining the feudal medieval status quo. Yet, as medievalist
Robert Mills has noted,

…sometimes, just sometimes, it also provided spaces in which to work through more
subversive possibilities: empathy with, and opposition to, the pain of the punished,
fantasies of resistance and empowerment, even forms of eroticism that transgress
accepted norms. (Mills , 17)

According to this reading, the inquisitorial, look-out-for-the-wrath-of-the-lord,

Dominican (“hounds of god”) world-view was not—could not—be hegemonic, and
erotic transgression was one of several possible responses to the imagery of acts of
violence and cruelty produced within the medieval period. In an effort to “queer” the
middle ages, Mills further proposes a medieval “art of pain”, such that,

The art of pain might also have created spaces for the exploration of certain forms of
desire, notably sexual desire, in response to the naked, tormented bodies of the
martyrs and Christ. (Mills, 18)

Flagellation was one of the earliest forms of body-debasement practised by cenobites

and anchorites alike. As a practice it is a medievalism that has travelled through the
centuries up until our own times, making its appearance in religious festivals and
Hellfire Clubs [1] alike. This is a description of self-flagellation from the best-selling
memoirs of a life spent inside a Catholic convent in the 1960s:

The cords bit into my flesh, smarted and stung. I felt sweat standing out on my brow
and felt myself trembling all over… I looked up at the crucifix on the wall as my
numbed neck began to prickle painfully into life, bewildered by the excitement that
had possessed me. Where had it come from? Instead of beating my body into
subjection the discipline seemed to have roused it to life, touching something in me
that left me frightened, tingling and alert. (Quoted in Mills, 147)

Mills states that medieval devotional writings and modern accounts such as the
foregoing, “produce a fantasy of affective transformation, a fantasy in which the
boundaries between pain and pleasure become manifestly blurred” (Mills, 148). He
thus hopes to demonstrate that “medieval pain, when imaged, could be transformed
into a signifier of mystical or even erotic pleasure” (Mills, 149).

The esoteric function of Barker’s Cenobites is to provide, “…experience beyond

limits. Pain and pleasure indistinguishable”; in other words, an infinity of
pleasurepain that transgresses and transcends polarities, an ever increasing excess that
withers Freud’s Reality Principle at the very moment it tries to recuperate itself. In
this manner the radical alterity of our “shaggy medievalism” is transformed and
overcome in Barker’s vision such there is an evaporation of opposites (good and evil,
pleasure and pain) and with this transfiguration the recognition of a dark spirituality
that has always been with us—in medieval times just as now.
Notes

1. I refer, of course, not to Francis Dashwood’s notorious Monks of Medmenham, but

to the late 20th century phenomenon of commercial “Hellfire Clubs” devoted to
BDSM.

References

Barker, Hellraiser DVD commentary.

Mills, (2005). Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval

Culture(London: Reaktion Books).

Rockett, Will H. (1988). Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the

Cinema of Cruelty