Welcome to “Worms of the Senses,” a (hopefully) monthly feature where I reflect on the most notable things I’ve been seeing, hearing, reading, and thinking. Essentially, it is an attempt at cobbling together something we might call a structure of feeling.
This month, there’s a predictable preoccupation with the fires, as well as general terror with the direction of the world. If you’d like this uplifting sunshine delivered to your inbox every month, or to support my work, then don’t forget to subscribe.
Even in Los Angeles, it is easy for winter to draw out the darker corners of life. Most associate autumn with all things haunted and spooky simply because it’s where Halloween falls on the calendar. But the autumn is mostly a time of transition, when some things are still warm, dying rather than dead. The middle of winter, with everything withered and still, better suits this disposition. Better to indulge in the eldritch, the moody, the gothic. Particularly this year. Trump’s inauguration isn’t necessarily frightening on its own, but because it stands in for a worldwide trend. The time of monsters, so on and so forth.
January proved to be a particularly horrifying month for LA too. The fires still burn, though they are all mostly contained. Residents are returning home, or where their homes used to be, and at least 27 won’t return at all. Even now, typing this, I’m frequently coughing and am fighting off a cold that doesn’t really feel like a cold. The smoke still hangs in the air, along with lead and asbestos and other particulates fluttering in the LA winds. For some, the air is literally deadly.
Or, “Death, once conceived, was rapacious. It took all with it.” That’s the most powerful line from Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions (2017). It was recommended to me by a friend who knows well my love of classic gothic fiction. I’m glad they did. Purcell manages to recreate the genre effectively. An old mansion in the English countryside, a narrative that jumps between Jacobean violence and a broken Victorian family trying to keep a lid on the horror.
The most inventive part of the story is the titular companions: the dummy boards, painted wooden figures of uncanny accuracy with some inexplicable and malevolent will of their own. That’s the hook, and it’s a good one. There’s also plenty in here that the best gothic fiction always pointed to but could only be made explicit with hindsight, particularly disbelief in women and the rapid changes of industrialization. It doesn’t manage to necessarily tie everything up or explain it to satisfaction, but that’s likely the point. Lately, I find myself waffling on whether it is sloppy to leave some matters unexplained, or if it is simply truer to existence.
There’s little such ambivalence in what Richard Seymour writes in Disaster Nationalism (2024). At least not the kind of ambivalence that gives one reason for optimism. What comes after neoliberalism? It’s a question many of us have had on our minds ever since the great collapse of the late aughts, though it was always going to take a while to answer. Now the horror has made itself clear. Less corporate globalization, more tariffs and fortified borders. More stories of disasters for the undeserving abroad, but also at home.
These are the least of it, though. If this were a bog-standard “capitalism gives way to fascism” argument I would probably skip it. What makes the book compelling is its employment of radical psychoanalysis, Freud by way of Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. According to Seymour, the new historical-econonomic-political zeitgeist is characterized by motives and impulses long woven into the fabric of capitalist civilization itself. Profound violence unleashed unevenly in the past is now an overarching and defining characteristic.
I’ve only just started the book, but have read enough interviews around its promotion (and, frankly, am familiar enough with the rigor Seymour brings to his work) to know that it’s worthwhile. More ruptures are coming. I’m hopeful they are the kind we want, but hope, as always, remains distinct from optimism.
Back to the matter of winter. Producers at A24 probably knew what they were doing having Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) hit theaters on Christmas Day. Yes, it is as phenomenal as the reviews have been saying: a flawless cast making excellent performances, exquisite art direction and cinematography that allow darkness to encroach on any inkling of brightness. And very few horror filmmakers know how to cultivate fear like Eggers, where theme and plot are perfectly placed drivers of tension, rather than flimsy filler between cheap scares.
Granted, Eggers’ adaptation is only the latest experiment with the source material. F.W. Murnau’s unlicensed copy of Dracula seems to attract as many reinterpretations as Dracula itself, and from more daring filmmakers too (Herzog, E. Elias Merhige). Giving greater depth to Eggers’ version is the lengths he went to situate the story historically. The fictional city of Wisburg is a believable stand-in for any number of German shipping towns in the 1830s that held inordinate influence over mercantile economies around the globe. The bourgeois preoccupation with property and propriety seen in Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter or Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Friedrich Harding is fitting. It also brings downfall to the city.
Compare this with the Transylvania Hutter ventures to, and, of course, Count Orlok (sweet merciful crap is Bill Skarsgård remarkable as the Count). These are peripheral, underestimated in “civilized” society, possessing a terrifying power that predates Enlightenment notions of reason. Those straddling both worlds — particularly Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen — are driven to utter insanity. Attempts to quell her torment — straitjackets, sedatives — can only fail, making Orlok more persistent. Civilization, once again, is foolish enough to think it can overcome its discontent. Rational thought can only repress so much.
Then there are the concepts and stories that we want to break free, to surge to the front of our consciousness and rearrange our sense of the present. Moksha Black’s The Offering dropped on Bandcamp in the final days of 2024. King Britt — the sole member of the project — described The Offering as “a collection of electronic spirituals that pay homage to the sonic essence of Sankofa. These songs celebrate pivotal moments of Black liberation throughout cosmic history, presented in a non-linear narrative.”
The notion of an “electronic spiritual” is certainly a compelling one. Though you wouldn’t necessarily understand these tracks as such if you weren’t told, listening to them, you are invited into a strange, patient quietude. An apophatic space, creating its present self out of overlooked historical modes. I find myself wondering whether this kind of musical experimentation is a more potent form of confrontation than those that rely on lyrics or “messages.”
Something similar is happening in the Unthanks’ In Winter (2024). Old traditions are revived and made vital without losing their originality, and we start to feel the world differently. The British folk duo have mildly insisted that In Winter is not a Christmas album, an odd suggestion given that the track listing includes “O Tannenbaum,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” But at least half of the album’s songs explore winter itself, particularly how it feels in the north of England. The gentle stillness, the search for warmth, the quiet but unforgiving atmospheres.
Even the Christmas carols seem to have been reworked into the Unthanks’ particular oeuvre. Many are transposed into minor keys to bring an icier tone, their longing accentuated. There is also, particularly toward In Winter’s end, the growing recollection that winter ends. To compose an album revolving around the theme of winter isn’t particularly ambitious, but it is rendered near perfectly here.
Finally, a few closing words on David Lynch. There is far more to say about the man and his work than there is room here. A further, longer post is forthcoming. In the meantime, suffice it to say that there’s a painful, if somewhat hackneyed, timing in his passing away as the fires tore through this city he loved and understood like few other filmmakers. After the news broke, my first thought was that I had to go back and rewatch the whole of his Los Angeles trilogy.
For some reason, that meant starting with the third film rather than the first. I hadn’t watched Inland Empire (2006) in nearly a decade and had forgotten how much it demands from the viewer. Interpreting it, discovering its meaning, is part of what it has to say to us. We can be told all we want about how the proliferation and allure of the moving image invites all of us into a demonic circus procession where we’re all trying to ignore our pasts so we can better sell ourselves and someone is always trying to kill us. But we won’t really get it unless we experience the disorientation, the frustrating loss of coherence, the illusory promises of glamor and success. High surrealism for sure. Effective horror if you give yourself over to it. And its full three hours will utterly ruin your mood. I’m curious to see what emerges re-watching Mulholland Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (1997).
Header image is from Nosferatu (2024).