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"Lovecraftian"
12 years ago
I just saw somebody online describe the Nicholas Cage movie "Knowing" as "Lovecraftian," and it made me realize just how little that word seems to mean.
SPOILERS
"Knowing" is a movie where Earth gets burned up by a solar flare, but some people manage to survive because a little girl got warnings beamed into her head 50 years earlier by aliens while she was staring at the sun. Also, Nick Cage frantically does math for some reason.
Looking at the plot summary, I think that "Knowing" actually provides an excellent set of examples of things that *aren't* Lovecraftian that we can use to approach a definition of the term through process of negation. Let's try it:
1. In Lovecraft stories, having special insight into the future or the workings of the universe is pretty much never a good thing. In "Knowing," seeing the future helps some people escape from a disaster. In The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft writes that "The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate it's contents," because, if we ever gain a true understanding of the universe as a whole, "we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
This is because, in Lovecraft's fiction, knowing the true nature of the universe means realizing that truly awful things are going to happen, and that the human race can do literally nothing to prevent them. Which leads us to...
2. In Lovecraft stories, the aliens are not your friends. In the end of "Knowing," mysterious aliens take the surviving humans to an Eden-like planet where they can start anew. By contrast, the most sympathetic aliens in Lovecraft might be the "old ones" (he used that term a lot) from At the Mountains of Madness, who murder an entire camp full of humans not out of malice or indifference, but in the spirit of scientific investigation. Or perhaps one prefers the Yithians from The Shadow Out of Time, who will just trade bodies with you for a few years and probably ruin your life, before returning you to your own body and erasing your memory, leaving you with amnesia and a lifetime of nightmares. This, of course, just goes to show that...
3. There are no happy endings in Lovecraft stories. Don't get me wrong, the protagonists of his tales frequently triumph over the horrible alien forces they encounter; in The Dunwitch Horror Dr. Armitage and company manage to banish the titular monster from the earth, while Cthulhu is famously put back to sleep when he gets a boat rammed through him. The climax of these stories, however, doesn't mark their *end,* and in the denouement the "victorious" characters are left haunted with the knowledge that they have, at best, bought the human world a little more time, for they have seen the truth in the ravings of mad cultists and gained a glimpse of the fate of the world. Speaking of which...
4. Lovecraft never destroyed the world. Okay, that's not strictly true; in the prose-poem Nyarlathotep (one of my favorite works by Lovecraft, by the way) the titular character seems to bring about the apocalypse. Most Lovecraft stories, however, don't have such cosmic consequences. Indeed, for all their hideous revalations about the nature of man's relationship with the universe, protagonists in Lovecraft stories usually grapple with horrors of which the rest of the world remains blissfully unaware, their struggles going completely unnoticed and leaving them with no lasting injuries or other tangible evidence of what they've experienced.
And that is as it should be, because the horror in Lovecraft's best stories doesn't come from the threat of death; It comes from the threat of truth. It comes from the agony of having to live out the rest of your natural life knowing that there is no hope, that all the works of mankind are utterly insignificant and will some day pass away without the universe taking notice, and that the only real gods are uncaring cosmic forces who either don't notice us at all or view us the way a biologist might study a bacterium under a slide.
In the end, I think, that's what really makes Lovecraft's best stories resonate with us 80 years or more after they were written; what makes them "Lovecraftian". Even with all of their tentacled horrors and eldrich tomes and other trappings of the "weird," Lovecraft's stories force us to consider our world for what it is: a thin crust of living matter clinging to a tiny, fragile speck of rock whirling about one of billions of stars in a vast and largely unknowable universe. And even as jaded as we have become, that's still a pretty unsettling thought.
SPOILERS
"Knowing" is a movie where Earth gets burned up by a solar flare, but some people manage to survive because a little girl got warnings beamed into her head 50 years earlier by aliens while she was staring at the sun. Also, Nick Cage frantically does math for some reason.
Looking at the plot summary, I think that "Knowing" actually provides an excellent set of examples of things that *aren't* Lovecraftian that we can use to approach a definition of the term through process of negation. Let's try it:
1. In Lovecraft stories, having special insight into the future or the workings of the universe is pretty much never a good thing. In "Knowing," seeing the future helps some people escape from a disaster. In The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft writes that "The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate it's contents," because, if we ever gain a true understanding of the universe as a whole, "we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
This is because, in Lovecraft's fiction, knowing the true nature of the universe means realizing that truly awful things are going to happen, and that the human race can do literally nothing to prevent them. Which leads us to...
2. In Lovecraft stories, the aliens are not your friends. In the end of "Knowing," mysterious aliens take the surviving humans to an Eden-like planet where they can start anew. By contrast, the most sympathetic aliens in Lovecraft might be the "old ones" (he used that term a lot) from At the Mountains of Madness, who murder an entire camp full of humans not out of malice or indifference, but in the spirit of scientific investigation. Or perhaps one prefers the Yithians from The Shadow Out of Time, who will just trade bodies with you for a few years and probably ruin your life, before returning you to your own body and erasing your memory, leaving you with amnesia and a lifetime of nightmares. This, of course, just goes to show that...
3. There are no happy endings in Lovecraft stories. Don't get me wrong, the protagonists of his tales frequently triumph over the horrible alien forces they encounter; in The Dunwitch Horror Dr. Armitage and company manage to banish the titular monster from the earth, while Cthulhu is famously put back to sleep when he gets a boat rammed through him. The climax of these stories, however, doesn't mark their *end,* and in the denouement the "victorious" characters are left haunted with the knowledge that they have, at best, bought the human world a little more time, for they have seen the truth in the ravings of mad cultists and gained a glimpse of the fate of the world. Speaking of which...
4. Lovecraft never destroyed the world. Okay, that's not strictly true; in the prose-poem Nyarlathotep (one of my favorite works by Lovecraft, by the way) the titular character seems to bring about the apocalypse. Most Lovecraft stories, however, don't have such cosmic consequences. Indeed, for all their hideous revalations about the nature of man's relationship with the universe, protagonists in Lovecraft stories usually grapple with horrors of which the rest of the world remains blissfully unaware, their struggles going completely unnoticed and leaving them with no lasting injuries or other tangible evidence of what they've experienced.
And that is as it should be, because the horror in Lovecraft's best stories doesn't come from the threat of death; It comes from the threat of truth. It comes from the agony of having to live out the rest of your natural life knowing that there is no hope, that all the works of mankind are utterly insignificant and will some day pass away without the universe taking notice, and that the only real gods are uncaring cosmic forces who either don't notice us at all or view us the way a biologist might study a bacterium under a slide.
In the end, I think, that's what really makes Lovecraft's best stories resonate with us 80 years or more after they were written; what makes them "Lovecraftian". Even with all of their tentacled horrors and eldrich tomes and other trappings of the "weird," Lovecraft's stories force us to consider our world for what it is: a thin crust of living matter clinging to a tiny, fragile speck of rock whirling about one of billions of stars in a vast and largely unknowable universe. And even as jaded as we have become, that's still a pretty unsettling thought.
