Monsters and Mediocrity

Includes a recipe for making the perfect monster!

The Contraptions Book Club is currently reading City of Fortune by Roger Crowley, to be discussed the week of January 27. Also, check out the entries and winners of my dev-environment photo-motto contest in this chat thread.

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I’ve been thinking all week about monsters. In some ways, monsters are the evil twins of contraptions, and the precise nature of the kinship and opposition involved is our topic for the week.

An example that illustrates the relationship is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frakenstein’s monster starts off as an organic contraption — stolen body parts rudely sewn together — but is then brought to life via the application of a secret “spark of life” technique that breathes life into the meatbag. In the novel, the method is left unspecified, but in movies, this is usually depicted as artificial lightning created with Tesla coils and such, with perhaps some alchemical vat-of-chemicals involved as well. When Mary Shelley (1818) composed the work, educated people would have been familiar with Luigi Galvani’s studies of animal electricity (1780), and these would have constituted a widespread popular understanding of the phenomenon as somehow related to vitalism.

A key detail is that Victor Frankenstein’s monster does not have a name. As Wikipedia notes:

Part of Frankenstein's rejection of his creation is the fact that he does not give him a name. Instead, Frankenstein's creation is referred to by words such as "wretch", "monster", "creature", "demon", "devil", "fiend", and "it". When Frankenstein converses with the creature, he addresses him as "vile insect", "abhorred monster", "fiend", "wretched devil", and "abhorred devil".

There is an interesting parallel here to contraptions. The archetypal contraption is a Rube Goldberg machine. Contraptions, like Frankenstein’s monsters, typically do not have enough design integrity to merit a name, and as such, prefigure a design space rather than acting as a prototype within it. If they are named at all, they often get generic names. Like Wright Flyer 1. This is not a strict rule of course. There are monsters and contraptions with names. But being unnamed is often a tell for both.

Monstrous Vitalism

What is the role of non-living mechanistic elements in the construction of monsters?

The idea of a contraption applies to any loose assemblage of elements that work together imperfectly of course, and I referred to the pre-spark Frankenstein monster above as an “organic contraption,” but there seems to be some association between monstrosity and life itself. Monstrousness, as the Frankenstein story illustrates, seems to require a vitalist element. The “spark of life” idea seems to be a trope. For example, in Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins, giving water to Mogwai — which is barely more than a plush toy — turns them into Gremlins who reproduce.

Let’s take a clearly mechanistic example. In the most recent incarnation of Mecha-Godzilla, who is a mechanical monster, we find that he is animated by bits of an organic monster slain in an earlier movie, King Ghidorah.

We find the same principle at work in the Daleks of Doctor Who — mechanistic exoskeletons that are revealed to contain tiny, monstrous life forms. Cyber-Men, similarily, are exoskeletons containing mind-controlled humans.

It seems monstrosity requires an organic element. When there isn’t one, monster is more often an adjective than a noun qualifying an incomplete potential for monstrosity. For example a monster truck has some monstrosity in its design, but it requires a human driver to be complete. A monstrous burrito requires a human with a big appetite to wolf it down. If you neatly carved it up into slices to share out, it would no longer be monstrous even in potentia. A monstrous bureaucracy is typically peopled by creepily smiling automaton-humans.

I can’t think of a truly pure mechanical monster though. Perhaps the closest are the robots of the Transformers franchise— who are nevertheless the creations of an organic race. Wikipedia: “A cruel and coldly logical race of alien squid-like creatures with five faces and tentacles known as Quintessons, who were the creators of the Autobots and Decepticons.”

Speaking of Transformers, it is fascinating to me that the multimedia franchise literally grew out of a line of contraptioney toys, but as the fictional universe expanded and deepened, it apparently needed an organic backstory to serve not just as a deus ex machina to get around the need for an evolutionary mechanism, but also to provide some sort of narcissistic wounding and Jungian anima/animus for a compelling “animation” of the robots as characters. The very word animate is revealing. Contraptions must be brought to life before they can exhibit a capacity for monstrosity.

Can something like monstrosity exist without life? I think so, but not of the contraptioney sort. You can have spreading inanimate horrors of the sort found in J. G. Ballard’s stories (my favorite is a story where the entire world gradually crystallizes into a gem-like state within which time gets warped). You can have austere oppressiveness of the sort associated with monumental brutalist architecture. The Shrike in his time tombs in Hyperion is an animate+inanimate type of monster.

It is notable that brutalism, which derives from the French brut — for raw and unfinished, as in naked concrete structures — acquired English connotations of brute and brutality. This observation is often trotted out as a bit of gotcha etymology, but brutality is not entirely unrelated to rawness/unfinishedness. Frankenstein’s monster was brut in the raw/unfinished sense as well a brute in the regular English sense (perhaps a misunderstood one who only wanted a friend, but a brute nevertheless).

A recently emerged source of this kind of non-vitalist monstrousness is any kind of cold and mathematical process, such as geometric growth, runaway chemical or nuclear reactions, tessellation, fractal growth, Turing-complete computations, and so on. For example, mysterious proliferating monoliths, or the more oozy flows of a toxic chemical or gas spill. Such processes can also be entirely invisible, creating an atmosphere of terror rather than horror (which typically requires an object you can sense). Pandemics are an example: individual viruses are not monsters, but aggregated into a pandemic process, they perhaps are.

From these examples we can conclude that there are other natural processes that induce affective gestalts similar to monstrousness, but they have to have a power comparable to life processes.

But though such horror and terror inducing processes are somewhat related, it feels not quite right to include them in the category of the monstrous proper. I think the monstrous requires some kind of recognizably vitalist process to be at work. Other kinds of processes might induce other kinds of fear, horror, and terror, but monsters require a vitalist principle to be at work, though it can be allegorical or metaphoric. For example, completing an electrical circuit and bringing a machine “to life” counts. Sort of.

A good example of the process boundary between the vitalist regime (where monsters lurk) and non-vitalist regime (where other horrors and terrors induced by comparable processes lurk) is the Lovecraftian Shoggoth, the memetic apotheosis of fear of AI. Shoggoths are protoplasmic masses that are poised at the transition point to sentience and life. Their underlying process is a sort of souped-up (heh!) primordial chemistry short of life. They were created by a prehistoric alien race (of true monsters) and escaped their control. Shoggoths are monstrous to the same extent, and in the same way, modern AI is to the fearful, who see in the torrents of matrix multiplications something like a protoplasmic ooze that can challenge its creators.

True monsters though, are more unambiguously biomorphic. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they are typically derived from Chordata. Though there are monsters derived from members of other phyla, most monsters have spinal cords of sorts.

Monsters and Monumentality

The idea of a monster as a recognizable perversion of a familiar being is intuitive. I asked people on various sites what their default image of monster was, and a fairly consistent answer emerged: a being that is somewhat larger than a reference being. So a monster cockroach might be as large as a rat or perhaps dog, but is monstrous because it a cockroach. A monster humanoid is 8-10 feet tall.

I want to try and relate this bit of wisdom-of-crowds about monstrousness to the idea of monumentality.