I like the stories. I really want to see the movie. But
the original writer of the stories is a stone-cold bigot, and I detest many of the
ideas he endorses and espouses.
Oddly, I am not talking about Orson Card Scott and Ender’s Game. I am talking about
HPLovecraft and the oft-proposed Mountains
of Madness.
[OK, talking about OSC for a moment. I never read Ender’s Game – it came out in the mid-80s, when I was busy with a lot of other stuff, and I never caught the wave. I
did read some of his Worthing Saga
from the 70s and found that its central conceit (skipping through time by
recorded memory) to be interesting but the delivery to be heavy-handed in its moralizing. That’s
about it for me.]
Back to Lovecraft. I enjoy the sense of despair he
evokes with an uncaring universe, his “Cosmicism” – that not only we are not
the center of the universe; we don’t even matter to it. I also love his “Yog-Sothery”
– his created world of strange gods that he hangs on his best tales, a universe which has expanded
through other creatives into a greater creation – one of the first modern
shared worlds.
But let’s face it – the man was a racist. Not just a
creature of his times. Not a youthful indiscretion. Not just viewed with a modern lens. Not just misinformed. A barking mad racist. To him, pretty much
all peoples who are not rock-ribbed white New Englanders were inferior, and the
less you resembled Lovecraft, the worse you looked to him. His dark mutterings
of subhumans and mongrel races permeates his text, and once he gets rolling,
his is a most odious and repellent form of bigotry.
I like the man’s work (the parts where he not being barking mad), and I deeply love what he created,
but to be honest, after five minutes in his presence, I would likely come across the
table at him. He is petty and venal and a bigot.
And others have had to deal with this bigotry on a deeper
level than I – talented writers of color who have been recognized for their
work by awards with the Noted Racist’s head on it. The stalwart representative
of Weird Tales, of that curious creation that is American Fantasy as a separate
entity from its European forebears, is a poster boy for intolerance. What can
be done?
Ignoring it is a mistake, a white-washing of the past, a
denialism that does nothing for confronting the racism of its age and its
metamorphed descendants in the present. Bowdlerizing his more offensive
statements and pushing them to the back of the closest is dishonest to both him
and ourselves. But how to accommodate the talent of the work with the failings
of the author?
I think we simply say no. We tell him that this is not
yours anymore.
This comes to me via the Call of Cthulhu RPG, where I
have told numerous stories set in the Lovecraftian universe, a universe of the '20s, when overt racism (sexism, and any number of other isms) was more
acceptable. So I have run adventures that have a strong racial or gender or nationalist component. Which means I and my players can choose what we want to talk about regarding those matters in the adventures.
[Indeed, this is something that CoC, with its limited
Player Character empowerment and its deadly combat system does well. In CoC, you CAN
bully the character around with hostile NPCs or a hateful universe. In D&D,
you can have an Elf Warrior being refused service in a tavern, but if the Elf is
14th level, the tavern will likely not last long].
Many years ago, I ran the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign from Chaosium, a huge and recommended
campaign that is a sequel to the story by Lovecraft. And one player wanted to
run and African-American polar explorer.
OK, how to handle it? Saying no didn't work for me –
there is a history of African American Arctic Explorers, and besides, player
agency, the ability to do as they see fit within the parameters of the story,
is part of the game. Instead I did the research and tried to treat the
character accurately, but without frustrating the hell out of the player (it is
a game, and he is a protagonist).
As a result, the institutional racism of the time kept
hitting him with a thousand small cuts and the occasional two-by-four to the
forehead, particularly in the “civilized” world. When the funders of the
expedition first meet him, they are taken aback by his presence. Indeed, his character is
interviewed last, left in the waiting room while the rest of the team gets the
story pitch. One of the leaders of the expedition was an obvious racist, and barely concealed his disdain. In NYC, the character is
asked to used the service entrance, is initially denied access to the
expedition’s hotel, and suffers from suspicion and latent hostility.
And when they get clear of New York, when the expedition
heads south, that drops away, as the coherence of the team overwhelms the
societal roles. I was actually pretty happy with the result (though in the
adventure, they later meet Nazis (spoilers) and while I wanted to include an overly earnest German
officer who “Really, really admires your Jesse Owens”, I never had the chance).
The comparison between the mores of
larger society and the smaller expedition was marked. It was a good story, remained true to the era, and none of the challenges were squamous or tentacled.
In this I and the players have taken it all away from
Lovecraft. We have said. “No. This is not solely yours anymore. We recognize
your creation, but all like creations, it has gone beyond you.”
This should not be a surprise, I suppose. Creations, once
they leave their originators, often evolve into new forms, forms that those
originators would hardly recognize. Moving to a new media, be it games or movies,
changes the substance of the creation, and allows reinvention, for better or
for worse. O course, this is based on the assumption that the movie
will be an exact representation of the book and the author’s original intentions. I mean, hasn't every new media adaption treated the works of, say, Frank Herbert (the
David Lynch version of Dune), Ursula
K. LeGuin (the Syfy Earthsea) or Alan Moore (just about everything) with respect and an eye towards the author's original intent? No. It is beyond the original creator when it gets to that stage.
And it is more than just a corporate control issue. Look
at Star Wars. Lucas may have
controlled the IP for many years, and his original three movies hold a deep
place in the hearts of many of us, but his return to the universe for three
more films elicited strong pushback from the very people who embraced his earlier work so
dearly. The fans, in effect said “No. This is not yours anymore. Not yours
alone.”
I think that is where I stand on Lovecraft. I want to
haul out into the light of day his inherent and detestable racism, and to take
this creation from him and make anew. Let us not sugar coat it. Let us take the
ideas and press forward. The author, the artist, the original creator controls
his or her vision, but as that vision passes through others (particularly in a
large operation as a motion picture, or a shared universe as created with other
creatives, or in RPGs), then the provenance
is both weakened and broadened. It becomes part and parcel of our larger universe.
In effect, the same process that allowed OSC to re-imagine
Hamlet as a hateful homophobic screed
in turn allows others to influence, develop, and evolve his work. And will be
the same process that will turn At the
Mountains of Madness: The Movie, should it ever happen, into something that
reflects other sensibilities than those of the author.
And I think I will go see that movie. And I will leave
poor Howard, impoverished and barking mad, at the door, letting him howl and
moon and wet himself publicly in whatever afterlife that would admit him. Let him rage against the
presumption of those who work to get beyond his odious attitudes. I’m good with
that.
More later,
