What's most interesting in Clive Barker is his wide and wild multimedia dimension. For him a story is a tale, and nothing else. And this tale is translated on various media. It can be put on paper in the shape of a novel (The Hellbound Heart). It can be put on paper in the shape of a comic book (Clive Barker's Hellraiser comic books, open to all kinds of artists within a guideline sheet known as « Concepts and Guidelines for a Horror Anthology Series from Epic Comics » or The Hellraiser Comics Bible). It can be put on film in the shape of a video or a film (four are available, the fifth one is being shot in Hollywood and the sixth one is announced). His stories seem to be perfectly transferable from one medium to the other, without losing anything, and in spite of this transfer, which is very often negative for many authors, the story on the new medium is enhanced by it. Clive Barker is able to use all possible media, each one in its own creativity, and using the specific value of each without jeopardizing the story itself. That is the first impression we get. We are going to explore this multimedia dimension through our theme.
Clive Barker's career started with two black and white films when he was a student : Salome and The Forbidden. And there he already dealt with flesh and its suffering. But the tale was only visual, without any words. A black and white visuality that used light and darkness as the poetic expression of a world founded on suffering, and maybe pleasure. Already, the body, its flesh, two senses (hearing and sight) were dominant, and the second film was the story of a man being peeled like a ripe fruit. The skin was dominant then. Hence three senses were at work in these films : hearing, sight and touch. Note the audience was able to share the first two, but only to symbolically take part in the third : the audience could only see the peeling. The third sense was mediated through the audience's eyes. The suffering that was obviously present in these films was also mediated both through the ears (the music and the flapping of the wings of some scared birds) and through the eyes (dancing, body movements, the frightened flight of the birds).
So, when we get to The Hellbound Heart, we expect to be kind of dissatisfied, since we are only going to have words. But we discover very fast that words are an asset in Barker's hands, and not a handicap. This book gives a full vision of pleasure from the very start, pleasure that will at once turn into suffering.
« The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handfull of humans had even known existed, much less tasted - pleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment which had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that knowledge, wouldn't he ? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling and remain unchanged. » (p.6)
WhenFranck is confronted to the Cenobites for the first time and discovers, at his own demand
« 'Show me,' he said.
'There's no going back. You do understand that ?'
'Show me.' » (p.11)
what kind of pleasures they are bringing, a hierarchy of the senses is put down as the road to suffering, to ever higher levels of suffering.
The transition from this demand to the experience of what he expects to be pleasure is achieved with
« the same panic-filled darkness from which the members of the Order had stepped. » (p.11)
First « the smell of burning » (p.11). And then « half a dozen other scents » (p.11). And these smells coming from his direct environment are excessive, overpowering. He is submerged by their strength, as if he was finally made capable of capturing them afer a life of unawareness, escape from them.
Second and third, together : « each nerve-ending and taste-bud » (p.12). This new level of sensations saves him from nausea brought by the previous level. Once again these senses (touch and taste) are excessive and they make him capable of feeling and tasting things he normally wouldn't feel nor taste, or would no longer feel nor taste, like the taste of the beef he had eaten the day before, without brushing his teeth, it's true :
« a morsel of yesterday's beef that had lodged between his teeth sent spasms through his system as it exuded a droplet of gravy upon his tongue » (p.12).
Fourth his ears are made supersensitive to sounds. And the result of this new level is mental and sensual impotence :
« the cacophony drove any power of analysis from his head » (p.12).
Fifth his eyes made it all « worse » (p.12). And the conclusion is natural.
« Too much ! Too much ! » (p.13)
So all those senses, five of them but in four layers or successive stages, all of them traditionally associated with pleasure, are made so powerful, so potent, that Franck becomes mentally, sensually and physically « appalled » (p.13). And his reflex is natural : he closes his eyes to try to close the outside world out. But then the same procedure starts inside. Another level, a fifth level, of pleasure/pain is reached « inside » (p.13), a higher level :
« But there was more inside than out » (p.13).
And there he finds « memories » (p.13). All kinds of memories, good and bad. But they all become so strong that he nearly becomes senseless. And this inside world is so painful that he tries to open his eyes to go back to the outside world.
« But they wouldn't unglue. Tears or pus or needle and thread had sealed them shut. » (p.13).
He was
« locked up behind his eyes with the parade of his history. » (p.13).
And this parade is the supreme pain he finds on that road to the bliss he expected to be granted.
« More sense-impressions were swimming up from the past to torment him. » (p.13).
The essential word of this tale is found, met : « torment ».
We must note here that we do not have six levels, but only five : touch and taste are only one. Note this unity corresponds to the common initial of these two senses. This number five is essential in this book. There are five Cenobites in the tale. They are the Order of the Gash he had learned about in the diaries of Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais. Only four comes that first time, but when he asks about the fith one, he is answered he will come soon, « the Engineer », and only one is obviously a woman. The others are men. We can wonder if there is a correspondance between these five Cenobites and the five levels of sensation, and then which sense is the female in the lot. But there is no direct answer to this question.
And so he is brought to this strange conclusion :
« No hope but to be lost to hope. » (p.15).
And it is this conclusion that stops the torment and the senses are enumerated in reverse order, in a chiasmic order :
« Gone. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. » (p.15)
just as if he were stepping back down his previous trail. And there they are five again. Memory hence is the level where the five senses are all associated.
Only five heartbeats are necessary for him to finally open his eyes. And he even thinks for a short moment the whole thing is finished. It is the fourth Cenobite, the woman, who is bringing the conclusion :
« 'So you've finished dreaming... Good... Now we can begin'. » (p.16).
And this female Cenobite is associated with
« sensuality and death » (p.15).
Hence we know here that these pleasures must lead to death. And this death will come in the form of being dismembered and torn up into pieces, alive, by chains and hooks.
We said there are five Cenobites in the original book and film.
Pinhead, whose head is pinned with nails on a perfect square pattern.
Chatterer, whose teeth are uncovered (missing lips) and constantly chattering.
The Female Cenobite, who is the only female looking one and carries a special knife.
Butterball who is extremely fat.
The fifth one, the Engineer, is hardly present, and some do not consider him a real Cenobite. Yet he has the body of a scorpion.
In the second film another turns up : Chanard. He has a face like whipped in a semi-square pattern and his head is held by the claws and talons of an enormous monstrous leg.
In the third film some more appear. The Terri Cenobite is another female one. Then we have the JP Cenobite (is it Justice of the Peace or Jet Propulsion ?) who spits fire at people. Camerahead has his left eye and the left side of his head transformed into a camera. The CD Cenobite attacks people with CDs that he throws at them, to kill of course. The Barbed Wire Cenobite, or Barbie, uses barbed wire to attack or capture people.
In further sequels more Cenobites appear, like, in Hellraiser, the Bloodline (the fourth film), the Twin Cenobites that are connected or linked together at the level of their heads, Duc de l'Isle and some other French aristocratic Cenobites (Clive Barker seems to know his French history), The Chatterer Beast that is a crisscross of different animals with some kind of a dog dominant in this « composition », and Cenobite Angelique who is a third female Cenobite and has an engelic face with a denuded skull, the skin being held apart by some kind of links. The Cenobites are a gallery of horrors, and their deeds are purely horrible.
These are the people who wanted to go to Hell, who solved the secret of the puzzle box (Philip Lemarchand's box also known as a Lament Configuration) and brought the Cenobites out by doing so. But they became Cenobites in their turn because they were truly deranged individuals. « The guilt-ridden twisted stuff of their psyches make them perfect material to be refashioned by Leviathan within one of its Cenobite creation chambers » (The Hellraiser Comics Bible) by the Cenobite Maker. It is their being extremely perverted and crual on earth that makes them potential Cenobites. « They are the SS of the damned » (The Hellraiser Comics Bible).
All other damned people desired to go to hell, and this principle that one goes to hell because one desires to do so, and hence behaves on earth in order to deserve such a destiny, is essential to understand hell as a place where suffering is the only objective, with the promotion of the most thwarted personalities to the aristocratic state of Cenobites. Those who do not become Cenobites, though they managed to get one of the very numerous Lemarchand's boxes and to open them, solve the puzzle, will forever suffer and wail like screaming souls (« those foolish enough to unlock the puzzles and travel the corridors of hell » but « not twisted enough to ever qualify as a Cenobite ») inside Leviathan. They will be forever Leviathan's pleasure. Leviathan finds its pleasure in the suffering of humans and particularly of their souls.
Leviathan is the heart of hell. It is « an enormous diamond shaped being » that turns endlessly at the center of Hell, but it contains the final level of Hell inside itself, and there are the screaming souls. Leviathan is a world entirely dedicated to order, I would even say geometrical order, and this order is expressed in its structure, that of a diamond, the perfect geometrical form par excellence. Leviathan is identified by The Hellraiser Comics Bible as a fascist order that brings together three elements :
- perfect order and structure that can in no way be changed ;
- suffering for those who were lured inside and are not worth promotion ;
- an absolute and constant war against humanity.
This war against humanity is justified by two elements :
- humanity is in no way order. It is chaos, malleability, constant change ;
- humanity is flesh, and flesh is chaos, malleability, constant change.
Leviathan has one objective : to torture the flesh of humans in order to make them discover order, structure, that is to say fleshlessness. But we must take some distance from the principles of this Bible, because it is a « reincarnation » of the fundamental christian beliefs, as they were accepted and understood in the darkest periods and the darkest communities in the Middle Ages. It is not only fascism. It is a feudal form of fascism. We can also note that this works perfectly well with all fundamentalistic approach of life, be it religious, philosophical or simply political. The rejection of any vatiation from a « perfect-declared » line. The rejection of any deviation from a « perfectly-straight » line. Any one who ponders on this world created by Clive Barker thinks of two English words meaning bigotry : « straight » and « square ». Leviathan is the world of the perfectly straight and square bigots of our everyday life. Clive Barker makes it so perfect that he goes to real geometrical extremes to do so. But this is the next step of our story.
This book contains also five characters.
Of course Franck, but behind him, the person who sold him the box that opens the door to the Order of the Gash, a certain Kircher.
This Kircher is an essential character though he is never in anyway clarified. So the origin of the box is more complex. The box was invented by a music-box maker, Lemarchand (Philip in the Bible). It is a three dimensional jigsaw. Lemarchand was a Frenchman who associated
« the acuity and technical genius of the Chinese » (p.3)
to
« a perverse logic which was entirely his own » (p.3).
This Lemarchand is also known as a bird-maker, because his profession was to build mechanical singing birds. And as a matter of fact, Franck discovered, when he managed to get one piece move out of the whole, that the box was a music-box of some kind.
Then we have Franck's brother, Rory.
Then his sister in law, Julia.
Finally we have Kirsty, Rory's daughter, with no more specifications.
Hence I say we have five characters because Kircher and Lemarchand are one : the origin, the source, of the box. And this is heavily emphasized in the Bible where the real origin is Leviathan who scatters tens of thousands of those boxes all over the world, with some kind of « salesman » that makes sure the box reaches the hands of one who has the desires for pleasure that will make him or her elligible for this puzzle and the future it may bring him or her. The whole process of discovering the Order of the Gash (note this Order of the Gash is not mentioned in the Bible) is intricately connected with the basic family structure we find in this book.
Two brothers, Rory and Franck, are competitors or even enemies. Franck will systematically live away from Rory, hence from England. Though he will come back to THE house of the novel, that is to say the parents' house, the family home. It is there he will meet the Order of the Gash, and die to survive in the floorboards of the room he had been experimenting with Lemarchand's box in.
But, when Rory is about to marry Julia (before Franck meets the Order of the Gash), this Julia meets Franck, when she is putting her wedding-dress on, and he rapes her, not entirely without her desire or acceptance. Franck is thus a thief : he steals things from Rory. This makes Julia a natural accomplice later on. In the house she is attracted by the mystery of this darkened room where Franck died, though, of course, she does not know about it.
On the day when they move in, Rory hurts his hand and runs for Julia to dress his wound. This makes him splash some blood on the floor of this room, where Julia is. This blood will be drunk by Franck through the boards, and this will start his ressuscitation. Franck steals Rory's blood.
Then he will capture Julia and she will bring him two men, for him to go on with his regeneration. She becomes a murderer to give Franck the blood, marrow, flesh and other fluids he needs, with the promise that he will love her when it is finished, that he will satisfy her desire.
The stealing process goes on as far as stealing Rory's skin to put it onto his newly-'found' body. Then he assumes Rory's identity.
It is at this moment Kirsty comes into the picture. She does not like Julia, which sounds logical for a very young woman : Julia is a later wife who cannot be a real mother in anyway. But Julia becomes strange because of Franck. So Rory asks Kirsty to pay her a visit and make her talk. The visit is very badly timed. Kirsty arrives at the house, when Julia has just brought the first man in. Kirsty sees the coat and believes Julia is having an affair. So she comes back to survey the house. And she sees the second man. She has not told Rory about it yet. She only tells him an innocuous version. She wants to solve the problem herself. So she arrives one night and asks to see her father. Julia accepts, but it is already Franck in Rory's skin. She discovers the truth because the creature tells her
« Come to daddy »,
a phrase her own father would never use, and this phrase triggers her memories of Franck. Yet Kirsty's role is far more important than that.
She will be taken to hospital in shock after stealing Lemarchand's box (throwing it out the window of the fateful room and picking it up on her way out). She will play with the box and open the gate to the Order of the Gash in her very hospital room. There she will evade the Cenobites by promising to lead them to Franck, which she will do. To make it possible for the Cenobites to reclaim Franck, she will have to make Franck say he is Franck, which he does, even if relunctantly, and only to boast in front of her at the very moment when he thinks he is going to have her, to steal her from her father, whose skinless body is on the floor, behind Kirsty, in the room where Franck met with the Cenobites for the first time. And then Kirsty will use the box again to send the Cenobites, who want her of course, back to hell.
So if we can summarize the situation we can say we have five characters :
We must notice that there are TWO men, Franck and Rory, that Rory has TWO women, Julia and Kirsty, that Franck stole and used Julia, and wants to steal and use Kirsty. It is thus a drama of the rivalry between TWO brothers, amplified by and into the rivalry between the TWO women. Franck, the dispossessed one (of any social position : it reminds us of a very British situation where the younger son(s) of a noble family is(are) dispossessed of the title and family assets to the profit of the elder(est) son), is trying to steal what Rory, the privileged one in society, has.
This dramatic and even tragic square is taken between TWO poles :
Between those two poles the box, a cube, six faces, a TRIdimensional square, the THIRD dimension of the basic square in the tale. Franck will be the opener of the third dimension, and Kirsty will be the closer of this third dimension. This third dimension is presented as a window, a door, a gash in time and space,
« the threshold of a new world» (p.5).
Note also that the box can take the shape of an oblong DOUBLE-pointed TRIhedron that will be used as some kind of dagger or also some kind of compass-hand, pointing BOTH ways at the same time. The TWO points are the TWO poles of the situation and the TRIangle of the center is a reduction of the square to what it is fundamentally, FOUR TRIangles :
This leads to the feeling of a very strong structure in the novel, all the stronger because it is embedded in family relations. We hence reenact very old mythological beliefs. And we thus bring together The Helleraiser Comics Bible and The Hellbound Heart.
This brings us back to the senses.
Smell is the opener. Then we come to the couple touch and taste, then we move to hearing, and then to sight, to end up with memory. In a body disposition it gives us the nose, the skin and tongue, the ears, the eyes and finally the brain. Two poles and a square in between, a square that is more or less only a triangle. Lemarchand's box reveals the three-dimensional organisation of the senses, of the body.
Or rather, the three-dimensional organisation of the senses and the body in Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart is in perfect phase with the dramatic situation in the book. It is both the origin and the model. The situation in the book is both the continuation of and the contrast to the mapping of the senses. Continuation because it is fundamentally the same structure. But contrast because it has a social dimension that will enable the taming and bringing back into acceptable limits of the senses. Here thus, the senses-body and the situation are a DIhedron, the TWO sides of one same thing, and a DYad, TWO antagonistic vectors of the same nature. We hence get in this book a perfect paragon of this couple DIHEDRON-DYAD at every single level of the book.
Pleasure is the objective of man, but it is revealed suffering is the result of this pleasure, or rather of this quest for pleasure, of the very tools of this pleasure, viz. the senses. And the end of the book shows that suffering has to be accepted and suffered in order to be able to close the door through which suffering has been unleashed. It will not bring us back to pleasure or even the quest of pleasure, but only to the absence of suffering, some kind of calm sea after the tempest.
We can think it is cathartic. It liberates us of our fears and of our divided loyalties or desires. But it is not really cathartic because this liberation can only come through the destruction of our antagons. Only one person survives, Kirsty, and she finds peace only after the total destruction of the others. But not of the box. And if we go back to the religious metaphor in Kirsty's name, we are at the antipode of Christ : she suffers but she survives. She saves the world by surviving. Her death would have meant the unleashing of the Cenobites on the whole world, the triumph of evil. She is in a way a Christian anti-Christ. We think of Yeats's The Second Coming, and yet we must admit that this story is closer to Blake's « Tygers » than to Yeats's laquo; Beast ».
That is here we meet with the videos. And the first remark is that there are sequels, five of them, to the original adaptation of the novel. I have only watched two, hence three videos. We can say that the first one, Hellraiser is a faithful adaptation and that it does not change the story, except by adding an extended version of a boyfriend for Kirsty, giving thus a sentimental background to Kirsty. It does not change the fundamental square-structure, at least radically, though it makes the video slightly more personal, sentimental, mushy, at least at that level. It also introduces the character of a bum who comes into the store where Kirsty is working and eats bugs, who, at the final moment of the video, when Kirsty throws the box into a fire in an open and empty wasteland that now surrounds the house that is crumbling into ruins, comes up to the fire and gets the box out of the fire without any visible pain. This is the guardian angel that the Bible speaks of.
The others, Hellbound Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III Hell on Earth, Hellraiser IV : the Bloodline, HellraiserV and Hellraiser VI, do not fundamentally change the basic story. But the family links will never be found again. In the first sequel there is an attempt at rebuilding them, in hell. But it fails because Clive Barker has been obliged to introduce new characters. In fact the situation is more or less confused. In the second sequel, a family situation is introduced, but it has nothing to do with the original situation. And even then it is a bit confused
Yet the videos give a new dimension to the story, and it is this new dimension that is interesting in the perspective of the study of suffering.
We briefly talked of the first films, Salome and The Forbidden. We said that black and white was used to create an atmosphere that compensated the absence of words. These films only used music and some sounds associated to darkness, light and movement to propose us some representation of suffering. The only other props used in these films were flapping birds taking their flight in some kind of frightened state, and of course the characters themselves and what was happening to them. We were there, in the field of images, as close as close can be to literature. We had to imagine a lot of sensations that were only kind of shown but never in a realistic way (black and white) or with elements implying suffering or pleasure : no shouts, no tears, no anger, no special effects, etc. We had there a very purified vision.
The films we are going to speak of now are in color and with a lot of special effects. The intention is to give us to see all the sensations and feelings the text has evoked or the sequels want to bring up. The first remark is that such films can only use three levels of communication : hearing (music, dialogues, all kinds of noises or shouts, etc), sight (the colors, the images, the movements, etc) and imagination. This last competence in the audience is prompted by all the other elements, but it is demultiplied by special effects and the realistic dimension of the images and the film in general. This competence works on memory (using the codes of horror films, fantastique films, science-fiction films and even thrillers) and on creativity (the ability to decipher new elements, new special effects in a new way, hence the ability to experience a new interpretation of old elements and to interpret new elements). Everything is hence visualised. Images can be limiting in their impact, but they can also work as doors or windows onto new elements through personal associations, metaphors, correspondances, … What's more, we find some elements that run from one video to the next, and this prompts our memory about the previous films.
The main aspect of these films is that each one has a new situation, even if this situation is built from an elements that comes from the previous ones. In the first sequel we start from the hospital situation of Kirsty. Then we expand from there. In the second sequel we start with a sculpture that is the representation of various elements already met before : the Cenobites, some suffering characters, etc. Then the situations are completely new. In the third film, the location is different too and shifts from England to what could be and probably is the US.
The films enable Clive Barker to give some identity to the main Cenobite, Pinhead. He used to be a commissioned officer who did horrible things in wars. From what we see it must be the First World War. In the second sequel a new character (all the old ones have disappeared) reminesces and dreams of her father being killed in another war, the Vietnam War. The stake becomes then to send back to hell these Cenobites, and thus to liberate the ghost of the soldier of the first sequel, who appears in the second sequel too, by reuniting him with the Cenobite that came out of him. The idea here is that someone becomes a Cenobite by using his power (no matter what it is) to make other people suffer. This soldier becomes a Cenobite whose head is adorned with nails, in a perfect square grille pattern (supposedly an allusion to a pattern that was already found in The Forbidden, but this is, to my point of view, rather anecdotical). From what we learn, Cenobites are centered on the tool they used, when alive, to make people suffer. Hence the soldier must have been some kind of a torturer (nails are so often used in torturing as we well know from testimony of people who have served in torturing units in some of those wars). Another Cenobite in the second sequel has one eye and the right section of his head transformed into a camera (he must have been a cameraman of some kind, and in this sequel the main character is a TV journalist). Another, the JP Cenobite, spits fire (he must have been an arsonist of some kind, or a Justice of the Peace who sent many people to te stake). The general meaning seems to be that someone who has been evil on earth becomes a demon that uses his favorite human tool to pounce onto earth, onto humans. At times the tricks used by these Cenobites are gadgets, like CDs transformed into killing discuses, by the CD Cenobite, in connection with the Boiler Room " disco " which is the main location of the coming out of the Cenobites (Pinhead essentially) and of their new trip in the world. These films are yet less powerful than the books. Why ?
The main reason is that the films cannot give a full « picture » of this trip into suffering. It can only use hearing and sight. It can only use memory. Hence it has to build ellipses between what we hear, what we see and what we may remember, to evoke taste, touch, smell and memories. Suffering is nothing but a built ellipse in the films, whereas in the book, suffering being in words, it is perfectly clear. The films use words too, but these words are always translated into pictures and anyway images are stronger than words which can only be ancillary. We need less imagination to compensate these images than words, or our imagination is limited by the images. But words use meaning, and the meaning of words, some special words, can lead the reader into knowing what we are speaking of, hence an individually-mediated direct knowledge of what the author is speaking of. Whereas with images and sounds another mediation appears, the mediation imposed by the images and the sounds, by the director. If the director, and the author, are skillful, and they are, we can trust the images and the sounds to lead us into constructing a full picture that conveys the meaning the author wants to reach. But even so, an image has or does not have, for one particular individual, the connections, hence the meaning, the author wants us to reach. The main Cenobite transforms himself into a fake representation of Christ, in a Catholic church, at the altar, by pulling out of his head two nails on which two worms are coiled and by planting these nails into his hands and then taking the pose of Christ on the cross. This may work with some people who are christian-minded. But it will not work with most people, even in the Western world. It is supposed to create total repulsion and absolute fear. But it can only reach that goal if the audience is deeply involved in christian belief. For those who do not consider the image of the Christ on the cross as something absolutely real in their lives, it will not reach this goal, except intellectually, as a critic.
In other words, I think that the films are less effective than the book, because they guide, channel the imagination of the audience into some roads of meaning. We are no longer " free " to see what we want from plain words. We are imposed some kind of limitation. These films are cathartic in many ways, but cathartic of the desire for cruelty (both ways) in the audience by showing it as repulsive and vain. The book was cathartic of something deeper than that. It was cathartic of the deepest fears we could find in ourselves, the fear that only imagination could apply to words, that only a lexical or semantic ellipse could bring up. The ellipse images and sounds bring up in our minds, is limited by these images and sounds. Catharsis is a process in which some real element opens a door for fears, frights and desires to come out. In fact Lemarchand's box is a representation of that very catharsis. It is the ellipse of the door that opens when we liberate our fears, frights and desires. Only dreams and literature can do that. Whereas the book is deeply moving and upsetting, the films are some kind of adventure films. A book is more cathartic because somewhere in our collective and individual mind we believe a story that is printed on paper could really happen, to us of course. Whereas the cinema is a fake. We know the actors will survive, though the characters will die. We know the actors do not suffer, though the characters do suffer.
A book is a direct contact between us, the readers, and the characters who are real and who are really experiencing what the words say. A film is an indirect representation of unreal characters in unreal situations. A film has no reality, whereas a book is part of the reality of a reader.
The suspension of disbelief with a book is permanent and it overlives the end of the reading. The suspension of disbelief with a film is only temporary and it dies with the end of the film. A book can forever be haunting for a reader. A film can only be a time-limited thrill. A reader can enter a book and live there in total reality, because the reality of the mind is absolutely material, whereas a viewer can enter the film but only for the length of time a film lasts, because at the end the images of the films will be denied by the images of the real world.
A book does not contain images, only words. And words live in our mind forever because they have been registered in our mind forever. One never forgets words or languages. One can only forget they knew them. But they are there in their minds, lurking and menacing to come out at any time. We have a fully developed and perfectly secret word bank in the brain, whereas our image bank is very limited and transient. The suffering evoked by words is permanent in our brains, whereas the suffering evoked by images can only be transient and repulsive for a limited period of time. We are shocked and we may become nauseous in front of an image. But some words will forever ring a repulsive bell in our minds.
We still have a lot to learn about the permanent power of words as compared to the transient power of images. That is probably why some censors want to forbid some works of literature, whereas no one has ever suggested the blinding of a whole society in order to prevent them from seeing shocking images. That's why any censorship on TV is nothing and useless, because it will not prevent anyone from telling, in secret if necessary, the dirty stories they have to tell to liberate themselves from their fears and frights.
If an old jewish friend of mine was shocked beyond belief by the image of her own mother walking into Auschwitz broadcast by French television for the fiftieth anniversary of the Shoah, it's because it gave a pictural form to something she had always known, in words : her mother had died in Auschwitz. But millions of people were not shocked at all because those images were nothing but images. You zap, you turn off the TV or you wait for the end, and the repulsion will be finished.
That's what I wanted to say about Clive Barker.
Dr Jacques Coulardeau
Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart, Fontana, London, 1986
Clive Barker, Salome, Redemption Films International, London, 1995
Clive Barker, The Forbidden, Redemption Films International, London,
1995
Clive Barker, Hellraiser, New World Pictures, Hollywood, 1987
Clive Barker, Hellbound, Hellraiser II, New World Pictures, Hollywood,
1988
Clive Barker, Hellraiser III, Hell on Earth, Fifth Avenue Entertainment,
New York, 1992
http://www.cenobite.com
http://www.rexer.com/hell : The Hellbound Web ; Clive Barker's Hellraiser, Concepts
and Guidelines for a Horror Anthology Series from Epic Comics.
http://www.clivebarker.com
