This Is Not Reality: H. P. Lovecraft, Jean Baudrillard, and In The Mouth of Madness

    In the heady years of the early 2000s, the name Jean Baudrillard was practically synonymous with postmodernism in the public consciousness. With dozens of books on topics ranging from popular culture to the Gulf War to his name, Baudrillard’s primary theoretical project was describing the related concepts of simulation and hyperreality. Simply put, or at least as simply as such concepts can be put, Baudrillard teaches us what children intuitively understand: that the images we see on our television screens and in the cinema are real, perhaps more real than we would like to admit.
    It should come as no surprise that Hollywood would be quite taken with Baudrillard’s theories. Perhaps the most famous example of Baudrillardian cinema is the Wachowskis’ Matrix franchise. However, Baudrillard actively distanced himself from The Matrix, stating in an interview with The New York Times that what the Wachowskis borrowed from his book Simulacra and Simulation “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings.” He would later refuse offers by the pair to consult on the film’s two sequels and generally seemed skeptical that any movie could ever adequately convey the themes of his work.
    Baudrillard’s critiques of The Matrix were, and remain, entirely justified. Were the Wachowskis to faithfully apply Baudrillard’s conception of reality within the fictive framework they establish in the film’s first act, The Matrix would either cut to black or loop back to its opening sequence as soon as the red pill hits Neo’s tongue. There is no possibility of an escape back into reality in an authentically Baudrillardian simulation. And maybe that would have been for the best given that the rest of the film plays out like a reheated pastiche of a lesser Phillip K. Dick novel. If any movie truly deserves to be described as Baudrillardian, it is John Carpenter’s 1994 cult classic In the Mouth of Madness.
    But before discussing In the Mouth of Madness, it is necessary to explore the film’s primary literary antecedents: the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Over the course of his tragic (and tragically short) life, Lovecraft produced some of the most enduring pieces of horror yet to be committed to paper. Though his stories only ever found print in the pulp publications of his time, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Call of Cthulhu, and others comprise a new literary canon unto themselves. In an interview with John Higgs, Alan Moore, acclaimed author of Watchmen and From Hell, drew a parallel between sixties science fiction and the potential for modern Lovecraftian horror, saying:

Micheal Moorcock was mainly interested in modernism. He noticed that the science fiction genre was laying around with its wheels off and that no one was doing much with it apart from kind of cowboys in space. So he thought, ‘Why don’t we hijack this and make science fiction a vehicle for modernism?’ And then, yeah, J. G. Ballard, all the rest. I think you could do the same thing with Lovecraft alone amongst horror writers. I think that Lovecraft’s preoccupations were so forward looking, and his writing techniques were so unusual, that, yeah, you could use Lovecraft as the starting point for a new kind of  ‘modernist horror,’ if you will.

While Moore’s appraisal is accurate-- and indeed there is a strain of modernist Lovecraftian horror practiced by authors like Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, and B. R. Yeager--a distinction must be made here between Lovecraftian and cosmic horror, with the former being characterized primarily by its transmogrification of impersonal and faceless forces into Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and other such named nameless gods; whereas the latter is distinguished by its refusal to do so. This distinction is not between two different species of narrative, but between narrative and theory. The author is only able to acknowledge true cosmic horror by analogy. The theorist, however, grapples with the unknown, the non-euclidean, and the squamous directly.
    Baudrillard’s obscenity of “immediate visibility,” as Judith Halberstam notes in Skin Shows, requires a collapse of body and soul into one. The Lovecraftian model, then, presents the perfect framework in which to explore not just modernism, as Moore proposes, but postmodernism as well: Cthulhu/Dagon/etc. are the embodied collapse of sign and signifier. This is true in literature, but doubly true in film.
    Enter John Carpenter. Director of Halloween, The Thing, and They Live, Carpenter, perhaps uniquely among his contemporaries, understood why Lovecraft’s work has been so enduring. In a retrospective interview on the making of In the Mouth of Madness, he said:

I’ve always wanted to tackle H. P. Lovecraft. I’ve always wanted to do something with him. It’s very hard because he describes indescribable horror. I mean, what is it? What does it look like? It drives people mad when they see it. So if you visualize too much of it, I think it may lose its punch.

Carpenter’s approach to Lovecraftian horror echoes the iconoclast’s approach to Christianity. To render the Lord God or, in Carpenter’s case, Cthulhu in images is to reduce Him/it to something knowable. The iconoclasts, and by extension Carpenter, argue that this ability to be understood undermines the power of their respective muses. Somewhat paradoxically, Baudrillard writes that the iconoclast’s approach does more to promote the power of the image:

If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn’t conceal anything at all…

The lady doth protest too much, Baudrillard thinks. These fanatical attempts to enforce the second commandment only serve to reaffirm the fact that there is, to borrow from and bastardize Baum, no man behind the curtain. Thus, with his implicitly iconoclastic mindset, Carpenter was perfectly positioned to direct Mike De Luca’s screenplay, and in so doing more faithfully, albeit accidentally, render Lovecraft and Baudrillard’s ideas cinematically than any film that has come before or since.
    Despite the film’s title, it was Lovecraft’s short story “Pickman’s Model” more so than “At the Mountains of Madness,” which informed the direction Mouth was to take. In “Pickman’s Model,” the narrator relates to one of his acquaintances how he gained the confidence of one Richard Upton Pickman, an artist infamous for his macabre paintings, and was subsequently granted access to the painter’s private gallery in a slum of Boston. While there, Pickman shows the narrator all manner of disturbing artwork depicting ghoulish canine-human hybrids defiling graves and crypts and eating the corpses within. The centerpiece of this hellish gallery is a massive painting of a giant creature eating a man alive. Attached to the easel is a small photograph that Pickman claims is of the real background in which he set his horrible scene. While Pickman is distracted by strange sounds in an adjoining room, the narrator pockets the photograph. The story concludes with the narrator revealing to his acquaintance that the picture was not of the real-life counterpart to the painting’s background, but of the creature itself.
    Returning again to Baudrillard. In the opening chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard both anatomizes the horror of “Pickman’s Model” and provides the blueprint for In the Mouth of Madness by differentiating between representations and simulations. Representations, by their nature, must refer back to the real, whereas simulations refer only to themselves; to the process of representation. He writes:

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

The horror of “Pickman’s Model” is the horror of what Baudrillard terms first order simulation: that the sign, here Pickman’s painting of “a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glowing red eyes,” is “a good appearance” or “the reflection of a profound reality.” The creature, whatever it is, is real within the logic of the story. Thus, “Pickman’s Model” falls into the same trap as The Matrix. That the real can be returned to, whether through taking the red pill in The Matrix or by delving into the forgotten catacombs beneath Boston in “Pickman’s Model,” is closer to a representation rather than a true simulation, and in turn prevents the creation of a fictive portrayal of a simulacrum.
    This is where In the Mouth of Madness succeeds. Following the opening credit sequence (which we will return to later), the film begins in earnest with John Trent (played by Sam Neill) being confined to a padded cell. Trent is shortly joined by a psychologist named Dr. Wrenn, to whom he relates the events that led to his current imprisonment. Trent, an insurance fraud investigator, was contracted by Arcane Publishing to track down their star author Sutter Cane who mysteriously disappeared along with the manuscript for his newest novel.
    Trent is rightfully skeptical of the publishing house’s claim that Cane has simply vanished. He believes that Cane’s “disappearance” is simply a publicity stunt to promote the author’s book and that his “investigation” would only serve to further the illusion. Trent’s reasoning here is not all that unlike Baudrillard’s. On page twenty of Simulacra and Simulation, he uses the example of a simulated robbery to describe what he terms “the reality principle.” Baudrillard writes:

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup. Because the latter does nothing but disturb the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks the reality principle itself… Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation. 

Hence, Trent’s reticence. To make himself a part of this mummery would be to participate in the unraveling of what is taken for “reality.” Trent, a living instrument of law and order, would see his skills reappropriated to the construction of a fiction. This same theme of simulation is addressed in the film’s opening when Dr. Wrenn all but accuses Trent of faking his psychosis in order to stay confined within the walls of the asylum, recalling Baudrillard’s invocation of Littré earlier in Simulacra and Simulation.
    Despite his reservations, Trent agrees to the job and sets out for Hobb’s End accompanied by Linda Styles, Sutter Cane’s editor. The drive to Hobb’s End is an almost complete inversion of the ideas expressed in Baudrillard’s America. Written as something of a travelogue, America foregrounds the distinctly American image of the desert flat lands to explore and explain Baudrillard’s theories. The desert, Baudrillard claims, is a physical escape from culture; a land so arid that no people can ever truly take root. This does seem to be somewhat at odds with Baudrillard’s earlier writings where the simulation is presented as omnipresent and inescapable, but nonetheless provides a vocabulary with which to discuss the simulation directly.
    If, then, Baudrillard found the so-called desert of the real in the American south west, Trent and Styles find themselves driving ever deeper into the jungle of the hyperreal. The field fringed roads stretch on to infinity, pregnant with promises of hidden meaning. The following exchange between the pair could just as easily have been excerpted from Simulacra and Simulation as from the film itself.

LINDA STYLES

I just like being scared. Cane’s work scares me.

JOHN TRENT

What’s to be scared about? It’s not like it’s real or anything.

LINDA STYLES

It’s not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane’s work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.

JOHN TRENT

Whoa. We’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about fiction. It’s different, you know.

LINDA STYLES

Reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places. If the insane were to become the majority, you would find yourself locked in a padded cell wondering what happened to the world.

    As they draw nearer to Hobb’s End, Styles’ fears become manifest. A teenager on a bicycle pedals frantically out of the dark in the opposite direction, followed closely behind by an old man dressed in the same clothes as the teenager. Clearly, the cyclists are one and the same, trapped in a circuit of pure meaning and action. When viewed in this light, the young cyclist forever riding out of Hobb’s End assumes yet another dimension of fear and terror; he becomes a grotesque parody of the “senseless repetition … already present in the abstraction of the journey.” His actions are no longer senseless; they are meaning itself, carefully controlled and modulated by a hyperreal fiction. A bleak and portentous omen of things to come.
    Once Trent and Styles arrive in Hobb’s End, the actual machinations and structure of the plot become significantly less important. Reality denatures around them as time passes, the plaything of a hack horror writer. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the lobby of the Pickman Inn, where a painting on the wall gradually assumes ever more frightful aspects reflective of the deterioration of Hobb’s End. That the inn shares its name with the antagonist of Lovecraft’s story is surely no coincidence.
    After several confrontations with the denizens of Hobb’s End, Trent finds himself at the bar of Pickman’s Inn. He is not alone. Slumped in the corner is Simon, played by Wilhelm von Homburg of Ghostbusters II fame. Simon implores Trent to leave Hobb’s End, explaining that his children, as well as the other children of the town, fell under Cane’s spell long before the adults, becoming incredibly violent and monstrous. No wonder it took the children first. No single group is as susceptible to the lure of fiction.
    The film concludes with Trent watching In the Mouth of Madness in an empty theater, laughing hysterically to and at himself. With this closing image, the meaning of the film becomes clear. Trent and the cyclist are one and the same; figures trapped in a constant and inescapable hyperreal loop. Throughout the film, Trent repeatedly cries that “this is not reality!” This proclamation would have been just as true if uttered in New York as in Hobb’s End. Reality was never there to begin with-- the film’s conclusion has always already happened, even within the context of the film. This is hyperreality. Trent will always be too late.
    What’s really intriguing about the conclusion of the movie is the way in which it addresses the mass production of culture, and thus the advent of the simulation proper. As has been mentioned previously, the opening credits play over footage of a printing press spitting out copy after copy of Sutter Cane’s books. Here the printing press serves as midwife, dragging Cane’s vision, dripping and mewling into reality. But, tellingly, his vision does not reach maturity until it has exploded onto the screen in technicolor. Carpenter asserts the ascendancy of film, of the visual, over the purely literary. This concept is actually given voice in the film when Jackson Harglow, editor-in-chief of Arcane Publishing explains to Trent that those that can’t, don’t, or won’t read the book will simply “see the movie” instead; thus allowing Sutter Cane’s ghastly visions to push into and replace reality. In short, there will be no escaping the cultural phenomenon that is Sutter Cane because his works have been resolved and reproduced into a variety of accessible forms in a way not dissimilar to that that Walter Benjamin describes in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” However, where Benjamin fears that the ability for endless reproduction will efface art, Baudrillard fears that endless reproduction
will efface reality.
    Maybe this, as Trent would say, is a “rotten way to end it,” but there are, of course, other instances of Baudrillardian cinematic horror; Cannibal Holocaust, The Last Broadcast, The Blair Witch Project, and the proliferation of Paranormal Activity movies all spring immediately to mind. Truthfully though, these films are a less complete articulation of Baudrillard’s theories, being little more than simulated holdups, whereas In the Mouth of Madness is, however unintentionally, about the distinction between reality, simulation, and simulacra. Carpenter et. al did accidentally what the Wachowskis failed to do intentionally.