HR Giger – Close Read

Review: ‘Love, Death & Robots’ 3 (2022)

Spoilers abound.

Two overarching impressions. 1) The Telegraph wrote that LDR 3 is about the pitfalls of human greed. I came to a different conclusion. Almost all of the episodes in LDR 3 were about humans meeting the ancient, the mysterious or the new and coming away humbled or humiliated, if they came away at all. It’s an important, but not necessarily interesting, choice of theme at this moment: the apparent centrality of exploitation to the human condition. Perhaps more importantly, LDR 3 seems to reflect on the violence that being good demands of us – call it revolution, survival, whatever – in this age of the banality of greed. Be good. It won’t be easy, but be good.

The second impression is at the end.

Episode 1: [Exit Strategies] The very end of the ending delivers a punch that is immediately humorous but out of sorts with the tone and narrative of the rest of the episode. The rest – in the form of a social commentary of humankind’s last days – was informative coming from robots but nothing quite eye-opening or mind-blowing. But it’s short, so it’s easy to enjoy.

Episode 2: [Bad Travelling] “There’s nothing more terrifying than a man prepared to live by his conviction.” This quote appears in the Netflix series Unabomber, about the manhunt for Ted Kaczynski. This line, or a minor variant of it, apparently originated with Kaczynski and it’s easy to see its imprints on his choice of lifestyle and his radical beliefs about the environment, industrialisation and self-governance. This said, the line has remained with me because it reads like one of the few fundamental truths about the human condition – something you can’t drill further down, something that leads to a fount of insights into what it means to be human. The episode brings this truth to powerful light, and demonstrates how the absolute adherence to doing the right thing – while it may lead to morally desirable outcomes – can appear just as devious as the actions of a chaotic-evil character might.

Episode 3: [The Very Pulse of the Machine] One thing this episode gets right within the first two minutes is that it resolves a long-standing what-if that two movies have left us with: Prometheus (2012) and The Martian (2015). At the end of Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw is stranded on an alien moon with the rest of her crew dead and only one spacecraft left to operate, which she intends to use to get to the home-planet of the Engineers. She is determined and focused. Through most of The Martian, Mark Watney has no self-doubt, no anxiety, no panic attack – even though he’s stuck on Mars and needs to find his way back to Earth, and also figure out how to feed himself and keep himself alive. He is instead simply determined and focused. What would it look like to be stranded on an alien world, with the hope of going or returning somewhere, and to have self-doubt as well? This is how this episode of LDR 3 begins – but the problem is that the character quickly consumes some potent drug that makes her high, and the self-doubt is replaced with visual and auditory hallucinations. Ugh.

Episode 4: [Night of the Mini Dead] This was funny from start to finish, but the laughter didn’t last. It began funny because of the medium – miniatures on a tapletop acting out the deceptively innocuous beginnings of a zombie apocalypse, followed by the apocalypse itself – and stayed funny because the rapid pace of events keep you from thinking too much and because the apocalypse for once seems neither unpredictable nor offers redemptive value. Even the ending, a climax that lasts for all of a second, carries the tone on and leaves you with a chuckle. But give it a few more seconds and you’re probably thinking what the point was. I did. I didn’t get it. Silly little things can set off non-silly non-big things, and when it’s all said and done, none of it matters? Fuck you.

Episode 5: [Kill Team Kill] This one was pointless. Really. I mean, LDR 3 like its two predecessors keeps its bodily obscenities focused on the male form, which makes sense only if you’re going to make a larger point about toxic masculinity and such things. But this one’s just adrenaline from start to finish.

Episode 6: [Swarm] LDR 3 was released earlier this year, unintentionally (maybe) coinciding with a time in which experts and stakeholders around the world were pondering how we should treat genetic information – in line with the biological specimens from which they’re obtained or with a separate policy. The man’s ambitions in this episode encode the hubris that we’ve come to expect from the corporate sector vis-à-vis our biological resources – the conviction that the exploiter will triumph by virtue of the destructive tendencies of exploitation. But as in the episode as in the real world, such conviction obscures the complementary admission that we assume we know everything there is to know. We never do, and exploitation always backfires.

When scientists working for a large company sequence the DNA of a rare plant using a single leaf plucked from a sacred forest, return it to the forest’s stewards once they’re done, and go on to replicate a compound encoded in the genes that provides a beautiful fragrance eventually bottled as an expensive perfume, should the stewards benefit? Should they have asked the stewards first? Should the stewards have much of a say? To my mind the answers to all these questions is ‘yes’, but few of the reasons are rooted in science. The stewards and indeed the complex community of organisms of which they are part often possess an intelligence to which science blinds us. Yet these discussions frequently begin among scientists, involve scientists and repeatedly appeal to scientific principles to claim moral, and eventually political, authority – and it inevitable leads to exploitation. The same thing happens in the episode, which I must say ends on a very gratifying note.

Episode 7: [Mason’s Rats] No particular thoughts beyond the two impressions.

Episode 8: [In Vaulted Halls Entombed] One thing that many (but not all) horror productions fail to get is that it’s not the grotesque that really frightens us but that momentary but singularly immense shock of being faced with something that we never expected to face – to have our minds confront something that they can’t possibly conceive. Even more fundamentally, terror erupts when we need to fill in a blank in reality (or in a movie if we’ve suspended disbelief). The brain is a prediction engine, so when it has no reasonable options to choose from, it seems to go haywire, populating the blank with monsters lurking in the dark of our conscience. A production succeeds the moment it creates a suitable blank and forces us to admit that we can’t ignore it. But I’d say there’s one fear that’s even deeper, even more unsettling: the incomprehensible. It’s the blank that’s clearly been filed yet which evades complete comprehension. Hans Giger’s art captured this sensation wonderfully well as did H.P. Lovecraft’s lore of the Old Ones – but I experienced it most profoundly in the latter’s The Outsider. It’s the thing that you know and that you struggle to know, both at once – and it’s the sensation to which this episode builds up. Excellent stuff. Also: “Embrace the suck” – a line worth remembering.

Episode 9: [Jibaro] The internet suggests this was the most popular episode. I’m going to stick with In Vaulted Halls Entombed but only because of my fascination with the unknown. Without that, the fever-dream that is Jibaro would easily cut ahead. It brings together a “baroque” combination of “film and animation” and “dance and mythology” (source), a melancholy soundtrack and a story so replete with metaphors that it’s hard to come to one conclusion about it – and that apparently was also its maker’s intention. It’s shot through with greed but it doesn’t seem reasonable to stop there, with that conclusion, that Jibaro is a parable about one of the seven deadly sins. Instead, the tale seems to me to be about what how perfectly acceptable being our worst selves looks like (as its maker told Awn), how familiar the Knight and the Siren seem to us. We’ve seen them before, at least parts of them, in the people around us, in the people we read about.

I don’t want to fall into the same trap as the readings I am criticizing and try and ‘pin down’ Jibaro into a single parable or message. Mielgo is not deliberately making a comment on Cervantes here. Rather, his short film, like his characters, is meant to ‘dance’. It spins on and through and around a variety of tropes, the central one being that of toxic relationships and the way these are both frightening and alluring. But the textual bed in which the deaf knight and the siren sleep together is less that of Spanish colonialism than that of Spanish mythology. The correspondences to the latter are much more precise.

The second impression: Many of the episodes seem to bear the echoes of episodes in LDR’s still-the-best season 1. Exit Strategies is obviously related to Three Robots, but the other episodes are connected more subtly. Night of the Mini Dead brings to mind Ice Age. Mason’s Rats brings to mind The Dump. In the Vaulted Halls Entombed brings to mind both Shape-Shifters and The Secret War. The Very Pulse of the Machine brings to mind Fish Night. Jibaro brings to mind Good Hunting (and The Witness in style of animation). Bad Travelling brings to mind Sonnie’s Edge. It’s hard to say if this was intentional (I’m being lazy and not googling), but it’s also hard to explain the raft of similarities. This said, the ultimate effect of LDR 1 was mind-expanding (Beyond the Aquila Rift and Zima Blue remain unmatched); LDR 2 was to remind us that LDR can also be bad; and LDR 3 is a contemplation of the costs of being good.

Featured image: A scene from Jibaro. Source: Netflix.

The mad world

Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

… [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?¹

1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

Gigernama / 'A man dressed in black with a tube under his arm'

On May 12, 2014, about half a week before the Lok Sabha election votes were to be counted, ahead of the result that would catapult the BJP to power with an overwhelming majority in the lower house of Parliament, H.R. Giger passed away. I didn’t hear about it until two days later, on May 14. I remember dropping whatever I was doing – which was quite a bit because Counting Day was almost upon us – rushing over to the Sunday Magazine desk and pitching an obituary for Giger to Baradwaj Rangan. I was commissioned 20 seconds later, and I was done two hours later.

As far as I was concerned, it was very, very bad news. With his death, Giger’s repertoire was finished, complete, finito; there wasn’t going to be any more new material. I could complete his obituary in such a short span of time not because I was familiar with his creative output – familiarity would imply I understood what was going on; I didn’t. If anything, I was just a kindred soul – with many fears and terrors, and little faith in solace or hope. It was a world, and worldview, that Giger the artist had helped validate.

Yesterday, I’d met a friend for coffee and – as our conversation about the future of science journalism meandered on – we happened to be talking about sci-fi Netflix, Alejandro Jodorowsky and, soon, Giger. I don’t remember how we got there except that one of us had mentioned Dune and the other had been very excited to meet a fellow Dune fan. We hugged. After exchanging a few notes about having had a childhood equal parts traumatised and enlivened by the Necronomicon, my friend mentioned that there was a documentary about Giger released sometime in 2014. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.

So yesterday, I completed all the tasks on my to-do list, grabbed some early dinner, and shut myself off in my room. I’d decided that for old times’ sake I was going to gift myself some masochistic mindfuck: I was going to watch the documentary, called Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World.

[One hundred minutes later] I’m incredibly glad I did.

[Early next morning] No excuse is weak enough for me to revisit, rediscuss, reanalyse and reconsume the brilliance of Giger – as if being able to enjoy an old and favourite track for the first time. And Dark Star was a fecund, almost extortionate, excuse.

For example, fifteen minutes into it, a few lines – spoken by Hanz Kunz, a poster-maker, and Leslie Barany, Giger’s agent – confirmed what I’d suspected about him for long: despite the intricate methods and symmetries depicted in his images, Giger didn’t have an artistic process; he intuited his symbols and their placement on his canvas. Barany: “I thought he was channeling something and I don’t believe in those things.” Stanislov Grof, a psychiatrist: “Giger was the medium through which Another World was introducing itself to us.”

That intuition was akin to a mysterious agent speaking guy through him, call it your subconscious or your true self or whatever. Giger really tapped into that, terrified himself with it, remained terrified with it as he worked; as he says, “When I put it on canvas, I have some sense of command over it. It’s healing for me.” Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, his wife, says, “Giger’s art has the same effect as nigredo, the blackness, an alchemical ritual that begins by looking at the dark night of the soul.”

Li Tobler, Giger’s first partner and who committed suicide in 1975, embodied the struggle that he had won as a little boy of six – the struggle to recognise and acknowledge what it is that we’re truly afraid of, the struggle to not self deny, the struggle to honestly explore reprehensions. She had had a Catholic and puritanical upbringing but her lover was an artist so gleeful when, on the sets of Alien, he explains to someone that though he had to change the opening of the xenomorph’s egg from a vaginal slit because the producers hoped to be able to air the film to Catholic audiences as well, he was pleased that he could give the opening four flaps to “doubly offend the church”. But when he says in Dark Star that his art could not do much to help her deal with her depression, it’s as if his art was all he had to give her. That is a silencing moment.

H.R. Giger speaks in a scene from 'Dark Star' — H.R. Giger speaks in a scene from ‘Dark Star’

In fact, Giger had a rare set of privileges: to have been able to explore the darkest recesses of the human condition, to have confronted those demons through his art, and to have ultimately reconciled with the shape of those horrors. His paintings and sculptures extend us – the viewers – that privilege. Sometimes that makes me wonder if there is something to be said for the creative process Giger uses, if that takes away some of the edge since Giger has visualised his demons from scratch. Is he as terrified as one of his fans when he beholds one of his finished products? Or, to Giger, is the process of creating his demons more therapeutic than is the moment of beholding his demons frightening?

Nonetheless, his privileges prevail. As I wrote in his obituary, Giger’s extensive journeys through the wombs of horror revealed that rotting corpses and camisado surprises are not the stuff of fear. We are. Our terrors are of our own making – fevers about the peri-normal, about what we’ll find when we open new doors, break taboos, burst into life from tabula rasa unto the innate. Kunz/Barany: “His art has this quality, an element of reality combined with his own fantasies, and what makes it stronger is the reality, not the fantasy.”

The metal in his paintings and sculptures twisted and bent in ways that no metalsmith would attempt to achieve. Semblances of humans, human forms, caught up in the workings of otherworldly engines, monochrome lips and spring-loaded breasts grafted around solenoids, crania tubula labia shot through with tentacular electric cables, Tesla coils and Jacob’s ladders of homuncular bullets. It was easy to get lost in this frightening order of symbols, for each one of us to behold this visage and to take away a seedling of serial nightmares. Giger’s visualisations were all together pareidolia as public good – where except faces you saw something you didn’t want to see, something you’ve known all your life but hidden away…

And in Dark Star, Giger himself looks terrified, as if he knows something is coming. There is a remarkable scene where his assistant says Giger’s house is big enough for the ageing artist to disappear into, to become one with the house itself, that he can’t be found unless he wants to be found. Right after that, the cinematographer goes looking for Giger in the house, slowly exploring passages, corridors, crawling with building apprehension through tubes crisscrossing the house in much the same way Giger contemplated perinatal misgivings.

It can be difficult to communicate the brand of horror that Giger stood for, a deep existential visceral soulful tension, an unassailable yet unspeakable awareness of a darkness, a knot of shame festering in our hearts and minds. But explore Giger’s house with the impending frightful sight of a terrified old man who’s seen the faces of hell and it will unseat you somehow. Whence that fear, that anxiety? What do we fill in the blanks of our reality with?

Featured image: H.R. Giger in a scene from Dark Star.