R.S. Benedict
Welcome to Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good I’m R.S. Benedict. Before we get into the episode, I have a little announcement. I would like to announce that I am fucking tired. I am exhausted. We’ve been doing this podcast reliably without interruption for several years now. And I need a little break. Life is hectic. So we’re taking off for the month of March. We’re going to freeze the Patreon for that month so our wonderful subscribers don’t get charged you will be charged money and during that time, we will reach into the vault and release an old paywall episode for free so you folks have some content to non while you wait for us to come back in April. So see you in about a month. Now that that’s out of the way. Let’s get to the episode. In this podcast, we talk a lot about transgressive arts and pushing the envelope we rail against censors and prudes. And for that reason, we’ve gotten a little bit of a reputation as shock jocks and edge lords. And we have definitely attracted some shock jocks and edge lords. But in this episode, we’re going to talk about the limits of shock value. Joining us once again, is the world’s greatest writer, June Martin, June. Thank you for coming back.
June Martin
Thank you for having me. I feel like this is the moment now where I just like unload a list of all my favorite slurs.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, well that Harley Harley. No, do not hang off the balcony hurt. No, no, no. The cat is making me nervous. Get down, get down. Get down there. Use the stairs, go downstairs by the stairs.
June Martin
Do not do it Harley.
R.S. Benedict
I live in a loft and my desk is facing the balcony now be facing the balcony railing because the Fung Shui is better that way. I’m in the command position of the apartment. But the trouble is that sometimes the cats like to hang out on the balcony in front of me and it makes me nervous as hell because Harley and honey have both fallen off of there and it’s a pretty big drop. They’re okay they were both fine, but still makes me very, very anxious.
June Martin
Yeah, of course like Harley has nine lives but also that stupid boy cannot count to nine.
R.S. Benedict
He’s real dumb. Yeah. He doesn’t know he’s not keeping track. No, he’s not smart. Henny Penny, no. No. My cats are being edge lords in that they’re just lording over the edge. Just frightening me and making me anxious right now. Oh, Jesus Christ.
June Martin
Okay, they heard you were taking a break and they’re like we got to get in this podcast. People are going to miss us.
R.S. Benedict
If anything does happen, you’ll know because you’ll hear a really loud 10 pound of cat thump followed by me crying. And worrying that I’m a bad cat owner. Hurley set himself on fire the other day, I still haven’t recovered from that
June Martin
fully. Cats are not supposed to do that.
R.S. Benedict
He decided that a scented candle would be a good thing to rub up against while it was lit. And it’s not a good thing to rub up against when you’re made afer and he fucking set himself on fire. I saw him going for the candle and knew that he was dumb enough to do that. So I sort of leapt in and reached for him but I didn’t get to him quite in time to stop him. So I fortunately he was not hurt. I like got the fire out really, really quickly and he wasn’t burned or anything. He’s perfectly fine. All that happened is he smelled really bad for a while. Because the smell of burning cat hair is not nice. It doesn’t smell good. But that was another fun adventure. Just me putting out a flaming cat.
June Martin
Not what you want to do.
Not not
R.S. Benedict
a good time I was really upset.
June Martin
Like, as a general rule, you don’t want your cat to be on fire. No,
R.S. Benedict
no, I don’t. So anyway, what do we mean by Edge Lord ism and shock value? I don’t know if you can hear the boy yelling. That is his yell of triumph. Oh, that is his scream of joy.
June Martin
He saw he has never made a mistake.
R.S. Benedict
He’s so Oh good. He’s perfect boy
R.S. Benedict
All right. So yeah, I hope this tides the listeners over for the next month just to have enough Harley shouts for quite some time. Before we go on let’s talk about what we mean by Edge Lord ism and shock value edge Lord or shock value for shock shock or the word grim dark, or accusations that often get thrown at art that makes people uncomfortable. Game of Thrones gets accused of it a lot. A lot of like dark fantasy gets accused of being grim dark or edge Lord, a lot of meat a lot of like harder music or metal or something like that. But I think we should define the term or refine the term because we’re not referring to any dark media as inherently edge lordy or shock jock or grim dark, we’re not calm down cat Jesus Christ. We’re not bashing dark art. We we love that here. But when we’re using the terms like vigil, murder, shock, shock, or shock value, what we’re saying here is that you’re being gross, because your goal is to gross people out, you’re being shocking for the goal of shocking people first and foremost, and not necessarily for any other reason. And I want to say that that’s not inherently bad.
June Martin
Yeah, it is important to disentangle those two things. Because as we explore this, what we need to like keep in mind is that the same element can be in present in different stories in terms of like, an act of brutal violence, and have different valence is in all of those different stories. And so we’re not saying it’s like that this cannot be portrayed. Right. But that there are different ways of approaching it and some ways that are perhaps less effective than others,
R.S. Benedict
right? Like, it’s how you’re approaching it. It’s why you’re approaching it, why you’re making the choices you’re making. And I want to say that shock value in art isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not everything needs to be tasteful, not everything. You know, sometimes being shocking, for its own sake, is kind of a good thing. Like, there are a lot of artists who happily revel in bad taste and shock value and it can work really well. John Waters likes to call himself the king of filth, and he loves reveling in bad taste. And it works. It’s great. I fucking love John Waters. So sometimes art being really shocking or deliberately using bad taste can be a way to challenge your social norms. And a lot of the time social norms should be challenged, you can shake people up, and sometimes it’s a very good thing to shake people up. So again, we’re not trying to say like, you should never be shocking or you should never do anything in bad taste. Bad taste absolutely has its place and it can be a wonderful, wonderful, beautiful, powerful thing, if used effectively.
June Martin
The way that like John Waters is I think, is an incredible example here because a lot of his stuff is absolutely like shock value first, but because it is married so tightly with camp, which itself is a very historical like game mode of media. You get that you get this like playfulness in with the shock value. And you get this sort of valence of lightheartedness along with just the absolute disgusting filth. It creates a very interesting texture to his work and what makes it so fun. And like even when it’s hard to watch at night, I know I say like texture and I think immediately of thankful mangoes and of course, all of you think of that too.
R.S. Benedict
Right? Right. So again, even being a bit of a shock jock even being a little bit of an edge Lord have done really, really well like, it’s awesome. We love it. We love that shit. We fucking love John Waters in here, John Waters rocks, gotta love Sean waters. So we’re not trying to say that art should never be shocking. I mean, this is us, obviously. But I think there’s also a way to do it kind of poorly. And something I want to stress too is that I think a lot of the reason why we’re in this current era, this current very fuzzy if you want to call it squeak or era in a lot of culture and a lot of media, especially geek media. I think that sort of early 2000s Edge Lord shock shock bullshit kind of got us here, like, I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember but back in the day, the style of humor was to be as sort of shocking and edgy and kind of mean as possible. It was just to be as like gross and bad taste as possible. And that fucking sucked. Like it really, really sucked because a lot of the early 2000s humor was just being mean it was really a lot of ironic quote unquote, misogyny and ironic homophobia and ironic racism and a lot of that shit aged badly because a lot of it turned out To be on ironic, unsurprisingly mask off like, early Vice magazine loved playing with the sort of quote unquote ironic, shocking, politically incorrect humor and oh wait, shit, it turns out that the guy who ran it was literally a neo Nazi. It was not it was not ironic racism, it was not ironic sexism, it was this is who this guy actually is. So I don’t want to return to that era either. Because I remember that era, and it fucking sucks, especially fucking sucks. If you were like a girl, or it sucked, if you are queer, it would it sucked if you were like anything other than like, a thin, you know, able bodied, straight white dude, it really really sucks shit. And I don’t want to go back to that. I don’t want us to go back to anything like that. And what I’m afraid of right now is that I think we got to where we are as a reaction or an overcorrection. against that. I’m worried that, you know, I think people are getting kind of tired of where we are now. And I could see us swinging back the other way. And I’m worried are we going to swing back too far? Because I don’t want to go
June Martin
back. Yeah, me either. And I think the fact that we are where we are being a reaction to that, like previous edge Lord ism is why we so often see like edge Lord shocked, shocked grim dark as terms of pejorative against things like Game of Thrones, which are quibble with it, like the ending criticisms of the show abound, numerous criticism available even of the books, but the idea that they are like one note, and shock value is a patently like, ridiculous claim to make about them. But the reason why they are used pejorative is in this dominant mode of, I mean, let’s just let’s, let’s call it sweet core we’re on right good, is because those are the terms of the movement that they have supplanted. And so they are a very effective pejorative and that sort of the sense of like, well, these are the things that we have defeated. And from this downward position is easy to like, marginalize other works by using these phrases as pejorative. Right. But there’s a downside to that, which is, if you’re calling things that people like, and are good grimdark people think, Well, hey, what’s up with this grim darkness? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, it’s kind of a black and white thinking too, which I’m going to talk about a little bit more. Before we get into that. Let’s talk a little bit about our own issues with shock value as a goal in and of itself. shock value as your goal is just to shock people and just to shock them and just to shock them and just shock them. And I think a lot of artists, and I’ve noticed a lot of our artists in our orbit kind of falling into this desire to shock and this almost contrarian ism, right? Like, you get scolded by the moralists, you get scolded by the Puritans. So you decide, fuck you, I’m going to be everything you hate. I’ve heard some writers that I know say, Well, every time I hear people complain about our sex scenes, necessary art, I’m going to add more sex scenes to my work, which okay, I mean, that’s fun. But is that what your work actually needs? Did your work need that particular scene? And I’m not saying it’s wrong to put sex scenes in art, obviously, you know, it’s cool. That’s good. But my issue is, are you letting people who hate you and people that you hate determine the shape of your work? Like, okay, you’ve gone beyond letting other people censor you, and that’s good. But you’re still kind of writing for the censors, only you’re writing, specifically to upset them, but you’re still writing for them. Right? You’re like, you’re still writing to this audience that’s hostile to you. And I don’t want to do that, that’s not the audience that I want. That’s I want to turn that person off. When I’m writing, I want to, I don’t want to write to please that person. But I don’t want to write specifically, to upset that person, I need to get that out of my head. Because, you know, on one hand, I don’t want to let people who hate me, tell me who I am. And I’d rather kind of do my own thing or lead or go my own way than to react to other things. It can be a trap, it can be kind of satisfying, and I understand falling into that. And I’ve definitely gotten into stages where I’ve kind of fallen into that trap. But it’s a trap. Maybe it’s a stage, you know, part of your liberation. But you need to move beyond that and keep going beyond that.
June Martin
I agree. Like, you can oppose someone and say, I’m doing the opposite of you and you can be more correct than they are. But ultimately, by forcing yourself in opposition to them, you are letting them set the terms of the conversation. And I think this in terms of the sex scene thing, which sex scenes are actually a very complicated part of a piece of fiction, not just because of like current cultural attitudes toward them. But because sex is such a like delicate and nuanced form of like communication between characters. And if you’re focused on in a sexiness sort of just like, well, I’m adding this to like, be explicit, you’re missing an opportunity, because you are seeing it in terms of your imagined prudish opponent, and not seeing it for the opportunity that it is. And not to go off on a tangent, but it’s very similar to the conversation around like representation in fiction, where people are like, oh, we need good representation only. And the opposition to that is like, No, we need like to use criticism, we need like, really, really messy, like, oh, like awful reputation. Like, I got nothing wrong with that. I love some, like, messy queers. But the idea that the way to oppose that we need good representation is like we need better representation is, like completely misses, like the actual answer, which is, we need to we need different terms of the conversation entirely. Yeah, I think the sex scene conversation is another one of those.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up the notion of representation too, because it seems a little bit like going beyond defining your work, but also defining yourself. And I know, there’s a lot of people like to reclaim terms and a lot of people like to sort of play with it. Oh, you call me this? I guess I am. And this doesn’t just happen with identity. This happens with politics, too. We had a lot of women calling themselves nasty women and a lot of right wing people calling themselves deplorables. And I’m of this, I’m of that and it’s kind of like, alright, what I’m watching is people sort of rub dirt and filth upon themselves and go, Aren’t I a naughty boy? Aren’t I a naughty girl? And it’s like, it’s kind of grotesque. It’s this display of like, self hatred, or don’t you hate me? Aren’t I a naughty little thing, and it’s just kind of like, I want to be a grown up. I don’t want to be either of these things. Maybe this is part of just me that I’m getting older. You know, I’m, I’m getting older. And that’s, I’m too old for that fucking shit. It’s just teenage shit. And maybe part of this too, is my own writing process. I write really, really slowly. I’ve been working on a novel like a gothic horror novel, I guess for about five years now. And at the end of it, I need it to say something besides Fuck you, dad. Not my actual dad. You know, my actual dad was very nice. He watched Star Trek and smoked weed mostly really nice guy. But um, you know that energy of that like, fuck you fuck you did I can’t keep up the fuck you Dad energy for five years straight while I’m writing. And if I put five years into putting something whose only thesis is fuck you Dad, like, that’s, that’s a lot to spend five years on. Maybe if I was if I was churning out something quick, like I’ve written you know, shitposts stories I’ve written like, little silly fuck up stories. But those are always very, very quick things that are like, one or 2000 words that I bang out in under a week. But to write a full novel length, whose only thing to say is like, Fuck you, fuck you to like, that’s just I don’t want to put that much time and energy in and only have that to say
June Martin
Yeah, and I once wrote something that everyone took to be like a fuck you too. And people actually missed like the other drift of it. Because they saw it as being like plugged into like the discourse around Isabelle fall and like, in a way, where it was kind of assumed that that plugged in this was total, yeah, instead of partial. And that is a danger of plugging into these things in that way. Which is it is it can flatten your work, even if you don’t want to be flattened. But it can also be dangerous. If you are writing to prove people wrong. When you’re doing that you’re producing writing that is not thoughtful, it is writing that is more about who you are as a writer and making a point of contrast between yourself as the writer and these other people and like look at how much better and look how much braver I am look at how much more shocking I am. And I think writing to prove something about yourself is a really bad place to come to things from as a writer, much in the way that like trying to write something to prove how clever you are doesn’t really work in like doesn’t end up producing works of fiction that actually are full of the kind of like interlocking and like complicated thought that makes a piece of fiction really shine. My example of a writer who does this and in fact, both the posturing and the shock value is Oh, Tessa moss Fay who your nemesis it’s for now very one sided because she has no idea who I am. Even though I’m the world’s greatest writer, yeah, but she’s big enough that I think I can speak openly critically about her without anyone accusing me of bullying. Here. You’re
R.S. Benedict
punching down? Yeah, I guess literally because you are taller than her.
June Martin
I am definitely taller than her very telling Yeah, I’m my legs are so long. You’re like a you’re like a hot giraffe. It’s very important to all you for all your listeners to know that Yeah. Oh Tessa moss Faye does this I have called her just sort of like the quintessential poser as a writer because generally her fiction is written in a way that suggests that like, the way that she approaches it is, well what would a clever writer do here? What would someone who’s like a little bit better than you? And like a little bit too good for like contemporary fiction do here. Or in the case of Laconia, her recent novel, which was a like bleak and disgusting medieval tale. It was full of the bleak the gross scatological particularly say much other than like How shocking she thought she was being. Yeah, and I feel like if you come away from a piece of fiction thinking about how the author sees themselves, that is a missed opportunity for more interesting thought as a reader and it means that you as a writer have missed an opportunity. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, it has. And I’m gonna note that sometimes the quieter stuff hits harder when you like pylon gross thing after gross thing after gross thing. The gross things kind of lose impact and you just that becomes kind of the norm and that might be a purpose. Like you might be doing that to show like the world we let this book takes place in is really disgusting or really awful, or really base. I mean, I’m not going to I’m not going to necessarily question that. But if your goal is to disturb, like, maybe you’re kind of not maybe you’re just kind of be like, Okay, I’m grossed out now. Now. What have you got? Like some of the books we’ve read for the book club, one of the grossest parts of a previous month’s book, Yukiko, Montoya’s collection, the Lonesome bodybuilder, there’s a story in it called an exotic marriage where like a woman is married to this horrible parasitic shapeshifting thing, and there’s a lot of really gross body horror stuff that happens in the story. But for me, the most memorable upsetting moment in the story is where her husband manipulates her into eating too much fried food and there’s like tons of much weirder grosser shit that happens people’s faces melt this guy, like there’s a vor scene, but for me, the part that upset me the most is when he’s just whining at her and being fucking little bitch so that she over eats fritters and it’s just describing the way she’s just cramming in these greasy fritters. And it’s just, it’s the grossest part for me is the part I remember the most because of how it’s handled and the emotional stakes behind it and what it signifies. I mean, it is just a woman eating too much fried food, which like that’s the thing I’ve done during my life. It shouldn’t unsettle me that much, but it sure did.
June Martin
And it’s easy to imagine another story where it’s just like someone’s eating a bunch of fried food and it doesn’t have nearly that impact. But because of like the valence is of like the husband the way like this we’re like neatly and like anxious way everything surrounding it the context of it delivers this relatively innocuous if unpleasant event, this really disgusting texture in a way that if you subbed it out for her just like eating like I know some animals intestines, it actually would have been less gross. Yeah, it’s important to understand contrast, as a source of intensity, just in a source of depth in a work both in terms of how like impactful in a calm work a sudden breach of violence can be because violence is like that in life a lot and like feeling how it can just intrude can be really impactful. But on the other side in some work that is like often like correctly, called like grim dark, like the say the comic berserk, which is full of horrific violence. It is the main thing that happens in the comic, but like contrasting with that there are moments of real tenderness and there are like there is still more going on in it is just important not to only be doing one thing Yeah, you
R.S. Benedict
don’t want to play a song with just one note and I’m sure some music theory student is going to be like well actually this will protect here’s a list of songs that are only just one note and they’re all very good. What do you do? Okay, you know what I mean? You know what I mean? A little snotty people for you well actually mean it’s gonna be some John Cage flowing before you John. Yeah, fuck you, John Cage, like like fine. We’re around whatever, extend those four minutes and 33 seconds to the rest of this episode just stopped talking. Okay. Would you need more than than one note and the quiet moments make the loud moments hit harder and how you present things and how you linker things. Another instance of a book that we talked about on the book club is Kurt Vonnegut’s breakfast of champions and that’s a book in which a man goes on a violent rampage in his small town and something I really want to stress is that he doesn’t kill anybody. During this rampage. A lot of writers who would write you know, a man goes on a violent rampage story would happen. Killing people killing people killing people doing a slasher thing. And he doesn’t do that he just beats up people really, really bad. He just beats up a lot of people really, really bad. But in the book, Vonnegut takes the time to get to know these characters, he shows you everyone’s in our lives, he tells you everyone’s penis size for some reason. And he doesn’t shy away from showing just how awful the violence is, and how much it hurts these people, how it lingers on these people how it affects them. So a moment that a lot more like shock value heavy writers, a lot of these acts of violence are things that other writers might kind of skim over, and just might get lost in this constant noise of violence and be like, Oh, I didn’t even die, who cares and and it wouldn’t hit. But the way Vonnegut presents it in here is that these beatings, which again, I want to stress, no one dies in them end up feeling so brutal, and they’re brutal in ways that a lot of deaths in literature for me don’t hit as hard. Like, there’s a bit where Coover beats up his son for being gay. And it’s like one of the most horrific moments of violence in a book that I remember reading. And I still remember it vividly, like years after reading the book, and it’s just like, fucking awful. It’s just grueling to get through this section. And it’s hit me so much harder than a lot of other writers might have hit by like killing a character. Yeah,
June Martin
because I think there’s a tendency in some of the stuff that is called grim dark for, like death to become actually quite cheap. Yes,
R.S. Benedict
it becomes way too cheap and kind of loses its impact. You’re just knocking over bowling pins or something. Yeah,
June Martin
we’re talking like grim dark, and like we are implicitly talking about like Warhammer 40k stuff where like, billions of people die in a battle or whatever. And it’s like, this is nothing, it’s meaningless.
R.S. Benedict
And I want to stress that if that’s the point, if you’re you’re trying to point out that this is a society where life is meaningless, like, well, there can be a point to that, like, I’m thinking of Paul Verhoeven, who uses tons of ultra violence as a way to say like, this is this brutal society we’re working we’re living in, I don’t want to say that it’s always wrong to kill off a lot of characters, but,
June Martin
but like, you’d have to understand when you’re doing that, the deaths won’t be impactful, they will have almost no emotional content, because they can’t, because to create that emotional content, you do have to do stuff, like in breakfast of champions, where the violence isn’t shocking, because it’s violence. The violence is shocking, because you’ve come to know these girls, and you understand the ways that like, this violence is a disruption of like, their life and their hopes, like they themselves as like emotional beings, you understand not just as physical pain, but also as this intrusion of carnage into their lives. And
R.S. Benedict
something that he does in that book, too, is he lingers on the actual effects of injuries, it’s not Oh, he beat that person up. And it’s like, well, this guy’s missing a finger now, and this guy’s deaf in one year, because he ruptured a near drum and this and this woman, you know, has this problem now. And like, he really, really stays with it, because he’s really these fleshing out these characters. And that means he’s fleshing them out after they go through this thing. And not just before and during, but after, and he’s making us understand these people are going to stay alive. And they’re going to have to keep living with this.
June Martin
Yeah, exactly. It’s a, it is a permanent change to like the life that you encountered these characters living before. The violence. Like it is not just a fight scene,
R.S. Benedict
right. And that’s something that I realized I played into with this book that I’m writing, without giving too much away in the rough draft, it was a lot more murdery. And just having a lot more fun with the murder and stuff. And rewriting it working on the second draft, I realized, I’m not going to put any murder in this book, there is a death, but it’s not something that I would really call a murder. In fact, with the way it’s written, and I found that to be a lot more interesting. Maybe it’s a little bit less edgy or something. I mean, I feel like it will be less shocking, but more impactful in the way I’m handling it at least I hope so.
June Martin
That is the goal, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially for a book like a books job is to bring to the fore like a wide like a network of ideas, and explore them and bring up all of these like questions and complications and, and ways that they entangle. And you can’t do that if you’re trying to provoke just one experience from the reader.
R.S. Benedict
Ya know, in the notes, you talked about the standard mode of extremity.
June Martin
Yes. So I think and this is actually a little bit of point of irony with some of this stuff, which is a lot of people when they are trying to be shocking. Well, the only way you can shock in this sense is bikal between two extremes like look at how extreme I can be as a writer and always the extremity is the same kind of thing. It’s extremity and Gore in sexual violence in scatological. And that a writer should seek extremity on those means is actually yeah, ironically unsurprising it is what people always do. But those are not the only extremes in life. Actually, there is extremity possible in every experience. There’s the extremity of boredom of bleakness of melancholia, or even happiness or joy or curiosity, like, pushing those to the extremes, like beyond normal experience would be surprising and would itself be shocking, because I think when writers are trying to like transgress, they are it feels like they’re always reacting to a lot of the same things. And by accepting that the way that they need to like transgress is to step over the line, and stand opposite and say, Fuck you, you and your opponent is like walking back and forth along this one line, and leaving all of this territory untraveled. I think a great example of this is a book that was actually very surprising to me, and perhaps even shocking, and like actually, maybe even like transgressing against the idea of like, well, what a what is a book was a book called Vaseline Buddha. And what it was, was a meditation on meandering. And every time it tried, it started to tell a story. It veered off on another detail, and told half of another story, or got distracted, or lost. And it was kind of boring. But it was this extreme of meandering, of wandering, of distraction. And it was so surprising to me. And so interesting, I think about that book all the time. And by doing something else, I have an impression of this writer, as someone who like, like, the brave and inventive writer who’s not afraid to do something shocking. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
that’s interesting that that’s the way the writers go into shock or going to extremes. And that committing to that bit, I mean, that’s commitment to write an entire book that way, I couldn’t do that.
June Martin
I probably couldn’t either. And I can write a book with some absolutely fuck structures, let me tell you, this is perhaps a strength and weakness of mine as a writer, which is I always think of my structure my books as in terms of like systems of meaning, like, how do these parts correspond to these other parts? In ways that help their meaning map in ways that make sense, I don’t really think very much about is this structure going to be an enjoyable experience for the reader? Often, I think it still is, I sort of, there are parts of my work that are more welcoming than the structure as sort of a balanced because I’ve heard like a rule of thumb is like, well, you can have difficult structure, difficult prose, or difficult content or some things like that. It’s like, yeah, like, pick one, pick two, if you’re really ambitious. And I know it like surprise me do all three. If you do something well enough, you can do anything. Yeah, there’s a lack of creativity in Edge Lord ism. Yeah.
R.S. Benedict
Anyone can scream the word rape really loud? Yes, not hard.
June Martin
Yeah. But by desiring to shock, you have failed to be surprising. And surprise is where you really make an impact on readers. It’s why that contrast that we talked about earlier is so important. Because you can’t have surprise without setting people up with different expectations. Same people are like, allowing us to come in with an understanding of like, here are the limits that exist on these things on these concepts, and then pushing past them. But I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who thinks at this point that there is any limit on cruelty. No, which is, which is not to say that you can’t represent it. In fact, it is important. As much as I hate the word. It’s important. It’s necessary. Yeah, it is important to have fiction that represents the full depth of human cruelty and depravity and violence, right but it’s works that reach the normal limits of those things in search of other meaning that are really impactful, right?
R.S. Benedict
A lot of the works of shocking art they were any distress not because just the shock value but also because they’re really well crafted and they have something to say like the famous pice Christ photo it is genuinely an aesthetically pleasing photograph. Yeah, like it’s a really pretty photo of of a crucifix. In some piss Yeah. And much as another interesting layer. It’s not like look at this PIs. It’s It’s something called piss Christ, but then it’s like, genuinely quite beautiful.
June Martin
Like it’s very like warm and inviting photograph. Here it is.
R.S. Benedict
If you didn’t know it was pissed. You just think like, Oh, that’s pretty. That’s nice. Yeah. And again, it’s that contrast, right? Or the movie that we love in our group, Ken Russell’s the devil’s there, a lot of shocking, unpleasant, icky things happen in that movie. And I still haven’t seen the Director’s Cut, because the cut that’s on shutter that I saw, didn’t have a certain scene involving a bone in it. But I mean, the movie I love the movie, not just because the bad stuff happens. And yeah, there’s a lot of shocking things in it. But this again, it’s a movie with a lot to say. I mean, it’s beautifully crafted, it’s incredibly aesthetic. It’s gorgeously photographed the costumes, the set design, it’s just fascinating to me the way the way the the convent looks like a mental institution, the way this sort of weird anachronistic set design is really really really interesting to me and everything looks like surreal and strange and slightly modern. And it also just has a hell of a lot to say about the church about human relationships about politics about sexuality. It’s not just look at this gross shit I
June Martin
love watching the devil’s the first one I watched it was like great quality then like the nun orgy scene, which had to be at like 50 p resolution, right, like five pixels rising together on screen and then cut back to the rest of the film because someone had just like, edited it in Yeah. But I think the reason why some of these movies are remembered more for like odd. They’re like shock value oh, these like, disturbing stuff is because like your thoughts about the movie are being informed by like their reaction against it. And the reaction against it is responding to these elements that were transgressive, but that’s not the entirety of the work. And the reason why someone hates a work is not the same reason why like a person should like it. I think about Solow a lot because now there’s a transgressive film Sure is. It is really horrifying stuff on screen. And it was done not because the director was like who I am I’m a shocking little boy. I’m
R.S. Benedict
a naughty boy. I’m a nasty woman. Oh, no, I’m a deplorable.
June Martin
No, no, he was not it was to create a film that like portrayed the mind of fascism and like to accomplish that film’s goals. It needed to go to these are horrifying depths. And it is a truly transgressive film. And it’s truly unpleasant to watch. Because that sickening unpleasantness that misery of watching it is provoking an emotional experience that is like, resonant with like the other ideas that helps you get into the mindset you need to to understand what the film is saying.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah, are we recently for Valentine’s Day in the server, we watched audition, which is also known for being a very violent, very shocking film. And something that struck me because this was a rewatch of it. This was the second time I’ve seen the movie, which is probably twice as many times as you really need to see audition. But what really struck me is that the first hour of the movies really quiet. And it’s actually almost a romantic comedy. Like, this is a movie whose premise was very much in line with the Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan romantic comedies of the 1990s. Like, oh, man gets a woman through deception. And she finds out and she gets mad. And well, that’s like every rom com from the 90s. The reason the movie works so well, especially when it gets really, really disturbing at the end is how quiet it is. And this sort of coldness and how it’s really beautifully shot and really, really well acted like it’s if it was just this nonstop, sort of screaming in your face. It wouldn’t work. But the fact that this, the man at the center of this movie is doing this thing that is kind of fucked up. But he’s still kind of sympathetic in a big way, because he’s this lonely widower and how this woman who turns out to be a really dangerous, horrible, scary woman, how the actress plays her as she could go either way, maybe there is something terribly wrong with her. Or maybe she is just incredibly fragile, because she is this abuse victim. And she does look like she’s ready to just, you know, break into pieces at any given moment. And it’s such a well made film. And it’s so carefully made, and I mean, you’ve got these really, really horrific scenes of torture, but there are a lot of parts that are just not shown, like simply not shown, like, the bit where the bag moves is like one of the most horrifying moments and all we’re seeing is that a bag is moving. It’s just we have the context to understand what’s wrong and that there’s what exactly is in the bag. And that’s what’s scary is about it. But like it’s this incredibly horrifying, disturbing moment is just a large bag sort of moves.
June Martin
Anything could be in that bag. Exactly. A smaller bag,
R.S. Benedict
it’s probably fine, perhaps. Yeah, a bunch of a bunch of little bags. Yeah.
June Martin
I don’t want to deal with that. Yeah, that’s too many bags. audition is a great example. Because in a story, you always have the option to add complication, not just in terms of a lot of things happen in the story, but like emotional complication in terms of like making it hard to like, or not hard so much as creating situations where there is no like, good guy or bad guy or there is but like, but the ways in which they are bad are mitigated by these other things. And you can keep the viewer away from simple revulsion or simple catharsis and keep them somewhere in the middle where they have to think and actually try to understand what they’re seeing or what they’re reading. Yeah, in general, I
R.S. Benedict
think that the need to shock this desire to shock as a reaction, it ties into this, all or nothing kind of black and white binary mentality. That’s not just a bad way to look at art, it’s not a good way to look at the world. It’s not a good way to approach yourself to approach other people in your life. It’s just psychologically not a great way to think it’s a it’s a mindset, and it’s a mindset I’ve been like trying to escape from for a very long time personally. So this idea that you either have to make wholesome family friendly squee work or you have to make like horrific, ultra violent, you know, rape snuff porn. I don’t want to make either of those. I don’t, I don’t want to make either of those things. I don’t I don’t want to do that. But people really want to stick you in one camp or the other. You have to be like, wholesome or you have to be a sicko. And it’s something I noticed when I wrote that essay. Everyone is beautiful, known as horny, some people accuse me of wanting to stick hardcore pornography into every single movie. And that’s deranged. That’s not a response that I expected. And of course, that’s not what I was asking for, like the scene in that essay that I referenced as like, here’s an example of something that treated normal bodies and desires mundane was a bit from Poltergeist, which is a PG movie by fucking Spielberg, like, it’s just, it’s not porn. It’s not pornography. It’s just this really kind of nice little cozy scene where you see two people who are in a long term relationship, and the dad is kind of fat, just like smoking weed, and it’s very, and feeling a bit frisky toward each other. And that’s it. And I think it’s a beautiful scene. And this all or nothing attitude creates a space where you either get these like, unreasonably restrictive, oppressive boundaries, or you get no boundaries at all. Both of those are places where like abuse and cruelty happens where people aren’t respected and reasonable boundaries are good. They’re very good to me. They’re, they’re good for people.
June Martin
Yeah, I think where a lot of this comes from is a lot of people understand their engagement with culture as the site of like their political struggle. I think this is very tied up in squeaker as you and Jr. explored in that previous episode, yeah. Which lends itself to the crusade. And it’s like, if this is where we are making our political engagement, then we need to win. And the only way we can win is by pushing like our value to like the limit. And I think it’s a misunderstanding of how politics and art engage, because it’s actually much more indirect than that. But it also creates these intensities. And, and again, this opposition because we’re so used to thinking of politics as a system of two opposing forces, and that the only way to be victorious over a political entity is to be part of its direct opponents. And for art, this makes no sense. Yeah, just because art goes through such a complicated process of social evaluation, which is itself filtered through like existing ideological, philosophical, etc. mode, the line from your art to real political change is so complex, that you cannot hope to just pull that lever directly with whatever you’ve made. But I think people get caught up in the struggle, and people end up making a lot of fiction that is directly in response to Twitter discourse, which is such an unworthy thing to do with your fiction. It is abdicating the chance to complicate and again for the sake of posturing for the sake of presenting oneself as more moral or more shocking or smarter or pure or any of these things that the writer can try to be because they are trying to present themselves as a writer with their like who they are as a writer with their fiction in not present the fiction as itself, the primary thing to think about, right?
R.S. Benedict
And I can kind of get why it is that way. We’re in the era era of the influencer, where like content is kind of secondary to your personal brand. But as an artist, I think you really want to resist that. You should be the antidote to that. And part of that
June Martin
how you brand yourself as a writer is, unfortunately, I think that writers do have to think about if you want an audience, yeah, I try very hard to resist that while I’m writing because I think it produces less interesting work. And I think it interferes with the act of writing fiction as a mode of thought in itself. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I mean, you did brand yourself as the world’s greatest writer, which was good. Yeah, that does that does trap you into having to be perfect all the time. Which is difficult. Yeah.
June Martin
Like, yeah. Here’s my writing advice. We’re going on Break Time for some, just like great writing writes that can carry you through. bangers only. Yeah, just just get good. Yeah, write stuff that’s good as hell and then write something better. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
right. Right. Good. That’s our advice is to write good. Yeah.
June Martin
But my actual advice for like writing good works of fiction that stick with people is to write things that are emotionally complicated, that are surprising that catch people on their back foot. And you can’t do it with intensity of all one kind out the gate. Like people may be shocked, but not in a way that’s interesting.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I definitely do think for a while I did trap myself a little bit with my own brand of like, oh, the most dangerous writer, you know, most dangerous woman and like, I’ve been kind of slowly moving away from it. But I want to stress that the reason I branded myself this and this is kind of deep lore is that uh, so a few years ago, I wrote some posts on Twitter in which I said, I don’t like fanfiction, I don’t think it teaches you to write very well, I think it’s kind of stupid. And as a result, a writing group I was in called Codex put me on their list of predators. in publishing, like, and on this list of predators were some actual con artists, like people who’d committed financial fraud, and some people who sexually assaulted women at cons. So it was like some con artists, actual sexual predators. And me the fanfic hater and I had other writers, people I knew people I’d hung out with in real life, telling me that they’d had to schedule emergency therapy sessions to deal with the trauma of having to read my tweets. And it was a very, very, very, very strange time because I had had was having people sending me death threats telling me I should kill myself, while other people who I had to the that point considered colleagues were accusing me of being dangerous and violent. And as a result of that, I started calling myself the most dangerous woman in speculative fiction, because people were treating me as this genuine threat that had to be eradicated. And it was very silly and I thought, well, let me try and reclaim this because the idea of little chubby five foot two Hobbit like me going up to someone and saying, I’m dangerous just struck me is very funny. If you’ve ever met me, I’m really really short. I’m very Hobbit like in body type.
June Martin
Also very sweet and not particularly dangerous. Oh, well,
R.S. Benedict
thank you. But part of the, you know, brand coming from that it’s like, well, that it’s kind of corny first of all the call yourself that and then it’s like, I really kind of had a habit of attracting some sorts of people who didn’t get the it was kind of a joke who didn’t get that? You know, me calling people sickos was kind of a joke. Because I don’t actually want to be a sicko very much. I am just sort of a very mild mannered person who goes to work and does volunteer work and plays with my cats and and all that stuff. And it’s something I’ve worried a little bit of, oh God, have I trapped myself in this identity, which is why I tend not to say it as much anymore. It started as a very like liberating feeling of Yo you say I’m dangerous fire I’m dangerous be afraid of me, but I’m tired of doing that. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to do it anymore.
June Martin
I’m too old for that shit. But like it totally makes sense to want like stridently opposed like kind people who would like put you on a list with like sexual predators for like, making some mean tweets because they are clearly representing a patently ridiculous cultural force. Yeah, but if you oppose them on the wrong grounds, you’re not accomplishing anything. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
it goes from a reclamation into a trap of being like, well, I’ve realized that maybe I’m letting people who fucking suck shit and are horrible kind of helped me define who I am. And I don’t want that to define me. I don’t want them to define me as much as they want to try to make me out to be this quote unquote, predator If my violence against my immortal, I don’t really want to be that, and I don’t want that to be my legacy on this earth. Yeah,
June Martin
it’s this push and pull over questions that don’t matter, which is the question of how much doesn’t matter. Like how much sexiness, how few sex scenes, how much violence, how little violence? That’s not a question that matters. There are people who think that is a question that matters is their problem. The way to like oppose a cultural force like that isn’t to like, get into that push and pull with them. It is to be better it is to literally write better things and write better things that have sex scenes that have like, shocking violence sometimes, but you won’t beat them on quantity. You beat them on quality.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. So in conclusion, we urge all of you to write good. Always, always just right, good. Yeah. Easy, easy peasy. That’s all you got to do. Okay, so we’re winding down. It’s been about an hour before we go June, promote your many wonderful works.
June Martin
Okay. Well, first and foremost, I have a book coming out my debut novel on the week of May 12. Called Love slash aggression. It is my novel of queer community conflict, surreal architecture, and the terrifying power of total agency. Nice. Yeah, it has two young kids and one of them is a huge bitch. Nice. You’ll love her, you’ll hate her, and so on. I also write short stories, I have many available for free on the internet, you can find them at the world’s greatest writer.com. I also have a Patreon where I post them for free, which is also the world’s greatest writer on Patreon. And that should generally get you to more than enough stuff for me. Do I really do have to stress the book by the book
R.S. Benedict
by June’s book? June’s book. It’s
June Martin
not out yet. So I need your listeners to just like, do daily affirmations. I’m going to buy a book. Can we preorder it somewhere? Not yet. Dammit. I know. But hopefully by the time this comes out, you will be able to preorder on Amazon. If not soon.
R.S. Benedict
Keep an eye on it. Wait, just wait. Just wait by your computer by Amazon or a less evil place to buy books for when love aggression comes on and wait for it the way the girl in addition, waits. Buy the phone. Click Refresh. Do it again. Yeah, just keep doing it. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. And thank you all for listening. If you like what you heard, head to patreon.com/ritegud. And subscribe. Until next time, keep writing good. I’ll see you in a month.
Featured image by Nathan In San Diego/Flickr.