On Monsters and Marginalization

by Jonathan Schatzberg

Sometimes, I feel like a monster.

One of my first interactions with the concepts of “monsters” or monstrosity was watching Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in middle school. I’d never really been interested in movies or television as a source for anything more than pure entertainment until entering the mind of del Toro. I beg you to picture it. A towering Faun gliding across a boxy tv in my family’s basement, intruding on the life of a girl in Nazi-occupied Europe to invite her into his own world: the Faun’s maze of goblins, warped fairies, a Pale Man, and mythic royalty. How could these entities of terrifying proportions possibly provide an escape to this girl’s own terrifying world? Pan’s Labyrinth and del Toro’s visions of monstrosity invited me, just as a Faun invited the young Ofelia, into seeing monstrosity and horror as an escape from the horrors and terror of the real world. Who’s to say that a fairy-eating Faun is any more terrifying than a cult leader or a serial killer? Who’s to say that giant, tentacle-shrouded eldritch beasts are any more terrifying than the human emotions of grief, sadness, or love?

I didn’t exactly come to these philosophical conclusions when I was 12, you know? Yet I knew that for some reason, I felt this strange attraction and fascination with seeing monsters as forms of escape from the stress of life. What does it mean for us, then, who exist in the real world, if we can only truly ‘see ourselves’ in the realm of the supernatural or hyperbolic? Maybe our reality was never meant to contain the ideas of you nor I. On the other hand, maybe this world is too small to contain our grandiosity.

Watching monstrosity in movies and television even helped me to reconcile with my space in the world as a person of queer experience. Being “othered” is something I’m familiar with; never really feeling comfortable to fit in with the label of “boy” or “man,” and at the same time never quite feeling “trans enough” to fit under that umbrella term. Although I didn’t come to identify with the term “nonbinary” until recently, monster movies have always comforted me in knowing that there’s always an audience out there rooting for these supposed un-categorizable, grotesque beings; these creatures assumed to be villainous by the sheer fact of their otherness. The same goes for my identity as a Jewish person — seeing Jews or Jew-coded villains depicted as vampiric, blood-thirsty beasts seeking to kidnap good Christian children is nothing I’m unfamiliar with (re: Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Disney’s Tangled, etc.). The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a personal favorite, does an excellent job at satirizing and reflecting upon this very question of “coded” villains.

What’s in a name? There’s power in titles. Queer, nonbinary, genderqueer, Jew. Dybbuk, vampire, gremlin, witch. What happens when you don’t have a say in how you’re named? What happens when you’re the Creature of Dr. Frankenstein, known only in association to your oppressor? How do we create names for ourselves out of so-called codified language? How to redefine “woman” as detached from “man”? How to state “trans” without having to be reminded of “cis”? Why must “person of color” be the alternative to “white”? Labels that do not exist in opposition, but rather entities that can and do exist on the same plane, the same tongue, intent on encapsulating us all. There’s power in creating a name for yourself — an identity, a sphere, a space by which you can call your own. Slap my ass and call me Virginia Woolf because I crave a room of my own.

Monsters exist under our very noses, not manifested in marginalized people but rather as the utter grotesqueness that humans exhibit to one another: corrupt politicians, war, genocide, murder, death, codified oppression, brutality upon brutality. Ursula K. Le Guin’s tortoise-like aliens in her science-fiction thriller The Lathe of Heaven are, in several ways, more ‘human’ and empathetic than the book’s greedy, capitalistic, manipulative psychotherapist. Is ‘human’ synonymous for empathetic? Does ‘human’ imply kindness? Monstrosity is versatile in the way that it can represent the grotesqueness of human brutality and anger, and at the same time provide a sense of comfort for those that feel outside the borders of “normality.” Vampires, werewolves, Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature, ghosts, witches, golems, dybbuks, fauns… I see myself in each of them. Monsters are pretty damn queer! Am I too deep into the lexicon of Twitterverse to take myself too seriously? Perhaps. But there’s something here. I’m just running out of time–