A bit of cultural theory
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (see here), the word RANT, as a verb, means the following: to talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner; to scold vehemently; to utter in a bombastic declamatory fashion. As a noun, it means: a bombastic extravagant speech; bombastic extravagant language.
And RANT certainly does mean all those things.
What I mean by a RANT, however, is much more specific and specialized. And—surprise, surprise—it involves SATIRE.
To make a long story short—and to indulge in some shameless self-promotion—I recently published an academic book titled: Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film (see here). [Sidebar: Please note that although the hardback version of the book costs a whopping $190, the new paperback version is a steal at $52.95!!! Order your copy now before supplies run out!!!]
The subtitle of my book is: Rant Against the Regime—ringing any bells? [Sidebar: I wanted the subtitle to be the main title and the main title to be the subtitle—it’s just snappier that way—but academic publishers these days prefer boring, descriptive main titles that can be searched easily in a database. So, alas, the boring title comes first.]
In my book, I argue that since roughly 1980, when neoliberal economic and neoconservative policy forces began their hostile takeover of western (and especially American and British) society, a new form of political satire has emerged that seeks to comment upon and even deter those toxic doctrines. To be sure, this type of protest is not the only form of challenge popular entertainment levels against the mounting neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony. Satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, for example, have led the way with their faux-news shows. But the kind of dissent I point out in my book is distinct and identifiable.
I call it Speculative Satire or, for short, the Rant. To wax super-pretentious, I’ll quote myself:
The Rant is grim (even in its humor), highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles designed to disturb and to provoke. (1)
The Rant targets what I call the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. To quote me again:
Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. It is my contention that the Rant seeks to gut-punch audiences with an unmistakable warning against the Regime. That warning is this: we are astray; it’s only getting worse; change course now or suffer the consequences—which are likely to be calamitous. (1)
That’s my scholarly assertion in a nutshell. This is what I mean, precisely, when I say Rant and Regime.
If you’re interested in all the gory academic details and explanations about those two concepts, see Chapters 1 and 2 of my book—now reasonably priced at $52.95!!!
Applying this bit of cultural theory
You may—or, more likely, may not—recall that in my two-part post about disliking Tucker Carlson (17 and 24 May 2023), I review the general characteristics of satire. If you care to refresh your memory about the genre, please take a look there.
What I’ll add here is a quick note about a particular kind of satire known as Menippean. This brand of satire has a long and murky past beginning with the now lost writings of Menippus, a Greek philosopher and Cynic satirist of Gadara in Syria, who flourished about 250 BCE. In brief, his writings had a huge impact on other ancient Roman and Greek writers whose works did survive and became quite influential. In this way, Menippean satire got carried forward into the intellectual culture of medieval and renaissance Europe, and thus is still with us today.
The purpose of a Menippean satire is to oppose a threatening false orthodoxy. As literary scholar Howard Weinbrot describes it in his 2005 study, Menippean Satire Reconsidered (see here), Menippean satire is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble within their society and want to do something about it. According to Weinbrot, creators of Menippean works are “dark satirists” who “think the unthinkable, write the unthinkable with compelling concepts and language, and thereby help us to read the unthinkable” (302). In short—and to put it bluntly—such satirists are not fucking around. The shit is about to hit the fan, and these satirists want everybody to know about it.
As you can guess, I theorize that, at its heart, the Rant is a Menippean satire.
In my conception of the practice, the key satiric element of the Rant entails a bleak forewarning. This alert involves a postmodern critique (that is, the kinds of cultural theories we’ve been applying in these posts) of the modern state that is in the throes of the false and threatening orthodoxy of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and now the MAGA movement in particular.
Structurally, Rants take the general form of a longer narrative. Sometimes this narrative is in novelistic prose (e.g. The MaddAddam Trilogy), sometimes it is a feature film (e.g. Snowpiercer), more recently it has begun to appear as a multiple-episode series on new media streaming platforms (e.g. Westworld). These tales feature fantastical settings, situations, and characters, often of a dystopian quality.
Important to note as well about these vexing tales is that Rants blend into their satire pronounced components of science fiction and monster story. In fact, Rants tend to merge seamlessly these three forms of expression: satire, sci-fi, monstrosity.
So let’s take a look at those other two narrative modes.
Sci-fi shares with satire remarkably similar roots and histories, with the most vital developments in these two genres occurring from the 17th century onward. Like satire, sci-fi regularly offers critiques of the here and now by way of imagining an altered reality. Like satire, sci-fi often gives voice to non-hegemonic people and points of view.
In particular, sci-fi offers audiences what scholars have identified as the novum, a term meaning “a strange newness.” Key to understanding this concept is that although sci-fi creates and depicts other possible worlds, no matter how extraordinary those other worlds seem to us at first, they in fact reflect our own. That is to say, in a sci-fi created world, we actually are seeing ourselves—but presented in a strange new way.
When it dawns on us that the outlandish sci-fi world we think we are seeing is, in actuality, a distorted version of ourselves, an effect known as cognitive estrangement takes place. By having our familiar made unfamiliar to us, the naturalizing processes of ideology, myth, and convention are stripped away. We are given the opportunity to recognize the arbitrary configuration of our own social order—that what we do is not “natural” but every bit as constructed as that bizarre-seeming sci-fi world.
But our transactive reader response to sci-fi doesn’t stop here.
Accompanying this cognitive estrangement is what’s known as a cognition effect. The sci-fi text causes us not just to be distanced from our social order but to rethink our current view of the world. By demonstrating just how un-normal and unfamiliar our social conventions actually are, the novum in effect erases “normal” altogether, allowing us to perceive the world anew. I’ll be a jerk and quote myself one last time because, well, I really like this line:
Sci-fi gives us something strange to contemplate so that we can understand how strange we are. (15)
Over the past four decades, such sociological sci-fi and Menippean satire have paired together so well that, in my book, I coin the literary term speculative satire to describe their heady combination. At the core of the Rant against the Regime, then, is the anti-establishment speculative fiction of sci-fi blended with the warning against false orthodoxy distinctive of the Menippean cautionary tale.
Monsters fold easily into this potent mixture of satire and sci-fi. Strange beings and horrifying beasts make regular appearances in both of those genres. My own approach to the study of monstrosity builds on pioneering research done by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (see here). Cohen proposes what he terms Monster Theory as “a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender” (3). It’s a brilliant approach to analyzing monster myths and stories of all kinds. Gaining insight into what a people, in their collective imagination, fear and hate most reveals a lot about a society.
According to Cohen, monsters can be read as symbols within the larger discourse of a culture. They are terrifying Signifiers linked to disturbing Signifieds. While their functions can be many and complex, overall, monsters act as creations that subvert dominant social constructs and beliefs within a given culture—that is to say, what’s considered “normal” and “right.” With their disturbing hybridity and incoherent bodies, monsters roam the borderland between not just the acceptable and the unacceptable, but between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible.
In short, monsters are binary busters.
Monsters simply don’t fit or make sense in our standard way of looking at the world. The biggest threat posed by monsters, then, is to our tidy beliefs about existence itself. As Cohen writes, monsters “demand a radical rethinking of boundary and normality” (6). I’m sure you can see already how perfectly monsters figure into the upset-the-applecart mindset of the Rant.
One very interesting paradox about monsters is that while they are constructed to appear aberrant and from beyond the cultural normality, they actually originate from within the culture as a representation of those who are excluded by the dominant group. In other words, monsters tend to be representations of those in a society who—according to dominant standards of “normal” and “right”—must be exiled or destroyed. As might be expected, such ostracization-via-monsterization targets people who are different in terms of their culture, politics, race, economic status, sexuality, gender, or other identity factors.
Behind many monster tales and myths, then, is cruel propaganda—an act of raw social power designed to segregate and marginalize certain groups of people.
A frequent twist of Rants, however, is what might be called a monster-inversion. That is, those beings who initially seem alien, monstrous, and evil turn out to be, in fact, familiar, admirable, and good. Meanwhile, the dominant powers of society who monsterized the “monsters” in the first place turn out to be, in the end, rapacious, immoral, and criminal.
Very often, the worst monsters in a work of speculative satire are, in reality, the humans in charge of “normal” society.
So what?
As I say above, since the 1980s, speculative satire has become a recurring and influential feature of our popular culture. In spectacular and memorable fictive packages, Rants deliver razor-sharp political satire along with gritty social commentary—all designed to slap us out of the stupor of our routine.
In my next post, I’ll discuss some of these Rants as well as explore in detail a pair of recent dark satires that have made an impact on the popular mind. To conclude this post, and by way of a quick for instance, we’ll do a lightning-Rant-read of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film, District 9 (see here).
In Blomkamp’s inventive film, a prime occurrence of monster-inversion can be seen in the depiction of the so-called “Prawns.” These aliens, as monsterized racial Others excluded and oppressed by the hegemonic social order, function poignantly as stand-ins for victims of actual South African apartheid. These marooned, insect-like beings have been ghettoized into shanty towns by hysterical public opinion and draconian governmental policy; meanwhile, an avaricious and underhanded multinational corporation hopes to exploit their advanced weapons technology.
In this scenario imagined by Blomkamp, the real monster is the Regime.
The film mounts a pointed argument against the neoliberal state, highlighting for blame the bigoted, corrupt, and violent collusion between political and corporate institutions ruthlessly pursuing abusive objectives. Held up for praise, on the other hand, is the longsuffering communitarianism of these erstwhile monsters, the “Prawns.” While as viewers we are given no details at all about these space aliens, and while when provoked these aliens can act unpredictably and sometimes violently themselves, we nonetheless witness how they possess more “humanity” than do the humans in the film.
This application of monstrosity, then, explores important social, racial, economic, and political issues of the day via two recurrent and effective rhetorical tools of satire: distortion and exaggeration. Moreover, the novum presented to us in the film—namely, the strange situation of a gigantic alien spaceship hovering for decades over Johannesburg, South Africa—has the effect of making us see more clearly who we are as a society and, furthermore, ponder whether or not we approve of the current reality we’ve constructed for ourselves. In this way, the twin objectives of sociological sci-fi—cognitive estrangement and cognition effect—are achieved.
And so—BOOM! District 9 readily can be read as a monster-driven, sci-fi-based, Menippean warning against a threatening false orthodoxy. This film certainly qualifies as a Rant against the Regime.