INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

Les Sciapodes: Monsters as Human

Thomas McLean

It is no secret, at this point, that humanity loves monsters. Maybe not as much as money, or feeling important, but when it comes to our entertainment monsters always seem to pull through. We see it in the success of so many thriller and horror stories that exist almost entirely to show us something horrible, something unnatural, something that we can point at and label as an enemy. Most importantly, it seems, is that it should be something that we have little to no danger of actually encountering.

In films like Alien and Jurassic Park, this is achieved by separating the audience from the threat by space, time, or, most importantly, technological development. We can rest assured in the gaps between our experience and the experience of the text’s human characters because they seem uncrossable to us. Despite the unrealistic nature of these stories, there seems to be something that continually draws us back to them.

Whatever it is that attracts us to the monstrous—the grotesque—whether that be fear, curiosity, even disgust, it’s something that seems to be sticking around. In fact, it should be easy enough to say that it has stuck by now, given the longevity of this collective obsession. If we look to the past we can see monsters as an important part of our culture as far back as the Bull of Heaven in the Epic of Gilgamesh, some 4000 years ago.

Because some of these tales are so old, we’ve had the opportunity to watch patterns emerge. A lot of monster stories follow the same series of events, sharing the same conventions. Take, for example, the myth of Medusa. A young priestess who was transformed into a monster following a forbidden sexual encounter with the god Poseidon in a temple dedicated to Athena. Slain by a god-ordained hero. Different versions of the myth tell different stories: was her engagement with her godly partner something she entered willingly, or was she dragged against her will? It never mattered to Perseus, a hero and child of the gods who was enlisted to slay her. Of course, Perseus devised a way to kill the monster, and the crowd cheered for him. They cheered for his cunning, and his superhuman ability. But even if you truly believe Medusa is the villain of her story—that there is no moral quandary—somewhere in the back of your mind there’s a little nagging voice, there’s a suspicion that you might not be able to, could not do what Perseus had. The appeal of the monster, to most, is in that doubt. In our need to prove ourselves, to prove that we could survive, that we deserve to survive. In the story of Medusa, that happens through combat. In classic literature, especially patriarchal literature, this seems to be the standard: the strong, clever hero outwits or otherwise bests the monstrous antagonist, and is applauded for his brilliance.

Though our media generally seems to posit violent opposition as the supposed natural response to encountering a monster, it is by no means the only response we’ve anticipated. In The Shape of Water (2017) the monster is an amphibious fish-man that the protagonist conquers (or tames, or comes to understand) through appreciation and, eventually, love. This film is part of a common trend in monster stories where the monster is significantly more human (and by human, we refer almost entirely to the romantic traits of our race, to empathy, honour, and loyalty) than the people who see fit to attack them purely for being different. We see this again in the story of The Beauty and the Beast (1991) in which the thick-skulled Gaston is infinitely more brutish than the titular Beast. As much as we want to dominate monsters, to stand over them, there is most definitely a secondary urge to understand them—to care for them.

It is easy to draw our attraction to monsters into a dichotomy between maternal and paternal urges. The desire to protect and provide, or the desire to love and understand. It could be said, potentially, that our engagement with monsters as a concept is just an outward expression of our need to interact with the outside world, a modern facsimile of the uncertain and dangerous lives that our ancestors lived so long ago. However, with how varied our lifestyles and values have been throughout history, it’s absurd to imagine that our response to a potential threat would have narrowed down into two neat little categories.

The truth is, our responses are much more complex than a switch that rests flicked towards either ‘love’ or ‘war,’ they’re complex, multi-layered emotions that draw from both our personal history and our biological impulses. That’s part of what makes monsters so appealing in art. Our urge to have those primal senses of ours triggered, regardless of how artificial the stimulus might be. We want to feel fear, we want to be the hero, we want to love the unlovable. It seems to be built into our blood. To make monsters is an eternal compulsion of ours.

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The Sciapodes: The head as low as possible, that is the secret to happiness! is a lithograph by Odilon Redon, currently hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Created in 1889, this piece shows a monochrome representation of a creature called a sciapode, a one-footed monster that has appeared in a number of different cultures.

In many depictions the sciapodes are represented as a person with one leg, and one large foot. Legend states that they may use this foot to protect themselves from the sun, holding it above their head. Painting a person with one leg as an inhuman creature is probably something that happens less today, for good reason. However, sciapodes are still occasionally depicted in our media and remain a part of our mythological lexicon.

I was unsettled when I first saw Redon’s work. Partly, because it seems inherently disturbing, with the sharp black shapes and uncanny features. Partly because I had no real clue about what the subject of the print was. The lithograph shows the sciapode while it’s asleep, or at least assuming the pose that it should take while asleep, hanging upside-down with its head swinging below the rest of its body.

It’s a little bit phallic, isn’t it?

I thought that myself, after seeing the lithograph a few times. It was not my first reaction, but it seemed a reasonable one, especially when we consider how Redon has presented the creature as significantly less human than other artists before him. Even the sub-title ‘The head as low as possible, that is the secret to happiness!’ could be seen as a comment on the joys of having a large penis, though I feel that this might be leaning ever so slightly towards conjecture.

I am well aware it may sound somewhat unhinged to immediately jump towards genitals, but I can find some solace in the fact that I wasn’t the only one to make that leap. While researching the subject of this piece I discovered (to my horror) that one Sigmund Freud had come to the same conclusion in his contemplation of the sciapode as a monster. He believed that the sciapodes operated as a sexual metaphor, that their ‘one-footed leg [was] [...] like a giant fallus’, which was, to him, a symbol for the fear of having children, the fear of producing ‘misfit[s]’. These thoughts were published in an article entitled On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia Under the Description Anxiety Neurosis in 1895, a mere six years after Redon published his lithograph of the sciapode.

Now, my satisfaction in having this line of thinking validated was lessened a little by the knowledge that Freud seemed to view everything as sexual in some way or another. I do believe that the incorporation of the human body, particularly through the lens of sexuality, is a common enough thread in our depiction of monsters for it to be a part of the discussion.

Take, for example, the works of H. R. Giger. Famous for his unsettling fusion of the sexual, the monstrous, and the mechanical, Giger’s work came to be the inspiration and basis for many other pieces that explore this particular intersection in our obsessions. Though both Giger and Redon’s works seem to offer the idea that monsters have some innate connection to the human fascination with our own and each other’s bodies, the answer is not, I think, that monsters are intrinsically linked to our concepts of gender and sex, though they surely play an important role. Instead, I believe that our monsters are more closely linked to our bodies as a whole, with gender appearing as something of a side-effect, an afterthought. It seems a symptom of being human, at least for their creators.

If we consider the Minotaur, the siren, the centaur, Godzilla, even Sully from Monsters Inc., we see that each is primarily defined by their similarity to (and their divergence from) humanity. Though these monsters are gendered in a way that is uniquely human, it falls secondary to their other; more obviously human traits: bipedalism, human facial features, and (relatively) elevated intelligence.

Gender is a near-inescapable part of being human, but it’s not the only part. We are inherently interested in the uncanny and the monstrous because we like to see the worst parts of ourselves presented as inhuman. Or maybe because we like seeing the best parts of ourselves in a creature that uses them in ways that we cannot, or don’t.

All media is made by people—flawed beings—it will always reflect the attitudes of the time and place in which it was produced. This is most likely why gendered stereotypes are so prevalent, why more feminine monsters tend to be more anthropomorphised and less physically imposing. Medusa, for example, is generally shown to be a normal woman with snakes for hair, whereas a more masculine monster like the Minotaur seems to regularly be portrayed as more bull than man.

I do not think this is an unchangeable phenomenon. In recent years I believe we’ve seen a shift away from the heavily gender-stereotyped monsters of the last century Maybe it is the genders that are shifting, expanding, and taking the monsters with them.

Regardless of how the human element of the monstrous may change, I believe it’s fair to say that it will stick around. I have a hard time imagining a world where humanity doesn’t invent its own enemies, whether that be to incite primordial responses or to downplay the threat of a real opposing force. Monsters and humanity have something special going, and I daresay it will last.

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It’s only now, after going on this grand romp, that I remember that much of this discussion was extrapolated from one lithograph that shares some vague qualities with a penis. It seems unlikely that Redon intended for his piece to be a commentary on anything I’ve mentioned. If anything, his depiction seems to lean further away from gendering its subject, presenting the sciapode as more monstrous than previous humanoid depictions. It’s entirely possible that Redon would have discarded Freud’s interpretation of the sciapode as nonsense, that he truly only saw it as a monster. Perhaps his intent in depicting this monster was nothing more than reaching for shock value. Maybe, reading gender into a piece that only depicts a monster is just further evidence that it will forever be present in our minds and in our interpretations. Perhaps the links that have emerged between them are merely a sign of their similarly prominent positions in the public consciousness, and in mine.

Or perhaps Redon produced a lithograph of a penis-monster. Really, it’s hard to say.