FIVE TAKEAWAYS FROM GOTH, AND ITS DARK SUBCULTURE
Depending on your background, the word “goth” means one of three things: 1) a Germanic tribe that hastened the fall of the Roman Empire, 2) a friend of yours in high school, 3) you in high school. But as a new book by the same name illustrates, “Goth” is a subculture that pervades nearly every form of art. Here are your takeaways:
1
“Gothic architecture” was never a contemporary term, but named in retrospect during the Italian Renaissance by critics of medieval buildings and their lack of classical principles. “What better term to name them,” Livingstone asks, "than that of the marauding hordes who, like the architecture that so offended the sensitive Italians, ruined their beloved Rome back in the fifth century?” I guess we can look forward to “Deplorable” architecture in the next millennium.
2
Gothic fiction as a genre is widely traced to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (subsequently subtitled “A Gothic Story”), which was published in England on Christmas Day of 1764. The book claimed to be a translation of a long-lost Italian text, and was well- received until that falsehood was exposed. “Its fascination with superstition and violence was apparently fine provided it came from a bygone age,” Roberts writes, “but decidedly unacceptable in upperclass England.” For younger readers, this is why it was okay for your father to be a fan of pre-Wayne’s World Alice Cooper but not okay for you to be a fan of ... okay, I admit it, I don’t have a reference any more recent than Marilyn Manson.
3
Roberts makes the case that, though not nearly as quintessentially gothic as 19 th century peers such as Shelley’s Frankenstein or Stoker’s Dracula, the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights can lay claim to the genre with psychological themes (“jealous infatuation”), hints at the supernatural and their gothic settings on the moors and in creaky manor houses. We should have known: that diaeresis in the Brontë name looks an awful lot like an umlaut.
4
Though Tim Burton is the director who first leaps to mind for many as an example of Goth filmmaking (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow), Roberts qualifies him as something of a “flamboyant circus- showman.” In other words – gothic camp. But Roberts continues with the interesting point that Burton’s entry in the Batman franchise ( 1992’s Batman Returns, with Danny DeVito as The Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman) faced criticism of being “too dark.” His was a Gotham City that audiences were finally ready for in the Christopher Nolan reboot some dozen years later (after the misguided overcompensation with Jim Carrey’s Riddler and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. “Let’s kick some ice!” Mr. Freeze said. Let’s kick some ice, he really said).
5
“‘ Goths’ technically didn’t fit the followers of this music,” Roberts writes, “who were mostly gentle, sensitive souls.” It’s why The Cure’s Robert Smith was a hero in South Park. It’s why your friend’s older sister wore Doc Marten’s but was also a vegetarian. Underneath the eyeliner was not the cold stare of a nihilist, but the beseeching of memento mori. Perhaps Ozzy Osbourne said it best, as Roberts notes, when he was dubbed a living legend: “That’s better than being a dead one.”