Madmouth

~ short essay on In the Mouth of Madness (1994) and our present reality.

In John Carpenter’s 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness, Sutter Cane is a mesmerizing horror author to rival Stephen King; his readers worship his fiction like acolytes for its ability to terrify them into brand new realities. On the lam with his latest novel due to his publisher, Cane is hunted through the New England countryside by insurance investigator John Trent, a sharp yet wholly ill-prepared man that Cane himself has created to star in his story. Sam Neill’s tour de force performance showcases an electrifying descent into monstrous madness. Time, space, and consciousness are warped by visions and phantasms, all to the ends of connecting Trent and Cane. The grim novelist’s books become capable of not only driving men mad but re-writing reality itself. As in classic Lovecraftian fashion, the humble author and the hapless salaryman fated to deliver the book are merely conduits for greater cosmic forces beyond human understanding, The Great Old Ones. These are elder gods set to devour time and space and shatter human consciousness forever, once contacted and comprehension of their multitudinously tentacled forms attempted. We can mirror Trent’s meta-madcap reaction to the film’s ending, knowing what’s truly in store for his flimsy reality. / In Alan Moore’s titanic comic Providence, he posits that H.P. Lovecraft performs the same secret messianic work as Cane, writing stories to introduce real elder gods from the stars into the collective human imaginary, altogether heralding the way forward into a new Dark Age where such deathly godlike abstractions rule over Earthly reality.

I posit that Sutter Cane (and by nature of the way of artistry, John Carpenter too) is a proverbial Madmouth ~ a prophetic figure of singular creative force, capable of grasping history and altering it by their will and word and imagination. There have been many other Madmouths through the ages: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, FDR. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Copernicus, Newton, Einstein. Shakespeare, Shelley, de Sade. Slavoj Zizek. Nyarlathotep. Fill in your own blank, we know these sages and bards and warlords all changed the world. Of the great men of history, many likely had mad mouths.

The present President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a Madmouth. Consider how effortlessly his words bend reality for millions of people. He presents a self-important narrative and speaks to it confidently and unerringly (not to say truthfully or sagaciously). As a result, his devoted listeners follow him, metaphysically speaking, to the very ends of the earth. Like many world leaders he has successfully developed a cult of personality with a key sect of the populace. And yet, acolyte or not, everyone in America and indeed the world is subject constantly to President Trump’s mad mouth. Through near five years of aggressively mediated TV governance, Trump’s administrations have deployed a strategy of tension within the imperial core and its diverse domestic populace; that is, he and his men have stoked fires along racial, sexual, and class lines within America’s fast dissolving social fabric. In a realm ruled by desperation and chaos, i.e. immigrant criminal elements, human rights abuses, mass surveillance, mass shootings, mass deportations, rampant corruption, semi-regular random political assassinations, and generally degrading living standards, among other sinister parapolitical phenomena, a studious overseer can exploitatively intervene at every profitable opportunity.

Blackrock and Exxon and the military-industrial complex are riding Trump like a dragon through the flames, swooping in most opportunistically at every market arbitrage and psychic vulnerability. Old narratives, new laws. Fresh cruelties and ancient prejudices. {Trump’s admin is constantly capitalizing on the dark alchemy of induced human suffering.} Trump’s worldview of absolute service to self and a denial of anything beyond his purview (not even just White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity but really Whoever Loves ME) formulates as a firm political foundation in the minds of his most loyal followers. Bold unprecedented actions, corporate bribery, Congressional cowardice, and courtroom fuckery burns the Constitution easily. Upon the wider commons, rhetoric works much like magic, by realizing a verbally-manifested horrid present & chosen future within the collective imagination.

Nasty, diabolical radical leftist terrorism & insurrectionism is taking over and we have to stop them. We have to act or everything you love will be destroyed! // From there, once spoken enough times, with a certain class or race or sect of people demonized enough — reality does start to fold toward the imagined circumstances, the nation suddenly becoming peopled by enemies we need Trump to dispatch. The more people you have already behaving and believing accordingly, the faster the process goes, like a snowball down the hill. This is how movements and lynchings and assassinations and wars and genocides start, of course. This is to say nothing of false flags spurring on the fascism at breakneck pace; who can say what the last non-manufactured war was?

A true Madmouth can keep the grift going as long as they grind and upkeep their breath and a sharp eye to the locally abhorrent and politically convenient. Reshaping reality with words alone is easier work than you may believe. All you have to do is reach many outrage-attentive human beings at once, ones economically immiserated and totally indoctrinated by propaganda, and they shall become instant agents for carrying out all kinds of reality-warping labors (even if that just means forgetting, or self-brainwashing, or poasting about it, or doing nothing instead of something).

Trump may be unpopular, but he has armies and institutions wielding words and weapons nevertheless. Ultimately, like many Madmouths, Trump must be considered an insolent amalgamation of his nation and age: an elderly avatar for United States hegemony in the 21st century, the Last Man of late-stage capitalism, golem of greed and gaudiness, tulpa of terrible grammar, and herald for some new Twilight Age coming by 2028.

The Madmouthian endgame is always the opening of a portal. Like Sam Neill at the midway of Madness, everyone must eventually confront and stare into the abyss (or the next page of your reality as-written) to try to discern its truth. In so doing, with whatever sights seen in tow, walking free from the dark and treading back into the light, one necessarily returns changed. The Madmouth’s work is done; the next world now exists inside you. The idea has been implanted, the nouveau thoughtform engaged. A mind virus apprises its patient zero and their most ardent network, or the greater field of its coming regard.

x

It would be wise now to realize that the Madmouth’s utterings have already altered you and me too. ~