black

                  

“The signature black clothing is, at first glance, a generic gesture of negation…It smacks of monasticism, vampires, and funeral directors…Goths do not go out in direct sun, so that their skin remains an alabaster white. This stands out against the dark gear in a most striking way. It asseverates the purity of the person, dressed as if in mourning for a still-visible innocence. The Goth motif of the fallen angel expresses this condition. It is not that the angel has fallen from a condition of intrinsic grace, but that he or she has fallen anxiously into a graceless world.” (David Lenson in The Aesthetic Apostasy)

The most important thing to know about Goths is that if they do not wear black, there is a possibility that they may die, or worse. Of course this is only a theory, since no Goth has ever not worn black. Black is the basis of the Goth aesthetic, a physical manifestation of the hidden and the spooky. Goths are sombre and melancholy, which their style reflects. They deck themselves in black garments, dye their hair black, paint their fingernails black, and sometimes even wear black lipstick. All of this creates a stark contrast to their oft bone-white skin. Their appearance symbolizes a twisted yearning for an innocence stolen by mass consumption and a hypocritical world.

Black is a lack of colour and so presents an absence, like graveyards.  As such, black is the most emblematic colour. It is the colour of night, of candle-lit rooms and subterranean spaces. It is the colour of Evil (the Prince of Darkness), authority (judges and executioners), and facets of religion such as asceticism (nuns and priests) and divinities (the Hindu goddess Kali). Given the religious context, the Gothic predilection for black is nearly sacrilegious. 

Black is reminiscent of the 19^th century Romantic sensibility. It has a diabolical elegance and a charisma of deviance. It is sexy in a dark, unwholesome way. Black obscures, dampens, dulls, softens, and deadens. It has the hollowness of embalmed corpses, the negation of death, the void of perpetual mourning, and the ambiguity of the otherworldly. Black is The (un)colour that caters to the Goth psyche.

graveyards

 

Goths match their melancholy energy to their surroundings, and so are inherently attracted to the resting grounds of the dead. The term Goth became associated with graveyards and medieval ruins during the Romantic period, and the silent, shadowy memorials remain a staple of Goth culture today. 

“For me…ruins and churchyards are places charged with special atmospheres where traces of the past and the dead linger. They fill me with a pleasurable melancholy and longing to escape from modern life to other times.”

Goths have a fascination with the concept of mortality, and graveyards are the perfect place for them to linger and ponder their existence, death, and the afterlife (or lack thereof). Goths feel at home among the dead, commiserating with the ultimate outsiders. Goths can only hope to one day be as disconnected from the Evils of consumerism, conformity, and hypocrisy as the corpses buried around them. 

Goths have a peculiar, contradictory relationship with ascetic tradition. The religious roots of graveyards come into conflict with the hedonistic Goths who love to brood in them, and render their association with Goth culture rather blasphemous.

“Goths often “profane” traditional religious iconography by using it for flagrantly stylistic rather than religious purposes. Christian (particularly Roman Catholic) references abound in Goth culture.”

Finally, graveyards, like black, present a profound, irreconcilable, absence. They emphasize what is lacking. 

“…the grave is also a foundational Goth obsession, the sign of something both incontestably “real” and of the one who is absent.”

Graveyards offer sanctuary and solitude for the Goth psyche. They are a space for introspection and both literal and psychological isolation at the dark fringes of society. You may even witness Goths resting in peace, dwelling on death, and hunting for vampires in a graveyard near you.

 

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Goth: Undead Subculture, Powell, p361

Goth: Undead Subculture, Powell, p361

Goth: Undead Subculture, Bibby, p234

romanticism

 

“The Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century found artists and writers abandoning reason and searching the dank crevices of all things mysterious, supernatural, and emotional, in the name of exploring the darkness of the human soul.” (Voltaire, What is Goth?  p12)

It is common for Goths to express nostalgia for a past they never witnessed, and instead patchwork elements of times of yore, reanimating them like Frankenstein did his monster.

The Goth subculture accepts and opens a new world to the rejects of modern day society, embalming them with Old World Romanticism while maintaining new world progressivism. They explore emotions and concepts most citizens of today suppress such as despair, mortality, and existential anxiety. These concepts served as focal points during the Romantic period and appear frequently in Gothic art and literature. Theatricality was also an important component of Romanticism and was thus adopted by Goths who are attracted to the performative fashions and aesthetics of the period.

It is also important to note that during this period the term ‘Gothic’ first appeared in relation to works set in the dark corridors of medieval ruins. These narratives delved into the macabre and refuted reason in favor of emotion. Notable Gothic novels include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Vampyre; a Tale by John William Polidori, and Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (as well as the works of Edgar Allan Poe). Gothic literature examines alienation, existence, and the undead. Works of the period also explored many taboo sexual themes, usually through metaphor, although Goths today are often quite open about their rejection of sexuality norms. 

An increasingly technological culture continues to alienate Goths from the mainstream, as Goths prefer to remain in their crypts with their dusty tomes of ages long since past. 

 

vampires

For the Gothic psyche, the ethos of a vampire is probably the most alluring of any mythological being. The vampire is the quintessential alienated outsider, and therefore the prototypical or perfect Goth. They are cloaked in black, brood, obsess over mortality, and have an inherent moral conflict. The depiction of vampires, and their literary tradition, is steeped in androgyny, eroticism, and sexual ambiguity. Works exploring these themes include Anne Rice’s novels, Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story Carmilla, and the television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Anne Rice is especially notorious for her emphasis on the androgyny of vampiric relationships with through characters.

Vampires, like Goths, are isolated both spiritually and socially. Their outsider status is marked by their undead or unorthodox appearance, which often arouses unease in the straight world. Goths’ failure to assimilate leads them to embrace and “celebrate the alienated outsider, creating a fantasy of power obtained by virtue of remaining unassimilated to one’s larger culture and supporting a panoply of overt signs to betoken that status” Goths love vampires because they present a notable contradiction- “one of the most striking tensions in the vampire narrative tradition plays between sympathy for, and detestation of, the vampire. He is both a monstrous, calculating predator, and yet again, depending on whose vampire he is, a lonely, haunted outsider trapped by his need for blood.”

Perhaps the most poignant observation of these characters comes from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles where “Louis evokes our sympathy in his helplessness, alienation, and sense of insignificance-even as consequences of his power and potential immortality.”

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Goth: Undead Subculture, Gagnier, p303)

Goth: Undead Subculture, Gagnier, p303)

Goth: Undead Subculture, Gagnier, p294)

Goth: Undead Subculture, Gagnier, p303)

tim burton

 

Tim Burton is a celebrated director who has been involved with such Goth staples as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, and Beetlejuice. Notable themes throughout many of his films are living with/coming to terms with the afterlife and mortality (in Beetlejuice and Sleepy Hollow), alienation (in The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands), and the ambiguity of morality (in Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Edward Scissorhands).  

In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Dark (represented by the citizens of Halloween Town) even attempts to take over the Light (Christmas Town). In Beetlejuice, a recently deceased couple hire Beetlejuice, a “bio-exorsist” to get rid of the new owners of their house. In the end both parties decide to instead live together in harmony. In Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane must appease the spirit of the Headless Horseman to stop the murders in the quaint town of Sleepy Hollow. Burton’s films, like Goths, often search for existential truth through the consumption of the past.

“such films articulate a nostalgia for authenticity. Paradoxically, however, Burton locates this lost authenticity in the B movies of the 1950s and 1960s.” 

Edward Scissorhands, however, may be the Burton film with which most Goths readily identify. Edward has been described as a fable of gothic otherness; a darkly humorous satire of suburbanism. Edward’s frightening appearance and dangerously sharp extremities isolate him from his blithe suburban surroundings. Edward’s defining moment is his statement “I’m not finished.” In this way Edward is a victim of a post-industrial ‘techno-alienation.’ 

[On Edward Scissorhands] “Edward’s appendages mark an alienation from others that is fundamental to the film’s depiction of adolescent identity: to be is to cut and to be cut”

Burton’s films present a conflict between Light and Dark, Good and Evil. Mostly they explore ambiguity and the inability to separate Light from Dark; learning instead to accept both the shades of grey, the Light and the Dark, Life and the Afterlife. 

In an excerpt from an MTV interview with Tim Burton, he discusses his affiliation with the Gothic subculture:

MTV: For better or worse, you’re a patron saint of the so-called “goth” movement. How do you feel about that?

Burton: People get scared of [Goths], but they really are quite sweet, great people. It’s that image versus what people have in their heart versus what people think people should look like — that always causes a problem.

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Goth: Undead Subculture, Markley, p29

Goth: Undead Subculture, Markley, p29

Goth: Undead Subculture, Markley, p278

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1543705/story.jhtml