Justin Lee, associate editor of First Things magazine and horror writer, joins the pod to explain the dissident art scene that is forming outside the boundaries of woke institutions. Justin and Inez discuss the need for both destructive art aimed at the regime and constructive art that points towards truth and beauty. They also discuss the reaction to First Things publishing an article by a Twitter anon, and the content of L0me3’s piece about the longhouse — the feminine bureaucracy that stifles impulses to creativity, competition, and risk.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And my guest this week is Justin Lee, who’s an associate editor at First Things Magazine, as well as a horror writer, which is by far the most interesting thing anyone has ever said about themselves to me at one of those conservative rubber chicken dinners that organizations have. But I wanted to bring him on to talk about the connections between this right-wing scene developing and art, and what the future of that kind of art scene might be, as well as the publication of a controversial, apparently, article in First Things for which I think he was probably responsible.
But I want to start out by asking you, so for people who aren’t following this particular corner of the internet, what is going on with this burgeoning sort of right-wing art scene? It’s a lot of Twitter anons, it’s a lot of folks finding each other on the internet, but also a lot of real creation of art, and it seems like a very intentional step into the breach left by this dullness of the woke mainstream art scene. So what’s the 10,000-foot view of what’s going on?
Justin Lee:
Yeah, I think the 10,000-foot view is that there are a lot of people with real talent who have been shut out of legacy institutions in one way or another. If you’re really an artist, you’re going to make art whether you’re told you can or not. Best case scenario, that art will find its audience. And so I think we’re seeing just what happens naturally when you do have talented people who are put in an outsider situation. And so to some extent, this is just a lot of outsider art, finally beginning to coalesce and find an audience.
Inez Stepman:
So one potential model for this was laid out by Michael Anton in IM-1776. He called it the Tom Wolfe model. And he points out that Tom Wolfe, his work is now considered right of center and almost certainly was when he was writing it, but he really resisted that label and made it just about making fun of the avant-garde of his time, for the most part, on the left. And that connected with people because he was a brilliant writer and hilarious. So Anton proposes, basically, this is probably a way forward, but then he points out that Tom Wolfe had institutional support. He had somebody pay him to go around the country observing different subcultures and groups and then write about them.
So I have two questions for you about the Tom Wolfe model, I guess. One is, where is this institutional support going to come from? Because it seems like it is to some extent necessary. Yes, the artist will always create art, but patronage is not a new idea. And then the second thing is, is satire enough? Because it’s true what Anton wrote, that the Left is a fertile ground for a smart and funny writer, for example, to make fun of. But do you think there has to be some kind of positive component to this, or do you think that we can just get away with making fun of the left because they’ve made themselves such easy targets?
Justin Lee:
I think it has to be both. I don’t think you can really have one without the other at this point. If it’s merely satire, and if it’s merely parody and lampooning, then that gets old very quick. You can’t simply be against, you have to be for something. This has become kind of a sub-mission statement of First Things lately. We generally want to avoid againstism and everything needs to be counterbalanced with a positive vision. One of the ways that I think about this is I use the cultural theorist, Philip Rieff, whose most famous book is “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” Just a fantastic indictment of the therapeutic culture and how it developed and what its consequences are.
He has another book, a little bit lesser known. It’s partially a memoir, partially a kind of aesthetic manifesto called “My Life Among The Deathworks.” He’s dissecting cultural works that serve the purpose of tearing down the normative order. So one classic example of this is, I forget the so-called artist’s name who made this, but the work was called Piss Christ. It was a crucifix turned upside down in a beaker of the artist’s urine. This was supposed to be some big profound statement because he is shocking sensibilities, all that. It’s obviously not art, but it’s doing a kind of work, that is to use blasphemy to murder cultural norms and shift the Overton window in certain ways. So we see the deathworks as those things that bring about anti-culture and defiance of culture. I think deathworks used to be pretty interesting in some ways, back when there was an orbit of culture to deconstruct.
But now that the deconstructors have succeeded, their works are, they’re just tepid. There’s no life in them. There’s nothing interesting happening. So the way I see a productive dissident arts movement operating right now is through deathworking the culture of death. So satire and lampooning the new norms of the anti-culture performs a similar deathwork function, but it actually helps pave the way for work that can be life giving. So I see you have two main jobs right now if you’re a dissident artist. And that’s to destroy woke culture, to destroy therapeutic culture, using your art. And so that means a kind of deathworking for that culture. And to build, to do works that are true art and clearly point people towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. But there does have to be a certain amount of destruction that takes place to create room for the other work, if that makes sense.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, no, it does. I’m reading “Triumph of the Therapeutic” right now, so maybe I’ll move on to “Deathworks” afterwards because I’m finding the “Triumph” just an incredibly prophetic description of where we are. And it’s funny to me because actually I find, as much as I like Christopher Lasch, I actually find this a better description in many ways. And I know that they have a lot of similar themes, but this is a little older for people who haven’t read it. In any case, it struck me when you were talking about Piss Christ the, I think it was a photograph, right?
Justin Lee:
Yeah. You could actually go see it in a museum as well.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. It came out in the ’80s. So it is interesting, at least it had that function that you sort of hinted at, which is that it did genuinely shock people’s sensibilities. I think you called it using blasphemy to… So you didn’t call it art, but it did do some kind of work. And it was legitimately in some way transgressive because in 1985 or ’87, it was still legitimately shocking to do what he did. And it strikes me that something today, I think you’re right, has very little power at all, even destructive power, because it’s simply they’ve reached the end of the line and there are no more norms for them to really transgress against. The best example of this, I think, is not an artwork but a building in Manhattan. There’s an old church that was turned into the, I think in the ’80s and ’90s, turned into a nightclub and then particularly a gay nightclub.
That was obviously done as an act of transgression. We’re going to put a gay nightclub in a church. And even if people were horrified by it, it had that transgressive kind of spark where people were like, oh, wow. And people who loved it, loved it, and people who hated it, hated it. And it actually did create, there is some sort of frisson there. I can’t pronounce that word. Whereas now it got changed into the nightclub closed, it ended up being a gym for a while, and now a pizza place. I think that’s just a perfect trajectory of how basically it’s lost even the edge because there’s nothing transgressive about it anymore. Now it’s just a place to grab a slice of pizza.
Justin Lee:
Yeah, no, I mean, if you want gay dancing, you can go to any progressive church in the city and you’re liable to find drag queens performing on Sundays. Yeah, it’s really hard to be transgressive in that direction.
Inez Stepman:
Very easy to be transgressive in the opposite direction, in a certain sense.
Justin Lee:
Yeah, just by being normal and trying to be healthy is becoming an act of transgression.
Inez Stepman:
I wonder how it would be received if somebody suspended the gay pride flag in a canister of urine and took a picture of it.
Justin Lee:
We could find out. We know exactly how it would be perceived. It would be treated incredibly harshly. The person who did it would be unpersoned rapidly and with as much vehemence as could be mustered, and it would be a significantly stronger response than what happened to Piss Christ. Because even in the ’80s, yeah it had some frisson to it, but it was largely something you could yawn about. It was like, yeah, these people are going to do their thing. The church certainly didn’t have the kind of cultural power in the ’80s to really punish anyone for doing that kind of a performance. Whereas the regime now absolutely has the power to unperson someone who urinates on a pride flag.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a hate crime.
Justin Lee:
Oh yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m pretty sure that would be considered, you might actually get prosecuted, depending on the context, because there was somebody who dragged down a pride flag on the front of some restaurant in the middle of the night, and I’m pretty sure she’s now being prosecuted.
Justin Lee:
And it as a hate crime, not just as vandalism?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah.
Justin Lee:
Wow.
Inez Stepman:
I’d have to look into the details of that case and I don’t know, but just from headlines. Let’s return for a moment to the, perhaps not as interesting, but at least equally important question of patronage. How do we build new institutions that will provide the kind of paycheck that Tom Wolfe was able to enjoy, or at least the kind of legitimacy within, I guess you could call it dissident circles, especially if you’re showcasing people who haven’t put their art into the public before. They don’t have a natural audience until an institution sort of grants them one. Are those kinds of institutions being built? How far are we from somebody who wants to do art that transgresses against the norms of our culture, being able to find the kind of patronage that left-wing artists do?
Justin Lee:
Yeah, we have quite a ways to go. It’s still very early. Some institutions are emerging. You mentioned IM-1776 earlier, and they’ve just shifted their focus to doing this very thing, to providing patronage and platforming dissident writers. I know they’ve just received a big chunk of funding to help do that. So there is some donor interest in making this happen. I know we’re going to get to the Longhouse article shortly, but the author of that article, Lomez, is launching a publishing company off of the success of the Passage Prize, which was an anthology competition that he set up on Twitter and got a lot of participation and a lot of interest in. His publishing project is very close to getting the funding that it needs to have a really big first year. This is actually, I believe unlike 1776, it’s a for-profit venture. So these aren’t just donors, it’s investors who see real opportunity in this nascent movement.
So what it’s going to take is, I guess, individual patronage and institutional patronage to support writers and creators in the creation of the work. But then the even bigger thing is we need our own publishing houses. We need our own art galleries. We need our own theaters. We need our own production companies. And we need our own distribution platforms. Because the big problem that a lot of the stuff we’ll run into is distribution, because there’s absolutely an audience for it. If any big five publisher found the new Tom Wolfe, he or she would sell like crazy.
But it’s just the question of do they have the willingness to take that reputational risk to tap an obviously existing audience. And right now, they’re largely cowards. Especially if it’s a new writer with no platform at all, it’s just not going to happen. Especially if that writer’s male, this is just how the industry’s working right now. If we can solve that distribution problem, then I think the whole thing is viable. But we have to keep in mind that it’s not an easy problem to solve because this stuff can’t just happen digitally. These can’t just be really good eBooks.
It has to be physical objects that are beautiful, that you want to have, that you want to hold and give to people, show to people. This is something that Lomez understands pretty well. You see this with this first Passage Prize anthology. The hardback sold for $400 apiece, is very lavishly produced. He only printed 250 copies, so it’s scarce, and they all sold out almost immediately. And so this shows that there is a viability, that there are people who are actually very invested in the idea of this kind of work being made and are ready to support it. But distribution is going to be, I think, maybe one of the biggest problems that we have to overcome.
Inez Stepman:
So another problem that I can see needing to be overcome is how to orient these institutions so as to avoid… Because there have been attempts like this, but I think this one has a lot more chance, a lot more hope than some of those others. But there have been attempts to fund conservative art, but they have always come at it basically with a very heavy-handed political messaging that has made it-
Justin Lee:
So it’s not art.
Inez Stepman:
… boring and usually it’s not very good art. How do you, for example, if you’re an institution. If you’re Lomez picking from entries for the Passage Prize, or if you’re in a foundation and you’re choosing artists to support, to patronize, to give the platform to, basically, how do you fit politics into the way that you evaluate it? Because obviously you don’t want to publish, like Lomez would never publish some woke piece of art with the New York Times stretchy heads and blank faces. He would immediately see that, but some things are more subtle. How do you keep it among “our guys” and make sure that you’re actually supporting that side of the artistic community that isn’t getting the support from the mainstream institutions, but at the same time, not actually just directly injecting politics and saying, okay, here’s a list of things you must believe if you want to submit art to the Passage Project. You understand what I’m saying?
Justin Lee:
Yeah. This early on, it’s very easy to tell who’s who and who’s potentially worthy of investment. Because at this point it is just easy to spot who’s not playing the game, who’s not playing by progressive rules. They’re often already canceled or they’re pre-canceled and they’re very typically already out. And behind closed doors, people who are still in the closet, so to speak, are very often reaching out to the people who are much more publicly present with their beliefs and still trying to make art. So there are already networks that exist informally for identifying people. So if you talk to Lomez or if you talk to Alex Perez or Mark Granza, they just have a whole network of people that they know who are trying to make art. And those people know people.
So what this tells me is that if you’re a donor looking to be involved in patronage, you very well may not be in a position to make good judgments about what is significant art or what is good writing, et cetera. You might be able to recognize things that you like or things that seem to connect with your politics, but you just might not have the training or the cultivation quite yet to have that kind of discernment. But there are a lot of people who do. And identifying people who do have discernment and empowering them to make decisions on your behalf in order to extend patronage, I think that would be the wise way to go forward.
Inez Stepman:
That brings me to another question I had, which is about the apparent cultural gap between what is being produced as dissident or right-wing art and, let’s say, the average Trump voter in America, and whether this movement would be… I guess I’m asking really a question about the relationship between, be avant-garde or newness and art generally. Because it seems like… I’m not of the opinion though. I’m not an elitist in this sense. There was a time in this country where art was aimed at a much more general audience, and I don’t think that that made it worse art. In fact, the modern left wing avant-garde scene shows how esoteric you can become when you are dependent only on grants and you’re only trying to impress two critics in two magazines.
Justin Lee:
Or just other artists.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, and not from creating art that connects with the average person. But on the other hand, there seems like a pretty big gap between some of this art and what, I don’t know, your average Trump voter is probably looking for or wants to see or read.
Justin Lee:
Yeah, I think that there’s some truth to that, but I also think that your average Trump voter probably isn’t reading a whole lot. For a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that fiction is very rarely written for them. You’re right about that, that this has been kind of an epical change in who writers are writing for, but this has been true for decades at this point. There is this radical disconnect between literary literature and genre literature. The former tends to be very naval gazing and self-satisfied, and the latter, even when it is infiltrated by woke nonsense, simply by virtue of being genre, it’s committed to plot, it’s committed to compelling narrative, compelling characters, and it’s committed to having stakes that are clear, which means that it’s much more likely to resonate with normal people. Because it’s actually getting at things that are much more eternal and that aren’t simply of the moment.
The traditional narrative arc is what it is for a reason, because it speaks to something very deep in the human soul. And when fiction tries to eschew that, there’s always a cost. But the other element of this though is, and this will start to get us into the Longhouse thing, that the publishing industry has been run by women for decades. And even when there’s been nominal male leadership, it’s been governed by the demands of a very feminine market. Between 70% to 80% of readers of literary fiction are women and about 80% of all the editors and agents in New York are women. So this has an impact on the sensibilities of the work that gets published and the kinds of writers that get chosen. This didn’t just now happen. This has been true for decades, and it’s just become much more extreme over time. But for decades, the message to the normal reader in America is that books are for women, and in particular, fiction is for women. So you see this huge gender divide between readers of fiction and non-fiction. And the divide breaks down by genre as well. You have very few men reading literary fiction, even old literary fiction. They gravitate towards science fiction, towards fantasy, towards horror. I think that this is a very unhealthy situation that we’ve found ourselves in. I don’t think that the gender divide should be what it is.
Inez Stepman:
That’s definitely true, even with regard to childhood books. There’s almost nothing being written in a modern sense that would attract boys to reading, it seems like. And especially there’s very little assigned. You don’t have “Ivanhoe” assigned in class anymore. You have “House on Mango Street” or what was the one by Amy Tan about the four generations of women? I can’t remember already because it wasn’t good.
Justin Lee:
“The Joy Luck Club.”
Inez Stepman:
Joy Luck Club. You don’t have these sort of adventurous themes in books that would attract boys to reading at all, so that the content seems to be very feminine skewed, even what’s assigned at school and so on. So let’s talk about the Longhouse article. So First Things published a few weeks ago. We’ve mentioned Lomez a few times already, but he is an anonymous Twitter account that goes under the name, Lomez. That’s not his real name. And people seemed very upset that First Things, a Christian magazine, had published someone of this sphere. And that’s really what it seemed to be because the article itself, even though it uses that sort of very online buzzword longhouse, I mean the article itself, Heather McDonald wrote something quite similar about universities being dominated by women and becoming feminized in their responses, for example, to student hysterics. When the student says that they’re offended, there’s a sort of feminized bureaucracy that responds, not by just telling them to get over it, but by trying to respond to those concerns and bend over backwards.
And that’s City Journal. That’s a very mainstream Manhattan Institute publication. So I find it hard to believe it was the content of what was published, so much as the gall you had to publish one of these sort of anonymous art scene Twitter anons. First of all, what was the reaction? How did you experience the reaction from Patrick Deneen and others? There was a lot of pushback against it. Why did you publish this article in First Things, and then why do you think it was important, I guess, to publish something like this in an established Christian magazine?
Justin Lee:
So for a number of reasons, the biggest is I think that it taps into something that is very true and that needs to be discussed and that we need to have debate about. I think that it’s something that is very clearly worth our reader’s time. A lot of people have come to similar ideas in different forms, like this recent McDonald piece, but even in the New York Times. Thomas Edsall, who Lomez quotes in the article, wrote an enormous piece on this a few years ago that’s very, very well researched in showing the extent to this phenomenon. But of course, offering no judgment. Just purely descriptive. And of course, First Things has written on this, we’ve published on this in the past, we just didn’t call it the longhouse. But for younger audiences, especially people who are really online, they’re going to be familiar with this term or they will have come across it. And it has a lot of resonance. People really connect with it.
So it’s something that our readers need to be aware of. That here’s this potent metaphor for this thing that, presented differently, we would all acknowledge, yeah, this is a real thing. But here’s the metaphor that has gained the most traction in relation to this problem. So it’s something our readers should know about. But publishing, it also sends a message to anonymous land that an establishment institution like First Things recognizes their validity. That there are real ideas that are meaningful, that are potent and worth engaging, coming from outside of the conservative mainstream. So, yeah, some people pushed back, but the reception in that world was overwhelmingly positive and you just had this sense of gratefulness that, oh, they’re taking us seriously. And that’s a good thing. Doesn’t mean we need to take everything that comes from that corner of discourse with the same level of seriousness, but we need to recognize what’s well-thought-out, what’s deeply considered, and particularly what is resonant, and engage it intelligently.
Inez Stepman:
How do you think this is… Oh, go ahead.
Justin Lee:
Oh yeah, I was just going to say regarding the pushback, there was pushback from people like Deneen who didn’t read the piece when he had commented on it, which I know with certainty. And that was the case for most people. So it was almost purely about the fact that we use a term that was popularized by Bronze Age Pervert and because we published an anonymous guy who’s an internet flamethrower. But if you look at the response to Deneen on Twitter, not just coming from the anonymous quarters, but coming from a lot of mainstream voices, he got absolutely thrashed for that tweet. The reaction was resoundingly, this is an idiotic position. It’s mere gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping and it’s beneath someone of his intellectual caliber. Behind the scenes, the magazine has gotten this outpouring of support and gratitude from people, especially men, who’ve said something to the effect in their emails of, “This is what I’ve been experiencing, but haven’t had the words to articulate, thank you for publishing this.”
Inez Stepman:
So I feel like we’ve been dancing around what the longhouse actually is, and this is an article called “What is the Longhouse,” I believe, right?
Justin Lee:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
So what is the longhouse? Because I sort of blew past that just because, probably from being very online, I’m used to the terminology. So what is the longhouse, how does it relate to this sort of increasing proportion of various industries being female dominated? Because Lomez, for example, has a great line in the article where he says, this is not only enforced by women, so the longhouse is not a mere sort of numerical accounting of who’s in what job.
Justin Lee:
Yeah. Although that can help us understand it a bit. But yeah, it’s basically the general trend over the past several decades of making a kind of feminine, or I guess feminized phenomenology the cultural norm in many significant spheres. And this is I think most consequential in domains that used to be characterized by more masculine values related to competition. So the way that men and women compete and handle conflict is different. Men and women are not the same. We are different in important and typically complimentary ways, and I think certain domains of public life are better served by certain masculine predispositions. So in the business world, a hierarchy and conflict that proceeds from competition is very valuable. It drives innovation. And if you have a more feminized sensibility that is opposed to overt hierarchies and overt competition and prefers things to be done subtly and with a more surface level egalitarianism. That doesn’t necessarily serve innovation in certain contexts.
And so we’re kind of downstream of a lot of those effects. So one way to think about the longhouse is the normalization, or I’d say the supremacy of a feminized sensibility within domains that are better served by pure gender neutrality or even a masculine sensibility. Lomez talks about the way this contributes to safetyism and cancel culture and just the entire complex of woke pathologies that afflict our culture. And I think that’s right. To draw things back to Rieff, we can just refer to the longhouse as the therapeutic culture writ large.
It’s just another term for what Rieff is getting at. And having said that, that means it’s important to know that it’s not about blaming women, it’s not about this being the fault of women, because men by and large pioneered therapeutic culture. So much of this stuff stems from Freud. So it’s not simply a matter of women in the workplace causing issues or women running HR departments or compliance offices are causing a certain set of problems. It’s about a certain way of seeing the world that is more traditionally feminine than masculine, having supremacy in domains where it shouldn’t.
Inez Stepman:
Which came first then, in your estimation, the female dominance of important industries or this feminized culture? Because I could see it going either way. I could see a sort of post-Freud world and particularly an economy moving into a managerial phase of capitalism, really favoring the risk averse, favoring the managerial, favoring and having certain sort of conditions that then make it… I don’t know, I’m thinking here about an industry like HR or a good one that I think is totally female dominated largely is hospital administration. Those jobs require or favor a set of skills that tend to be more feminine. So I guess I’m asking you, which way did this go? In other words, did we have this kind of therapeutic cultural revolution in the ’70s that consequently combined with a longer term economic shift just make essentially female culture more competitive in a certain sense and more valued? And now, do we therefore have the 58% of degrees and so on going to women. Or is it the reverse that having a certain number of women in these industries then feminize the culture to such an extent that men simply started kind of bowing out?
Justin Lee:
Yeah, I think it’s the former. I think that certain deep structural changes, probably beginning in the Wilson era, and the emergence of the managerial phenomenon is probably the deeper culprit. And of course, this made it possible for women to be in the workplace in a new way. This is in some ways good and in other ways negative. One of my favorite ways of thinking about this comes from Wendell Berry in his essay, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” and it says something to the effect that this whole system has been pretty awful for men. Why would we expect it to get any better just because we let women experience these awful things as well in this context. So if it’s abusive of men, we’re not going to make it better by letting it abuse women as well, if that makes sense, just regarding to the whole capitalist system.
But I think that there might be kind of a clearer origin of guilt in the managerial system. But all these problems, which maybe you can think of them as latent problems, really could actualize when the gender balance is, in practice, lopsided and a certain character of the system becomes more deeply ingrained, more deeply constitutive. I mean, bureaucracy has been around for a long time. We don’t think of Prussian bureaucracy as being especially feminine. So it’s not like bureaucracy itself is necessarily profoundly gendered, but I think in our case, it combined, maybe just serendipitously, with the emergence of the therapeutic. And the therapeutics served the interests of the managerial class to such an extent that it just got very much enshrined.
Because when you think about it, if you’re trying to minimize risk in an organization, and you’re also trying to protect your own position as a hired administrator, if you want to safeguard your own power, then de-emphasizing hierarchy, hiding the extent to which you do control things, and minimizing overcompetition can protect your own ass. So there’s this element of self-interest, too, that has driven it. And historically this has been the self-interest of men. Anyway. So another way to think about this, if you want to make it even less about blaming women, is that this is the beta male patriarchy. We have beta males using feminine values in order to preserve their own standing.
Inez Stepman:
The counterpoint to the example you gave, oh, nobody thinks of the Prussians as a feminized state. We do kind of think of the Byzantines that way, though. In juxtaposition to the Western empire, we think of them, and perhaps unfairly, as sort of the softer, more decadent, less martial half. And famously, they gave us the word Byzantine as descriptive of bureaucracy. So I do think there’s some kind of inherent link here because a managerial system is necessary at a certain level of size, I think, so I’m not an absolutist. There has always been an “administrative state.” I mean, Jefferson complained about Hamilton’s treasury department being bloated. It was 23 people.
So there is a certain amount of administrative organization that is necessary. And in fact, one of the geniuses of America has been the ability to organize logistics in war, for example. But it is also true that this kind of managerial or bureaucratic form, by its nature, does distribute and make unclear lines of accountability and responsibility. And we always talk about the system now. We’re constantly talking about things in terms of the system rather than personal responsibility, and it strikes me that that is very much part of the feminized… I mean, it is a feminine mode of being in the way that it’s described in this longhouse article, which is that the lines of accountability and responsibility are of necessity sort of unclear in a bureaucracy because the whole thing is so unwieldy. I mean, everybody has had that frustrating experience of going to the DMV and then one worker, usually a woman tells you, “Oh, you don’t have the right form.” And then you say, “Well, this other woman told me that this was the form that I needed.”
Everybody’s had that kind of, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing or at least claims not to, sort of experience with bureaucracy. So maybe there is something inherent about it. To circle back to the questions at the top of the hour here, what drew you to writing in the first place? As one of these artists, as a man who’s trying to escape the longhouse, however we want to define this, what drew you to writing and to horror in particular as a way of making art?
Justin Lee:
Something I keep discovering with other writers is that you don’t choose writing, it chooses you. It becomes this kind of demonic compulsion. Some writing mentors will go so far as to discourage people from becoming writers. But as they know, if you’re supposed to be a writer, you’re going to write. And it doesn’t matter what the world says to you, you have to do it. One of my college professors put it really well. He said that the only thing worse than writing is not writing. So there’s this kind of compulsion to it. And I can’t really account, sometimes I try to moralize or intellectualize my interest in horror, but at the end of the day, I watched “Alien” when I was too young to watch “Alien” and it scared the hell out of me. I fell in love with the monster and the kind of powerful emotion that could be produced by this. I would draw the Xenomorph in the margins of my homework in elementary school and freak out my teachers. And I got a lot of delight out of that.
It’s just this perennial boyish impulse of, you find a toad and you come and set it on someone’s shoulder and they freak out. And that just feels wonderful to be the person that brings that about. And so if I can do that to someone at an existential level, then the perverse delight is even deeper. But Stephen King answered this question really well. He might have been stealing this answer from another writer, but he used to say, when people say, “So why horror?” He would say, “Well, I have the heart of a young boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
So it’s true without the second half of the sentence, and it’s even truer with it. But I do think that horror is a powerfully moral genre. You know what I mean? Post-modern horror tends to revel in ambiguity, but I think the most effective horror has a very clear demarcation of good and evil. It might have characters that are very gray, but to have the kind of shadow that makes horror effective, you have to have a black and white world. When you watch a well done horror movie, it’s very likely to throw in relief, moral absolutes in the way that Greek tragedy used to.
I sometimes think of horror as a purified, modern version of tragedy, even though it doesn’t always have the tragic arc. So one example is, my favorite recent horror movie is “Hereditary” by Ari Aster. It was just a phenomenal movie about the disintegration of a family. And the whole movie is very, very intentionally structured like a Greek tragedy. Instead of the gods or the fates creating the impossible situation, it’s demons. But the sense at the end is the same, that we’re trapped in a particular way. As a Christian, I don’t ultimately believe that as being true of ultimate reality, but I do believe that experientially, that’s often very much the case. That we seem to be trapped, and it seems that we’re being compelled by forces outside of our control. And witnessing that in a fictional context does bring about catharsis in meaningful ways.
Inez Stepman:
Well, where can people go to find your work, other than First Things where you’re an associate editor? Can you give us your Twitter handle and then where people can read your short stories?
Justin Lee:
So my short stories are kind of all over the place right now, but you can find them on my personal website, which needs to be updated badly. But Twitter handle is @justindeanlee. Dean, like James Dean. And that’s my website as well, justindeanlee.com. There’s a fiction section that’ll have links to all my published stories. Most recent one is at the magazine “Return,” it’s return.life, and it’s called KillShare. It’s about an app that allows you to participate in political assassinations.
Inez Stepman:
That seems just realistic to be horrifying. Just like close enough to us to be horrifying. Justin Lee, thank you so much for joining High Noon. It’s been a pleasure.
Justin Lee:
Thank you for having me. Likewise.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. That really helps with those algorithms. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
