“Touching You Makes Me Die Inside”
narcissism, narcosis, and necropower
in the nü metal confessional queen of the damned
presented at the University of Houston, Halloween 2024
Once again I find myself delivering a lecture under misleading pretenses.
I think I initially expected to present some follow-up to my four-part craft essay “In My Defense Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific.” I would have again been a hopefully thorough conduit between the work done by some smart philosophers and some smart poets and artists.
I’ve been incapable of that kind of work. I’ve been incapacitated. For almost as long as I’ve known I would eventually deliver this Martha Gano Houstoun Visiting Scholar lecture, I’ve been trying to escape a hell of a relationship.
A hell in that it was an agonizingly cyclical endeavor, punctuated by brief, deceptive moments of respite and seductive pleasures that, for my indulgence, the relationship itself became a continuum of punishment. Before last fall, no one could have told me that I’d want a man’s love so badly that I would court a crystal meth addiction. No one could have predicted that I would spend even one single night of my life fellating dopeheads whom I’d just met in order to appease this man’s voyeur curiosity; I would’ve spat on such a prophecy. That I would be manipulated and mistrusted, stalked and spied upon, that I would be financially sponged off of, isolated from friends and family, that I would be raped, humiliated, that I would be psychologically run into the damn ground, that I would allow it…who could have said this to me in the summer of ’23?
There was also the hurricane. There was also the new job in the new city, the new apartment my mother fronted a deposit for so I could move out of my ex’s house and have, in her words, somewhere I could breathe without offending anyone. And yet, of course, I invited that man and our issues in.
But I’m taking steps now.
I’m able to join y’all today due entirely to the kindness of strangers and the grace of friends. Having been unable to recognize myself for some time—and I can promise you that a year really is some time—I perhaps unfairly rely on a few people in this world to reflect me, and one of them is here. Thank you.
Throughout my life I’ve also relied, perhaps unfairly, on certain cultural products and artifacts for reflection, and one of them is the 2002 Warner Bros motion picture Queen of the Damned. Who’s seen it?
This movie—along with its classic and notably stacked soundtrack—is one of the last vestiges of 90s horror aesthetics and is a treasure to me. The film stars Aaliyah as the title character, the queen mother of all vampires, Akasha. As a baby gay, Aaliyah was the only entertainer I ever idolized. She was
I wept myself to sleep the night I learned Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, at the age of 22. The towers would fall soon. I would soon fall in love with the first bisexual to break my heart. It would be a few months before I’d first listen to Linkin Park, a couple more until Queen of the Damned would receive wide theatrical release in February 2002 and bomb at the box office, and then Korn would release Untouchables that June.
I have been a Korn fan for 22 years. Jonathan Davis, Korn’s frontman, not only scored Queen of the Damned with composer Richard Gibbs and made a cameo as a scalper ahead of the film’s centerpiece concert scene, but of course his is the singing voice of the vampire Lestat, which rouses Akasha from centuries of slumber. Essentially Jonathan Davis’s music is the reason we see Aaliyah, however pitifully briefly, in this movie at all. I love to think that Korn resurrects Aaliyah each time I watch.
I could argue that Korn did for heavy music in the mid-90s what Aaliyah did for neo-soul: as massive crossover acts they formed nexuses for elements considered less than integral to their respective genres and made them essential. Destiny’s Child, lest we forget, ascends in the wake of One in a Million, when everyone sought out Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Darkchild, and Jermaine Dupri. Likewise it was after he produced Korn’s first two albums that Ross Robinson’s thumbprint on Sepultura’s Roots, Limp Bizkit’s debut Three Dollar Bill Y’all and Slipknot’s debut and then their monumental sophomore effort Iowa rounded out the nü metal sound. In future exploration, I want to follow an inkling that both these sonic transitions in popular music share the common denominator of incorporating rap’s emphasis on staccato deliveries and sampled ephemera, something about the transformation of everything into drums and haints.
Though it was a short-lived moment in music, nü metal has the distinction among hard rock and heavy metal’s innumerable dated subgenres of being possibly the most hated, so it comes as no surprise that people generally also despise Queen of the Damned. They are wrong to, but they do. Granted, the film is narratively fuckin convoluted. It’s one part sequel to Interview with the Vampire, one part condensed adaptations of both Anne Rice novels The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, a bastardization of all three, and one part long-form Korn music video/MTV2 circle-jerk. The film has arguably two protagonists, neither of whom is the queen of the damned. There is no young Kirsten Dunst here, it was not and an awards darling nor did it mean to be, and all the actors seem to be having fun camping it up. Nothing about this film, at first appearance, set out to submit an abiding, respectable commentary on the human condition. I continue to think that this sort of self-levity in the antechamber of loathing is horror’s (less the more respectable thriller’s) true strength. You can get away with saying a lot when no one is really listening.
Scholars are expected to say a fuckload. Alex Weheliye writes in Habeas Viscus:
In supposing that all human subjects occupy the space of humanity equally, post- and antihumanist discourses cannot conceptualize how “the transubstantiation of the captive into volitional subject, chattel into proprietor, and the circumscribed body of blackness into the disembodied and abstract universal seems improbable, if not impossible.” Much post-1960s critical theorizing either assumes that black subjects have been fully assimilated into the human qua Man or continues to relegate the thought of nonwhite subjects to the ground of ethnographic specificity, yet as Aimé Césaire has so rightfully observed, “The West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” (Weheliye, 35)
Most post-1960s critical theorizing does not engage the text of Duane Jones’s protagonist role in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which revived and revised a still-abiding representation of zombiism as a biopolitical determination and as one phase of the state’s facilitating the creation of lynch mobs and blunt-instrument vigilantism. Most post-1960s critical theorizing does not read the supernatural vengeance of Sugar Hill’s title character in the context of enslaved African ritual sites of resisting state, and specifically police, violence and extralegal applications. But thank goodness for Robin Means Coleman. And most post-1960s critical theorizing does not look toward the survival of Keith David’s “Childs” in John Carpenter’s The Thing as a way of popular cinema perhaps thinking through viral and/or antihuman intervention in “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, in 2020’s Becoming Human, offered that “black(ened) people are not so much dehumanized as nonhumans or cast as liminal humans nor are black(ened) people framed as animal-like or machine-like but are cast as sub, supra, and human simultaneously and in a manner that puts being in peril because the operations of simultaneously being everything and nothing for an order—human, animal, machine, for instance—constructs black(ened) humanity as the privation and exorbitance of form.” (Jackson, 35) In other words, requiring blackness to denote, connote, and evoke each of these malleably and most of the damn time really freaks the linguistic center that allows human, animal, and machine to mean anything at all, and as Sleater-Kinney say, “the center won’t hold.”
Justin Phillip Reed, in 2020’s The Malevolent Volume, in the poem “I Must Be Some Kind of Impossible,” offered this:
I signify the super
and the sub in one
body. I body
unbeing with unreal ease.
Boss up. Scrap for what
scraps of whom?
In this poem, I reference the films Guess Who and Get Out. That’s plastic.
I’m starting to pile some really special bones to pick with Black post-humanist theory. Because to dialogue with human formal excess, plasticity, monstrosity, and the bionic without somewhat reverently reading science-fiction and horror cinema (cinema, that is, where literature meets visual art meets music meets specific and dynamic framing) feels almost spiteful as a disciplinary oversight. The theorists make so much of “rupture” and “what space opens up,” but it seems to me they mostly ignore, say, the discursive potential in the agency of Black actors and extras, writers, designers, composers, etc. who choose to help create television and movies gener(ic)ally presumed to dialogue with Black being in no meaningful way, and yet these are sites where a multidisciplinary, polyvocal public, rather than an academic elite, does engage regularly in theorizing the human and, by assigning or withholding value, by showing up or not, this public does somewhat get a say in how fully and roundly those theories are explored or philosophies expressed.
This isn’t to say I’m so brattishly frustrated that my favorite movies don’t get mentioned that I’m canceling critical race theory. I’m not a U.S. governor.
I do wanna pick up, later in Becoming Human, Jackson’s expanded concept of necropower, which sounds awesome if you’re a metalhead but it’s fucked up in fact. Revisiting Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical theories in which contemporary society is essentially organized into systems that prioritize power over death and seek to reduce the desire for human autonomy in their operations (the prison and military industrial complexes, for instance), Jackson takes it further by offering, kinda ominously, that actually the physical Black human body is within the weaponry of state necropower, in that the body’s receiving and reacting to the detrimental exertions of antiblackness as a series of environmental stressors is scientifically probable to accelerate fatal processes on the cellular level, and to even be inscribed in genetic information reproduced in the creation of new cells (a new depth of what we’ve been calling “intergenerational trauma”), further exacerbating (or merely fortifying) the project of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, aka racism. In short, if I read correctly, necropower theoretically weaponizes my cells and my blood against me and my progeny; antiblackness possesses my body to betray more than just myself.
Now, in cinematic vampire lore, blood is everything. It can heal fatal wounds, it can resurrect the dead. It can be the link between a new vampire fledgling and a millennia-old ancient, and if that ancient is killed so too the fledgling will die. Some times. Drinking enough of it might allow a vampire to daywalk.
In the 22 years of Queen of the Damned, I’m sad to say it only just strikes me how textually invested the film is in emphasizing blood as an active transmitter of information. The Underworld franchise, starting in 2003, will later take up this lore, using blood-letting and -drinking to illustrate how vampire covens record their histories, structure kinship and super-slumber schedules, maintain their own classist and racist structures, and even spy and rat on each other. But for Anne Rice’s bastard nomads and brooding narcissistic bloodsucker children, blood is mostly a conveyor of individual memories and identities, and it carries a risk of overdose.
In 1973 Ganja & Hess wove one of the greatest vampire/love/addiction stories ever told around the refrain “the blood of the thing is the truth of the thing.” Living, loving, and failing a little longer has allowed me to revisit Queen of the Damned to experience differently what blood exerts narratively, and one thing I’m relearning is that there is something black, or at least “black(ened),” about a vampire being: the vampire is tethered to original violation, the violence of their origin, and their need to consume blood—the most essential fact of their existence—curses them to rehearse, to relive the moment of their first death, their birth. Being vampire, like being Black, is an arguably lifelong acknowledgment of the singular rip from which all other rips and rifts continue to emerge. (This is the “raceplay” I had initially intended to bother y’all with.)
But this blood horror is only illustrated when Lestat drinks from Akasha, the one vampire for whom becoming vampire was not a matter of being made or thus being tethered to a maker and the moment of rip. Drinking Akasha’s blood is a trip.
Where else have you seen vampire feeding rendered in this way?
The disorientation of time, the vignettes of fear, panic, carnage, Akasha’s schadenfreude, the blood vessel as passage through memories, corpses interwoven by intravenous motion.These are, to me, the most unsettling images in the movie. Here Akasha’s blood functions to communicate the insatiable thirst that she revels in as well as its cost throughout the centuries, replicating death wherever her gift has been shared. But the power behind the blood horror is supremely intoxicating to Lestat. “Her blood is like liquid fire,” he moans.
If I were smarter, if this were four years ago, I could carry on exploring this particular representation of fantasy vampirism as a cinematic approach to theorizing necropower—alongside the traumatic continuum of original violation that might belong to Christina Sharpe’s theory of “the Wake” —and trouble both by indulging some Black diabolism, prodding the implications of the bringer of horror being here the Black Mother, played by someone who died in the throes of being young, Black, and overachieving—which, for now, no one considers a blood disorder.
But, as I said recently about this image of Lil Jon lip-syncing into Jonathan Davis’s H.R. Giger-designed microphone stand in the “Twisted Transistor” music video, I am thinking entirely too much about collisions of authentically inauthentic derivatives of the African, and how Simone White wrote in Dear Angel of Death “‘African traditions of expressivity’ like I am supposed to know what that means,” and how popular music (and unpopular cinema) is a continuum of confused flirtations with contrabands. And my brain’s just a little damaged after the past year.
Narcissism and narcosis. Hubris and addiction. The vampirism-drug abuse analogy is established and overdetermined enough to warrant little explanation here. We’ve had seven seasons of HBO’s True Blood, also adapted from novels, in the mainstream since Queen of the Damned.
Before I left him for the final time, and before I started going to meetings, I asked my ex if the meth—“doin shit,” we called it—ever made him feel like a vampire. After hitting the pipe all night, we’d be monsters. The surfaces of our eyes were glassy, our pupils so dilated our irises would disappear entirely; we could’ve been possessed by demons of the Supernatural series. We’d move through normal tasks abnormally fast, our bodies vibrating almost imperceptibly even at rest. I found it hard to ever make hyperfocus at all useful, even artistic practice as a response to boredom could be thwarted by the manic overstimulation. I sometimes bared my teeth as I ground them to dust, so my mouth typically appeared pinched while I chewed gum or sucked on a lozenge to avoid bruxism. In the two days it’d take me to come down, I suffered extreme sensitivity to light and sound, which would leave me mean as a snake and from which I could find relief only in bouts of petrification and hypersomnia.
I hated the daytime, how it exposed my pallor and exhaustion, the greasy, glossy surface of my skin where my pores worked overtime to pump out the toxins. During this time I would detest the thought of engaging with anyone, especially people who weren’t high and could see me for what I was. I spent days in hiding. Malaise lay in inevitably, and then depression.
They say I cannot be this
I am jaded, hiding from the day
I can’t bear, I cannot
tame the hunger in me
My ex never cared much for this hiding. Whereas I would get high hoping we’d have sex for hours and then dissociate through the aftermath, he preferred to socialize while high and then to keep smoking to stave off the debilitating return of sobriety. In his mind, everyone was too dumb to recognize what we were doing, and if they did they couldn’t do shit to us. “A drug is a drug is a drug,” he used to say, like coffee or tobacco.
Back when I wrote about the bankruptcy of compassion that is the heirloom of white men’s internalized impunity behind bootstrap idealism as evidenced in the lyrics and lives of hard rockstars in the essay “Melancholia, Death Motion, and the Makings of Marilyn Manson,” I might have recognized my ex immediately and warded myself against him. But I was already in the process of forgetting what I know when we met, and what he knew about raising horses and rigging lawnmowers and hunting ginseng truly dazzled me.
I did not know until too late that he could not be taught a thing by anyone but himself.
In Queen of the Damned, the major conflict between Lestat and everyone else is how to live in shame: secretly or, in Lestat’s case, with brash, incorrigible public egotism and disregard for consequence (narcissus, from the Greek narke for “numbness”), which is what, in part, awaken’s Akasha. Akasha later reveals to Lestat that her blood in him basically labors to enable him to carry on this way. He thought it was all him, the way my ex thought his dick kept the lights on.
All vampires being essentially parasitic addicts, the blood in Lestat compels him to reunite, in body and spirit, with the Queen for whom the addiction is totally shameless and the absolute pinnacle of power. Marius first describes her as having “no respect for anything except for the taste of blood—human and immortal alike.” If Marius, Lestat, and Akasha can represent the three tines of vampire existentialism like the plug, my ex, and I can represent those of dopehead existentialism, I’m approaching it this way:
Someone has to do it and loathe it.
Someone has to do it and love loathing it.
Someone has to do it and love it.
Who’s who, though? I’ve been all three on any given pass of the world through its shadow. That’s how horror talks about us: in archetypes. Human, animal, machine. The Lestat concert scene opens with Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness”: It seems what’s left of my human side is slowly changing in me.
Finally the other Ancients, led by Akasha’s early progeny Maharet, decide to unite and defeat the Queen. They conscript Lestat into their assassination plot. Maharet convinces them to do this by appealing to their remnant reverence for (her far removed) human kinship and the sanctity of life. “The family is who you are,” Maharet declares, relying on these familial ties to retain the memory by which she identifies. Akasha, who has presumably drank more human blood—presumably enough to be desensitized and jaded (what we might call “tolerant”)—would logically have a rounder, though duller, sense of humanity’s essence than anyone. Akasha’s blood remembers horror.
Part of what Lestat values in humans is their need to desire, adore, and worship, and being worshipped is part of what he wants to preserve. If all the humans are dead, he will have only memory of godhood. I might liken this hubris to the way an addict wants to retain even tenuous attachment to the good things and people in their life as a reminder, or a persuasion, that they have not totally succumbed to the infernal paradox of self-absorbed self-destruction.
·
I’m not dead inside yet. I’m certainly not done thinking about this. Please ask questions.