“Can I bring him to show-and-tell on Monday?”
Much of our understanding of the monstrous foregrounds how we react with fear, horror, and/or rejection when confronted with beings that disrupt our understanding of the world. Mary Douglas teaches us that culture “cannot neglect the challenge of aberrent forms” and for that reason must have ways for dealing with the dirt that confronts and contradicts the “positive pattern in which ideas and values are tidily ordered (p. 48).” Responding to the anomalous in fear or terror reveals just how seriously we take these cultural systems of order that organize our lives.
At the same time, Douglas also reminds us that our encounters with ambiguity -- entities and experiences that do not fit into our pre-conceived categories -- can be sources of wonder. Ambiguity reminds us that the world is far richer, more complex, and filled with possibilities than what our understanding allows. In imposing systems of order upon the world, we limit the potentiality that the world offers to us.
This is my way of introducing you to a wonderful film, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990). Edward -- created but left unfinished with makeshift cutting implements for hands -- is initially received by the neighboring surburban dwellers as an object of curiousity and wonder. For the inhabitants of this tidy, ordered, routinized world, Edward introduces a creative, imaginative sensibility into a place where diversity has been reduced to a palette of pastels painted on otherwise identical houses. He has the capacity to make a difference because he is genuinely different.
It is not long, however, before the neighborhood turns on Edward. Mary Douglas also teaches us that systems of order are invested with power and that power is exercised to preserve the system. Anomalous difference is threatening and while Edward’s scissorhands are easily imagined as weapons, it is not a physical danger that he poses but a social, cultural, and “moral” danger. This danger is that his existence exposes the limits of the cultural system of order itself: that there are sources of life, joy, and love that exist beyond what the system allows or can imagine.