Why Are We Drawn To Disturbing Art?

by Will Anderson

Most of us have a fascination with the macabre. From horror movies to true crime documentaries, our culture has a ravenous appetite for the morbid. Our fascination goes as far back as the violence of the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe the allure of these subjects is inexorably linked to the surrounding taboo. We are taught to avoid the forbidden fruit, yet this subjugation of content only makes the shock more enticing. Honestly, I’ve found the most salvation, acceptance, and understanding through exploring transgressive art, and I know I’m not alone in saying that.

As defined by Michel Foucault in his 1963 landmark essay A Preface to Transgression, transgression is merely to go beyond social order through art. Usually, through explorations of gender, race, sexuality, drugs, violence, and the intersections therein. On paper, the goal of transgressive art is to depict the world we live in a shockingly heightened way. To talk about issues we do not want to think about, let alone envision and actualise. In some cases, such as Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, their explicit explorations of sexuality, drugs, and violence resulted in obscenity trials, or in the case of Marquis de Sade, imprisonment. These works were often censored for opposing the status quo at the time, while remaining morally ambiguous.  

Usually the greatest art aims to ask questions and understand something or someone, no matter how loathsome and flawed they may be. Through transgressive works, we can safely explore taboos without feeling ashamed. These stories, no matter how shocking or bleak, served a strange comfort for me. One that assured me that my experiences were valid, and that I’d never be alone, no matter how lonely I felt. Through repeated viewings, I controlled my emotions and fears I once held on such a pedestal. However, even if I didn’t admit it then, consuming such disturbing content perpetuated a sense of superiority in me. That, although my life was falling apart, at least it wasn’t that bad. This is one reason why many are interested in true crime stories. We can look at a tragedy and feel better that we’re still alive. Just as we can consume degeneracy without being deranged. 

Another appeal of transgression is the Jungian concept of “the shadow.” We all have a shadow, the worst traits we tend to suppress in our psyche, and that shadow is fluid. However, through his theories, Carl Jung outlines a way out through a lifelong process of individuation, when you learn to confront your shadow. As this relates to transgressive fiction, if you grow up in a homophobic environment, you are pushed into a box and viewed as lesser. You start to internalise your identity as a defect, rather than a critical part of who you are. So, through transgressive art, you have an outlet for understanding. One that mirrors your experiences and emotions through extremity and shock. Suddenly, you stop feeling alone and learn to stand up tall against your problems, or rather, revel in the negative stigmas and reclaim them. 

However, my fascination with subversive, transgressive, and disturbing art has raised an issue: the fallacy that anything that isn’t overtly miserable isn’t as honest as art that is positive in nature. There’s a fancy term for this called masochistic epistemology, a fallacy where one conflates objectivity with pain. It is, however, a fallacy. One that makes me question both why we are drawn to the devil and if art made from hope can be “real.” 

While there were many films, books, and albums I consumed then that were formative to my development. Some that shaped my perception of art and the world. There were just as many that perpetuated the misery I was trying to escape from. Like any genre, transgression can be done poorly. Especially if the creator is festering in nihilism or being shocking for the sake of shock. But also, the repetition of miserable spirals through the art I consumed cultivated a cynical worldview. They may have been cathartic at the time, but now I see how their messages left a scar on my life. Sure, we all have a negativity bias, hence why mainstream media has moved to rage-bait headlines and posts. But sleeping under a poster decrying, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” eventually became a mantra. 

For someone who grew up in a rather explosive environment in a conservative country town, I wondered how art could be both happy and true? It seemed like an oxymoron to me. Especially when I subscribed to such a fatal view of the world. One that was echoed through the art I consumed. But over the last year, I’ve noticed how the art I’ve consumed has shaped the person I was, and how their guidance has prevented me from becoming the person I want to be. 

While I still struggle with overly optimistic and somewhat cheesy depictions of life, I have started exploring art to uplift, rather than compress and depress.Here are two albums that radically changed my mind on the sincerity of positive art. 

In the year 2000, Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns was in a strange position. He had decided, after being on antidepressants since he was 12, to spend the year resting and weaning off the medication. Daniel, however, is an artist, and while isolating himself, he started working on new music. Inspired by the band Kyuss, Daniel was eager to create a sprawling, guitar-centred stoner metal album as the fourth Silverchair record. 

But really, Daniel was unsatisfied with the material, feeling as if he was merely making music for his record label and fanbase, rather than something true to himself. This, on its own, isn’t a notable story, as many artists have released albums they had no interest in out of contractual obligations. But instead of playing the game, Daniel, after performing the largest show of his career (2001’s Rock in Rio, with an estimated attendance of 250,000 people), and two weeks of deliberation, decided to erase the tape. The act of erasing a tape is simple; just a click of a button. But erasing 18 or so months of obsessive writing isn’t. Ultimately, this act became a transformative cleansing for Daniel. 

Even at 22, Daniel’s life and work were the product of extreme pain. His last album, 1999’s Neon Ballroom, was born from Daniel’s struggles with alienation, pharmaceutical dependence, anxiety and depression, stalking and harassment, and a debilitating eating disorder. He wrote songs about these feelings, namely: “Emotion Sickness” and “Ana’s Song,” as an outlet. But Dan would quickly see the adverse effects of portraying such subjects. He would see crowds of teenagers crying, and in some cases, with slit wrists. Likewise, in early 1996, a lawyer blamed their song

“Israel Son” as a motive for a triple homicide. Daniel became aware that his music may perpetuate misery instead of transcending it and decided to change.   

Then, as the story goes, Daniel sat at a piano—an instrument he had no formal training on and barely knew how to play—and wrote a song that would start his next album, “Across the Night.” Mixed with the intense emotions of coming off anti-depressants, a heady dose of Brian Wilson, orchestral arrangements and old Hollywood musical whimsy, Daniel wrote a new batch of songs. Most of which, if not uplifting lyrically, are anthemic and catchy in melody. Named Diorama, the album was written as a world within a world, or rather, an escape from the suffering around him. Lead single, “The Greatest View”, was the most optimistic he had been up until that point. While the evocatively strange lyrics in the verses portray a sense of essential annoyance: “You’re the analyst / The fungus in my milk.” The chorus howls: “I'm watching you, watch over me / And I've got the greatest view from here.” A lyric dedicated to Daniel’s friends and family, who, even at his lowest, never gave up and always supported him. Elsewhere, on “World Upon Your Shoulders,” Daniel sings about rebirth: “All the bridges in the world won't save you / If there is no other side to cross to.” The chorus repeats the song’s title before ending the phrase with the iconography of a phoenix rising from its ashes. Later in the song, the bridge depicts a dark world that prevents optimism. His vocals are double-tracked and claustrophobic. Before rising and fading out as a guitar solo suffocates the listener, mirroring the intense negativity. But like the rest of the album, the negativity is short-lived, as the song ends on an extended chorus, lingering on hope. The album closes with “After All These Years,” a piano ballad with the final line: “And after all these years forget about all the troubled times / The troubled times, all those years I was hurting to feel something more than life.” The song is both a closing of the darkest time in his life and, like the rest of the album, an astute acceptance of change. 

The sound of Diorama is the sound of a broken man rebuilding the world he wanted to live in through sound. A collage of textures, emotions, and melodies, splayed over a blank canvas, creating something earnestly original. I won’t bore you with every detail of the making of this record; the lack of support from the record label, or reactive arthritis, but the record is a triumph. For all these reasons, and a million more, Diorama is my favourite album. 

Similarly, there is the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers. In 1994, the band released The Holy Bible. The album with songs about the Holocaust, anorexia, self-abuse and suicide, shame and desire, fascism, censorship and the death penalty. 75% of the lyrics were written by mascot and “guitarist”—he was often muted on stage—Richey Edwards. The album, although their least successful for years, is now widely seen as their artistic high point and one of the darkest albums ever recorded. For the next album, Richey wanted the band to go heavier, sliding a note listing Nine Inch Nails and Pantera as sonic influences. The band, however, wanted to embrace melody with lush string arrangements. Then, slightly ahead of their US tour in early 1995, Richey Edwards went missing and hasn’t been seen since. 

The myth of Richey Manic is pervasive in discourse about him. Many view him in one-dimensional or salacious ways. Instead of the flawed and damaged person he was. Richey had been in and out of mental health facilities, had a public history of self-harm and disordered eating, struggled with alcohol and sex addiction, and was diagnosed with BPD. Yet people, both at the time and now, sensationalise his suffering and treat him as nothing more than a death-rocker cliché. 

But in the wake of this tragedy, the band released their 1996 commercial breakthrough: Everything Must Go. A record that contained the hit single, “A Design for Life.” A working-class anthem that contains the opening line: “Libraries gave us power.” Sure, the record wasn’t devoid of darkness. The blood splattered polaroids of Richey-penned single “Kevin Carter,” and the Holy Bible dead-ringer, “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky.” But above everything else, the records' mission statement can be sufficiently summed up by the line, “...All I want to do is live / No matter how miserable it is.” While this record was reacting to darkness, there’s a hope and catharsis on this record that you don’t get on The Holy Bible, and like Neon Ballroom and Diorama, these albums are linked: a continuum. 

Despite the success of Everything Must Go and the growth of Diorama, there is still a group of fans who believe these were “sell-out” records and therefore less sincere. After all, to say someone “sold out” is to imply that someone sacrificed their integrity for more airplay. When, if anything, both records were commercial gambles that could’ve ruined their careers. While it’s fine to prefer their earlier albums, the reaction to both albums and their follow-ups (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours and Young Modern) is a great case of what I’m getting at: people viewing something made out of pain as superior to something made out of hope. I’d argue that the dark circumstances that inspired both Everything Must Go and Diorama make them even more miraculous. That a group of people can stand together and overcome an impossible situation, and not only conquer it, but do so with confidence. Besides, we didn’t create these things, so who are we, as listeners, to dictate the authenticity of the emotions we’re sold? Who are we to say “Die in the Summertime” is somehow more sincere than “A Design for Life”? 

Famous writer and alleged plagiarist F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” This is especially true when creating and consuming art. We can be disturbed by something, but we know deep down that it’s just words on a page, or a series of images spliced together. In creating hopeful art, we know that the world is seemingly falling apart. One might ask how we could willingly depict something antithetical to our experiences? But this is really what art is about. Creating something mythical, and in the process of creating, reaching something transcendent that we cannot understand. The dialectic and confluence between opposing ideals is what I believe to be the power of art. The push and pull is not only more complex than typical woe-is-me type artistic expressions, but more identifiably human. 

Circling back to Michel Foucault’s definition of transgression, to go beyond the status quo through art, I wonder what transgression is in the modern era? Especially when 30 years ago, the most transgressive thing you could do was wear make-up and tear up a bible on stage. Something that doesn’t even register with current generations. One could point to controversial figures such as Chud the Builder or Clavicular as modern cases of transgression, but this line of thinking assumes left-wing values are the status quo outside of Hollywood. Given the rise of conservatism across the world, it’s not necessarily accurate to call these figures transgressive when they uphold hierarchical order. Likewise, mainstream media has co-opted and sanitised many groups that transgressive writers had written about for decades. Now, openly queer characters are allowed to star in mainstream Netflix series. Don’t get me wrong, this is undeniably a good thing, but it also runs the gamut of tokenised depictions that, although positive, aren’t allowed to be flawed and lifelike. Making these characters flat and infantilised, or worse… boring as shit. I’d argue that the only remaining transgression in our world is to create something hopeful, even naively so. In a world where most art is ironic, sanitised, disposable or pessimistic, we need a counter-narrative. To sink in the beauty of the world—despite it. As some German guy would say, we stare into the abyss, as it stares back at us. We walk through the fire, while burnt, able to limp through stronger than before. We are drawn to the devil, even if we are afraid, we are still alive.