Double-edged Sword

The Novel The Filth is an exaltation of repessed desires. It portrays a world in which people act considerably more on instincts than today's society and considerably less on systems of ethics. In disollution of a supergo, violent and sexual fantasies escaped the imagination of the individual and manifested themselves in the physical realm. Perhaps the novel predicts the physological, political, and relational revolutions of the future, in which secret and dark fantasies are openly sought and fulfilled. But this book is not purely a degradation or warning about a future society; it is mostly an exploration of the qualities of latent mental and emotional desires.

The contextualization of The Filth's thematic ideas in prophetic literature and related ethical and metaphorical revalations lays a framework for discussion about the graphic novel's central themes. Although unique in its combination of mediums and harsh rhetoric, The Filth expands upon a vast, evolving collection of literature and media about the opression of people.

In The Shawshank Redemption, Red (Morgan Freeman) discusses the psychological stages of life in prison. At first, he admits, people have a repulsion to the system that took away their freedom. But over time, they become accustomed to the system and cope with it. Eventually, Red intonates, people become dependent upon the prison constructs. But even without the precise confines of a secured prison in the 1950's, individuals and societies utilize artificial references, frames, and scales to embed human behavior in certain habbits, routines, and supposed duties that benefit the greater good. Likewise, we become dependent on our social contracts and conceptualization of relationships to limit certain social behaviors.

To introduce his novel Amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman discusses the accuracy of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley's dystopia novels. In Postman's comparison of the writers prophecies, he writes, “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (Foreword, vii).

Although Postman makes a credible argument for his intended purpose (to point out the recall effect in delegation of mental imagery to physical apparatuses), he assumes a mutual exclusion between two symbiotic mechanisms of oppression. Although a Big Brother is indeed not required for a society to opress itself, the government will naturally fill the void that people leave for it. Thus, pain and pleasure play comlimentary roles in opression of groups of people. By seeking pleasure purely outside a polticial realm, people force the governmental leaders to research theories, predict outcomes, and create policies and laws among a smaller groups of people. Likewise, the pain perpetuates pleasure because it uses up the majority of individuals mental energy with information that conforms to social norms within a production paradigm. As a consequence of this increased power, the leaders seek further control over other people. In order to attain sufficient information about people to implement coercive strategies, the government uses technologies to investigate private behavior.

In today's society, particularly American culture, people safeguard themselves from thinking about or contributing to important political decisions by distracting themselves with trivial information. Whether watching scripted reality television, reading about the latest happenings in the lives of Paris Hilton or Brittiny Spears, or obsessing over games where men play with different shaped balls and hit each other, society has revealed that it has an infinite appetite for triviality. As people feed their appetites, the government fills a larger and larger void, making more and more decisions, controlling more and more of the infastructure of society. Although information about local government decisions, international relations, and military activities are often open to the public, they typically choose not to learn about these subjects. For example, a survey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent declaration of war against Iraq indicated that the majority of Americans thought that the individuals who hijacked or attempted to hijack planes were all from Iraq, even though the majority of them were from Saudi Arabia. As in Huxley's prophecy, the government did not have to hide this information from the public in order to gain support for their political agenda; the government could rest assured that people would voluntarily choose to ignore such information.

Through another allotance of society's ignorance, the government designed and implemented homeland security laws that allow private organizations to listen to phone conversations, check physical and virtual mail, and maintain intimate records on individuals private lives. Although some of these privacy statutes are being overturned, the fact that they were implemented is a sign of increased delegation to authority.

As these real world examples illustrate, pain and pleasure are both tools of our opression imposed by the government and by ourselves. As Grant Morrison intended, The Filth depicts the revelation of both of these prophecies together. Through images, dialogue, and symbols, Morrison develops a unique example of how pain and pleasure can be complimentary forms of opression.

Depicted throughout the novel in sex scenes and pornography use, The Filth exposes latent mental and emotional fantasies and desires. By indulging their biological urges constantly, people distract themselves from important poltical decisions and often delegate the rational and logic of their personal decision making to the Hand.

As a representation of self-imposed fate, the Hand acts as an internal moral code and external enforcing agent in the novel. With sophisticated technology, the Hand moniters the everyday lives of individuals and coerces them to become more efficient and productive. Through sophisticated technology, human operatives, and fear mongering, the Hand dictates the every day behavior of individuals within the society and symbolizes their self-imposed fate.

An ardent example of this is the Hands intervention with Slade's phone sex habbits. While he is watching pornography, the Hand directly calls him and asks "have you thought about reducing your teleophone bill? I notice you've been calling a lot of seedy sex lines during peak times when its more expensive"(The Filth, 66). By invading Slade's privacy to help him economize on his pleasure-seeking habbits, the Hand is inducing submission through pleasure. Although this indirectly causes strife (Slade's frustration with the invasion of privacy), the support of fulfilling desires shows how the authority is using people's biological instincts against them to repress their rational thought.

By specifically exploring the politics of sexual desire's manifestation, The Filth contributes an important dimension to the literature and media about mind control. Similar to the prophecies of Huxley and Orwell, the characters in The Filth delegate their superego to an organization that imposes fate on them. Ironically, the revolution against personal repression creates a vaccuum for an external opression. Indeed, The Filth demonstrates that pain and pleasure can symbiotically opress the masses.