Gothic as a Modifier

One thing we can definitively say is that the Goths weren’t dressing in all-black and ornamenting their buildings with gargoyles. So how did the name of a single barbarian people make it to the 21st century and still mean so much? 

Transcript

T&J Episode 5 (Addendum):
Gothic As A Modifier 

Content Warning

Hi everyone. I want to make a couple of announcements before we get started. For all of my Patreon subscribers, you should have already received a new bonus episode in a new format. In it, I have a wonderful and in-depth conversation with friend-of-the-show, Byzantine scholar David Parnell about T&J era travel. We discuss sailing insurance, piracy, ID … We cover it all and the good news is I plan on doing more of them. So if you want to listen and support the show, go to patreon.com/tandjpodcast. Or, per my second announcement, you can now listen by simply subscribing on Apple Podcasts.  Now, a quick content warning: There is swearing and also the subject of suicide in this episode. I also briefly talk about the work of actor Johnny Depp as well as singer Marilyn Manson, two men who have allegedly very seriously abused women. Please take care of yourselves. The state of the world feels really bleak these days and I hope this can provide some respite. From my end, at least, your being here helps me a great deal. So thank you.  

Intro

At the top of ‘Barbarian Makeover Part 1,’ you may recall a little section on lexical origins and inquiry that I did not manage to address.  Which is mainly, that ‘Gothic,’ has arguably surpassed ‘Vandal’ and ‘Barbarian’ as the preeminent modifier; and how from reality TV series like Selling Sunset, to thrillers like Poker Face and Interview with the Vampire … ‘Gothic’ today is used in all kinds of ways: 

Christine Quinn, Selling Sunset [Season 3, Episode 5 - 06:52]: I’ve always considered myself, like, a little bit of a Gothic barbie … 
Charlie Cale, Poker Face [Season 1, Episode 2 - 40:39]: What about the, uh, the other kids? Sandwich guy and Goth girl. They didn’t want to come? 
Daniel Molloy, Interview with the Vampire [Season 1, Episode 3 - 10:35]: Fifty years later, you talk like he was your soulmate, like you were locked in some fucked up Gothic romance.

There’s Gothic architecture, Southern Gothic, American Gothic, Goth music …  But unlike ‘barbarian’ and ‘Vandal,’ ‘Goth’ is consistently medium-negative or weakly pejorative. Those who embrace it do so in the sense that ‘gothic’ describes aesthetics and trends that are united if only their conveyance of a certain … darkness. 

Now, we still have a ways to go with the Goths’ story in the T&J era, particularly the details surrounding the Gothic War, which kicked off in 535. But one thing we can definitively say is that the Goths were not dark. Or at least they weren’t dressing in all-black and ornamenting their buildings with gargoyles; the Goths neither invented, nor exhibited, the aesthetics we currently associate with their name.

So how did the name of a single barbarian people make it to the 21st century and still mean so much? Or, as some might argue, manage to mean everything and nothing?

I’m Christine Laskowski and this is T&J, a limited podcast series devoted to sixth century Byzantium and the greatest recorded love story on earth – that between Empress Theodora and her husband, the Emperor Justinian. Welcome to my Barbarian Makeover episode addendum: ‘Gothic as a Modifier.’  

Part I. When Did Architecture Become Gothic? 

Ironically, for all its connotations of darkness, Gothic architecture was all about the pursuit of light.

The cross-ribbed vault, the pointed arch, the flying buttress; its verticalism, were all a departure from the Romanesque, or the Byzantine-style — as architecturally articulated via Emperor Justinian’s own masterpiece cathedral, the Hagia Sophia.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to it.

However, with Gothic architecture, thick church walls were trimmed into a thin, practically skeletal framework; and decorated not with ornamental paintings, but in vast and elaborate stained glass.

The person credited with designing the first Gothic structure was a man named Suger — spelled  S-U-G-E-R — in 1144 AD. And the structure that he gave the first-ever gothic glam up to was a monastery located just north of Paris called St. Denis.

Founded by Dagobert, who was king of the Franks during the T&J era, the monastery of St. Denis had been named after, well, a guy named Denis, who had brought Christianity to Gaul. It was also where Suger was sent for schooling when he was a young boy.

Poor, but highly intelligent, Suger just-so-happened to become very close friends with another boy there his age named Louis Capet, who would grow up to become King Louis the 6th of France. Must be nice. Because when that happened, Suger became Louis’ adviser, and in 1122, Suger was elected the abbot of their old alma mater.

And Suger, now Abbot Suger,   had the power — and the means — to enact his belief in what he himself called ‘the spiritual quality of light.’ How did Suger do it? The OG pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and an excessive amount of stained glass, including a rose window.  And did Suger look upon St. Denis 2.0 in 1144, fold his arms with satisfaction and say, ‘I’m gonna call this style I’ve created … Gothic.’ No, no he did not. For a long time, it was simply called French. Or, ‘the French Style.’ Which makes sense. 

But then, a Renaissance Italian came along … And Renaissance intellectuals, we know, loved retrofitting labels — remember, it’s how we got Byzantium — and Italians, well, they have always loved sticking it to the French. And in the 1530s a renowned historiographer and Florentine named Giorgio Vasari would alter the course of history by insulting both the Goths and the French in a single go. 

Buildings from the Middle Ages, Giorgio Vasari wrote, were not carefully planned and measured like Renaissance buildings or the buildings of ancient Rome. And just as the barbaric Goths had destroyed the classical world, so had this approach destroyed the architecture of the 12th century onward. To quote Vasari directly:

Giorgio Vasari: Then arose new architects who, after the manner of their barbarous nations, erected buildings in that style which we call Gothic.

‘That style which we call Gothic’ is the royal ‘we’ because no one actually called it that, yet. Only Vasari himself called it ‘gothic’ because he coined it, maybe for the first time, in that very text. As an insult.

Nevertheless, something about the pairing — like chocolate and peanut butter, like Gram and Emmylou — something about it resonated and, as we all know, the name Gothic stuck.  

So how, then, like a zoonotic virus — too soon? — did ‘gothic’ make the leap from medieval architecture to fiction? 

The simple, albeit labyrinthine, answer to that question is a castle.  

Part II. When Did Literature Become Gothic? 

The Castle of Otranto may very well be the most important work in the history of fiction that you’ve never heard of. At least I’d never heard of it until I began researching this episode. And having now read The Castle of Otranto I have to say that it is not what I’d call a good book. Nevertheless, this has not stopped the recondite text from being more-or-less continuously in-print since its debut in England on Christmas Eve in 1764.

And at that, I cannot scoff.

What matters here is the release of the book’s second edition during that same year, when The Castle of Otranto’s author made a seismic decision to add to its title page, the subtitle: ‘A Gothic Story.’

Now, it would take a couple of decades for this idea of ‘a gothic story’ to catch on. But that probably had a little something to do with what else was going on with that second edition title page. 

If you happened to be a bookish Brit back in 1764 and nabbed yourself a first edition copy of The Castle of Otranto, it would have been written by William Marshall, Gentleman. And William Marshall, Gentleman, would have described, in the book’s preface, that what you were about to read was his remarkable discovery. 

You see, the first edition of The Castle of Otranto was the English translation of a 16th century text written by a man named Onuphrio Muralto, of the Church of St. Nicholas in Otranto, Italy.  Who was himself recounting a tale dating all the way back to the Crusades.

Exciting, right? Borgesian long before we even Borgesed!   

And it gets better. Because when the second edition of The Castle of Otranto hit stores that same year, well, that second edition looked a little different. 

William Marshall, Gentleman was no longer on the title page.

And that’s because he didn’t exist.

The Castle of Otranto had, this entire time, actually been written by Horace fucking Walpole, and you, being the bookish Brit who could afford books was probably like: ‘You have got to be shitting me.’

Because Horace Walpole was then a living, breathing, 47-year-old, long-standing member of parliament, and an English Lord — one with unresolved literary aspirations, apparently — whose dad just so happened to be Britain’s first ever prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. 

It was such a huge reveal, that you likely missed the whole ‘A Gothic Story’ subtitle addition on the second edition title page. Or, were perhaps a little at a loss — given all the other changes — as to what Walpole might have even meant by his ‘A Gothic Story’ subtitle in the first place.

But lucky for son Horace, people appeared to have gotten over this whole elaborate matryoshka doll origin story hoax fairly quickly. Exactly why Walpole decided to come clean is unclear, but his connection to the Gothic was evident to anyone who knew him. 

Because Horace Walpole loved Gothic architecture. Loved, loved it. He loved it so much that he spent years and many thousands of British pounds converting his estate, Strawberry Hill, into a Gothic wonderland.  Do an image search online. It looks like a medieval castle summoned from Sir Lancelot’s wet dream: gleaming white exterior, crenelated tower, lancet windows …  This was so out-of-step with the Italianate, English baroque and Palladian-style homes of his peers — who were literally the peerage — that Strawberry Hill itself became a bit of sensation. People started dropping by and asking for tours, which you can still do, by the way. 

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is credited with kicking off the Georgian Gothic revival movement, effectively reviving Gothic as a popular architectural style; Strawberry Hill is also very clearly the inspiration for Walpole’s own fictional castle in The Castle of Otranto, which is itself considered to be the very first Gothic novel.

The Castle of Otranto, the book, opens on a wedding day; A storytelling convention that appears everywhere from The Marriage of Figaro to The Godfather because it works.   
 
The betrothed are a young, sickly prince named Conrad, who is the castle’s inheritor, and the beautiful Lady Isabella, who is clearly out-of-Conrad’s league.  The young couple, and everyone else in the castle, are busy preparing for the wedding ceremony when, what I imagine to be an elephant-sized knight’s helmet falls from the sky, and lands on poor Conrad, killing him instantly.  Now, I’m not going to get too much into the plot other than to say that Conrad’s dad, Manfred, is an unequivocal villain, whose chickens have finally come home to roost …  But key to Manfred’s undoing is the castle itself, with all its hidden chambers and trap doors; stone corridors and creepy ancestral portraiture. As a setting, the gothic castle was fertile ground for the supernatural to reveal themselves.  And whether he meant to or not, Horace Walpole … well, he inverts the castle; turns it inside out. From a place of safety and security into a place of sexual predation, spirits, and secrets. A fortress that, rather than repel, keeps people in … 

Now, what kind of people tended to enter a castle of their own will based on promises of protection only to discover that they’d been lied to, that they are sexual prey and they’re also unable to leave? Well, those people — more often than not — tended to be women. 

Which, at least for me, explains why many of the authors of early Gothic fiction, those responsible for developing the genre after Walpole, were … female: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Dacre. It would also be women who would no-question continue the Gothic literary tradition with absolute fucking classics: Mary Shelley and Jane Austen in 1818 with the publications of Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey. Emily and Charlotte Brontë would come along thirty years later in 1847 with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

And the Brontë’s, they were Victorians. And like a pocket of warm, rising air a bird needs to soar, the Victorians? The Victorians would be that warm air, giving ‘gothic’ as a modifier yet another critical lift. 

Part III. Back to Black Thanks to Queen V

Ah, the Victorian era. That century of corsets, whaling, spiritualism, imperialism, and the industrial revolution wedged between 1820 and 1914, that corresponded closely, although not exactly, with Queen Victoria of England’s reign.

And Queen Victoria may have single-handedly done more for the color black than Johnny Cash, Irving Schott, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, and Amy Winehouse combined.   
Because before Queen Victoria, when it came to dressing in mourning attire following the death of a loved one, that was really something only aristocrats and royalty would do.  But after Victoria …

Following the death of her husband and soulmate, Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria …
 
Queen Victoria: My life as a happy one is ended! 

 … committed to wearing black every day, for the remaining 40 years of her life.   
 
And people noticed. 

Only now, due to the popularity and availability of ladies magazines and mass market textiles, across all classes in the UK and the US, people began to emulate her black-as-mourning-attire example. 

Especially widows.

For the first year and a day of mourning – a widow’s clothing had to be covered in stiff and gauzy black crape. Prayer books and bibles were to be bound in black leather; there were black ribbons, black handkerchiefs, black broaches. The more black, the better …   
So now, not only did the color represent death in the broader Victorian sartorial lexicon, but black mourning attire, as demonstrated by the Queen, could be worn forever, if you really wanted to.  Permitting the expression of a whole range of unhappy feelings: not just of grief, but of disconsolation, alienation, woe. 

Part IV. How the Victorians Made Gothic into Everything 

So that’s what the Victorians — and again, mainly women Victorians — were wearing.  What they were reading was a lot of Gothic fiction, a tradition that continued in earnest with works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. 

But by this point, its authors are doing a bit of swapping. Sure, there were still castles … sometimes. But more often there’s a preference for the new gothic castle, which takes the form of foggy and eldritch Victorian cities, like London and Edinburgh.  What’s more, supernatural spirits are out, and monsters are in. As are women who’d gone insane. 

You see, the Victorians had also really begun exploring the darker aspects of the human psyche and incorporating that into their work. Thanks to the popularity of this guy over in Vienna named Sigmund Freud.

But what’s really important about those darkly-clad, corseted Victorians is that they took the gothic and … made it into almost everything.

Thanks to Mary Shelley, we got science fiction. Stevenson and Stoker, they gave us horror. And let’s not forget Edgar Allan Poe in America, who invented the modern detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue back in 1841. Major literary genres codified in the 19th century were rooted in gothic fiction, whose own lineage could be traced back to a single, common ancestor: The Castle of Otranto. 

So one could make the case that, ‘If sci-fi, horror, vampire and detective stories all come from the gothic, isn’t everything, then, like, a little gothic?’ 

Not so fast. Some people had thoughts. 

But first, a short break. What you’ll hear next is a 1909 performance of a song called ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ by Dick Jurgens and his Orchestra.


Instrumental Break: On Green Dolphin Street (1909) 

 
Part V. When Did Music and the Teen Aesthetic Become Gothic? 

Maurice Lévy was a prominent French academic who’d decided he needed to blow the whistle on how the word ‘gothic’ was being used. Or misused.

Maurice Lévy: The object of this paper is to mourn the radical evolution over the last two or three decades of a word dear to my heart and which I hate to say has been seriously damaged by the blind, ruthless, chaotic proliferation of meaning which accompanies the progress of history. This is a mourning paper.

In 1968, Maurice Lévy had published a whopping 750-page literary and historical analysis of English gothic fiction appropriately titled The English Gothic Novel. So Lévy knew a thing or two, and had developed some strong opinions over the years based on his extensive scholarly work. Especially concerning what the Americans were doing with that word so dear to his heart. 

Maurice Lévy: I can find nothing in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland or Ormond, or ‘Rip Van Winkle’ to justify the use of an epithet which in my opinion cannot be dissociated from the manifestations of the first Gothic revival and the culture of Georgian England: the naturalization of the word in a country with no medieval past and whose fiction owes more to Indian folklore than to European legends does not convince me.

This and that first quote you heard come from a 1994 essay I found of his titled, ‘Gothic and the Critical Idiom,’ where Lévy argues that Gothic literature has a specific set of criteria, damn it, which did not apply to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Diane Arbus’ photography or anything in America, for that matter. 

The Victorian stuff was a stretch, Lévy concedes, but acceptable. However, the Americans … We were just reckless philistines. And like ketchup — my analogy not his — we were willing to put Gothic on everything. 

Because just a year before Lévy published his massive literary work The English Gothic Novel, an American would put that word to music.

John Stickney: The Doors met New York for better or for worse at a press conference in the gloomy vaulted wine cellar of the Delmonico Hotel, the perfect room to honor the Gothic rock of The Doors.

It was March 1967. And the quote you just heard comes from a music critic named John Stickney, who had penned a piece with the seminal, albeit underwhelming title, of: ‘Four Doors to the Future: Gothic Rock is Their Thing.’ 

It is widely believed to be the very first time Gothic and rock stepped out together on the red carpet of the cultural zeitgeist.

Now, I was unable to locate the article in its entirety online, but the excerpts I’ve read point to Stickney’s desire, like any good critic, to paint an accurate portrait of what this new band, The Doors, was doing. With their music. And with their live shows, which were indelibly helmed by lead singer, Jim Morrison … 

John Stickney: Jim Morrison gets all the attention, with black curls cascading over the upturned collar of a leather jacket worn the way leather jackets should be; tight, tough, and somehow menacing …

I’m with John Stickney here. Because I can see how Jim Morrison’s own damsel-ification checks a major Gothic criteria box. The tight black clothing he wore — turtlenecks and leather — his cascading, curly dark hair … Jim Morrison was young and he was beautiful. And he was also trapped in a labyrinth that he fought to escape each and every time he performed. 

John Stickney: There is terror in the sexuality of ‘The End,’ Morrison’s black masterpiece of narrative poetry about a physical and spiritual odyssey which finishes in patricide and incest.

John Stickney: Morrison is at his best […] and staggered blindly across the stage as the lyrics and screams […] poured out of his mouth: malevolent, satanic, electric, and on fire.

Stickney, the music critic, didn’t just pair gothic and rock together because it sounded alliterative and cool, although it most certainly does. The Doors were a gothic rock band based on everything gothic had grown to mean up until that point. Although now …  the Doors, as captured by Stickney, had imbued it with a little something extra. Now, gothic could also be: ‘malevolent, satanic, and electric.’ It was a performative rock style coupled with an aesthetic.

An aesthetic that, by the time I was growing up in the 90s, would be the subject of frequent derision on some very popular TV shows. 

Jenny Jones NAT: Jenny, they look like they belong in caskets, I really do.

From daytime talk show host Jenny Jones’ style interventions to Saturday Night Live’s very own … Goth Talk. 

SNL’s ‘Goth Talk’ Molly Shannon [00:11-00:29]:  Hello and welcome to Goth Talk. I’m Circe Nightshade and tonight we are paying our last respects to a dear kindred, who has finally gone thither!

Now, how did we go from Jim Morrison … to a whole subculture of teen goths ripe-for-the-mocking? Shopping for pentagram necklaces and black lipstick at the mall? Or, as my friend Elizabeth and fashion industry insider, so aptly put it: ‘How did we eventually get to the Hot Topic of it all?’

One clue actually lives in that 1999 SNL Goth Talk sketch, which featured none other than the actress and episode guest-host, Christina Ricci. 

SNL’s ‘Goth Talk’ Christina Ricci [01:03-01:11]: I’m sorry I’m late my fiendish brethren. I was plunged into the depth of an icy, blue madness trying to park my new Dodge Neon. [laughter]  

Arguably, it was Christina Ricci, who did more than anyone to make the smart, saturnine goth girl truly iconic.

Because you see, something else was happening in America back in the 1960s that went beyond Jim Morrison and The Doors.

And that was … The Addams Family.

They’re creepy and they’re kooky. Mysterious and spooky.  
 
The Addams Family premiered on ABC on September 18, 1964. Giving us the gift of Gomez and Morticia Addams as well as their two kids, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams. 

Truant Officer: Nice place you’ve got here, Wednesday.
Wednesday Addams: We like it. It’s so nice and gloomy.   
 
... who would later be played on-screen by Christina Ricci in two 1990s film adaptations. 

Wednesday Addams [The Addams Family, 1991]: Nobody gets out of the Bermuda Triangle. Not even for a vacation.

Amanda [Addams Family Values, 1993] : Why are you dressed like somebody died? Wednesday Addams: Wait.  

But back in 1964, about three years before The Doors article, The Addams Family enters the homes of millions of Americans via their television sets. But then, get this, just days later, on CBS, the TV show The Munsters premieres. Seriously, within the span of a week in 1964, we went from no TV goth families to two TV goth families. What a time to be alive!

Now, they weren’t necessarily called goth then, but their aesthetic — the pale skin, dark makeup, dramatic black clothes — created the first primetime space for the Goth look. 

Something Maila Nurmi, a.k.a. Vampira, modeled for us a whole decade earlier … as our very first late night female horror TV host for Channel 7 in Hollywood. Tall, willowy, with skin that had never made Vitamin D, with long pitch black hair, an impossibly small waist and a long, deep v-necked black dress, Vampira fashioned herself after Morticia Addams, but not the TV Morticia, who we know didn’t exist, yet, but rather the cartoon Morticia, who had first appeared with her ooky, spooky alt-family in the pages of the New Yorker magazine all the way back in 1938. 

But Vampira and the Addams Family goth look didn’t come out of nowhere. These were inspired by our dear friends, the Victorians, who we know took the notion of the Gothic and ran with it … presumably down creaky spiral staircases. 

Here’s my friend Elizabeth and fashion industry insider from our lengthy voice memo exchange:

Elizabeth: So you’re probably gonna get a lot of, like, word vomit from me on this subject. I … Because, like,  I’m sure you’ve discovered the hippies and their penchant for wearing Victorian garb.

By that point, dear listener, I had not.

Elizabeth: Because that was really popular, especially in the Haight-Ashbury … was finding all of this old Victorian garb to augment their other clothing. And yeah, the hippies would wear these original pieces that were found at thrift stores. Or ya know, in grandma’s attic … The overcoats and the blouses, like the big, pirate-y blouses … And of course that very much informed the aesthetic of The Doors among other bands. And the aesthetic of the Addams Family and The Munsters, for sure. 

But once we arrive at the late 70s and early 80s, those vintage Victorian pieces are a lot harder to come by. However, all of these things are in the ether — the chiaroscuro in makeup and exaggerated tailoring, along with what I like to think of as one’s own gender fluid damsel-ification, which is obliquely — if bleakly — sexual. Along with some notes of the malevolent, satanic, and electric, of course. 

Music critics and historians latched onto what ‘gothic’ conveyed about Jim Morrison and the music of The Doors as a touchstone and a reference-point and, really, a way to sell the thing. Because now the utility of ‘goth’ was even greater, stretching far beyond what a single band and its frontman were doing, to include a whole collection of artists and bands coming out of the late 70s and early 80s post-punk scene.

Klaus Nomi, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the bands Magazine, and Bauhaus. ‘Goth’ captured the music, but it also captured a cohesive style. 

During a 1979 performance, even Joy Division’s own manager, while on the BBC, described his band’s music as ‘gothic’ compared to the pop mainstream.
 
Joy Division Manager, Tony Wilson [03:44 - 03:58]: This lot are doing the same kind of thing. They’re using melody and rhythm in a hypnotic way, which is what makes a hit single. But because it’s unsettling, and slightly sinister and gothic, it won’t be played, which seems a shame.’

Kind of an odd thing to say when your band is literally performing on the fucking BBC. Must be nice. And yet, the music’s supposedly non-starter sinister and gothic qualities are what got it played. And played and played.

And we're changing our ways, taking different roads … 
 
Sufficiently enough to land their song ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’
 
Then love, love will tear us apart again Love, love will tear us apart again

As number 13 on the UK charts in June of 1980 and ranked as the 179th greatest song out of Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs.

Impossible to say where they might have gone had they continued. Because Joy Division only made two records during their short time as a band before frontman Ian Curtis took his own life at age 23, right before what would have been their first North America tour in 1980.   

And it is therefore no accident that it’s in the 1980s, where we arrive at the birth of the mall goth. And indeed, the Hot Topic of it all.


Part VI. The Hot Topic of It All

For the uninitiated, Hot Topic was the store in the mall — in the days of the mall — where the Goth kids shopped. The way the preppy kids shopped at The Gap, and the skaters at Spencers. Talk about factions. 

The Montclair, California company opened its first store in 1989, and Hot Topic early on seized an opportunity to sell band T-shirts specifically for goth bands. Like Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure. Which were in high demand from suburban fans who had trouble accessing them. But the young retailer also specialized in accessories, which is how they pretty soon began to notice something else going on. 

Among the jewelry and handbags and sunglasses, they also had a section for some of the edgier stuff: spiked wristbands, collars, crucifixes, things with skull and dragon designs … and that shit was just flying off the shelves. Not by the powers of Satan, mind you. But supply and demand! 

And Hot Topic owner Orv Madden was like, ‘O.K.’ And decides he’s gonna alter the direction of his new business to cater to alternative looks. So not only goth, but before you could shop online, Hot Topic was one of the few places a goth kid living in the ‘burbs could go.

And who was immortalizing goth kids in the ‘burbs at the time? The suburbs being the post-war Castle of Otranto?

[Doorbell] ‘Avon calling!’

Well, that would be…

It’s showtime!’

None other than …

His lavish, gothic take on Batman in 1989 was a worldwide phenomenon.
Tim Burton.
Tim Burton.

Tim Burton.

Director Tim Burton had himself been a monsters-obsessed goth kid growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1960s. And turned it into a career.  

In interviews, at least in the many I’ve seen, Burton never uses the term to describe his own work … However, his Batman remake, his film Beetlejuice in1988 and Edward Scissorhands two years later, no question revamped the gothic for mainstream American — as well as global — audiences.  Who ate it up. 

Two of those films starred actress Winona Ryder, whose role as the beloved goth girl, Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice …

Lydia Deetz: My whole life is a darkroom. One, big, dark room.

… was an overt homage to the Wednesday Addams character. Who, we already know, would later be played by Christina Ricci.

Wednesday Addams [Addams Family Values] : Your work is puerile and under-dramatized. You lack any sense of structure, character or the Aristotelian unities. 

That Ricci would star as both Wednesday Addams and the emo-goth daughter of a ghost-hunter dad in the film Casper … 

Dr. Harvey: It’s not so bad, huh?
Kat: If you’re Stephen King.

The 90s was serving us some serious goth movie stars!

And the thing about movie stars is that ever since we first had them … we have wanted to look like them. And dress like them. And where did people shop to do that? Mainly …  Hot Topic. 

Although, it should be noted that by the mid-to-late 90s, the goth look was … witchier.  Largely, I believe, because it coincided with the Satanic panic. Hard to get more counterculture than that. Replacing the adolescent obstreperousness of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz and Ricci’s Wednesday Addams, we get the mature, wild-eyed, black magic spell-casting Faruza Balk of the 1996 film The Craft.

Skeet Ulrich: You’re a witch!
Fairuza Balk: She’s a witch, too, you know. I think the only reason you’re in love with her is because she cast a spell on you.

And we also get the music of antichrist superstar, Marilyn Manson.

Now, I was … all over the place in terms of my fashion faction aesthetic as a teen growing up in the suburbs of Memphis in the 90s, but I … never went Goth. For one, it didn’t really represent my musical tastes: Tori and Fiona forever. And two, because I grew up in the south during peak Satanic panic, to be an outwardly, truly committed goth was tantamount to being a satanist, which was not for the faint of heart in the bible belt, especially when you had a Mom as devout a Catholic as mine. But lastly, I also remember goth clothes as being really expensive. While preppy and skater and vintage clothes could be found on sale either in-store or in discount outlets and thrift stores, my experience was that goth attire never really made its way onto those racks. You kinda had to go to Hot Topic and, well, Hot Topic they knew what they had. 

Here’s my friend Elizabeth, fashion industry insider, once again.

Elizabeth: But what I can tell you about Hot Topic is … it actually is still doing really well. It’s actually like a profitable business. In retail. Which is, which a lot of businesses can’t say. Which I think is really interesting. That they’re like their cornering of this very niche market and having this like really well-established brand is working really well for them and has for a really long time. And I find that super fascinating. 

Conclusion 

As I wrap up this journey of the word gothic — wrap it up in luscious black velvet, of course — I’d like to spend a moment talking about … a plant. Now bear with me here. It’s not just any plant. I want to talk about a wild mustard called Brassica oleracea.  

Brassica oleracea is the name of the plant species that gave us cabbage, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, Chinese broccoli, and cauliflower.  Around 2500 years ago when it was first cultivated, Brassica oleracea didn’t look like much, it actually just … looked like a weed.  Which is why I highly doubt that the ancient Greeks and Romans  — and let’s be real, their slaves and servants — who grew it for consumption would have ever fathomed that the ditch grass-looking Brassica oleracea would be mass marketed to Keto dieters as cauliflower rice in home delivery meal kits two and a half millennia later.

But here we are.

Brassica oleracea is what’s known as a cultivar. A crop whose different varieties are bred based on the qualities in them that humans desire. In this case, buds, lateral buds, stems, leaves, flowers, and flower clusters.

The reason I bring up Brassica oleracea is I’ve come to think of the Gothic as a sort of cultural cultivar.

Because ‘goth’ doesn’t mean dark — although it can — so much as it means oppositional. Oppositional to whatever’s mainstream.

And it is this oppositional essence that we as humans appear to find really attractive! And useful! To the degree that it almost starts to feel axiomatic. 

The gothic, in the west, at least, has functioned as a kind of counterweight that is at times so culturally necessary, not only does it fundamentally alter the mainstream, it sometimes takes the mainstream down with it. And in that sense, I think Gothic as a modifier is actually really appropriate.

Because the Goths may have lost the war against the Romans, which I’m going to get into in the podcast, I promise. But the Goths? They did not go down alone.

Outro/Wrap

Research, scripting, narration, and editing for this episode were all done by me, Christine Laskowski.

Scoring and musical arrangements for T&J were also written and performed by me in collaboration with the inscrutable Jack Butler.  The T&J logo was designed by Meredith Montgomery.

Giorgio Vasari was voiced by Vincenzo Marzotti, Queen Victoria by Gwen van der Linde, Maurice Lévy by Quentin Bardi, John Stickney by Michael Caster, and friendly fashion advice from Elizabeth Kuzila.

Additional sources for this episode are available in the show notes. If you liked what you heard, spread the word and leave a nice note in the review section wherever you’re getting your podcasts. Become an Apple Podcast subscriber or follow and donate on Patreon – that’s patreon.com/tandjpodcast.

Now, enjoy the outro because I wrote it just for you. 

Nilufar says she can’t say no
Castle of Otranto
The Northern lights dance
their green, green glow
Castle of Otranto
A precious departure;
the kiss that she stole
Castle of Otranto
O purity, that prurient joke
Castle of Otranto 

When sins of the father fall from the sky
And wifely obeisance is its own crime
I’m not the same, I will die to escape
Tyrants suffocate
and rape and rape and rape and rape and rape and …  

Manijeh tells me go-go-go
Castle of Otranto
Where the Kopet Dag
shows its desert bones
Castle of Otranto
How can I taste it?
The poets should know
Castle of Otranto
Feathery poppies;
incarnadine rows
Castle of Otranto   

When sins of the father fall from the sky
And wifely obeisance is its own crime
I’m not the same, I will die to escape
Tyrants suffocate
and rape and rape and rape and rape and rape and …  

Nilufar says she can’t say no
Castle of Otranto
The Northern lights dance
their green, green glow Castle of Otranto