Welcome RUE MORGUE Magazine September-October Issue 2021

t’s that time of year again! I live four blocks from the nearest Bath and Body Works and I can smell the pumpkin spice candles from here – which is handy, because it’s hard to smell them in the store through my face mask. Rue Morgue’s annual fall double issue represents several things – our anniversary, for one; another tickmark on my coffin lid; another thatch of grey hair on my head; another year of winning the battle against That Which Can’t Be Helped (a.k.a. the various hurdles of existence as a niche print periodical, ranging from the economic to the epidemiological). But let’s look on the bright side: I’ve got my Halloween costume picked out! I’m the girl from Logan’s Run, squinting against the sunlight as I emerge from my geodesic dome, loosed to rejoin the untouched wilderness and live out the rest of my thirties (lol) in something resembling freedom.
But I have to admit that freedom isn’t feeling the way I expected it to. Never mind the fact that we’re not quite out of the proverbial woods yet, or that my liver appears to have aged ten years in the past two, or that my clothes seem to have all shrunk at once. I’m crashing into a full year’s worth of FOMO and I’m realizing that I’ve become quite well adjusted to existence on my couch with my beloved 2960 x 1440 quad HD+ display and it’s been keeping me up at night in more ways than one. Can actual human experience really compete with this slab of sensory instant gratification? And to what extent can I even expect it to?
You see, faithful readers, while some relax in the summertime reading campy fiction or beautifully designed Canadian horror mags, yours truly sat around fretting about a French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard. We first became acquainted about a decade ago – he died in 2007 but his hot takes on postmodern semiology and popular culture made him something of a hip cat in my alma mater’s sociology department, and he came up a lot. I wasn’t the biggest fan at the time – far from what you’d call accessible academia, his work required its own glossary of terms before you could read a sentence, much less comprehend it – but his 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation comes up every now and then on The Faculty of Horror podcast, which kept it fresh in my mind.
I’ll attempt to summarize succinctly: JeanBo was concerned with a cultural trend he noticed where the human experience was increasingly reliant upon a constructed simulation of reality – the simulacra – that was made up of symbols and signs and other forms of meaning that only make sense within a specific cultural context. Like many a grumpy old sociologist, Baudy didn’t have the most positive prognosis for the way society was headed.
This hyper-reality, as he termed it, was just the latest form of Marx’s concerns about alienation, and the result was a complacent populace taking commercial agendas as truth: confusing reality TV as reality, for example, or taking one tweet as if it represents popular opinion at large. Examples of this hyper-reality anxiety abound in science fiction movies, often to horrific, dystopian effect – consider The Matrix or Total Recall; if all we have to identify reality is our sensory experience of it, how are we capable of discerning what is real?
Anyway, back to post-lockdown neurosis. My thinking on the subject started leaning into Beaudrillard’s intellectual turf after receiving Paul Corupe’s Files From the Black Museum entry from RM#200, in which he likens our house-bound quarantine situation to that of the marooned scientists in 1964’s The Time Travelers,
where flickering electronic screens are not only technological marvels but a veritable lifeline to reality. It got me thinking that even though we’ve spent so much time physically apart, we Rue Morgue Magazine weirdos have been using the same movies for comfort and diversion, the same magazine for insight and community. Yes, we might have been distracting ourselves from a terrible predicament by stargazing but we’ve been looking up at the same stars, haven’t we? If Baudrillard is right and we’ve created our own hyper-reality by looking through these same blood-spattered lenses, maybe we’ve actually been much closer to each other than we might have realized.
I know, I’m a huge nerd who could have just filled this page with the usual Happy Halloweenery that I normally employ to kick off our annual anniversary issue instead of dusting off my old grad school textbooks, but it’s too late to return them and it’s important to me that we don’t look back on these difficult times as a complete loss (and I don’t look back on my masters degree as a complete waste of time). The magazine you hold in your hands can’t tweet or take your picture or lead you via GPS to the nearest Starbucks location but it’s part of the (hyper) reality we’re choosing to inhabit – and it’s one I’ll choose any day, not just Halloween.
Thanks for spending your lockdown with us… and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

NitroFlare

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