Visions of Hell

A Prisoner’s Cinema
by justin lee
passage press, 257 pages, $29.95

A first proposition: High-quality film video lowers the cost of horror to zero. The horror of the horror genre can’t compete ontologically with the horror of a snuff film or a beheading on the dark web—or sometimes even on the general web. A second proposition: This wiring together of the globe into a giant tele-media sharing apparatus shows us that hell is here on Earth, it’s just not evenly distributed.

If you work in AI and live on a coast, you might wake up on a Saturday, make an expensive coffee with organic beans, and then add in all sorts of biohacking powders. You go to the gym, find a date that night on an app, eat steak tartare and drink natural wine, have something approaching placid, semi-memorable sex, and then repeat the ritual the next weekend. At the same time, you can open your phone and see that a Christian village has been exterminated in Nigeria—or that young, hopeful protesters have been liquidated in the streets of Iran; or that a migrant boat floating off the coast of Spain has turned to cannibalism and witchcraft after finding itself becalmed on the open sea. Sometimes, high-quality or low-quality imagery accompanies these stories; visions of horror snake through the internet and weave themselves into our cortexes.

Streaming imagery on social media creates the feeling, perhaps the ontologically correct intuition, that something bigger, looser, more malevolent—a force—is darting around the globe, disassembling goodwill. Safe, automated lives protected by the American empire repress a quiet horror, a quiet awareness that the real nature of human nature—the real meaning of history—lies elsewhere, deeper, hibernating in some cell in the psyche.

This, as far as I can tell, is a potential motivation for Justin Lee’s new story collection, A Prisoner’s Cinema. The modern mind—or maybe I should add, in Lee’s case, the modern male mind (male because the stories all seem to take up a distinctly masculine POV, shot through with a fear of castration and powerlessness and dismemberment)—is only superficially stable, rational, minimal, milquetoast; it is beset by the fear that life on earth is, in fact, hell.

The precursor for Lee’s stories is undoubtedly Edgar Allan Poe. There’s a sense in Lee, as in Poe, that a robust, technologically enhanced, mutating world conceals a malevolent, omnipresent world. Poe’s America was subject to the rapid, almost overwhelming speed of locomotives, the beginning of extreme concentration of people in cities, the beginning of mass immigration from Europe, the counter-revolution of the Second Great Awakening, antagonism with Mexico, the rapid discovery of the West. In Poe’s canonical story “The Man of the Crowd,” nothing really happens other than that the narrator sees the same man everywhere around the city and wonders what purpose this man really has. The Man of the Crowd seems more like an agent of a demiurge, a bad god who has scattered his spies, a generalized force of eyes everywhere.

Lee’s world—our world—on the cusp of transhumanism, humanoid robotics, self-driving vehicles, a new age of space exploration, rumors of alien disclosure, the dissolution of the post-war global order, AGI, and perhaps, similarly, a third—though markedly Catholic rather than Protestant—Great Awakening is similarly disorienting. Lee’s gory stories and dialogues point to a “spiritually exhausted, lonely, possibly suicidal” spiritual state—which can only be expurgated because self-knowledge “requires fictionalization as much as careful reflection.” It is fair to say that the stories represent an attempt to uncompress the deep-lying data of the psyche and to give a “true form” to the background radiation of the schizoid yet algorithmically benumbed contemporary soul.

A Prisoner’s Cinema essentially reads as a continued series of hallucinatory transformations in a single dark night of the soul; I would suggest that it’s better read as a novel than a collection. The protagonist of the first story, “Gods and Spiders,” Drazen Dizdarevic, a young man of Bosnian descent whose psyche is shot through with hypnotic ancestral trauma from the Balkan religious wars—even after his family has moved to Michigan—is not fundamentally different from Michael, the protagonist of “Faintly Falling,” whose erotic imagination is activated by seeing a girl from church at a bookstore cafe, where he is in fact reading St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. In “Gods and Spiders,” Drazen watches a Serbian mesmerist force a volunteer to confront his fear of spiders, to “address your subconscious . . . refuse to be forced in subservience . . . tell it you are a master of your own mind and actions.” Michael in “Faintly Falling” has his own private rites: “playing guitar, reading psalms, lighting a single candle, meditating,” while trying to resist his lust for the church girl. Across the collection, the ritual is sometimes religious, sometimes sexual, sometimes violent—but always initiatory.

In so many of these stories there’s a young man, there’s a girl, there’s a ritual. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” the Divine Feminine appears in the form of Greta, who both comforts and unsettles Michael. Their encounter culminates in a ritual of closeness and quiet despair: “They fell asleep together, neither able to touch the hollowness in the other.” Michael also attempts to spiritually rehabilitate his junkie brother, Dane, after the death of their parents. The story splits the male soul in two—Michael and Dane—and ends with Michael on a strange, Dante-esque journey, on a boat, guided by a nameless child and haunted by flickering images from his disconnected, yet magically still-working TV playing home videos.

Similarly, in “A Prisoner’s Cinema,” the title story, Cal, the protagonist, is forced by a sadistic medical experimenter into a series of hallucinations known as prisoner cinema, in which he experiences sexual torment and bodily mortification that are filmed and recorded for research purposes. This metamorphic male psyche goes through—over the course of A Prisoner’s Cinema—transformations too numerous to fully recount here, but that is largely beside the point. I’ve said that A Prisoner’s Cinema reads best as a novel, with different faces and performances. I would even amend that statement to the following: It reads best as a religious manual, as a dark night of the soul. It takes up the fictional mode of Poe, links it to a mystical and ascetic tradition of facing and wrestling with demons and visions—summoning visions of hell in life in order to remind and instigate the soul to take every possible precaution against going to hell after death.

The simplest way to read A Prisoner’s Cinema is as the testimony of someone who really does not want to go to hell and believes in hell, but knows that the modern world has wounded his capacity for moral reaction—to a dangerous degree. The psyche at the center of A Prisoner’s Cinema wants to wake up from the hallucinations, wants to push itself as far as possible, so that when the hallucinations are over, there is no doubt about what to do next. Find salvation.