When I read Jon Greenaway’s piece on the horrors of Jimmy Fallon in Common Dreams last week, I knew I needed to get him in front of a microphone and talk. Then, I worked my way through Greenaway’s excellent book Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination and I couldn’t wait to record this conversation.
Here Jon and I discuss, first, our thoughts on the disturbing experience of acts like Fallon, who are so thoroughly corporatized, and who play jester inside a studio as the world burns outside, as to radiate an energy that repels the soul. From there, we discuss the secret horrors of capitalism that have always been just below the surface and hidden from full view, but the feeling of how they are bursting from the seams now as class consciousness and precarity grow. We turn to popular pieces of horror that voice a lingering sense of dread and horror and how they are often reflections, intentionally or not, of the unconscious guilt and trauma we all carry as capitalism manipulates and exploits us. I can’t recommend this conversation enough.
Jon is over at TheLitCritGuy and the podcast is Horror Vanguard. Give Jon and his work a look. You won’t regret it.
