DERCINATE review by David Vichar for Erratum Press

 

The afore-mentioned “Digester”, sometimes also accompanied with the epithet “Perpetual” (a.k.a “ZUERIDICTHRAHX”) is a collective entity composed of “voyeuristic clusters of vigilante peepers” (118) who wreak havoc onto the community, sowing violence-induced chaos near and far, always wantonly and at random. More metaphorically, the suggestive name lends itself to a twofold interpretation: that of a stand-in for capitalism, consumer culture and media cannibalism, a reality-devouring force, digesting and regurgitating prototypes of people, symbols, identities, and societies more and more alike; or of the never-ending circle of media trauma, postmodern despair, and ritualised alienation compressed into a name that sounds like a present-day deity straight out of a Blake prophecy. The logic of consumerism that early on, Poe encapsulates under the neologism “DEVESTATE”, aka “What happens when you DEVour, digEST, and defecATE at the same time” (10). One of the ways this “Perpetual Digester” wreaks havoc across society is the “DEPRAVATIVE” Project, “a code-title for a film adaptation the popular (albeit highly controversial) Wrath Madamn video game series” (44), an Infinite-Jest-like weapon of mass distraction, only this time a film too graphically violent for the populace to see (hence desired by all its wannabe spectators).

THE PLACE

Erratum Press