Long post ahead, please bear with me - because I'm right. 
I believe Our Lady is OTM. It's counterintuitive on a number of levels to
discuss the Filth issue by issue - the bigger picture's much more important if
you're looking to pick apart the story & penetrate the subtext. I didn't get the
actual chronology of the thing until I read the trade, where having the entire
thing laid out at once in front of you fills in the blanks between concepts.
I don't know that the Filth can be easily understood without having been through
some terrible experience with having your body rebel against you and seeming to
leave you for dead. I wouldn't be surprised if it can, but I didn't get it until
I understood the autoimmune diseases that left me disabled two years ago.
This is the shit that I didn't know before I sat down and reread the thing in
trade:
The whole experience with the Hand takes place within a miniscule amount of time
during Greg's suicide attempt - it's mixed in with what are likely real events
leading to his suicide attempt, but it all happens in his head at that moment
where he's dying on his kitchen floor. That giant hand is his, the ink is his,
the Filth is his suicide note and all the trash that fell on the floor next to
him. That's why they have to go micro to reach Hand HQ (I'm reminded of
the old JLA issue where it says that Hell is in the spaces between things).
It is his brain working out what he feels and the terror of his life. Whether
it's 'real' or not is irrelevant. Mother Dirt says she 'selected' him for
initiation - that is, initiation through a terrible fucked up life filled with
self-loathing and fear and inadequacy. To what end is utterly debatable, but its
his imagination building a house, a fantasy, that his fears can live in where
they'll be transformed into something else - something hopefully more positive
so that he can ultimately survive his ordeal.
Each 'encounter' with a 'villain' that he has with the Hand is Greg (and Grant)
confronting the things that terrify him most about existence - the possibilities
of his life that are too terrible to bear. The Anti-Persons are fears
personified, Qlippoths, too, but I think it helps to avoid the Qaballa symbolism
to really get it.
1st Encounter: Simon the Billionaire - Greg's Existential Despair - God
Is Dead, We've Been Bought & Sold, & the Ones In Charge Are Psychos -
The I-Life are us. The person who created the world is dead and gone and the
planet was bought & sold to someone who could give a fuck. The New God pisses
into the ruins of the world and turns it into The Ultimate Debauch, a really
ugly thing, perverting the I-Life (science's new ultimate healers) into killers
(purportedly).
2nd Encounter: Arno Von Vermun - Fear of Getting Old and dying
ungracefully - Von Vermun uses time as a weapon to murder innocent people.
It's a fairly straightforward correlation.
3rd Encounter: Anders Klimakks & Tex Porneau - Ultimate Sexual Inadequacy
& Depravity - Rape - that ultimate denial of choice and control in the face of
overwhelming sexual terror. Anders is also an anti-person because he's the
New Model and he makes everything else on the planet with a cock sexually
inadequate. Hardcore Porno is quite often about loneliness and
power-fantasy fueled by inadequacy - but it just keeps the inadequacy going when
its on that level. Same with Greg watching guys like Anders (even if he is
a pretty cool guy).
4th Encounter: Libertania - Utopia is Bullshit and just a hair away from
murderous, raping anarchy anyway - It's kind of key here, though, that what
happens afterward is another form of consciousness, after 'the fall', as it
were. 
5th Encounter: Max Thunderstone - Behind every superhero is a sad little
momma's boy with sexual inadequacy issues living out his power fantasies - and
in the real world he'd just be strung up and burned alive or converted into a
shill for All The Wrong People, anyway.
6th Encounter: Greg Feely/Ned Slade - It's Greg's final rage at being
saddled with his existence and feeling like he's been told all this bullshit
from so many people who tried to assure him that everything was working fine and
that the universe was perfect when it fucking well was not. You know, he becomes
King Mob to take on his aggressors and Get His Revenge, but by attempting to
destroy this structure he's only attacking himself - tearing down the ideas he's
imagined, that house he built to deal with his 'crisis' (which he had to do to
come out on the other side of his suicide, both the building and the eventual
tearing down) . It isn't so much that you spread the Shit of Life on your
flowers, it's just that it makes them grow if you can put it in your mind to
take it in your hands and put it in the earth.
I'm not entirely sure what the deal with Feely's supposed alliance w/ Arno & Max
Thunderstone & Spartacus Hughes is, but I have my theories (they're just not
particularly developed).
Another point:
Everyone in the Hand is someone who either hates themselves or has had a
terribly traumatic experience with human frailty or both - they were all subject
to the harsh reality of 'random terror' before joining the Hand - the Hand is
sort of imagination working things out for them - making existence bearable
somehow against what seem like impossible circumstances.
Moog Mercury was a sad little heroin-addicted comic book lover who wanted
to join his heroes and wrote X-rated stories about them in his spare time. He
was given significance in the imagination of the Hand by becoming an explorer of
the comic book worlds he loves, being significant in. But superheroes only exist
on the comics page - try to bring them into the 'real world' and they fall apart
(Moog set up the storyline of SO coming into the world so he could be with him -
Think of Grant wanting to bring Superman into the real world to be his friend
and then writing it to make it happen - SO's what happens when it goes wrong).
Cameron Spector was a terminal cancer patient.
LePen was a rape & attempted murder victim.
I don't know about Miami, but I think they mention it at some point - I
could be wrong. The obvious notion is that she was undergoing chemotherapy, but
I may be doing an injustice by assuming that. (Greg wears a wig that
serves some special sci-fi purpose but its only real significance is that it
addresses his discomfort with baldness. I assume Miami with same.)
The list goes on. (I'm not sure what the deal is with Man Green/Man
Yellow)
The Filth is about fear - every fear of emptiness and hollowness in every
concept that ever made us feel okay or right in the world. Grant's always
been big on taking your weaknesses and your ultimate fears and finding ways to
turn them into strengths (and rightly so) - the Filth is entirely on that
subject, its just a lot heavier. Reading it in issues makes it seem
modular, when it's really not - you have to sit down and read the whole thing
before it begins to become clear.
The Filth and its para-personas are what happens as people attempt to deal with
the horror of their real, non-comic book, non-pop-magicked, non-glamorous, very
often genuinely lonely and terrifying lives - they have to work it out with
their imagination or they die. Or rather, it's Grant's way of dealing with his
existential fears & despairs, and I think there's a lot of truth in it as to how
other people do the same. It helped me to get through two terrible years of same
(which I think quite a number of people experienced at a similar time, oddly
enough).
What Greg goes through, that rebellion, is a really a natural process of anger
when you're confronted with your own deterioration and mortality - fuck you,
fuck this, how dare you people walk around like everything's okay, it isn't fair
that I'm saddled with this bullshit burden and you're not, if you all saw the
fucking horrible truth of your lives you'd be a damn sight more humble and quiet
& respectful, fuck you, etc. But you can't do that. Like it says, nobody's
special, but everybody deserves the right to feel like they are.
The thing I understood most, or rather the message I received most loudly from
the Filth was that everybody out there just tells themselves whatever the fuck
they have to to make it through the goddamn day, even you, no matter how right
you think you are. That's the long & short of it. (In the popimage interview he
translates that by way of Monster Magnet into "Shut your mouth, you big fucking
baby!". That works, too.)
I used to kind of be afraid of it, (The Filth, I mean) since I became ill right
around the time it began coming out, and I kind of tied my experience to it for
awhile - I felt as though I might have become ill by 'exposure to the Filth
Sigil' or some equally self-important thing. I talked with Our Man George a
little about it at last year's Comicon in San Diego, too, which helped, but
didn't advance my understanding of the thing at all. I'm gonna try to get
a talk in with him again this year, but we'll see.
Once I could stand on top the rock that lupus & fibromyalgia & thyroid disease
had chained to me to and could see the forest for the trees I got it. |
