I’ve never understood the opposition of so many priests and pastors to Halloween. Growing up a Baptist, I was solemnly warned that it was tantamount to devil worship. Now that I’m a Catholic, I’m told that the festival has stolen the thunder of All Saints Day, which venerates those who have made it to Heaven. It’s all politics, of course: the Day of the Dead and Halloween are often proxies for pagan festivals that we did our damnedest to suppress. The Catholic Church is right to push its line for the sake of orthodoxy, but one senses a touch of jealousy when millions of Mexicans gather around their private altars to offer marigolds, tasty snacks, and sugar skulls to their dearly departed.

The mainline churches miss a trick when they denounce Halloween. In a culture which is so unashamedly materialist, it’s nice that we take a moment to contemplate the supernatural – even if it is by dressing up as Freddy Krueger and hitting on Janet from marketing. Christians should surely have no fear of this devil fancying. In a recent editorial for Fox News, the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, writes that he never grasped why people found his book so scary. He intended it to be, “a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story – in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through.” He was inspired by the possession of a boy that occurred while Blatty was at Georgetown University in 1949. He explains, “I remember thinking, ‘Someday, somebody’s got to write about this, because if an investigation were to prove that possession is real, what a help it would be to the struggling faith of possibly millions, for if there were demons, I reasoned, then why not angels? Why not God?’”

Blatty makes an excellent point. Acknowledging the existence of the Devil is a first (albeit tortuous) step towards acknowledging the existence of God, for one is proof positive of the other. For this reason, genuine Satanists (and a few probably exist) have bet on the wrong team and are nothing to be afraid of. To accept the Devil is to accept God is to accept the Biblical narrative of their conflict. And the Biblical narrative ends with the Devil’s defeat and God’s victory. QED, Goths, Wiccans, Satanists, and Ozzy Osbourne are all witnesses to the eventual triumph of Yahweh over everything. They are Bible bashers in every sense.

I grew up in an odd age in Britain in which there were still only four TV channels, but we suddenly had VHS – which meant you could theoretically watch everything that was on them. As a kid, that opened up Halloween for me. Year after year, there’d be a slew of movies shown around midnight that I could record and watch the next day, while skipping school. Even during my malevolent teens, I was struck by how moral most horror movies are. That might just be a product of form: getting the audience on side requires pitting identifiable good against tangible evil (Van Helsing vs. Dracula). But creakiness of the movies helped, too: for every shudder at a bitten neck, there was a giggle at a pair of plastic fangs. The fact that I could see the wires holding up the bats, or occasionally hear someone shouting “action”, proved that it was pure artifice. The Devil/Frankenstein/Mummy/Dracula was being set up for a fall, much as you could guarantee seeing Christopher Lee fall on his backside in the final reel (and then try to act like it was in the script). I suspect that our exposure to crappy late night movies explains a lot of the cynicism of my generation.

I’ve been impressed with Los Angeles’ preparations for Halloween. One house two doors down has covered the shrubbery in sugar cobwebs and planted tombstones in the lawn. Another building has a skeleton hanging from a tree that moans. There will be a street parade soon and roads are already being blocked off. In an unrelated incident, a drunken girl dressed as Wonder Woman sat on my apartment block lawn last night and shouted obscenities at the moon. Several residents shouted back and the foul language reached a fascinating crescendo around 11pm, when the cops finally arrived. The lady, who was struggling with that ancient conundrum of which breast to try to keep inside one’s costume when there just ain’t room enough for two, told the officers, “I’ve had a bit to drink.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” came a cry from the apartment next to mine.

The writer Charles Coulombe has a nice summary of the various things one can do in Los Angeles this weekend, and he notes that part of the fun is the naysayers. “From his desert stronghold, evangelist Jack Chick annually unleashes his horde of comic-book tracts upon unwary trick-or-treaters. Numerous other evangelical preachers vociferate against the proceedings’ evil nature, allowing various atheists to prattle on about how stupid the Christians are. Each side is thus able to enjoy Halloween in their own way. It is truly a festival for everyone.” In the sense that it gets us all talking about the supernatural in one form or another, it’s all probably good for the soul.

Warning: this will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t seen either Alien or The Thing. And if you haven’t, you should. As soon as possible.

What a lucky boy I am: this week I got to see both Alien and The Thing (the prequel). It was an emotional experience, bringing up a lot of repressed memories from my childhood. Both movies are “pretty cewl” (©South Park) on a dramatic level, but they also play to themes of physical decay that mean a lot to me. Every time I see the alien pop out of John Hurt’s chest I think, “Brother, I’ve been there.”

It wasn’t until I re-watched Alien on Friday night, with chamomile tea and a pizza, that I realized quite how much it’s about sex. The sets are pure fetish. The Nostromo looks like Roger Vadim designed a womb: soft tan furnishings, gently throbbing lights, and lots and lots of hexagonals. In contrast, the spaceship that our heroes find crashed on a windswept planet is a Freudian nightmare. They enter it through an open orifice and descend through a small gooey hole into a misty pit full of eggs. John Hurt then stumbles upon a monster that latches onto his face and lays its fetus inside his stomach. One might accuse the alien of pushing his luck, but then he did pay for dinner…

When the little brute burrows its way out of Hurt’s chest, it becomes a metaphor for the nightmare of physical change. When he first reviewed the movie, Roger Ebert hypothesized that its cast is middle aged in order to emphasize that they are a group of ordinary people doing a job, not action heroes. I disagree. I suspect the director (consciously or unconsciously) cast older actors because people over 30 are more vulnerable to physical change than adolescents are. As a young adult, the things that happen to us are unnerving but healthy: they are the body evolving towards its zenith of intellectual and physical capability. After 30-or so, what was once growth becomes decay. The hair falls off one’s head and sprouts elsewhere. Muscle becomes fat; dull aches become “warning signs”. The infinite sexual possibilities of youth become desperate and less probable: one must breed ASAP, before everything dies up or falls off. Romance is dead and man is a walking advert for entropy.

When the body starts doing things that you don’t want it to, it becomes a separate personality from oneself. That theme is picked up in The Thing, which has just hit cinemas. It’s a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Predictably, it’s an inferior movie. But by dint of the excellent premise, it’s okay. In this movie, the alien is a virus that replicates or consumes its victim, hides in the body, and then attacks others. We never entirely understand the nature of the thing, but it is hinted that its victims don’t know they’ve been taken over. The monster only bursts forth (with several arms, a dog’s head, and a scorpion tail) when threatened. The metaphor for the loss of control of one’s body is striking.

A chronic illness is like undergoing a personal alien invasion. The tumor that was recently discovered in my father’s throat could be the seedling of a malevolent entity. It consumes half the calories that he puts into his body, growing stronger as he grows weaker. This, combined with a nervous disorder, has left him bowlegged and tiny. Every time I see him, I recognize him less; the changes in his character suggest possession. This process is tragic, but entirely natural. Cancer is the body’s way of placing time limits on our mind’s habitation. If we all lived to 150, we would be a walking mass of tumors not unlike the creature that slithers into shot in the last reel of The Thing.

For others, the horrors of Alien and The Thing provoke a subconscious response. For me they are a trip down memory lane. When I was thirteen, I contracted an appalling case of eczema that required hospital treatment and lasted for five years. Isolated with my own carcass, I found the most bizarre and terrifying things taking place. I discovered that the skin can bleed without breaking, that sores can blister and hatch, that it is possible to scratch to the bone. Doctor after doctor unwrapped my bandages and recoiled in horror, without a clue what to do. My legs were encased in cotton wool and I began every morning with a bath of antibiotics and salt. O, how I spent so much time rubbing salt into my body – desperately trying to dry up and dust off the ooze. I was a “thing” all right: a larva jammed in metamorphosis. Oddly, the disease never touched my face. I suspect it understood that if it did, I might elicit sympathy from other human beings and someone might actually try to help. Hidden beneath the neck line, it was free to feed uninterrupted.

I am sure that it is significant that this condition arose during puberty. It convinced me that sex and physical decay are intrinsically linked. It left me with a profound revulsion for the human form – perhaps because the hours spent mapping it in hospital made me aware of its every imperfection, its every potential for disaster. Today, I am a physical Dualist. I earnestly believe that the body and soul are not only separate, but at war with one another. The soul’s quest for transcendence is constantly disrupted by the body’s sensual needs. The only way to achieve salvation is to starve the body and free the mind. Of course, living as we do in a material reality, that is impossible. So, unable to completely liberate myself, I live a dual existence between mental exercise and physical degradation. Once in a while I give my body free reign and permit it excess. When it is done “wandering the world seeking the ruin of souls”, I punish it with purgation. The best cure for a hangover is prayer and green tea.

I am a survivor of eczema. Around 18, it suddenly went away. Incredibly, I have no scars and haven’t suffered with it since. Always, there is the lingering fear that it will return; every small itch could be the beginning of a long campaign. But the experience has taught me that the body is intrinsically treacherous. Treacherous, but still a part of me: something to be negotiated with, or placated.

Watching The Alien, I was struck by the conviction that me and the “toothy one”, if given a chance, could get on rather well. I’m sure it wouldn’t want to eat me (I’m all skin and bone) and I’d make a terrible father for its little facehugger (I’d always be out with my mates getting drunk). So, instead it might tolerate me as the chronicler of its exploits. By writing about the beast, maybe I could pacify it and even own it – just as I have done on this blog post by writing about my eczema. I can imagine myself crossed-legged on its icky nest floor; one hand tapping away at the keyboard, the other tickling the gelatinous space between its numerous chins. Sci-fi yin and yang.

The bus stop I use in Los Angeles has a large poster of a chap in his underwear. I think it’s supposed to be advertising his briefs, but the object of the picture is clearly the man himself. The image is disturbing. Not only is the model being objectified like a prime cut of beef, but he has been blown up so large that his anatomically perfect body looks freakish. Each rib is as thick as my arm. West Hollywood is full of homoerotica of this sort; a sensuality so aggressive that it borders on Hitlerian. Confronted by images of thrusting masculinity in every shop window, I feel soiled just buying a pint of milk. West Hollywood is Pornotopia.

Back home, in Great Britain, there’s a discussion going on about whether or not to force internet providers to put filters on porn sites. Prime Minister David Cameron’s modest proposal was denounced by “conservative” commentators as injurious to liberty. The government cannot and should not legislate morality, they cried. I am confused as to why such people use the label conservative to describe themselves. The single purpose of conservatism is to protect what is good about the traditional order. The internet is a threat to the traditional order and so it is not our friend. The North Koreans understand that, even if we do not.

Government can legislate morality and it does. Aside from murder and theft, it also outlaws things that can be consensual – like incest and polygamy. Against this regulation of the sexual code, critics often argue that whatever the government prohibits instantly becomes fashionable. The fact that arrests for public drunkenness actually increased under Prohibition is often cited as evidence that state censorship of this kind never works. The argument is redundant on two counts. A) Morality takes its authority from something other than popular sentiment. B) There are plenty of instances in which something has been outlawed and the public hasn’t reacted with civil disobedience. Florida recently banned sex with animals. By this logic, are we to expect a sudden spike in assaults on chickens? Are Floridians really that bloody minded?

Internet pornography is an obvious example of how permitting one variety of perversion invariably leads to greater and more terrible crimes. The internet turned pedophilia from a private sin into an organized crime. It put people in touch with each other who would never have otherwise met, allowing them to pool resources and share victims. It gave predators access to kids through forums. It also used mainstream porn as a gateway drug. By introducing younger and younger models into erotica, it blurred the lines between childhood and adulthood. People who previously would never have had access to material by which to test their inclinations were now goaded into more and more depravity (“If you enjoyed that, you’ll love this…”). Its the expansiveness of the internet that makes it so ripe for regulating.

When I was a child, getting access to filth was bloody hard work. The best source was The Daily Sport, a silly old rag that featured saucy stories. America could have dropped a bomb on China, and The Sport would have run with the headline, “Six in a Barracks Sexy Sex Shock!” Beyond The Sport, there were one or two books in the school library that covered the sexual cycle in terms of the birds and the bees (with the occasional reference to the behavior of monkeys). I also recall a sex education video that featured a family playing Frisbee in the nude. I'll never play Frisbee again.

All of this contact with nudity was fleeting and furtive. The joy was less in the seeing than the getting. Nowadays, all a child has to do to access some muck is to log on to the family computer. Within seconds they can see videos of whips, goats, origami and tantric projection – the whole T&A. “O brave new world that has such people in’t!” It is madness to suggest that this environmental pollution should not be subject to regulation. We shall never expunge the natural curiosity of the young, but we can at least make sure that the messages they get about sex are healthy ones.

I would go one step further and suggest that it’s time to give back to local authorities the power to outlaw the sale of pornography altogether. Like heroin, porn has been proven to be addictive. Back in 2004, medical witnesses told the Senate Commerce Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee that there was no doubt that it can lead to physical dependence. Sexual activity releases hormones that provide a short term high. If that high is not associated with ordinary, socialized sexual activity, then it becomes internalized and unhealthy. Mary Anne Layden of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today. The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors.”

Given how potentially dangerous it can be, it’s astonishing how weakly pornography is regulated across the Western world. It is even more astonishing considering the West’s supposed commitment to human rights. The porn industry is an unpleasant sector that often mistreats its workers. Innocents are dragged off the street with an offer of "modelling work" and then intimidated into more. Inevitably, rates of venereal disease are high. To quote one official report, “In September 2009, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 2,396 cases of Chlamydia, 1,389 cases of gonorrhea, and five syphilis cases among porn performers. It was also reported that Chlamydia and gonorrhea prevalence in porn performers is ten times higher than that of Los Angeles County 20-24 year olds and five times higher than that of one of Los Angeles County’s highest risk populations.” 

On an existential level, pornography objectifies human beings, reducing them to the status of commodities. There is no need to engage with them as real people because the sexual stimulus is entirely one sided. This encourages the viewer to regard the subject as less than human. Of course, all of us like to be objectified on some level – to be told that we are handsome or pretty. But for us to benefit, we have to have some degree of personal exchange with the spectator. Pornography lends distance and alienation.

That objectification has lethal consequences. Porn addiction is a common trait among serial killers. The murderer Ted Bundy detailed his experiences thus: “I would keep looking for more explicit, more graphic kinds of materials … until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far. You reach that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.” This is not to suggest that pornography conditions the madman’s mind. But, as with latent pedophilia, it normalizes and feeds perverse desires. It reduces humanity to fresh meat. It becomes easy to disassociate sex from mutual pleasure, violence from pain.

The profusion of legalized porn reflects so many paradoxes about 21st century society. We are supposedly an epoch that respects the personhood of women, and yet we objectify them. Gays are trying to build stable families, and yet they are ghettoized by a culture that stresses fetish and permissiveness. We assiduously protect the virginity of children, but we take away their emotional innocence as soon as possible. Most bizarrely of all, we have a conservative movement that prioritizes the freedoms of business over the health of society as a whole. Give me a conservative presidential candidate who values the souls of the vulnerable over the bottom dollar and there you will find my vote.

The finest time to be in Los Angeles is the early morning. The garden sprinklers turn the city into a veritable rain forest; the water steams off the pavement and the palm leaves drip gold. In every garden, a Hispanic laborer cuts and rakes on tiptoes so as not to wake his masters. Ladies with big hair walk their dogs along the curb. There are no cars and no bums, only empty, wide streets and the occasional jogger. This morning I ran up into the hills – a steep climb that puts you on top of the city. Pausing for a moment, you can see the studios to the south, Beverly Hills to the west, and the ghetto to the east. It’s incredible how flat and still the city looks at 7am. We’re approaching Yom Kippur, so the quiet is particularly broad and creepy. Millions of Jewish moviemakers are locked in their homes, twiddling their thumbs, unable even to use a light switch because the Talmud tells them so. It’s rather wonderful to think that an ancient faith is capable of bringing this modern metropolis to a standstill. The only thing that compares to it in Britain is the changing of the guard, when cars along the London Mall have to wait patiently for half a dozen horses to make their way to Buckingham Palace.

I’m back in the mad land of Los Angeles, the most frustrating place on earth. As my new friend, the writer Charles Coulombe put it, “This is the only city in the world that you can have a love hate relationship with.” Those emotions are felt in the extremes: the hate is strong enough to make you think every day about leaving, but the love is sweet enough to make you stay. It is possible with enough money and a car to spend one’s time only in the bits that you love. But I’m penniless and can’t drive, so every journey to something pleasurable requires a long walk through miles of pain.

One thing I appreciate is the city’s capacity to soak up insanity. Anything you want to do here – from a monkey’s tea part to a Trotskyite whist drive – you can make happen, and some fruitcake will happily join in. On my first night, my pal Rupert Russell (who seems to have graduated from Harvard academic to making adverts) took me to a comic book store on Sunset. We were greeted by a woman dressed as a butterfly. Rupert gave her a password and we were shown to the back of the store. There was a theatre comprised of a small audience of single men, each sitting two chairs apart from each other, their eyes fixed on the stage. The act was a woman in a Guy Fawkes mask signing “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again.” When she finished, there was a quiet round of applause. Catwoman introduced the next act: Wonder Woman and Super Girl singing “Don’t Stop Believing”. It went on like this for an hour. I sat in the back with Rupert, eating a mushroom pizza.

The evening was run by a comic book writer and a former porn actress. Rupert says that back in the early noughties, when the DVD market was really taking off, porn stars gained followings that rivaled mainstream actors. The sordid anonymity of the video (hidden away on the top shelf in a black box) was replaced with a new sense of commercial and artistic self-confidence. This particular actress loved comic books, so the gentleman in the audience hail from the subculture of Marvel fetishists. She is a heroine to them, a silicone goddess. “Of course, the internet has changed everything,” one creature with glasses and a beard told me. “Now you can download barnyard action for free and you won’t know the names of any of the girls in it.” He sighed “Porn has lost a lot of its personality.”

The least pleasant bit of Los Angeles is that for which it is best known: Hollywood. What is so frustrating about movieland is its introspection. I’ve spent a lot of time in politics and journalism – two areas of life that are equally self-obsessed. But they are also fundamentally extrovert: they exist to engage with or to change the world around them. In contrast, Hollywood is eaten up with itself. World War III could break out and all this place would be talking about is how much Shia Labeouf made for appearing in Transformers 4: the Rusting.

That narcissism is especially frustrating for me as I am here, ostensibly, to interview a bunch of celebrities for my book on Hollywood politics. It’s proving tough. Phone call after phone call is met with the same bland, joyless pleasantry (“O how fascinating, can you put that in an email?”), their small talk so empty of promise that sometimes, when I put my ear to the phone, I think I can hear the sea. Hours of deflection wound me up to breaking point. I called the office of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and asked to be put through. I mistakenly asked for “Jerry Katzenberg.”
The operator (and she is only an operator remember) said, “We don’t have anyone working here by that name.”
I ended the call and thought about it. Then I rang back and said, “Sorry, do you definitely not have a Jerry Katzenberg there?”
“No,” she replied.
“Do you have anyone by the name of Katzenberg?”
“We have a Jeffrey Katzenberg.”
“O that must be the one I meant,” I said. “But the names aren’t so different, why didn’t you just correct me and put me through?”
“If you can’t be bothered to get Jeffrey’s name right, why should I connect you?”
“Who are you?” I asked. “His mother?”
She hung up.

The bigger problem with getting access to a star is their obsession with image. I want to talk about their politics, a subject that threatens to muddy their profile. They won’t give me access unless they can control every aspect of the conversation, from what is asked to what is written down. An actor is like a corporation. They brand themselves to the hilt and carefully orchestrate every aspect of their waking lives. Working for them is, apparently, Hell. One girl told me that Holly Hunter sacked her for bringing her the wrong label of mineral water. I replied, “Holly who?” The banality of the sin and the situation is my big issue with Hollywood. Structurally it fascinates me – its etiquette, its soft power, its ability to define global culture. But artistically it is dead and socially it’s a total bore. Of course, there are pockets of wonder and wisdom. And the closest a person is to you is measured in how honest they are. If they give you their real age and the correct number of marriages they’ve had, then you’re in.

***

The vanity infects Hollywood’s politics. This evening Rupert and I saw a movie called The Ides of March, directed by George Clooney. Ostensibly it’s about a young staffer on a presidential campaign who is corrupted by the process. In reality, it’s about George Clooney’s fantasy of running for president. In this scenario he is that rarest of creatures: an electable liberal. Cue scenes of him explaining to unibrow Christians why it’s okay to be gay, or why solar polar is a sustainable alternative to the War on Terror. In the real world, Clooney’s candidate would be ranked somewhere beneath Dennis Kucinich, but in movieland he’s the frontrunner for his party’s nomination and a shoe-in for the presidency. His only flaw? Why, the only flaw that Hollywood would understand – sex. His nineteen-year-old squeeze gets pregnant. Whether one is prochoice or prolife, the this subplot is truly execrable. Not only does no one at any point suggest she might keep the child, but the movie’s handling of the physical and emotional realities of her condition would shock even Planned Parenthood. Put it this way: Clooney’s mistress is possibly the first woman in history who dresses for an abortion.

The movie’s lack of moral focus is beside the point. It is an exercise in Hollywood idealism that is now hopelessly detached from reality and no longer heartwarming. It’s time for Mr. Smith to either wise up or quit Washington – his kind of schmaltzy Jimmy Stewart pap won’t cut it anymore. Obama, rumor has it, has disappointed movieland liberals and his donations are down. If that is so then he has my sympathy. At a time when millions are unemployed and the Western world hurtles towards economic oblivion, only Hollywood could continue to express outrage that the Japanese go whaling once in a while, or that Bill and Ben can’t get married in the mosque of their choice.

Yet, for all its absurdities, I still find myself sleepless with paranoia out here. Intellectually it is bereft, but Hollywood always manages to convince me that it matters. Every unanswered phone call drives me insane. I want to walk up to Robert Redford’s front door, bang on it and cry, “Why won’t you talk to me, you SOB?” But he won’t be there; he’ll be away promoting a soap or launching an ice cream. And I won’t even get to the front door because every home is protected by a gate and private security. It’s easier to break into the White House than it is George Lucas’s garage.

For the respite that it offers from this madness, I thank Yom Kippur. Safe in the knowledge that the only reason Richard Dreyfuss won’t take my call is because he’s locked in his house with everything unplugged, I can relax and fool myself that Hollywood loves me – it’s just otherwise engaged. Free from responsibility, I shall hop on a bus to Century City and grab some food at Panda Express. Then I shall while away a couple of hours in America’s greatest innovation, the cigar café. Behind the dark curtain is another of Angelino wonderland, a place where grizzled truck drivers (who otherwise don’t exist on this side of town) gather to drink JD and coke and smoke themselves to death. We shall discuss Sarah Palin’s munificence and I shall fall in love with Los Angeles all over again.