Why the Minotaur Is So Much More Fucked-Up Than You Thought

Half-man, half-bull, completely disturbing, more or less a warning against weird sex: the minotaur.

“minotaur with dead mare in front of a cave,” by pablo picasso

Last week’s American Horror Story premiere introduced Kathy Bates as Madame LaLaurie, a psychopathic society woman who expresses her creativity by incorporating classical touches into her acts of torture. In particular, she places a severed, hollowed-out bull's head onto to that of a slave as punishment, turning him into her own personal minotaur.

In Madame LaLaurie’s eyes, this punishment would be fitting, as she doesn’t look kindly on her slaves’ mixed ethnicity, and the minotaur is a primo classical example of a mixed thing, a mongrel, a thing-that-should-not-be. But while people know the basics of the minotaur’s story — he lives in a maze, the Athenian youths are sent down into his lair as a sacrifice to him/lunch for him, and Theseus ultimately kills him — there’s a backstory that’s even darker and weirder than all that.

Let’s skip over to the story of Icarus, the boy whose father invents wings that allow him to fly until they don’t. (Kerspslat.) Did you ever wonder what, exactly, Icarus and his father were trying to fly away from? Those faulty wings were no mere weekend project. Icarus and his father, the inventor Daedalus, were actually in prison in a tower on Crete, and they were sent there for two reasons: (1) to prevent Daedalus from blabbing about the Labyrinth, the maze he was forced to invent in order to trap the minotaur; and (2) because Daedalus was being punished for indirectly creating the minotaur. You see, Daedalus’s reputation for inventing was known even back in his day. And according to some versions of the minotaur story, his knack for inventing machinery proved a little too helpful. Queen Pasiphae was married to King Minos, ruler of Crete, who had offended the sea god Poseidon by declining to sacrifice a rather stunning bull. In revenge, Poseidon made Pasiphae fall madly in love with the bull, and when her human form proved incompatible with the bull’s, Pasiphae asked Daedalus for his assistance. The solution? A cow suit, logically enough, which Pasiphae crawled into and which was passable enough — and equipped with a rear flap, apparently — that she soon conceived the minotaur.

pompeiian fresco of daedalus and icarus presenting pasiphae with the bull suit

So yeah — the minotaur looks like he’s half-man, half-beast as a result of the most obvious possible reason: he literally is. A human woman, under a love spell placed by the mythology’s most vindictively manipulative sea god, did the nasty with a male bovine, and she subsequently gave birth to a child-like middle ground between bull and woman. (I wonder what she called the baby. Minnie? Lil Moo?) It’s interesting, really, that King Minos’s reaction to this news wasn’t to slay the boy-calf but to let it grow to burly, bashy, flesh-gnashy adulthood, whereupon he required imprisonment in the Labyrinth. Leniency for the minotaur not withstanding, Daedalus got the same fate: imprisonment, though curiously not in the super-prison that Minos just had Daedalus build but in a facility that’s easier to escape — thus the wings, thus the escape, thus Icarus going kersplat. (I assume Icarus was imprisoned alongside his dad as the result of some kind of father-son internship. So it goes.)

So remember, the next time you’re confronted with a minotaur — on TV, in your dreams, in literature, in some kind of withdrawal-induced nightmare vision — take a moment to remember that the minotaur doesn’t exist as do the centaurs or the mermaids, who are a half-human, half-animal race unto themselves. No, the minotaur is a one-off, thankfully, as well as classical mythology’s cautionary tale against bestiality.

You have to wonder, though: How much more disturbing would the minotaur have been if he had been a human head on a bull body?

Mythology, previously:

• SPERMO!
• The best unit of measurement ever, the millihelen
• The most pathetic character in all of Greek mythology
• The creepy thing where they had robots back in Greek mythology times
• Snakes on a Dame
• The slasher movies of Greek mythology

The Translucent Dahlia (Or — A Short Story That Should Stay Short)

Elizabeth Short died at only twenty-two years old, her list of accomplishments numbering few. I don’t count an arrest in Santa Barbara for underage drinking as a resume-worthy, but in her brief, mostly unremarkable life, it serves as a high point, sadly enough.

Of course, most people know her, in a sense, because in death she became the Black Dahlia, one of California’s most famous murder victims. And to this day, her killer has never been identified. Given that her mutilated body was found in 1947, it’s quite likely that Short’s killer has also died. But her legacy lives on, mostly as a result of the infamously grisly state of her corpse, the sensationalist reporters who covered the investigation and later writers who cobbled into her story a considerable amount of fiction.

And this, I say, is fucked up.

I've written here before about the strangeness of taking creative liberties with Short’s story — only one of the many problems I had with the 2006 Brian de Palma movie, The Black Dahlia. But I was reminded of this awkwardness again last week, when I watched American Horror Story. Yeah, I’m still watching it, not because I think it’s scary but mostly because I’m curious to see what campy heights (depths?) the writers will take the story.

On last week’s episode, Short, played by Mena Suvari, showed up as one of the ghosts haunting the Murder House. (Yes, that’s what I’m calling it, in the same way that I called Lost’s setting Four Toe Island. I simply don’t have a better name for it.) Not that the house needed a resident spook, exactly, since at least thirteen others were already hovering about, and since I'm nitpicking, where the hell was she in any of the preceding episodes? Lost in the linen closet? It’s not that big of a house. Whatever the case, she’s there in Los Angeles County’s single most problematic piece of real estate, rubbing elbows and other body parts with Moira the Nympho Hag, Jessica Lange’s ghost children and the crazy-eyed sister of the girl playing Lisbeth in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (Awkward Christmas for the Mara family.) As a character, Ghost Dahlia is a little superfluous, maybe, but superfluity is tough to gauge in a Ryan Murphy creation.

Irrespective of American Horror Story’s status as the most Karo syrup-y campfest this side of Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, I have two main objections to Short’s inclusion as a character.

First, it wasn’t necessary to present her as the Black Dahlia when they could have just made her a Black Dahlia, so to speak. I understand that the writers have enjoyed riffing on historical crimes in Southern California history. That’s a good instinct on this sort of show. I didn’t have a problem with the second episode’s introduction of the R. Franklin character — the psycho who killed two women in the house in 1968, back when it was a dorm — because they futzed with the details of Richard Speck enough that the plot didn’t directly piggyback off Speck’s real-life murders. That’s what makes the Black Dahlia’s appearance “as is” seem so awkward. They could have easily made her a Black Dahlia-like character in the way R. Franklin was a Speck-like character. Why spare the victims of one tragedy the indignity of becoming camp caricatures but throw Elizabeth Short on the sofa with Moira (hot Alex Breckenridge version) for some titillating lesbi-action?

Secondly, in placing Short’s ghost in the Murder House, the writers had to explain that she died there. All the house’s ghosts were humans who died within the property boundaries, apparently, so it was deemed necessary to show her getting gassed unconscious by a dentist and expiring while the good doctor screwed her on the operating chair. The problem I have with American Horror Story inventing a character to be Short’s killer is the same problem I had with the The Black Dahlia revealing a histrionic Fiona Shaw as the culprit. It’s shitty. It gives the viewer a false sense of closure about a real-life murder, when the person who most deserves justice — the dead girl — doesn’t get that. It’s in bad taste. Again, I know — Ryan Murphy project. But there’s a difference between an eye roller of Glee musical number and appropriating the tragic end of some poor girl for the purposes of cheap entertainment.

I know biopics reinterpret the lives of important people. As I write this, I could run out to a theater and watch fictionalized, dramatized takes on both Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover. But while these two earned their place in history as a result of how they lived, all Elizabeth Short has is how she died. (Seriously: Off the top of your head, how much do you know about her?) I don’t care that it’s been more than fifty years since some tossed the wreck of her body into some brush on the side of the road. I don’t think I want to see a fictional solution to her enduring mystery.

Alas, I’ve read that Suvari will be back for at least another episode, playing Elizabeth Short and not, like, Sharon Tate, though I would not blink if Murphy were to pull such a move. I can only hope the writers find a way to artfully intertwine her story with that of the other real-life personage who appeared in last week’s episode: the Pope. Yes, the Pope is a character in American Horror Story. I only hope he was majorly weirded out when he watched this episode.

Stray thoughts:

• Upon appearing on this show, Mena Suvari can now count American Pie, American Beauty and American Horror Story among her credits.
• Fiona Shaw from The Black Dahlia happens to be the same actress who played the female heavy in the Super Mario Bros. movie. Neat, huh?
• I couldn’t think of a way to artfully work in “She looks just like that dead girl,” that infamous line from The Black Dahlia, spoken more than once about Hilary Swank’s resemblance to Elizabeth Short, who in the film is played by Mia Kirshner. I’d just like to point out that Swank looks no more like Elizabeth Short or Kirshner than she does Lucille Ball, and I’d like to point out that Suvari doesn’t much resemble Short either.

Not Yet Having Seen American Horror Story

I can’t say that I’m not excited about American Horror Story. I am, despite my feelings toward Glee, the latter two-thirds of Nip/Tuck and Ryan Murphy in general. TV generally doesn’t do horror and rarely does it well — remember NBC’s Fear Itself? — but I’m hopeful about the prospect of people tuning in every week to see something strange, something disturbing and something unlike anything else on basic cable. After all, horror allows the kind of broad metaphors that writers can use to touch on subjects that remain off-limits to other genres, and I’m fairly certain that American Horror Story will go deeper than, say, our nation’s concerns about the housing market. (The devaluation of homes is scary! Get it?)

But independent from the actual show, which premieres tonight, there’s the advertising.

Every night, I drive beneath a billboard that displays the above image: a pregnant lady pointing her womb fruit at some sort of vinyl fetish sex ninja straight out of Ryan Murphy’s darkest fantasy. My reactions gradually shifted from “This is a really messed-up thing to see every day” to “I’m kind of glad I don’t have kids in the car asking what Midnight Stealth Spider-Man™ is doing to the trampy lady” to “What an interesting-seeming family” to “Hey there, Mr. sexy Gimp! You have yourself a good evening!” In short, the shock wore so quickly that I know find that to be the disturbing thing. I hope this won’t hold true for the actual show.

In any case, I will be watching tonight, eagerly waiting for the debut of Vinyl Man, whom I already have come to view as a friendly acquaintance.

(For reference’s sake, here is my post about why I stopped watching Glee and why I’m okay with that.)