Hallowicked 2014 in Detroit with the Evil Clowns

My friend and colleague, Suzanne Bottelli, spent  this past week in Oaxaca, experiencing the preparations for El Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead.  Whatever you call your festivities this time of year –Samhain, All Hallows Eve – for many it marks the end of the pre-Christian calendar year, and thus a time when the veil that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead is at its thinnest and most permeable.  For this reason, we might have a picnic on the grave of our beloved relative, enjoying his or her company.  We might make sugar skulls, or an ofrenda with photos and mementos of our dead friends and relatives.  We might see spirits or skeletons, both friendly and menacing, dancing through the streets, waiting to be appeased with treats.  In the United States, of course, we celebrate Halloween – the children dressed in costumes, mildly threatening a “trick” if we don’t give them candy, are only mildly reminiscent of visitors from the other side, wanting something from us that we had better give them.

One of the most feared visitors on Halloween is, of course, the evil clown.  I spent this past week in Detroit, experiencing the preparations for Hallowicked, the end of the Juggalo calendar, a holiday older even than the Gathering itself. 

In Detroit's historic Fillmore theater

On this day every year, fans of the Insane Clown Posse gather in Detroit to celebrate the new year, anticipate a new “Joker’s Card” (or record album), reunite with old friends and join in a veneration of the Dark Carnival, the symbolic spiritual realm of the Wicked Clowns.  “It’s a full moon and the riddles are calling,” sings Violent J, a Falstaffian wicked clown of epic proportions who recounts his dream of the Dark Carnival every year at Hallowicked:

"I never been afraid of clowns 
But these clowns were different 
There was nothing funny about these clowns… 
They smiled, they juggled, they laughed 
But yet something was terribly, terribly wrong 
I didn't like these clowns for I could see through them 
I knew what they were really like 
I knew that this carnival that had come to my village 
Was an evil, evil thing."

During the song, “The Show Must Go On,” Juggalos welcome the “Dead dirty carnies, dead Juggalos” and exhort one another to “walk hand in hand with the dead carnival.” Many Juggalos paint their faces to resemble wicked clowns, and inspire fear in others who may not understand their intent.  But what is the root of this fear?  And what is their intent?  What do the clowns do to and for ordinary people? 

Despite their masks, clowns actually serve to unmask us, remove our illusions of grandeur and immortality, and remind us of our humanity.  Of course this is scary, since if I remember I am human, I have to remember that I am mortal, and therefore, as ICP reminds us in “Tilt-a-Whirl,”  “All you muthafuckas are gonna die.” 

The week before I left for Detroit, I went to see the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s production of Twelfth Night, which, like most of Shakespeare’s plays, features clowns. 

Feste and Toby Belch

The clowns of Twelfth Night are at times bawdy and drunken and at other times mysterious.  Much of the plot revolves around the clowns’ plot to bring the pompous and self-important Malvolio “down to earth.”  Malvolio is, as the clowns put it,

“the best persuaded of himself, so
crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is
his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him.” (Twelfth Night II.3) 

The clowns concoct an elaborate plot to humiliate Malvolio, eventually having him imprisoned as a madman.  In Seattle Shakespeare’s production, the director takes the imprisonment and torment of Malvolio to a darker level, involving straps and chains and the beginnings of dental torture.  While this is definitely not a choice I would have made, it made me think of the sinister nature of clowns in general, and of the Dark Carnival in particular, where the wicked clowns often sing about strapping people into freakishly violent carnival rides in order to strip them of their illusions about their lives.  

Click here to watch ICP sing "Halls of Illusion"

So shouldn’t I be afraid of these clowns?  Certainly, if I am like Malvolio, who spends his life in illusion and grandiosity, I will be afraid. Humility and mortality are frightening.  As the calaveras remind us, “as I am now, you soon will be.”  

costume for Dia de los Muertos

Juggalette

Even the drunken antics of Falstaff or Toby Belch can remind us of our own past mistakes and humiliating behavior.  But if I accept physicality, the flesh, and ultimately death and decay as part of being human, I gain a freedom from both pretension and shame.  “The Mighty Death Pop,” ICP’s latest album, reminds me that death is inevitable; both the Hatchet Man and the Greek goddess Atropos are symbols of the fragility of human life.  The words “humility” and “human” both have their root in “humus,” or “earth.”  If we remember we came from the earth and will return to it one day, we won’t be afraid of the clowns. They are the zanies, the rustics, with their hijinks, their schitcks, reminding us to lighten up, not to take ourselves so seriously.  To the lazzi of the commedia dell'arte we can add the lazzi of the Faygo. The Hatchet Man cuts through our bullshit and leaves us with an attitude like the Juggalos at their best, or like Feste, my favorite Shakespearean clown: “generous, guiltless and of free disposition.” 

Happy Hallowicked, everybody.