[Editorial] Blood, Muscle, and Red Paper: My Bloody Valentine’s Recording Hearts

“Pardon me for writing so much, but my hands and tongue go along with my heart.”

Catherine of Siena (14th cen.)

“From the heart comes a warning, filled with bloody good cheer, remember what happened as the 14th draws near!”

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

1. Hearts, Horrors, and Mystical Recording

Heart. A muscle pumping blood. Heart. A desire. Heart. The inner part of anything, its core. Heart. Seat of emotions. Heart. To remember, to know by heart via recitation and repetition. Heart. To like a lot, to love. I heart you. Heart. The ticker. The timekeeper, the recorder.

Around February 14, 270 AD, a Roman priest by the name of Valentine was dragged through the streets and beheaded for performing marriages in secret during the reign of Emperor Claudius the Cruel who banned marriages in hopes of boosting army recruitment. His thinking was as follows: if a man didn’t have to worry about missing his wife, he’d be more willing to fight. Valentine thought the ban was unnecessary and married couples anyway. Over two-hundred years later, in 496 AD, Pope Gelasius I established Saint Valentine’s Day to honor the date of his martyrdom. 

The lives of saints and mystics often read like horror stories, filled with violent deaths, extreme bodily practices, and painful stigmata. Mystical modes of recording are filled with channeling, transfigurations, and strange transmission. In other words, dialoguing with the divine is wild. Many mystics had dictated their visions to scribes, intermediaries between voice and page. Their recording processes and timelines are filled with large gaps between death and canonization, many versions of a story told in various ways over the years. Dates are approximate. Details, too. Saint Valentine is the patron saint of couples, marriages, love, the mentally ill, and those suffering from plagues. His most famous miracle is also the first Valentine. He wrote a letter about faith to a blind girl named Julia which ended: From Your Valentine. As the story goes, she was granted her sight so that she could read his note. 

Both love and recording are associated with the form and feel of the heart: a muscle, an image, and a flutter in the chest. To record is to repeat, reiterate, recite, rehearse, know by heart. And the heart (from the Latin cor) is a specific kind of recording device. My Bloody Valentine (dir. George Mihalka, 1981) is a wildly underrated slasher dealing in every way with the heart: its horrors, holidays, memories, ticks, and red paper scribbles. Its capacity for recollection and return. Its bloody, heavy, folded, and candied forms.

2. Physicality, Mines, and Time

Set in a town called Valentine’s Bluffs, the film opens a few days before Valentine’s Day, which will be celebrated for the first time in several years. We first hear the backstory from the local bartender, who warns a group of twenty-somethings to beware of this time of year. He says: 

This town is accursed. It all started twenty years ago. It was the night of the Valentine’s day dance at the union hall. It had been a tradition for over twenty years. Everyone was there except for seven miners who were at the mine, five of them down below in the mines. Anxious to get to the party, the supervisors left before the men were out, and they didn’t check the methane levels of the tunnels. Five men were buried alive as the town continued its party. For six weeks we dug to try to save them. After we broke through, one man was found alive: Harry Warden, who spent a year in the state mental hospital and one year later, on Valentine’s Day, he came back. He killed the supervisors who had left the post then cut out their hearts and stuck them in heart shaped candy boxes.

The human heart came with a note warning the town to never again hold a celebratory Valentine’s Day dance. As the local legend goes, every February 14th, Harry comes back to town and waits in the shadows of the mine to kill anyone who doesn’t heed his warning. As paper hearts and streamers decorate the small town, pinks and reds punctuating a grey, midwinter working class landscape, there’s a palpable sense of both excited anticipation and dread. The townspeople begin receiving human hearts in candy boxes again and the murders begin against the festive backdrop.

In The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han argues that under digitization, we’re losing the texture, scent, and thresholds of time as we zap, click, and scroll. He says: “Intervals or thresholds form part of the topology of passion. They are zones of forgetting, of loss, of death, of fear and anxiety, but also of longing, of hope, of adventure, of promising and expecting.” My Bloody Valentine shows this ambivalent and complicated topology of passion as the town awaits the bloody holiday. Scent and taste are close senses, often regarded as “lower” or less “intellectual” than the more distant experiences of sight and sound. These intimate senses are crucial to celebrations and memory and they escape technological capture. The bizarre recording device of the heart holds those fleeting experiences which shoot us into various zones of disgust, love, desire, longing, dread. Scent, the sense tied most closely to memory, snags progress and fast forward momentum. It spits us out and returns us as lingerers near the candy, mine, blood, world.

My Bloody Valentine was shot in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, a town whose mines closed in 1975. In the film, the mines are still open, though there is the sense of the beginning of the end. Taking this into account, the film could be read as forecasting a different kind of economy in the west, dilating the grey gap between industrial and financial capitalism littered with economic and emotional precarity. In an interview, the director George Mihalka explains:

We wanted to set this in some place where there is a slight hint of social consciousness. This was really the first film in that era where teenagers are actually talking about the fact that there's no future left[…]There's no jobs, there's no future. Not a lot of hope. It was, in a strange way, the first of a Generation X mentality. I think that's what may still resonate after all these years.

The film depicts working class bodies and landscapes and the form of a town whose heart – the labyrinthine mine – is getting gutted. How to envision what’s to come? The film shows the repetitive labors of mining but also comradery amongst workers and the celebratory feel at the end of a workday. There is the puncture and rootedness of marked time. Workday, weekend, holiday, feast, celebration, anticipation. With the outsourcing of factory work and the closing of mines, laborers are freed from the repetition of certain kinds of manual labor but also beset with a kind of anxiety that spun from a new kind of labor, a digital, always-streaming collapse between work-play, weekend-weekday. My Bloody Valentine is an important film for many reasons, including the way it forecasts the simultaneous mutation of recording devices and hearts. As the tagline read: There are many ways to lose your heart…

3. Varieties of Hearts and Recorders

The film’s protagonist is a group of friends, mine workers and their girlfriends, as opposed to one individual. After the dance gets cancelled due to the murders, they travel several hundred feet underground into the dark mine for a celebration of their own. The film climaxes in the mine, where we find out that Harry Warden has been dead for five years and he has an imitator in one of their friends. It ends ominously, the shadowy figure receding, suggesting that the killer will be back and the horrors will never really go away. 

The film’s brilliance is its ability to capture this in-between sensation so palpably, and the ways in which it re-inserts the scary sacrificial into a holiday smoothed over by consumerism. Digitization and its pervasive storage devices announce a crisis of memory and tactility. Not the internet, but the weird wisdom located of hidden ventricles. A town’s bartender. A coal mine. The film doesn’t moralize. Instead: it offers varieties of hearts: the freaky fist-shaped slab of meat in the center of a lovely paper box, red and pink paper ephemeral decorations, and recording devices in the form of pretty and eerie Valentines. What is a heart without a body? What is a rootless recording device? What secret recordings does a town hold in its tunnels and barrooms? What are the dangers of moving ceaselessly ahead without remembering? What is happening to our hearts? To time? When everything is recorded for us, where is the heart? If we never forget, how do we remember? In slippery streams of forever-data, how do we decide what’s important – what hurts, punctures, wounds, flutters? Where, in fact, is the heart? The center? The device which holds memory that has nothing to do with data or information and more to do with communal crises and ambiguities of love, fear, and shudder?

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says that it’s the punctum of a photograph, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” which leaves a mark. It is a moment of injury and error that stays with us and opens a space for memory. A heartbreak, a mark across an otherwise smooth surface without preference for “morality or good taste.” The form of the heart changes. It reaches a kind of maximum capacity, and breaks. My Bloody Valentine is filled with these formally puncturing moments: the many lights on the miner’s caps as they descend; hand cut hearts covering a blue and white laundromat; a heart bleeding into tissue paper; a sign: WELCOME BACK VALENTINE’S DAY; paint smudges on the town’s welcome sign; a bright pink heart on a dirty cement sidewalk; a pink circle of light like an awkward halo around the head of the miner.

The heart skipping a beat, the photographic error, the film pointing to layers of complicated history – catapulting us momentarily out of the film, celebration, rhythm, so that we remember we’re there. There is something very real about the film – you can tell it’s a real town with a real history. The characters look real. We can see the tired wear of the town and its inhabitants. Watching the film, my eye gets tactile, open to touch, scent, taste, the hard-to-name sensations of a past.

4. Trading Hearts

On Valentine’s Day – in the film and now – we trade hearts. The film shows sweet, folded-up paper and candy valentines being given and received alongside actual human hearts, literalizing the idea of giving a heart to someone, of hearting someone, re-inscribing the bloodied, sacrificial, and freakier physical elements of feasts, holidays, manual labor, and love. I want to return to this idea that mysticism and horror are linked, moving from Saint Valentine to the 14th century mystic Catherine of Siena, who, at age twenty-three, traded hearts with Christ and recounted the experience to her scribe and spiritual advisor in the visionary text The Dialogue. This mystical exchange of hearts is a dialogue both painful and thrilling, involving loss. Catherine claims she was without a heart for days as she awaited the divine heart after giving hers away. This kind of fiery, unmediated, intense experience of another – divine or otherwise – also signals a change in the rhythm and pace of speech and body. As she points out in the letter quoted at the start of this piece, the tongue, heart, and hands are all intricately linked – muscles become vessels moving at the speed of love, excitement, blood. Heart to heart, one enters into a conversation. And in My Bloody Valentine’s mines, we are given a certain depth of field and sensation. The heart, like the town, is not a flat piece of paper but an arena with many ventricles, tunnels, and hidden regions. 

Between Saint Valentine’s violent death and sainthood, two-hundred years of forgetting, remembering, forgetting, loss and accrual of other memories, residue attaching to and coming loose from the heart saint’s story. My Bloody Valentine reveals the heart as a many-chambered recording device, the messy medium through which memories get replayed, forgotten, lost, found again. What’s trapped in the vial of the heart? What’s leaking? What is the shape of the recording device?

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