"hear the werewolf’s howling as a mourning sob over the repetitive nature of city living"

Consider the werewolf

by Josephine Livingstone 

/ OCTOBER 31, 2013

Karl Steel, a professor at Brooklyn College who has written about Marie de France’s werewolf tales, agrees that the beast-in-man werewolf model is not a useful one. Instead, he thinks, werewolves remind us how strange are the distinctions between man, wolves, domestication, and wildness. “The dog is a wolf that has followed humans into their homes,” says Steel. “And a werewolf, similarly, [is] a human that has allowed itself to be domesticated in the other direction, into the homes of wolves.”

Our relationship to the over-built urban environment, our taming: that is what the werewolf evokes, for me. There’s nothing wrong with being a wolf-man, as long as you don’t happen to be one in New York (or Paris, or London, for that matter). Werewolves of all sorts—from the Romanian husband nibbling on his wife’s dress toProfessor Lupin—run off to the forest at the crucial moment. The wildness in the werewolf needn’t be read as simple impulsiveness. Why not think instead about what we have done to wildness, the wildness in our bodies but also our environment, and hear the werewolf’s howling as a mourning sob over the repetitive nature of city living?

In the end, the werewolf remains our creation—fictive but somehow true. To express this paradox at the werewolf’s heart, we might do worse than to turn to the lines that begin the screenplay for 1985’s Teen Wolf:

“Due to our strong personal convictions, we wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult. Nor do we propose that any beings, supernatural or otherwise, actually exist.

(page over)

Most of what follows is true.”