In interviews and debates, Paglia would spout aphoristic daggers at her opponents: mostly liberal academics and contemporary feminists, with Gloria Steinem a particularly manic obsession. Her quick, declarative speech-style rattled off grand cultural verdicts, insightful analyses of art history, and bitchy asides like a machine gun discharging a belt of ammunition: “leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist”; “male urination is a form of commentary”; “incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name”.

In subsequent essays and books, Paglia defended child pornography and snuff films; treated campus sexual assault as hysteria; framed the AIDS epidemic as nature’s revenge against homosexual excess; and defended both the right to have an abortion and the right to characterize abortion as murder. Also, somehow, Madonna “cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.”

Paglia’s performance as popular provocateur was ridiculous, at times insightful but more often than not just exhausting. This potential to overburden an audience is clear from her debut book — both in its excruciating length and in its sweeping generalizations about history and the human condition. As critic Roger Kimball noted, Paglia has a tendency “to skid suddenly from the measured to the outrageous, from the reasonable and well supported to the utterly fantastic”. Yet for every misstep in Sexual Personae, every overconfident declaration, there follows a statement so electric one has to pause to breathe it all in:

“A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage.”

The ambition of Sexual Personae is nothing less than civilizational, charting an epic battle across centuries in Western culture between Apollonian form and Dionysian chaos. This dynamic was first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), describing the twin artistic impulses of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche cast the god Apollo as the deity of image, dream, distance and beautiful illusion; and the trickster Dionysus as the god of music, intoxication and ecstatic dissolution. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy reached excellence by holding these forces together and giving form to suffering without denying the terrifying, irrational energies bubbling sinisterly underneath.

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Paglia translates this Nietzschean lens beyond the narrow purview of Greek tragedy to encompass a variety of motifs throughout Western aesthetics. In her hands, Apollo is line, distance, sculpture, classification, hierarchy, but also the eye, the column and the sculpted hard body. Dionysus is music, frenzy, sex and intoxication but also the “chthonian” in nature: the dark, abject and underworldly — including mud, blood, rot and ooze.

Sexual Personae goes yet further: in marrying Nietzsche with Freud, linking embodied sex differences and familial psychodrama to the production of different visual art forms. Under Paglia’s vision, heterosexuality and Greek tragedy are one and the same. Womanhood has a rightful mythic place within the Dionysian, while masculinity exists as an anxious Apollonian defense against engulfing nature. Female embodiment is the unbearable truth of chthonian forces: the body as a site of blood, fertility, vulnerability and cyclical shifts in mood. Female sexuality is shaped less by a single linear drive than by blurring states of receptivity and sensitivity. In contrast, testosterone-fueled male embodiment, in Paglia’s view, is “manic depressive” driven by obsessive projective urges of spontaneous desire, visual literalness, violence, competition and excitation.

In Paglian speculative pre-history, Dionysian matriarchy reigned supreme, an “earth cult” of animality, death, vegetation and maternal abundance. Pre-historic art centered on fertile womanhood, epitomized by the Venus of Willendorf, with her swollen belly, pendulous breasts and exaggerated hips. “She is the too-muchness of nature, which man longs to direct to his salvation” notes Paglia.

It is in Ancient Egypt that we see the masculine Apollo take control. Egyptian art is described by Paglia as an intricate balancing of “earth cult” with “sky cult”. The bust of Nefertiti is all geometry and symmetry, the cosmetic correction of swollen Dionysian fertility idols. For Paglia, “Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity”. This invention of refinement is epitomized by Egyptian feline cults, particularly of Bastet, as cats are those “uncanny creatures of the night” who mold elegance with vicious cruelty. This meshing of Apollonian and Dionysian forces also gives rise to the first “sexual personae” or recurrent erotic archetypes which plague Western culture: the femme fatale, the androgyne, the vampire, the beautiful boy and the Great Mother.

Ancient Greek civilization would continue this blending of forces. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, war, lust, pride, grief and death are not sanitized nor moralized but beautified in myth and image. Greek theology is a sky cult but with roots in the earth. The Olympians are luminous fascists playing in the primordial goo in which man is drowning. It’s here that we get the first portrayals of war-like womanhood, which Paglia views as distinctive of Western culture. The Amazonian myth, Artemis the Huntress and glorious Athena are projections of a male mind seeking to reconcile nature’s engulfing feminine power with the hard outlines of heroic form. The kouros — free standing sculptures of male youths — depict smooth, hard, youthful, bodies detached from the muck of reproduction. They exist, for Paglia, as “a living idol of the Apollonian eye”.

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Whilst Nietzsche documents a decline moving from the early tragic vision of Homer into the rise of Socratic rationalism, Paglia sees such times of “decadence” as cauldrons for great art. We see during this later period an incapacity for culture to integrate the Dionysian, which it then must aestheticize or condemn. Euripides’ Bacchae shows civilization unable to contain the feminized frenzy and liquefying force of Dionysus. In the playwright’s Medea, the barbarian sorceress becomes another eruption of chthonian womanhood into civic order.

It’s as we move out of antiquity that the central thesis of Sexual Personae becomes rather unconvincing. If you share Paglia’s vision of history, there is no aspect of Western literature or visual art that doesn’t contain some veiled reference to sexual personae. In her pagan eyes, the entire edifice of Western art is merely a series of veiled projections against devouring mothers, oozing sex, lust for twinkish ephebes and hidden transsexual desire.

That’s not to say all her claims are implausible. The Renaissance, of course, sought to revive pagan iconography along with corresponding sexual personae in the process. That Donatello’s “David” is “perverse and pederastic” is no coincidence. Also inarguable is that Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is blatant Apollonian aestheticism, womanhood masked and constrained in beauty. Finally, there’s no denying that the 18th-century dandy is pure pagan throwback. Oscar Wilde, who gets two chapters all to himself, is decadent aestheticism free of womanly influence with his lust for rent boys and cult of beauty.

There is also merit in Paglia’s notion in Sexual Personae that there are two strands of Romanticism: one strand epitomized by Rousseau in his sentimentalization of nature as innocence, and the other by the Marquis de Sade, who embraced nature as Dionysian cruelty and domination. For Paglia, it was the tendency of Romanticism to flip from the former to the latter which gave rise to the decadent genres of gothic horror, where nature’s ugly side is masked through sexual personae of vampires and ghouls.

All the same, Paglia has to make some ridiculous leaps in order to extend her psychosexual drama across centuries of art. It’s one thing to say that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is “the most extended meditation on sex in the history of poetry”. It’s quite another to claim that the English epic is mere set dressing for Spenser’s desire to explore a “encyclopedic catalog of perversions” that would make Bonnie Blue blush. Goethe’s genius apparently came from an inner “hermaphroditism”; Lord Byron was channeling the beautiful boy personae linking him spiritually with — I kid you not — Elvis Presley given their shared “brooding menace” and “urbane magnanimity”. By the time you get to “Emily Dickinson is the female Sade” it’s difficult to mount any resistance. Sure, why not?

It can be tempting to extend Paglia’s critique into the 21st century, as she did in the Nineties as part of the feminist “sex wars” over pornography and BDSM. Is looksmaxxing a masculine Apollonian resistance? Do K-pop idols signal the “beautiful boy” is in full bloom? Is the trans movement a sign of burgeoning decadence in culture? However, this would be continuing the mistake in assuming our pagan heritage is still within us. Under Paglia’s theory of the Western eye, our visual culture of buzzing screens and ceaseless images should be a high point of Apollonian artistic achievement. That it isn’t should signal that there is more to cultural flourishing than dazzling spectacle.

The strongest parts of Sexual Personae remain in its early chapters describing the pagan vision of early civilization. A pagan view of modern culture is desperately needed as an alternative to the increasingly exhausting ideologies of liberal progressivism and Christian nationalism. Nietzsche’s vision of an intricate integration of both Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life in pagan culture, a beautiful melding of the primal and the classical, remains a powerful ideal. However, Paglia’s simplification of these elements — her visions of a humanity separated into two distinct groups with one side responsible for the entirety of civilization and the other signaling its imminent downfall — is absurd.

Given the questionable validity of Freudian psychoanalysis, one has to wonder why man, just as much a composite of ooze and filth as woman, is not also at risk of signaling dissolution. Paglia’s oft-quoted line that “[i]f civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” envisions a certain heroic, stable masculinity that has not existed since the fall of the Roman Empire. Your average modern man is, both physically and spiritually, more Venus of Willendorf than Achilles.

Perhaps, a more universal pagan lesson can be taken from Sexual Personae, free of gender war and silly provocation: that it is our duty to our Western heritage to wrestle beauty and splendor from the muck and that both sexes are required for the hard labor of civilization.

Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pa., Weapons opens with 17 children from the same third grade classroom running away from their homes at precisely 2:17 a.m., and vanishing into the night. The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is startled to find only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), in her classroom. The story then unfolds in nonlinear, overlapping vignettes, a structure Cregger patterned after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). 

The first vignette belongs to Justine. An angular, frizzy-headed woman in her early 3os, Justine has a history of professional misconduct (hugging a student—gasp), alcoholism, and promiscuity — making her an easy target for a grief-wracked community desperate for answers. The townspeople’s suspicions send her into a booze-fueled spiral of paranoia and depression. Partly because she loves her students, and partly to avoid being scapegoated, Justine sets out to unravel the mystery. 

Her persecution intensifies when an unknown harasser beats on her door at night and paints “WITCH” in red on her car. This is clever misdirection: Cregger elicits our sympathy for a wrongly maligned woman so we will prematurely discount the possibility that an actual witch is behind the children’s disappearance. The real threat emerges when Justine fixes upon Alex, the sole remaining third-grader, as the likeliest source of information. Snooping around his house, she spies Alex’s parents through a crack in the newspaper-plastered windows. They’re sitting on the couch, catatonic, the home in disarray.

Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is on his own quest to save his son, Matthew, one of the missing children. At first, he suspects Justine (it was Archer, we learn, who vandalized her car), but circumstances compel the two to join forces, and they become the emotional heart of the story. Archer confirms Justine’s suspicions when he learns from home CCTV footage that all the children ran from their front doors in a straight line, converging on Alex’s house.

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Vignettes foregrounding other characters bring us nearer to the truth. A homeless tweaker named James (Austin Abrams), spars hilariously with Justine’s policeman ex-boyfriend Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). A plotline centered on Maybrook Elementary School’s principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), is alternately amusing and terrifying. It’s James, while burglarizing the Lilly home, who is the first to lay eyes on the children: locked in the basement, catatonic like Alex’s parents.

Finally, Alex’s vignette gives it to us in full: his gravely ill great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who had come to stay with the Lillys, presumably to die, turns out to be a witch who uses blood magic to take over her victims’ bodies and feed on their life force. When Alex’s parents prove too paltry a meal, Gladys forces him to retrieve personal items from each of his classmates. With these she performs a ritual giving her control over the children, and summons them to the Lilly home at 2:17a.m. 

Cregger’s writing is magnificent. Each successive vignette scratches our itching questions in unexpected ways, illuminating ambiguities of character and situation, the narrative pace accelerating as the gestalt comes into focus. Allusions to Stephen King tease where the plot is headed and clue us in to its meaning. Gladys appears in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares in garish makeup reminiscent of It’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown, perhaps the most famous contemporary devourer of children. “2:17” recalls Room 217 of the Overlook Hotel, wherein young Danny is assaulted by a rotting crone who attempts to absorb his life force (Stanley Kubrick, in his movie adaptation, changed the room number to 237). Justine’s alcoholism also evokes The Shining, as does a scene when Alex’s rampaging parents poke their heads through holes in a bathroom door. 

Some viewers, primed to look for progressive undercurrents by Barbarian’s portrayal of a #MeToo abuser getting his comeuppance, will be tempted to read Weapons as a school-shooting metaphor. At first blush, this is a plausible interpretation. School shootings are the nearest real-life analog to the disappearance of a classroom of kids, and parents are as powerless against them as the parents in Maybrook. Even the kids’ body-language while running—arms outstretched like the “napalm girl”—recalls the suffering modern weapons inflict on children. During a nightmare, Archer sees a colossal AR-15 suspended like a dark beacon over his home, “2:17” glowing on its barrel like numbers on a digital clock. Is this meant to evoke the weapon favored by school shooters? 

A more nuanced reading, one that gives proper weight to Gladys’s characterization, however, shows school shooting to be a thematic red herring, overshadowed by another theme from Barbarian: the monstrous feminine.

Camille Paglia famously reads the history of Western culture through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus. The masculine Apollonian principle, with its love of mathematical reason and lucid distinctions, seeks to tame the feminine Dionysian, the fecund undifferentiation from which all life springs and, inevitably, returns. Paglia has written: “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface.” The symbol of the Dionysian (or chthonian) is the Great Mother, a primordial figure of myth who births her children only to devour them. She recurs in myths in various forms, some emphasizing her nurturing qualities, others her role as devourer. The lamiae of Greek mythology embody the latter aspect: ancient succubi who subsist on the blood of children, often depicted as women from the waist up, serpents from the waist down.

While the unjust persecution of Justine may warn us against scapegoating women, Gladys’s demonic ministrations scream that sometimes witches are real, and women can sometimes be culpable.

Gladys, wan and grotesquely aged, rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine, and even its more particular instantiation in the lamia. She derives her magic from a potted tree covered in thorns. In a nightmare, Justine catches Gladys on her ceiling. Only her torso is visible, her legs obscured as if buried in soil—like the roots of a tree or the tail of a snake. Her legs are hidden in the same manner when she appears to James in the forest. Underneath her clownishly red wig, her real hair consists of sparse, snake-like braids. (As Paglia has written, “Medusa’s snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.”) Gladys’s use of archaic language (she tells Principal Miller that Alex’s parents are sick with “consumption”) alludes to her being ancient. Then there’s her lair: the front door of the Lillys’ house opens on a beckoning darkness, an orifice descending into the earth.

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Instead of serving as a reference to school shootings, the long rifle in the film is an Apollonian instrument, a symbolic phallus that kills. By contrast, Gladys kills by absorbing her victims’ life force, or by influencing others to kill on her behalf. Even the zombified state of her victims speaks to the horror of the chthonian, which, per Paglia, “we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

It is precisely her chthonian character that makes Gladys so terrifying. Civilization is built on a swamp and might at any moment be subsumed. The Apollonian is powerless before the full force of the chthonian. The ubiquitous Ring cameras installed on Maybrook homes were parents’ attempt to keep the children safe, to control the uncontrollable; but technology cannot save us from primal forces. Archer, a construction manager who, in proper Apollonian fashion, tries to make sense of the mystery by plotting the children’s trajectories on a map, is in the end powerless before Gladys.

It is only when Alex extracts a hair from inside Gladys’s wig and harnesses her blood magic against her, that the good guys triumph. But it is a triumph not of the Apollonian, but of the chthonian against the chthonian: in a scene that recalls Pentheus’s dismemberment by the Maenads in Euripides’s The Bacchae, Gladys is torn limb from limb by the children formerly under her power.

The monstrous feminine is experiencing something of a revival lately, suggesting a rebellion against the ongoing domination of culture by feminist sensibilities. Films like The VVitch, Raw, Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Titane, Pearl, and The Substance are refreshingly reactionary, attesting that female agency has its dark side, that women are capable of astonishing violence against others, and against themselves. “The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant, archetypal realities,” Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae. The repressed, of course, has a habit of returning. In Weapons it returns with mythic, lyric eloquence.