Annalee Newitz,
Pretend we’re Dead. Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 8223 3745 2
US$21.95 (pb)
223pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)

Remember when intelligent commentary on horror movies was virtually an oxymoron. When mainstream reviewers routinely rejected virtually every release and treated the genre like some kind of failure of the imagination or insult to the intelligence or both. (The New York Times often used the phrase ‘From hunger’ in their abbreviated television reviews as shorthand for wholesale dismissal. Most horror films were treated by them as if they were an undeniably innutritious form of nourishment.) When you read the fan-oriented and only occasionally published commercial magazine Castle of Frankenstein in order to affiliate with other people who took the genre seriously? (Not Famous monsters: too many puns and effusive worship of horror icons.) When the writings of Carlos Clarens and Ivan Butler were about the only in-depth treatments of the genre that illustrated some semblance of sympathy? Notwithstanding the fact that both authors for the most part treated anything that came even close to being over the top or infused with even a modicum of gore as beneath their contempt. Remember how books like David Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror or the Robin Wood-edited collection The American Nightmare burst through the veneer of censure and superficiality as though some kind of new language were all at once being spoken? Suddenly it seemed neither idiotic nor egg-headed to refer to the allusions to Sade, Byron or Baudelaire in Hammer films or draw attention to the sophisticated social critique that nestled amongst the blood spurting in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Italy/USA 1978).

I evoke these memories not only to evidence my own age bracket but also to illustrate how much distance has been covered in the course of three or four decades so far as the thoughtful assessment of the horror genre is concerned. It is as well an effort to place in a larger temporal if not intellectual context Annalee Newitz’s Pretend we’re Dead. Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Her work skillfully builds upon, and reorients, the kind of approach that Wood and Pirie initiated, and then others, including Linda Williams (Hard Core: Power, Peasure and the Frenzy of the Visible) or Carol Clover (Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film) or William Paul (Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy) extended. Her assertion that “Gloopy zombies and entrail-covered serial killers are allegorical figures of the modern age, acting out with their broken bodies and minds the conflicts that rip our social fabric apart” illustrates the notion that the genre invariably implants its narrative conventions and visual tropes in the culture and society at large (2). Whereas once such outrageous subject matter was presumed to be adolescent at best and empty-headed at worst, the recognition now infuses thoughtful audiences that the horror genre has become one of if not, perhaps, the preeminent forum for social commentary in the popular cinema. The recent debates, for example, over whether Eli Roth’s Hostel (USA 2005) either critiques false assumptions of American expectionalism or sampled them simply to savage yet another set of attractive bodies for a bloodthirsty public reinforces the potential for provocation inherent in the genre.

Newitz picks up on a notion that may not be striking in and of itself but gains in both credibility and complexity the longer she tackles it. To assert that “capitalism’s monsters cannot tell the difference between commodities and people” may, perhaps, be nothing more than a sophisticated reiteration of Charlton Heston’s shocked assertion that “Soylent Green is made out of people!” (2) More than one sage and more than a few schlockmeiesters recognize how much capital, intellectual and otherwise, can be raised by following through on the associations that can be assigned to bloodthirstiness. What Newitz brings to the enterprise is a fine wit, a sharp mind and a subtle style, but, most of all, a sense that we need to think more deeply about the monsters that roam about our cultural and social landscape. She focuses on how a consideration of class, for example, complicates this discussion and draws out the ideological substance in what seem to be just squirm-inducing fare. As much as anything, she wants to abandon the notion of the monster as an excluded ‘other’: one both explained by as well as explained away through its distinction from what we determine to be ‘human’. Her bogeymen are made, not born: “Capitalist monsters are, to put it succinctly, freaks of culture, not freaks of nature” (9). It is the “constructedness” of the characters that compels her interest (9).

To pursue these notions, Newitz subdivides her subject into three realms: mental monstrosity, bodily monstrosity, and narrative monstrosity. She associates the first with mad doctors and serial killers, whom she characterizes as individuals driven insane through the fact that their lives are forced upon them by profit-making institutions. Her examples range from Norman Mailer’s treatment of Gary Gilmore, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to John McNaughton’s blistering film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (USA 1986). Bodily monstrosity she affiliates with the undead and robots, beings who have been “physically disfigured by the very economic practices which grant them immortality and superhuman powers” (11). The examples here include the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Chaplin’s Modern Times (USA 1936), RoboCop (USA 1987) and the cyberpunk canon of William Gibson and Rudy Rucker. Finally, the notion of narrative monstrosity addresses “the hideous and sometimes pathetic creatures who participate in the culture industry as producers and consumers” (12). The “media monsters whose lives are ruled by commodity images and corporate propaganda” are illustrated by such films as A Face in the Crowd (USA 1957), Whatever happened to Baby Jane(USA 1962) and Network (USA 1976) (12).

To illustrate how sophisticated as well as snarky Newitz can be, her take on the ‘body-part’ subgenre inspires both chuckles and cheers of approval. She observes, “it is striking how often the madness of the doctor in contemporary movies is a kind of defense against going prole. As long as the doctor remains mad, he isn’t a part of the mental labor force doing someone else’s work, thinking someone else’s thoughts” (79). Madness illustrates a kind of Promethean disdain of, and distance from, other menials. This can be observed in the fiendishly ingenious experimentation carried on Jeffrey Combs’s Herbert West in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator(USA 1985). Nemitz draws attention to how much West’s ire and ultimate insanity feed off his position as low man on the medical totem pole, and that his attacks upon the bodies of his medical school Dean and a head surgeon result as much as anything from the revenge of the repressed.

Furthermore, in Gordon’s topsy-turvy universe, control of physical bodies permits control of the means of production: in the case of West, producing animated corpses and in the case of the surgeon, producing animated corpses whose minds he can control. Even more intriguingly, Newitz points out the hilarious illustration of the mind-body dualism in the film, when a loose, and outraged, colon from an animated corpse takes on a mind of its own and attacks West. (She foregoes analysis of the even more perverse episode wherein the surgeon’s mind propels his detached body to engage in cunnilingus: a scene that twenty years later still induces infectious laughter and righteous awe.)

Engaging as Pretend we’re Dead may be, Newitz’s insightful readings and involving prose style do not remove the one caveat I have about her worthwhile study. Newitz admits at the start that her attention is drawn by how “popular and literary fictions allegorize extremes of economic boom and bust in the United States during the past century” (12). Consequently, her interest lies more in the points made by her examples than the means with which they articulate those ideas. I wish Newitz applied her insight and her wit to the stylistic dimension of popular culture, for sometimes I find her examples are more interesting to talk about than watch or read. To stick with the cinema of severed appendages, while Stuart Gordon might be able to keep his tongue firmly in cheek, films like Body Parts (USA 1991), The Hand (USA 1981) and Frankenhooker (USA 1990) demand more latitude than they deserve in order to separate the ideological dialogue from the insipid dreck.

David Sanjek,
BMI Archives.

Created on: Saturday, 9 June 2007