Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (review)

Many of us, I suppose, in academia and other professions, have found ourselves musing on occasion that our conspicuously successful colleagues may be lacking in a certain human decency. Annalee Newitz's sophisticated and rewarding Marxist analysis of the horror movie is here to reassure us that this is not just (or not only) embittered grumbling; indeed, it is here to tell us that these people are, in fact, insane monsters, and that the purpose of horror is to present symbolic narratives which articulate the corporate-capitalist nightmares many of us have to live. To this end, in her chapter on "Mad Doctors" and other monstrous professionals, Newitz quotes this remark from psychiatrist Douglas LaBier:

I began interviewing . . . fast-track career winners who had risen high in their careers and who had never complained about conflicts or problems on the job . . . What I discovered was that within this group were people who were very sick. Some were dominated by unconscious, irrational passions of power-lust, conquest, grandiosity, and destructiveness, or conversely by cravings for humiliation and domination.

(78)

In some ways this is gratifying to hear, but it is also exceptionally troubling to consider that all of our institutions of power and authority—political, cultural, economic, bodily—are by definition controlled by the mad. Conversely, those of us exercised by difficult and conflicted relationships with these institutions—"proletarianized professionals," in Newitz's figuration—"are 'sane' but gain less professional power as a result" (78).

Sooner or later, most studies of horror find themselves turning to Marx's famous dictum that, "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."¹ Few of us, however, have been tempted to literalize Marx's image, and instead the dominant paradigms for the study of horror, as Newitz notes, have tended to be variously psychoanalytic (David Punter, James B. Twitchell), feminist (Carol Clover, Barbara Creed), or else, most commonly, attempts to reclaim, celebrate, or understand forms of dissident or marginalized cultural aesthetics (David J. Skal, Christopher Frayling, Mikita Brottman, Kerekes and Slater). While some commentators, notably Chris Baldick and Frayling, have written at length on the connection between Marxist theory and horror, Newitz's is the only book-length study I know of which takes Marx's metaphor as its intellectual point of origin to produce a wholly consistent argument on the horrors of capitalist living, and of the central ideological importance of horror, in its very excesses and monstrosity, as the only cultural-aesthetic form which is really commensurate with the job of articulating this: "it is in extreme images of violence and misery that we find uncensored fears of capitalism. . . . Capitalism, as its monsters tell us more or less explicitly, makes us pretend that we're dead in order to live" (5–6). We work in order to survive, in ways which alienate us from our bodies or our minds; horror isolates those bodies, those minds, performing for its audiences the grotesque realities of our undead life as "homo economicus."

Where Newitz differs from any other writer on horror that I've read is in her insistence that her distinctively American, anti-capitalist tradition of horror begins not with the Enlightenment and its discontents, which find form in the European Gothic novel of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather with the naturalist novel of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is a startling and, at first sight, highly contentious position, but it's one that Newitz argues rather brilliantly. Naturalism, with its view of human agency completely incorporated into economic processes, and its consequent tendency towards extremes of melodrama and sensation as its characters become aware of and react to their...