After monster theory? Gareth Edwards’s Monsters

This essay suggests that the emergency conditions of the climate crisis in the twenty-first century necessarily demand a transformation of the kind of depth hermeneutics typically associated with the ‘monster theory’ that developed in the 1990s in the wake of queer theory. Using Gareth Edwards’s 2010 film Monsters as its base text, this essay suggests we look to Latour’s resistance to the hermeneutic, the allegorical and the sublime and instead commit to reading the networks of associations that are signalled on the surface of Monsters, a film that comes to be very precisely about the conditions of ‘gore capitalism’ at the US/ Mexico border.