When There's No More Room in Hell, Should We Read Stanley Cavell?

We are born with the dead:See, they return, and bring us with them.

—T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

I

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." The memorable tagline of George A. Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead offers an explanation for the apocalyptic situation the film depicts: When the afterlife has been foreclosed, death will enter life in an unprecedented way. The visualization of that unprecedented form of death is so-called zombies, a horde of resurrected, contagious, homicidal corpses driven exclusively by a relentless cannibalistic drive. Since 1968, when Romero introduced the image in his earlier film Night of the Living Dead, its career has been nothing short of astonishing and has attracted scholarly scrutiny in media studies circles where Stanley Cavell's work is also of interest. My title, then, is asking in the first instance whether the writing of Cavell can tell us anything about the zombie image.

Two immediate considerations may give us pause. The first is a matter of decency. Stanley Cavell's death is recent and real, mournful for his friends and in a different way for the traditions of thought to which his life contributed. The zombie image, on the other hand, is an obscene cartoon of death, the lurid isolation of organic mortality at the expense of the fatal seriousness that attends the passing of an actual human being. In confronting Cavell's thought with this image here and now, we might rightly wonder if the promise of insight is great enough to justify such an ostensibly disrespectful reminder of our genuine loss. There is no sufficient response to this first hesitation but the eventual insight. Still, in a preliminary way, we can encourage ourselves by recognizing that the domain of mass distraction to which the zombie image is indigenous, in its very triviality and everydayness, has affinities with the "ordinary" that Cavell himself frequently evoked. Cavell's thought, then, may well be advantageously placed to elucidate not just the zombie image as an abstraction but precisely its implications for the actual deaths we mourn.

But for that to be the case, Cavell would need to have said something helpful about zombies, or at least their implications. And this is the second hesitation, lying closer to his thought. Cavell wrote extensively on movies, to be sure, but not on zombie movies. These are not the kind of films that he tends to discuss. Their vulgar sensationalism and often exploitative motivations are far from the randy decorum of the classical Hollywood comedies and the opulent poignancy of the classical Hollywood melodramas Cavell celebrated in his major books on film. Nor is this distance just a matter of private taste in movies. It registers an existential sensibility inscribed into the texture of Cavell's thought. Cinema, the cinema that Cavell found worth writing about, he takes to be fundamentally seductive. Comedies of remarriage and melodramas of unknown women unfold as love affairs, either happy or unhappy, and the attractiveness of the stars to one another in the story blends seamlessly with their attractiveness to us in the audience.¹ The World Viewed provides extensive readings of movies in which seduction plays a central role—Vertigo, The Graduate, Jules and Jim, The Rules of the Game, for example—and finds itself consistently pushed against an explicitly pornographic limit to cinema. Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears describe genres constructed around the achievement and forgoing, respectively, of a particular concept of marriage, one that grounds it entirely in active mutual consent and understands in these directly interpersonal terms the aesthetic and therefore philosophical significance of the films at issue. This may not say much more than that Cavell situates cinema among the central currents of Western dramatic self-representation, that his remarriage genre, for instance, with its formal precedents in William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen, participates in Western narrative structures that have long cast essentially human experience in terms of seduction and erotic reconciliation. Whatever the explanation, the recognizably humanistic cast of Cavell's...