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161 AUTEURDÄMMERUNG David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, and the Twilight of the (North) American Horror Auteur —Craig Bernardini The auTeur iS a zoMbie To the average mainstream video consumer accustomed to Blockbuster or Hollywood, the independent, “alternative” video store must appear a sort of Borgesian nightmare. Where the chains wallpaper their stores with new releases and shelve“older”films broadly by genre (drama, comedy, horror), the independents subdivide and re-categorize relentlessly. Foreign films may be divided by country— logical enough, given the larger selection than in the chains—and then divided again by genre (e.g.,“J-horror”). There will probably be a large“Cult” section, organized according to a manager’s whim. And then there is the defining feature of the alternatives: the “Directors” section, invariably organized alphabetically, where the alphabet is understood to be the great leveler of the global cinematic canon. Generic comedies and dramas, which together with new releases form the bulk of the chain video stores’ wares, are the alternatives’ leftovers. Auteur theory,it appears,did its job too well: the force that impelled film into the academy has survived a series of attempts on its life, often by reinventing itself in the guises of its would-be assassins.1 Perhaps,as PeterWollen once suggested,the theory’s resilience is a product of its particular relevance toAmerica.After all,it was those rugged individualists carving out territories inside the relatively more hospitable terrain of genre (territories already settled, of course, but only by the heathen), and circling their wagons against the hostile glare of the studios, whose canonization caused such a scandal. Ironically, the author’s death was pronounced at the moment when he was deemed to have arrived in Hollywood: the so-called director-as-superstar era (Wood, Hollywood 87).And if academics and film journalists have never managed to end their ambivalent, five-decade love affair with the auteur, it should come as no surprise that many liberally educated members of the general public (i.e., those who took a few craiG bernardini 162 film courses in college) remain enamored. In fact, I would speculate that a series of developments—the greater access to production information through the Internet; DVD packages featuring commentary tracks by“star”directors; and critics like Leonard Maltin appending a by-director section to the end of his immensely popular Video and Movie Guide—has fixed the auteur in the minds of more American moviegoers than at any time since the theory was first espoused. It is true that contemporary film criticism and journalism have a more sophisticated conception of the auteur than did those French mavericks who wielded him as a polemical hammer half a century ago. As the theory has accommodated itself to structuralism and poststructuralism, the auteur has devolved from transcendent cause to a“bundle of libidinous energies” set forth by psyche/society (Wexman 7), and finally to a “commercial strategy for organizing [audience] reception,” a “shell” of “material publicity” which has“effectively vacated the agency of a metaphysics of expressive causality and textual authority” (Corrigan 104, 118). To an extent, these academic resurrections of authorship have responded to broader cultural and technological shifts in production and consumption that have impacted, and continue to impact, the way texts are produced and consumed, and hence the way authorship is experienced by the broader public. And yet, if the auteur has indeed fallen from cause to commodity, I would argue that what is marketed is the nostalgia for authority itself. That is,in a time of fragmented authorship (Browning 40) and even more fragmented (hyper)consumption (Corrigan 27–29), the auteur appears as a harbor of stable meaning and authority, evoking a nostalgia similar to that Timothy Corrigan identified in contemporary audiences for lost collective rituals (15). Corrigan also notes that the auteur originally served to attract audiences to theaters by giving film a “romantic aura” that distinguished it from television (102). With the latter-day impact of television and home-viewing technologies on film production, however, film and auteur have come to reside in an interzone between the former’s romantic aura as art, and the purely commercial“producer’s medium” of television. Film, so to speak, is unable to die and become“just TV”; it“lives” like Videodrome’s Brian O’Blivion . . . only now in letterbox. The vacated agency of the romantic auteur, the limbo between (living) art and (dead) image—what could be more reminiscent of the zombie? It is a particularly fitting...

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