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

While the monster genres of horror and science fiction have obviously been good for business in America, Annalee Newitz's book argues that the reverse is true as well. It stands to reason that a society's economic system and its ideology will be implicated in its nightmares, but this is not an angle usually explored in influential accounts of horror and sci-fi. It is generally accepted, and insisted upon, in most public forums that Americans are, or should be, satisfied with the country's current economic order. Direct confrontation

Reviews Panel:

Kathryn Adams, Fred Andersson, Wilfred Arnold, Kasey Asberry, Roy Ascott, Jan Baetens, Niran Bahjat-Abbas, Curtis Bahn, John F. Barber, Marc Battier, René Beekman, David Beer, Roy R. Behrens, Martha Blassnigg, Barry Blundell, Paul Brown, Annick Bureaud, Chris Cobb, Geoff Cox, Nicholas Cronbach, Sean Cubitt, Nina Czegledy, Andrea Dahlberg, Victoria de Rijke, Shawn Decker, Margaret Dolinsky, Dennis Dollens, Luisa Paraguai Donati, Maia Engeli, Anthony Enns, Enzo Ferrara, Eugenia Fratzeskou, Charlie Gere, George Gessert, Thom Gillespie, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Daniela Kutschat Hanns, Rob Harle, Craig Harris, Josepha Haveman, Paul Hertz, Craig J. Hilton, Coral Houtman, Amy Ione, Jude James, Stephen Jones, Richard Kade, Nisar Keshvani, John Knight, Veronique Koken, Judy Kupferman, Jim Laukes, Mike Legget, Shi Li, Catherine Lord, Kieran Lyons, Katia Maciel, Roger Malina, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, Florence Martellini, Malcolm F. Miles, Eduardo Miranda, Rick Mitchell, Robert A. Mitchell, Christine Morris, Michael Mosher, Axel Mulder, Frieder Nake, Angela Ndalianis, Marcus Neustetter, Martha Patricia Nino, Simone Osthoff, Jack Ox, Narendra Pachkhede, Robert Pepperell, Cliff Pickover, Alise Piebalga, Patricia Pisters, Michael Punt, Harry Rand, Sonya Rapoport, Trace Reddell, Hugo de Rijke, Alex Rotas, Bill Seeley, Aparna Sharma, George K. Shortess, Joel Slayton, Yvonne Spielmann, David Surman, Eugene Thacker, Pia Tikka, David Topper, Rene van Peer, Stefaan van Ryssen, Ian Verstegen, Claudia Westermann, Stephen Wilson, John Wood, Arthur Woods, Soh Yeong, Jonathan Zilberg.

with the issue in entertainment media is likely to cause discomfort (and to scare away industry support), as Newitz notes in her Introduction. Therefore, the distractions of the gory and slimy genres can be highly effective devices for bringing class and capital in beneath the surface mayhem.

Newitz explores the development in modern North American popular culture of five forms of monstrosity: the serial killer, the mad doctor, the undead, the robot and the entertainment media themselves. Serial killers, as understood in both slasher movies and true-crime novels, are extreme examples of the American obsession with work and productivity. "They kill," Newitz argues, "after reaching a point when they confuse living people with the inanimate objects they produce and consume as workers" (p. 31). Mad doctors act out the ambiguous relationship of professionals to capital and confront (insanely) the need to convert the pursuit of knowledge into economically meaningful labor (Newitz describes the plot of Re-Animator as a study in "upward mobility through madness" [p. 81]). Most intrepid is Newitz's reading of the undead subgenre. She sees it as originating in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft's dead but dreaming monstrosities are almost-living memorials of a world before white colonial conquest, with the stories' intermixture of nonhumans with humankind underlining an already obvious dread of racial impurity. This anxious legacy and its transformations are then traced through I Walked with a Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, Blacula and beyond. Newitz finds the cyborg subgenre, on the other hand, to begin with Chaplin's Modern Times. Robots and cyborgs, half worker machine and half thinking being, serve to explore the possibilities of freedom, including love, in a world centered on labor for others. Finally, Newitz discusses the culture industry and the monster stories featuring its products, its workers and its audiences, including the cases of viewers themselves consumed by media worlds or taken over by insidious messages and signals.

Newitz's accounts...