Pretend
Were Dead: Capitalist Monsters in
American Pop Culture
by Annalee Newitz
Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina,
USA, 2006
223 pp., illus. b/w. Trade, $74.95; paper,
$21.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3745-2.
Reviewed by Nick Cronbach
Leonardo
nc@leonardo.info
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 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 of scientific and technological
monstrosity bring to mind that what is
often described as the irrational popular
fear and rejection of science and technology
is arguably better seen as resistance
to their control and manipulation (and
through them that of humanity) by those
who own and profit from the work. For
example, in debates over copyright law,
drug patents, genetic engineering, open-source
programming and network neutrality, special
corporate interests market themselves
as visionaries selflessly bringing society
into the future, while others see greater
progress possible outside of monopolistic
arrangements. The particular objections
to these arrangements in each case, however,
face a mobilized array of corporate spokespeople
and other well-funded ideologues deploying
a narrative of "free-market" progress
across all such debates. The resulting
effect gives resonance to Newitz's take
on the Matrix trilogy and its climactic
showdown against a replicated multitude
of business-suited artificial intelligences.
It also promotes the misapprehension of
science and technology as wholly inseparable
from corporate interests.
Given the effectively marginal status
of Newitz's position, a great point in
her favor is the straightforwardness of
her arguments. She does not complicate
them unnecessarily by resorting to obscure
language or taking long detours through
theoretical debate. A working journalist
as well as an academic, she is precise
and direct in assimilating complex ideas
into her discussion, taking scant paragraphs
to introduce the relevant theories of
Gramsci or Adorno and Horkheimer, for
example, where some would use several
pages to say less. Newitz's style is pitched
much more toward intellectually inclined
general readers and fans than other scholars,
which is perfectly in keeping with her
politics (so many other supposedly radical
writers seem much more concerned with
engaging experts in their fields than
with making their ideas accessible to
the uninitiated).
Often books that delineate ideological
dominance leave no room for optimism.
Newitz, in contrast, concludes by emphasizing
the grounds for hope in the viral, subtextual
protests that these monster stories pass
along. On the other hand, conventional
public discourse in the United States
being so degraded, it seems as discouraging
as it is understandable that some of the
most crucial issues facing our society
are engaged more in midnight movies than
on the nightly news and talk shows.