a small repository for the undead
authored and maintained by J. A. Wilcox
When there’s no room left in hell . . .
Aizenberg, Edna. `I Walked with a Zombie': The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity. World Literature Today. 73.3 (1999): 461-466. (show item notes)
461
Val Lewton's _I Walked with a Zombie_ (1943) most significant of those mentioned by Molina in Puig's _Kiss of the Spider Woman_.
461 BB: Newman, Julie. _The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions_. London. Arnold. 1995: 18. Use of Lewton's _I Walked With a Zombie_ in Rhys's _Wide Sargasso Sea_.
462 " So great is the horror, the horror, of these forces, that most cinematic analyses refuse to address the films' crucial transposition of the zombie from enslaved black victim vitiated by white colonization to virginal white victim menaced by black erotic rites."
462 "Some of the pictures do suggest a link between zombification and slavery, as in Val Lewton's more nuanced presentation, but the shifting of black suffering onto white women, and the eliding or underplaying of the oppressive historical circumstances, remains at the films' ideological and visual core."
462 "Through the zombie woman, the Caribbean, much like Conrad's Africa, becomes a screen onto which North Americans can project their fantasies and insecurities, the id forces of the libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous, and, yes, miscegenated, intermingled, or hybrid."
462 "[. . .]: Hollywood's zombie is thoroughly enclosed within a colonialist discourse that usurps history and identity. Here, hybridity menaces, unmasking the fear of black and white intermingling, the terror of black (male) bodies dominating whites." [This is a path to read Del Tenney's _I Eat Your Skin_ as a reaction against the powerful racial fear explored in the earlier zombie films.]
462 BB: Draper, Ellen. "Zombie Women When the Gaze is Male." _Wide Angle_, 10:3 (1988), pp. 52-62. [54 regarding the zombification of women in conjunction with enslavement.]
462 BB: Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth."Women Possessed: Eroticsm and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie." _Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and the Caribbean_. Eds. Margarite, Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997: 37-58. [Black men possessing white women "set against a background of tropical otherness".]
462 What is the point of hybridity if everyone and everything is, in the postcolonial moment, "diasporic" "in-between" or nomadic?
463 "Molina' version of the zombi movie pointedly tells of a rebellion by the black peons working as serfs on the banana plantations, the revolutionary act that led to their zombification under pressure by the owners; the American film says nothing about such a rebellion. This emphasis on injustice, revolution, and hybridity spills over into the 'imagined' pictures."
463 Argentinian racial identity which seeks to minimize African and Native American strands, emphasizing European whiteness.
463 BB: Newman, Julie. _The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions. London. Arnold. 1995. Newman argues using "striking similarities in emplotment and imagery that Rhys [. . .] used another, 'less prestigious' source: none other than Lewton's haunting film, which he himself described as 'a West Indian version of _Jane Eyre_,' what with its unchaste, abnormal first wife, its noble suffering husband, and its selfless nurse who becomes wife number two (Newman, 18; Bansak, 145-46)."
BB: Bansak, Edmund G. _Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. Jefferson, N.C. McFarland. 1995.
463 Discussion of how Puig's novel has an "ahistorical displacement that unhinges the link between zombification and a specific Afro-Caribbean slavery[. . . .]"
463 Puig moves the stories "from the cold and frozen North--the New York of _Cat People_, the New England of _The Enchanted Cottage_--to the warm and balmy South of _I Walked With a Zombie_ and the spurious celluloids that surround it."
464 "But reading Rhys along with Puig underlines what I noted earlier: the increasingly central role of pop-culture products--film, video, song--as the new metropolitan canon."
464 "Rhys has achieved the height of postcolonial pleasure, if you will, emptying the master text and filling it with an audacious revisionist content, to speak in Harold Bloomian terms."
464 "What about the homosexual in the cell, that revolutionary in the torture chamber, that madwoman in the attic?" [The clear message, if not problem, is that zombies are not obviously (or easily) recuperable.]
464 "[. . .]Rhys's novel displaces less, maintaining the specific geography, history, and politics of zombification."
464 Rochester uses colonial techniques of the master in order to suppress Antoinette Cosway's Caribbean dangerousness.
464-465 "In other words, Rhys's novel, too, [page break] exhibits the displacement that turns white women into hybrid zombies, that makes in-betweenness and doubling the heritage of whites."
465 Etymology of "abiku" which is the spirit that repeatedly returns as a child and dies (*ogbanje* in Igbo).
465 Spivak argues that " 'No perspective *critical* of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self' (253, emphasis in the original)." BB: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." _Critical Inquiry_, 12:1 (1985) pp. 243-61.
466 Concludes that Ben Okri's _The Famished Road_ presents "trope of hybridity which moves beyond Hollywood's menacing sexist and racialist version, beyond Puig's and Rhys's more contestatory though still ensnared postcolonial rendering."
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Ancuta, Katarzyna. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies or How to Be the Living Dead in Technicolor. (Trans)-Formations I: Identity and Property: Essays in Cultural Practice. Katowice, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 2002. 11-28. (show item notes)
012
Brief undocumented mention of the word "zombi" deriving from Haitian culture. Discusses references are to people " 'believed to be dead' ".
012-013 Discussion of association of Haitian political history with Vodou: "*bokor* François Macandal, who originated the 6-year slave revolt of 1751-1757", Boukman, the leader of a rebellion that killed 12000, and "the 1806 assassination of Dessalines, who came to be recognised as the father of Haitian independence, not only resulted in the general appraisal of his 'dying for the cause' but also earned him a place in the vodou pantheon."
013 "Romero was the first to notice that the exotic quality of the Haitian soulless creatures can be successfully transferred into the reality of early American consumerism."
013 n. 7 "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1957-1991) "would quickly silence all those who dared to question his vodou skills." It had been rumored he was an incarnation of Baron Samedi (who Duvalier claimed as loa).
013 n. 8 Myth of *Tonton Macoutes* (which translates as Uncle Satchel), who" 'comes at night to take away naughty children in his macoute (the straw satchel of the peasant).' " [Interior quote is BB: Roman Segal, _From the Black Diaspora (London: Faber and Faber, 1995): 203.]
014 "Democratic" (egalitarian?) principles of zombie transformation, contrasted with "elitist approach" of vampires and werewolves.
014 "The living, on the other hand, do: blood flows readily and we begin to understand that, addicted to possession, the living cannot live beyond ownership."
014 In DotD, what magically attracts characters, zombie and human alike, is a/the mall.
014 What is more disturbing, however, the zombies look not just pathetic but also very human in their abandonment and hopelessness, lost in the gigantic labyrinth of the mall."
015 Cannibalism of zombies "may be confusing the 'savage' vodou culture, notorious for its animal and rumoured human sacrifices, with the cannibal practices of other feared savages."
015 Zombie taxonomy: 1) random zombies, 2) slave zombies, 3) evil zombies, 4) smart zombies.
[Smart zombies are interesting:] "fully aware and intelligent creatures whose properties make them superior to ordinary human beings."
016 BB: Scores of Italian zombie films. Fulci's _City of the Living Dead_, _Zombie Flesh Eaters_, _The Beyond_, and Michel Soavi's _Dellamorte, Dellamore_ [sic?] (aka _Cemetery Man_, Lamberto Bava's _Graveyard Disturbance_.
016-017 Synopsis of BB: Joyce Carol Oates's novel _Zombie_: Quentin P., trying to overcome complex obtained as a result of having a professor of a father, seeks to make love zombies by lobotomizing his patients with an ice pink [transocular lobotomy conducted by Freeman].
017-018 BB: _Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town_ (1991) [Dan Hoskins]
018 Davis discovers "form of tribal judgement in which a person who offended the tribe was given a special drug to appear dead to the family. Then, such person remained conscious all the time, s/he was in fact burnt alive during what was supposed to be a funerary ceremony."
018 [Reactionary] narrative arc of _Chopper Chicks_ which shows women who "secretly dream of going back to the husbands and children they abandoned."
018 n. 13 Problems with political situation encountered by crew of Craven's _The Serpent and the Rainbow_.
018 n. 14 BB: Robb, Brian J. Screams & Nightmares : The Films of Wes Craven. 1st ed. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998.
019 Sam Raimi's _Evil Dead_ trilogy as example of "evil zombies"
020 Stephen King's revenants always come back evil.
021 Recounts relatively ludicrous philosophical debate regarding the conceivability of zombies.
022 Summarizes Dennett's concept of the "zombic hunch" that there is something missing from mechanistic models of mind, which Dennett finds untenable.
022 n. 21 Daniel Dennett: "[W]hen philosophers claim the zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the tasks of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition [...] If, ex hypothesi, zombies are behaviorally indistinguishable from us normal folk, then they are really indistinguishable."
023 Discussion of Jaron Lanier's objections to Dennett's arguments about zombies.
027 Improperly framed mention of the relationship between laborers in a system who are akin to zombies and deserving heroes who liberate them from "moloch."
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Anonymous. A Capitalistic Sublime?. Naught Thought. 29 July 2007. 30 July 2007.<http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/a-capitalistic-sublime/>. (load item notes)
Balibar, Etienne. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002.
—. Three Concepts of Politics: Emancipation, Transformation, Civility. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. 001-039. (show item notes)
001
autonomy of politics:emancipation::heteronomy of politics:transformation
Bonus: heteronomy of heteronomy
001 Heteronomy is "politics related to structural and conjuctural *conditions*" to which are connected figure of "*transformation*"
002 Imaginary dimension ("other scene") where "the effects of the autonomy and heteronomy of politics are engineered."
003 Civil liberty based on discrimination or despotism is impossible.
004 Citizenship (autonomy?) is conferred simply by being a human being without [specific] qualities. People represent themselves and so can be considered universal. [Romero's film shows a condition where citizenship is impossible. They do not have the quality of simply being a human being without qualities. They point to a condition of posthuman/nonhuman existence.]
005 "Have-nots cannot be "subjects *of004 Reciprocral constitution of autonomous (rights-conferring) subjects and the autonomy of politics (as an end in itself)
005 "The 'have-nots' in this radical sense cannot, then, be *either a whole or a part*; their existence, which is the condition of the possibility of politics, is at the same time the condition of its impossibility."
005 Hint that "unequal distribution of verbal skills" has consequences for autonomy
005 Why is it impossible to presuppose organization among have-nots and forced entry of have-nots into system?
006 History of emancipation is "struggle to enjoy rights which *have already been declared*." This makes the fight against the denial of citizenship a fight against the dehumanization of people (who are nonhuman by virtue of not being citizens.
006 Section of population "presents itself, then, not jus as the most active mouthpiece of the citizenry, but as that fraction which is capable of presenting its own emancipation as the *criterion007 Ideological universalization rests on rights of the dominated.
007 "discourse of hegemonic domination has to be one in which it is possible to appeal *against a006 n. 11 Denial of citizenship eventually becomes denial of humanity
"11. And through that denial the denial of humanity, for the denial of citizenship is always based on the exhibiting of some anthropological differentiations which can be set against universality in the name of the characteristics of the human species: maternal function, racial or intellectual inferiority, alleged inadmissibility or abnormality, etc."
007 Niezsche's "slave morality" suggest the analysis of the means by which consensus is engineered.
010 Marxian political practice is about the transformation of individuals into politicized and achieving-equality subjects.
011 Family and patriarchy (relations of gender domination) and of "symbolic capital" are dimensions which shape human relations (away from historical origins of superstructure).
012 Politics is change within change, a differential relation
"Politics the mere changing conditions, as though it were possible to isolate them and abstract from them so as to obtain a purchase on them, but it is change within change, or the *differentiation of change*, which means that the meaning of history is established only in the present."
013 Definition of "subjectivation" in terms of change in political system
"Subjectivation is the collective individualization which occurs at the point where change changes, where 'things begin to change differently' --that is to say, wherever the *tendency014 Foucault: power is "actions upon actions."
016 Position of body in Foucauldian analysis prevents analysis of power as dynamic ("clash of wills")
016 Transformation of action requires creation of new conditions
"And, in reality, no action has ever succeeded in transforming another - whether it be in production, education, punishment, discipline or political liberation or constrâint - other than by creating new conditions in which it can be carried out, just as no action can condition another other than by transforming it, or transforming the freedom of its bearer, as Foucault puts it."
018 "Only life can be governed."
"Only life can be 'governed'; only a living being can be disciplined in such a way as to become productive."
022 Deleuze and Guattari: "Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black." (291-292)
022 n. 29 Production of the pure through cleansing
Foreignness which is identified as opposite of the *propre022
Deleuze and Guattari: Relationship between becomings and minoritarianism, distinct from minorities.
023 (n. 32 references "junk population")
Bertrand Ogilvie's notion of "making of disposable man."
023 n. 30 Faulkner on becoming black to avoid being a fascist via Deleuze and Guattari
024 "Risibility" [futility] of trying to emancipate disposable humans since "there is practically no possibility for the victims to see themselves and present themselves *In person024-025
Non-functional elimination of disposable people goes beyond "limit of structural violence" for the "mere reproduction of structures."
025 "Forced disaffiliation from the other and oneself -- not just from belonging to the community and the political unit, but from the human condition, which Benslama describes in relation to ethnic cleansing."
025 Fascism progresses into "idealization of hatred."
026-027 Ultra-subjective violence because "the will which gives rise to them [actions of violence] can only be described, ultimately, as the expression of a 'thing' (to use Freud's term, picked up on by Lacan) of which the subject is the mere instrument: of that identity which is (which he 'believes' to be) in him, an identity totally exclusive of any other, one which imperiously commands its self-realization through the elimination of any trace of otherness in the 'we' and in the 'self'. An identity disposed as a consequence to 'prefer' one's own death to what seems to it to be the lethal danger of a mixing or a de-propriation."
027 "Rather than identities, we should speak of identificatioons and processes of identification[. . . .]"
027 "all identity is fundamentally transindividual. This means that it is neither (purely) individual nor (purely) collective."
028 "every identity is *ambiguous*" comprised of multiple identities.
028 Identity multiply aligned
"In this sense, too, identity is always wide of the mark; it is always in danger of mistaking itself or being mistaken. It always has to express itself successively through different commitments."
029 "being *absolutely one028 Proposes replacing identity with processes of identification
030 Possession of civility enables dominant class to characterize underclass as "reservoir of incivility"
"But it is so as to appear as the only conceivable creator of civility that the established power elaborates a theory of the passions of the multitude as an inexhaustible, threatening reservoir of incivility."
030-031 Hegel's notion of a convertible violence, one that can be employed by "a state which constitutes itself with the intention of liberating individuals."
032 "fictive ethnicity": "quasi-genalogical entity, formed out of family, linguistic or religious bonds, and vested in the sites and myths of historical memory, and so on."
Fictive ethnicity "is an identification of disidentification" through which barbarism can be attributed to others, "a move correlating with enjoyment of peace and civilization within one's borders."
033 History of twentieth century may document how multitudes and ordinary citizens forced state to "recognize their dignity, and to introduce norms of civility into public service of the public sphere."
034 Deleuzean perspective is that "the multiple is minorities; or rather (since he explains very clearly that minorities are state functions, 'territorial' functions), it is the processes of becoming-minoritarian which radically privilege disidentification over any identification, over any collective self-recognition in a normative model."
(top of item notes)
—. Ambiguous Identities. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. 056-074. (load item notes)
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—. What Is a Border?. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. 075-086. (load item notes)
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—. Violence, Ideality, and Cruelty. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. 129-145. (show item notes)
120 Popper's concern about anti-Nazi alliance borrowing Nazi "weapons and methods" for developing social utopias
"[ . . .] had been led to borrow some of their enemies' weapons and methods, themselves using massive retaliation and extermination of civilian populations. He was explicitly thinking of the Hiroshima bombing, but what worried him even more was the prospect of a new wave of political and social utopias, of the 'Platonist' type, which would aim at transforming the world, and human nature itself, by deconstructing and reconstructing the whole fabric of society according to ideal principles of justice. He warned that, as ever, this would not be done without resorting to, or being led to using, some extremely violent means."
Popper advocated " 'piecemeal social engineering' "
131 Ideality may render individuals inseparable from ideals and, so, groups and collective bodies from violence (in the immediate example)
"—the question really is whether 'hating violence' in order to eliminate its causes, and to reverse the violent tendencies in society with a view to defending human liberty and dignity, still comes down to hating something ideal, or has to imply also hating groups, institutions, forms of organization, collective bodies which *embody violence*, so to speak, and eliminating them. . . . "
131 Popper's opposition to violence informed by "certain humanitarian bias" rather than rationality.
Rhetorical framing along lines of "We who hate violence"
"This produces an extraordinary short circuit of the discourse and metadiscourse, and thus of the author's exegesis and subjective position." (130-131)
132 Bataille and his concept of "super-fascism", learning from fascism and using those lessons to oppose capitalist order
132 Idealizing negations of violence in form of "law, justice, love, respect" "communication, the human person" etc.
"This, perhaps, is the moment to suggest that Popper is much more of a Platonist than he would admit himself, as probably is anyone who poses the ideality of law, communication, the human person, as an absolute, and an antidote to violence - anyone, that is, who thinks that violence can be fought by idealizing its negations; the various fìgures of non-violence: law, justice; love, respect. . . . "
[Critique of Platonism and ideality equivalent to critique of "hypostatization".]
133 Sense among some Nietzschean intellectuals that fascism can only be fought from within.
133 Unknowability of violence must be transgressed (in order to understand it)
"But among the interdictions that must be transgressed, there is not only the interdiction which outlaws rebellion in the name of law and order, forcing individuals to bow beneath the yoke of institutions and morality (remember Malebranche's incredible formula:'The supreme virtue is the love of order'), but also the interdiction which prohibits knowing and investigating, a prohibition on knowing about violence in general and every particular instance of violence, as if there were a powerful interest keeping violence outside tlrre realm of the knowable and the thinkable - or, better, outside the realm of what is thinkable as a 'normal' determination of social relations and a cause of political, social and historical effects."
134 Legitimacy of hegemony (often) predicated upon "great transcenden *forms134 Questions of power cannot completely circumscribe issues of violence
135 Designation of some violence as self-destructive may be due to non-relation to questions of power.
136 Cruelty the third term to mediate between violence and power.
137 Cruelty intrinsically heterogeneous and *so) opposed in that way to ideality
Gewalt related to ideality in need to distribute itself.
138 "foundational violence" (monopoly of the state) must be implemented and exercised (in addition to being sacralized).
139 Only schema for "*schema139 Violence can only exists as the retroactive product (anticipatory?) of counter-violence.
140 Education deconstructs existing identity and constructs new one in its place.
142 Capitalist society based upon "*excess of exploitation"
142 New poverty produced by "*dis-membering" points to "*post-historical
142 (Present) market has no boundaries; there is no outside to the market.
142 Third World poverty most prevalent form and destruction of existing production equivalent to production of "disposable people".
Production of "disposable people" driven by cruelty.
143 Notes genocide/ethnic cleansing is "a violence which is not completely intelligible in the logic of power or the economy of Gevalt."
143 Production of disposable people appears to be a "natural phenomenon."
"The 'disposable human being' is indeed a social phenomenon, but it tends to look, at least in some cases, like a 'natural' phenomenon, or a phenomenon of violence in which the boundaries between what is human and what is natural, or what is post-human and what is post-natural, tend to become blurred: what I would be tempted to call an ultra-objective form of violence, or cruelty without a face; whereas the practices and theories of ethnic cleansing confront us with what I would call ultra-subjective forms of violence, or cruelty with a, Medusa face."
Theories of ethnic cleansing unleash processes that cannot bey symbolized.
144 If ideality is counterpart to cruelty how to deal with no resistance to violence except through ideals.
144 Similarity and differences between Spanish *conquistadores*' and German Nazis' ritualized use of dogs. (Spanish backed by hegemonic idealization.)
145 There is no zero degree of violence
"[. . .] there are certainly degrees in the amount of violence which goes along with civilizing ideals; but nothing like a zero degree. Therefore there is no such thing as non-violence."
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—. Ambiguous Universality. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002. 146-176. (show item notes)
147 "Real" universality as processes which interconnect individual units
147 Extensive and intensive aspects of interdependency
148 Implementation of utopia impossible because "universal" space already achieved
149 "As a consequence, the analytical schema that seems best adapted to interpreting the expressions of this world- politics is the Hobbesian one of a 'war of all against all', rather than a Marxian-Hegelian schema of growing antagonism between sym- metrical forces."
149 War of all against all more accurate than symmetrical opposed upper and under classes
149-159 "A 'world Leviathan', or a world-scale 'rational-central rule', seems incompatible with the complexity we are facing: new modes of regulation are needed if we are not to be doomed to an eternal 'Behemoth'."
150 Backlash of center-periphery produces networks
"It is not the suppression of domination and economic inequalities (perhaps it could be said that the polariza- tion of wealth and misery, power and dependency, has reached unprecedented levels) but the multiplication of centres, forming a network rather than a 'core' area. And it is the reverse movement which projects elements of the former periphery into the 'central' societies. "
150 Pablo Gonzalez Casanova: What West designates as multiculturalism long experienced in Third World
151-152 Minority a condition of "*normalized exception*" constructed by the state
152 Individuals increasingly unclassifiable according to present schemas
153 Policies of ethnic-cleansing likely to develop when majoritarian privilege cedes to economic and political justice (parity)
154 "*minorities without stable or unquestionable majorities*"
154 "internal exclusion" vs. "external exclusion"
154 Racism the effect of internal exclusion
"I have argued elsewhere (Balibar and Wallerstein) - that racism is not a simple excess of identity feelings or xenophobia, but more specifi- cally linked with internal exclusion, that is hostility and discrimina- tion among populations which are not really separated, but belong to the same society and are culturally mixedv¡tth one another. "
154 Real universality which produces (imagined?) social relations
"[. . .]: real universality is a stage in history where, for the first time, 'humankind' as a single web of interrelationships is no longer an ideal or utopian notion but an actual condition for every individual; [. . .]"
155 "It is not even a situation in which individuals communicate at least virtually with each other, but much more one where global communication networks provide every individual with a distorted image or a stereotype of all the others, either as 'kin' or as 'aliens', thus raising gigantic obstacles to any dialogue. 'Identities' are less isolated andmore incompatible, less univocal and more antagonistic."
157 "Total" ideologies "are pluralistic by nature", recognizing "the individual as a relatively autonomous entity: [. . .]"
"autonomous entity: not one which is absolutely free from particular identities and memberships, but one which is never reducible to them, which ideally and also practically (in the day-to-day working of basic institutions, such as sacraments, marriage, courts, edu- cation, elections, etc.) transcends t}re limitations and qualifications of particular identities and memberships."
159 "Recognized, differences, or otherness-within-the-limits-of-citizenship, become the essential mediation of national membership."
159 (Oppressive) false universality can only exist by means of "a more elementary structure, which is truly universalistic."
159 Religious and national hegemonies have different *points d'honneur*
160 BB: Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. _Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism_. London: Verso Editions/NLB, 1983.
160 Universalizing communities must "liberate" or produce " 'Individualized individuals' ".
160-161 Denaturing of individuals produces a "moral" rather than "ritual" obedience.
161 Tension between communities and state possible because of distance between individuals and memberships imposed by citizenship
162 n. 5 Valuation of subcultural behavior a contradiction between real and fictive universality (market vs. state)
162-163 Normality requires internalization of "normal" type
"For normality is not the simple fact of adopting customs and obeying rules or laws: it means internalizing represen- tations of the 'human type' or the 'human subject' (not exactly an essence, but a norm and a standard way ofbehaving) in order to be recognized as a person in one's own right - to become presentable (fit to be seen) in oder to be represented."
163 Family strucures, educational and judicial institutions become bearers of "hegemony" because of integration into everyday life
164 Hegemonic discourse draws upon ideas held by masses
" 'Society', or the dominant forces in society, can speak to the masses in the language of universalistic values (rights, justice, equality, welfare, progress...), because in this language a kernel remains which came from the masses themselves, and is returned to them. "
164 Voice of the oppressed does not exist before (representation by) hegemony
165 "*Ideal universality*" based upon idea of human history as emancipation, liberation
"*ideal universality*" "introduces the notion of *the unconditional165 "equaliberty" asserts one cannot exist without other
Present in bourgeois 18th-c. political tracts
165 Proselytic aspect of equaliberty related to contradiction of human beings derprived of "rights which are constitutive of humanity".
166 Because of equaliberty, fighting discrimination becomes fighting coercion
(equality begets liberty)
166 equalty and liberty are individual while abolishing coercion and discrimination are collective
Tension between collective and individual mean equaliberty cannot be granted but must be won, fought for.
Hannah Arendt: "a right to acquire rights"
167 Non-discrimmination and -coercion "immortal" [undead]
"What we observe, rather, is that the ideal of non-discrimination and non-coercion is 'immortal' or irrepressible, that it is revived again and again in different situations, but also that it has shifted continually throughout history. "
167 Women's movement example of quest for equaliberty which could not be granted (by will of men)
168 Feminism does not create community but transforms it.
168-169 Emancipatory movement must change "the whole fabric of society", must become "a general movement"
"An emancipatory movement in this sense has a symbolic and [page break] universalistic dimension per se: although at first it mobilizes mem- bers of the oppressed group, it can achieve its goals only if it becomes a general movement, if it aims at changing the whole fabric of society. Inasmuch as women struggling for parity transform"
169 Differences between "minority" communities does not mean all struggles are particular
170 Established forms of communication privileged with "fictive universality"
171 With blurring of boundaries (pseudo-)ethnic strife increases
identities become strategies (to impose on self and others)
172 "fictive universality" defined
173 Pardoxical collective/individual classes
"The best examples in this sense are those of the 'paradoxical classes' which claim the rights of a 'particular' group not in the name of this very peculiarity, but because its discrimination or exclusion appears to involve a negation of human universality as such: the classical *proletariat*, and *women*, engaged in a movement for parity or equality-in-difference."
(top of item notes)
Beard, Steve. No Particular Place to Go. Sight & Sound. 3.4 (1993): 30-31. (show item notes)
030 " Romero gave the imagery extra bite. He is almost entirely responsible for the familiar incarnation of the zombie as ghoulish cannibal. Or as Kim Newman puts it 'The most obvious and immediate effect of the success of _Night of the Living Dead_ was a sudden epidemic of inferior flesh-eating zombie films.' "
030 "Less the lower-class citizens of the monster world and more the disenfranchised underclass of the material world, they are a projection of post-modern capitalism's worst anxieties about *itself*."
030 "Savini [. . .] doesn't come close to expanding on the role of the zombie as surplus human capacity processed through the system as grotesque 'social waste' and conscious fears about mass unemployment in today's recessionary climate."
030 "the zombie, like the vampire or mummy, has returned from the other side of the grave. But it lacks the singular magnificnece of a Dracula or a King Tut. 'Zobmies are the real lower-calss citizens of the monster world and that's why Iike them,' Romero has said. Zombies always hunt in packs; they are blood-thirsty automatons whoo add to their numbers by feeding on human flesh. Individually, they are slow, stumbling and weak. Coollectively, they are a rampaging mob of clawinng hands and gnashing teeth."
030 Condescends that "film unaware of its real political significance."
030 History of site which serves as "The Ritz" in the film links history of "industrial workplace to consumer garbage dump to film set," "a synecdoche of the collapse of the Fordist system."
030 If on reads film as " 'dream-text' with a political unconscious buried beneath a layer of critical defence mechanisms, then it is possible to see that the zombie is a figure of an expanding post-Fordist underclass filtered through a bourgeois imaginary of disgust" "[. . .] they indicate a hysterical class fantasy."
030 Implication of the diversity of types of zombies is "that nobody is immune from the social restructuring of post-Fordism."
030 Note that Romero significantly changed cinematic zombie legacy as descended from Lugosi films such as White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, King of the Zombies, and Voodoo Man.
030 Regarding films such as _I Married a Monster from outer Space_ and _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_: "These are films whose political unconscious has less to do with the Red menace or McCarthyism than with social conformism demanded by Fordist economic integration. The anxiety they express is not that some Americans might be secretly different, but that all Americans might be obscurely the same--serial instances of such contemporary stereotypes as William H. Whyte's Organization Man."
030 Romero's zombies are representative of workers who have been discarded by the post-Fordist organization of labor.
031 "Schooled in selling corporations a flattering image of themselves, Romero took his revenge by defaming the reputation of the people they served." [Fails to account for educative (?) function of the film.]
031 Anecdotal evidence from Savini and unnamed technician regarding penchant for normal folks to portray zombies, an alternative to "going to a midnight showing of _Rocky Horror_[. . . .]"
031 Decoupling of zombie figure from referent of the underclass always present in Romero's film's. Reads this detachment as "semiotic instability."
031 Fort Myers suffers from urban blight which DayD capitalizes upon.
031 Image Ten offices themselves a post-Fordist " 'family' of highly-skilled workers who treated the office as a home from home." [No mention of mean living conditions afforded by Image Ten offices.]
031 Reads zombies as "demobilized organization men."
031 Romero: "The community I had in the original script was always sort of representative of the new west or Florida, where cities now collapse in ten years instead of 200."
031 Suggests DayD is "_White Zombie_ with added gore" due to its representation of zombies as not "much more than the proletariat in chains."
031 Unrealized vision of "human dregs" used as slaves or "fodder for zombie soldiers."
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Bishop, Kyle. Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Nonliterary Origins of Zombie Cinema. Journal of Popular Film and Television. 33.4 (2006): 196-205. (load item notes)
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Blake, Linnie. Another One for the Fire++ George a Romero’s Theology of the Flesh. The Shocking Cinema of the Seventies. Ed. Xavier Mendik. Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002. 151-165. (show item notes)
152 "Besieged from without by governmental forces of authoritarian right-wing militarism and from within by the rapacious self-seeking individualism and consumption that the economic policies of successive administrations had so shamelessly promoted it is clear that Romero's 1970s America has failed to heed Winthrop's warnings."
153 "As the American family is itself, consumed by murderous desires, a very Nixonesque President sanctions the 'accidental' dropping of an atom bomb on the town, an act designed to consume townspeople and virus alike in a conflagration of flame. Indeed, this flame, reminiscent of the US military's wholesale napalming of Vietnam and the earlier nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also connects with the purging fires of divine retribution that (according to Winthrop) would signal the death of the civic body and the failure of the American endeavour in the New World."
154 "The radical individualism that American have so long prized, the individualism that imprinted the figure of the lone frontiersman, the gunslinger and later still the biker-outlaw upon the national consciousness is here found to be a sorry substitute for cooperative social endavour."
154 "Unable to dissociate himself from the killing-machine his government has made him, unable to remake himself as a husband and father in a world of familial implosion and civil chaos David (like many of Romero's hero-protagonists) is effectively trapped between worlds: a condition echoed in the baffled speculation he repeats on several occasions--'Maybe we're in some kinnd of war. ... Maybe we are in a war.' "
155-156 "The garden of the New World, the Eden of mankind's new beginning, is thus shown to harbour a viper in its bosom: namely that which has tempted Americans away from the straight and narrow path of cooperative social justice 1960s-style into the despondent slough of the 1970s present."
156 "As Judy dies with her unborn child still kicking inside her, her hopeless desire to name the baby after its father leaves us with the sense that both Evans City and the nation itself have no meaningful future."
157 "Again palpable, as in _The Crazies_, is a sense of thwarted future and blighted present, a sense underlined by the highly ambiguous past of Martin our hero-protagonist who, as is usual with Romero, stands very much alone."
161 "We know, as Peter does, that they are their audience and that the audience of the 1970s were as dead as their dreams of America."
163 " In the bikers' astonishing theft of rings and jewelry from an African American zombie who screams and slashes in outrage, we can also see the institutions of American slavery reenacted as a crime that must, somehow, be punished. In the gang's ultimately destructive will to plunder, we can see the fate of the American people writ large."
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Caputi, Jane. Films of the Nuclear Age. Journal of Popular Film and Television. 16.3 (1988): 100-107. (show item notes)
100 "Some of the effect Lifton ascribes to this all-pervasive, if shadowy, nuclear influence include a new ephemeralism that tends to undermine interpersonal and family relationships, a sense of radical futurelessness due to an expectation of annihilation in our lifetimes, widespread fundamentalism, and a stance of near worship of nuclear weapons."
101 n. 3 List of critics who argue unrepressive function of cinema: Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sonta, Parker tyler, Michael Wood, and Robin Wood.
CC: Wood, Robin. "The Return of the Repressed." Film Comment 14.4 (1978): 24-32.
102 "But perhaps more significantly there also exist many other more subtle cinematic expressions of nuclear consciousness, a number of genre-spanning productions that, although not explicitly about nuclear technology, nevertheless reflect metaphorcially the configurations and concerns of the nuclear mind."
102 "The question so often asked, 'would the survivors [of a nuclear war] envy the dead?' may turn out to have a simple answer. They would not so much envy, as, inwardly and outwardly, resemble the dead." Citation: Lifton, Robert Jay, and Richard A. Falk. Indefensible Weapons : The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism. New York: Basic Books, 1982: 274-278.
102 "complicity with the abhorrent" (Sontag): In many Hollywood films, representation neutralizes threat invoked, [domesticating it, supporting prevailing ideology that redoubling of violent forces can produce favorable outcomes. ~Gentleman, we must stop the killing, or lose the war.~]
102 Investigation thread of nuclear films "that explore the shifting border between death and life."
102 Refusal to "resolve fear or to hold sacred tradiotionallly cherished social myths, heroes, and instituutions is itself a primary attribute of the radical nuclear film (e.g., _Kiss Me Deadly_, 1955)." Identifies NotLD as a "radical nuclear film."
102 n. 5 Andrew Britton discusses themes of "nuclear anxiety" in several contemporary films: BB: Britton, Andrew. "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment." Movie.31/32 (1986): 1-42.
103 Because zombies lack emotion and possess only hunger for human flesh, "They bespeak a monstrosity of consciousness. Finally, NotLD offers not only a symbolic description of the landscape of a postnuclear world: It provides a powerful metaphor for the psychic numbing that characterizes general consciousness in the Nuclear Age."
103 Hiroshima survivors referred to themselves as "walking ghosts."
103 n. 13 Hiroshima survivors "moving gradually away from the center of the destruction, but dully and almost without purpose.": Lifton, Robert Jay, and Richard A. Falk. Indefensible Weapons : The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism. New York: Basic Books, 1982: 275
103 n. 14 Survivors unable to "to enact that most fundamental of all human rituals, burying their own dead" Lifton, Robert Jay, and Richard A. Falk. Indefensible Weapons : The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism. New York: Basic Books, 1982: 277-278
103 n. 4 BB: Sontag, Susan. "The Imagination of Disaster." New York: Octagon Books, 1986: 220
Sontag calls assertion nuclear anxiety present in 1950s cinematic science fiction is a "commonplace."
104 Teenagers in _River's Edge_. Dir. Tim Hunter. 1986. "truly embody the emotional state of the undead."
105 Examples of characters explaining behavior in terms of nuclear consciousness.
106 Films explore fear characters who live with a sensed of "radical futurelessness—the conviction that there will be no biological continuance[. . .]"
106 RotLD's zombies are immortal and nuclear conflagration onl spreads contamination.
106 Summary of RotLD.
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Dargis, Manohla. Not Just Roaming, Zombies Rise Up. Rev. of Land of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 2005. New York Times. 24 June 2005: E1-E16. (load item notes)
Dillard, R.H. W.. Night of the Living Dead: 'It’s Not Like Just a Wind That’s Passing through'. . Ed. Gregory A. Waller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 14-29. (show item notes)
015 " The easiest explanation of the film's popular success would be to say that it has simply outdone all of its rivals in the lingering and gross detail of its scenes of violence and that its appeal has simply been to that basest of needs, the need for unrestrained violence."
Goes on to mention _Reader's Digest_ "which ran an article denouncing the film for its bad influence on the minds of children" and an article in _Variety_ which raises doubts about the future of cinema.
016 Burial rituals are enacted in film in reverse, and the fears regarding restless spirits of the dead can no longer be allayed by funeral rites. "The movie thrusts its audience into a situation of primordial fear and offers them neither rational nor religious belief. The apparently universal human ability to find pleasure in an artistic rehearsing of its worst fears is certainly at the heart of the film's popular success, [. . . .]"
016 Rejects Elliott Stein's and Joseph Lewis's arguments which compare the NotLD to the anti-war rhetoric of the time. Quoting Lewis: "describes the film's impact as 'cathartic for us, who forget about the horrors around us which aren't, alas, movies,' and goes on to say that Lyndon B. Johnson might never 'have permitted the napalming of the Vietnamese' had he seen _Night of the Living Dead_." n. 5 BB: Joseph Lewis, "A Blood Laugh," _The Point_, Feb. 26, 1970. 14.
017 " The night of the living dead is a Sunday night, the first after the time change in the autumn. The season, with its overtones of dying away and approaching winter cold, is symbolically significant, as is the Sunday, which emphasizes the failure of religion in a secular age." On the pages following, notes rejection of religious observance on Johnny's part.
019 "Ben, the black 'hero' of the film, is a working man. He is good with his hands, and it is he who turns the house into a fortress. He is also the most articulate and, to all appearances, the most intelligent of the people in the house; his long speech, which is the first indication of the scope of what is happening and which he delivers as he works purposefully to shore up the house's natural defenses, establishes him as a man who is fully capable of active thought and rational action. But, again, his heroic potential is shown in an ordinary context; he is just an intelligent and vital man caught in bad circumstances, trying to do what he can about it."
019 "The scenes is American, and the characters are democratically ordinary and American. Perhaps the only unusual thing about them is that no one of the ever comments about one of their numbers being black, especially in the light of his assuming a natural leadership. But even that lack of race prejudice in a tight situation may be more ordinarily American than we might suspect."
020 "His [Cooper's] selfish certainty gives him a strength almost equal to Ben's rational activism, and their clash, ideological and personal, gives the center of the film its tension."
020 After noting that McClellan is a grotesque figure that is accurately drawn if exaggerated and that his interviewer is in fact a newscaster with Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea the only two professional actors in the film: "The film is, then, the story of everyday people who are, for the most part, from that ordinary locale. The way in which _Night of the Living Dead_ transforms that familiar and ordinary world into a landscape of unrelenting horror reveals the film's moral nature and the deep adn terrible fear that is at its heart."
021 "The dead, unlike death itself, can be stopped and become a more ordinary horror, one to which there can be a practical response."
021 BB: Calvin T. Beck "Night of the Living Dead" _Castle of Frankenstein_ 5 (1972): 30. [Incorrect issue number, which should be 18.]
022 "Ben kills Harry because his cowardice has risked Ben's life, and the clash of egos between Ben and Harry endangers the lives of all the others throughout the film."
022 As the fear of the living dead is domesticated, the danger of the living to each other is highlighted.
022 The normal world becomes potentially dangerous: garden trowels, hammers, table legs, etc.
023 "the characters exhibit traditional virtues and vices, but the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty, all suffer the same fate: they all lose In fact, those virtues that have been the mainstay of our civilized history seem to lead to defeat in this film even more surely than traditional vices."
024 Ben not only literally descends but also descends into the primordial depths of his own psyche. [Ben goes underground much like Invisible Man.]
024 Electricity and fire: Tom and Judy dies by fire, and Ben is burned. Electricity eventually gives out.
024 Film can be read as a "decline of the hand," Ben's move away from building with his hands and dependence upon a rifle through to the first hand bursting through a boarded window which Stein reads as a "symphony of psychotic hands"
025 " The coming of dawn and the posse is handled very smoothly and simply; the editing supports the symbolic use of the dawn light--both indicate the reestablishment of human and rational order in the chaotic situation. Bt Romero undercuts the steady motion of the film must as he does the light. After Ben's death, he abruptly shatters the film's smooth forward motion. The account of the burning of Ben is composed of very grainy still shots with high-level voice overs, connected still to the narrative flow, but disjointedly and in fragments."
025 Analysis of initial smooth shots and infrequent cutting (as Ben tells his story) to an increasingly frenetic pace of cuts [conflict with Coopers.]
026 Compares NotLD to Hitchcock's _The Birds_
026 Remarks that fire is film's last moving image.
027 " The real horror of _Night of the Living Dead_ is not, then, a result of its inspiring fear of the dead or even a fear of the ordinary world. It lies rather in its refusal to resolve those fears in any way that does not sacrifice human dignity and human value. The deaths in the film are all to no purpose; they do not finally serve the practical cause of survival, nor do they act ot the enhancement of larger human value."
027 "Ben loses his moral struggle as well as his practical one for survival; he surrenders to the darkness in himself and to that around him."
027-028 Remarks on "The account of the burning of Ben is composed of very grainy still shots with high-level voice overs, connected still to the narrative flow, but disjointedly and in fragments. After shattering the naturally vital force of the medium with these devices, Romero moves one step further, perverting its motion by forcing it to serve the negative symbolic force of [page break] the fire."
028 "The idea of family is perhaps more harshly assaulted than any other in the film. The Coopers snarl at each other, and their daughter finally kills her mother and partially devours her father. Family ties actually become dangerous in the film--Helen does not even try to save herself from her daughter because the ideas of familial love was so deeply ingrained in her, and Barbara allows herself to be taken out by Johnny and the other ghouls because of the same idea and the shock of having it shattered."
028 " Reason itself is negated, the traditional quality that separates man from the rest of nature. 'Kill the brain,' the television announcers advise, 'and you kill the ghoul.' The head becomes the primary target of violence in the film--for your own protection, kill the brain!"
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Doherty, Thomas. Night of the Living Dead: The Original Cinefantastique. 21.3 (1990): 20-21. (load item notes)
Ebert, Roger. Just Another Horror Movie—or Is It?. Rev. of Night of the Living Dead. Dir George Romero. 1968. Chicago Sun Times. 5 January 1969: n.p..
Fiedler, Leslie. The New Mutants. Partisan Review. 32.4 (1965): 505-525. (show item notes)
058 "I am not now interested in analyzing, however, the diction and imagery which have passed from Science Fiction into post-Modernist literature, but rather in coming to terms with the prophetic content common to both: with the myth rather than the modes of Science Fiction. But that myth is quite simply the myth of the end of man, of the transcendence or transformation of the human—a vision quite different from that of the extinction of our species by the Bomb, which seems stereotype rather than archetype and consequently the source of editorials rather than poems. More fruitful artistically is the prospect of the radical transformation (under the impact of advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines) of *homo sapiens* into something else: the emergence—to use the language of Science Fiction itself—of 'mutants' among us."
Gagne, Paul R. Night of the Living Dead. The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987. 21-40. (load item notes)
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Harper, Stephen. Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic. Bright Lights Film Journal. (2005): n.p.. (load item notes)
* —. Zombies, Malls and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present). 1.2 (2002): n.p.. (show item notes)
001 Reductive characterization of debates on consumerism. Incorrect characterization of "postmodern ethnographers and sociologists [who] have argued that consumerism empowers capitalist subjects by granting them a limited, but politically important space in which to live out utopian fantasies of autonomy."
002-003 Notes that anti-consumerist "attitudes and activities can be a source of both pleasure and liberation."
003 Argues zombies represent, in Romero's work, "part of a maligned cinematic underclass" which is mirrored in the diegesis (by Captain Rhodes) "as a disposable and despicable underclass" [I wonder if this can be used to tie the zombies to Fritz Lang's representation of the working class as automatons being eaten by Moloch.]
004 Mall with its "contrast between its massive structural stability and the constantly shifting composition of its population" makes it a kind of "theatre or a stage: a space demanding action and transformation."
004 Reads SWAT Team invasion of ethnic tenement building at start of DotD as characterizing "zombiedom as a condition associated with both racial oppression and social abjection[. . . .]"
005 "cinematic mall, it might be said, solicits not only the consumption of its goods, but also the subversion of its systems."
005 Creation of oasis caravan in _Day of the Dead_ parallel to living sheltered life while many people suffer.
006 Peter and Stephen "compare loaves" in supermarket [which sets up my argument that there is an implicit and unacknowledged rivalry between Stephen and Peter.]
006 Stephen mocks "affluent middle classes" in armory, [where I would argue he is a member of the middle class and weapons are reserved for upper class.]
008 Fran eventually "identifies with her own glamourous reflection" and implicates herself "in the film's system of commodity fetishism," becoming a "cultural dummy."
008 Fran's narcissism attests to the zombifying power of commodity fetishism
008 [Can Fran's asking to be taught how to fly chopper be argued to lay narrative ground for Fran's eventually leaving Stephen for Peter?]
009 Consumerism alone, Romero implies, will not liberate women from their traditional subordinate roles.
009 Peter is only member of group whose background is mentioned: "Trinidadian grandfather and two brothers, who conform to the black stereotypes of professional basketball player and prisoner"
009 Roger's face when he returns from the dead captures the horrifying paradoxical relationship of the undead and the living. "They're us."
009 Uncomfortable self-recognition of a shopper in aspect of zombie-like shoppers about her. [Hyperreal, uncanny, abject.]
010 Establishes connection between activities depicted onscreen and role of viewer (as mall-goers).
010 Romero's depiction of "consumer society constitutes a humanist, radical, and one might say Adornian critique of racism, sexism and exploitation"
011 Anecdotal evidence of DotD fan who would "roam through the deserted mall, imagining scenes from the film."
011-012 Nuanced version of Frankfurt School-influenced view of consumerism: "consumerism is both morally perilous to those who can afford to buy into it and economically exclusive to those who cannot."
013 DotD's critique of consumerism connected to criticism of exploitation (of production). [Production is never directly examined in film.]
013 Morris calls for critics to take into account specificity of shopping mall sites.
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Higashi, Sumiko. Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film About the Horrors of the Vietnam Era. . Ed. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. 175-188. (show item notes)
180 " Alone without familial or emotional ties to the other characters, a black man named Ben, whose relationship to the blond sister has repressed overtones, is desexualized as a technician who invents tactics to resist a siege. [. . . .] Recent characterizations of black men as technicians illustrate an adroit reversal of this paradigm in that blacks are still in subordinate positions but less disturbingly sensual in being identified with machinery, gadgets, and hardware. Despite this reformulation, blacks still have little space within which to maneuver. In _Night of the Living Dead_, Ben displays ingenuity and leadership, but his destruction should come as no surprise, for assuming the prerogatives of the white 'Omnipotent Administrator' (who has access to the 'Ultrafeminine' white woman) or possessing the sexual virility of the 'Supermasculine Menial' are both offences punishable by death."
Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism. Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture. 35.1 (2008): 85-108. (show item notes)
087 Zombie as anti-subject
After Haitian zombie (Master/Slave) dialectic and living-dead (humans coded as subhuman): "[. . .] finally, we are putting forth a zombie that does not yet exist: a thought-experiment that exposes the limits of posthuman theory and shows that we can get posthuman only at the death of the subject."
087-088 movement from zombi to zombie to zombii
088 "Our manifesto proclaims the future possibility of the zombii, a consciousless being that is a swarm organism, and the only imaginable specter that could really be posthuman."
088 Romero's response he would seek infection after zombie outbreak
"In a television interview promoting this latest movie, Romero was asked what he would do if zombies were to take over the planet. He responded that he would go right out and get bitten: That way I could live forever, he said. The irony is that while the statement prompts us to ask what kind of life that would be, it reveals that our fascination with the zombie is, in part, a celebration of its immortality and a recognition of ourselves as enslaved to our bodies."
089 n. 12 BB: Kristeva, Julia. "Suffering and Horror." Powers of Horror++ An Essay on Abjection. New York++ Columbia University Press, 1982. 140-156.
"For another interesting discussion of fear, see Julia Kristevas chapter Suffering and Horror, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 140 56, in which fear is described as crucial to subject formation."
090 As "boundary figure" zombie threatens established order
"the zombie, neither mortal nor conscious, is a boundary figure. Its threat to stable subject and object positions, through the simultaneous occupation of a body that is both living and dead, creates a dilemma for power relations and risks destroying social dynamics that have remainedalthough widely questioned, critiqued, and debatedlargely unchallenged in the current economic superstructure."
090 n. 15 Zombie is a metaphor for other states of being whereas zombii is "truly consciousless posthuman"
"[. . .] Here we present this distinction: the zombie is a metaphoric comparison that can be casually adopted for such discussions; the zombii is always the truly consciousless posthuman."
091 Figure of Zombie is anticatharsis and offers nothing but destruction of current model of subjectivity
"The zombie is anticatharsis; thus, a zombie manifesto is one that can- not call for positive change, it calls only for the destruction of the reigning model."
091 n. 16 BB: Jamie Russell
" 16. Jamie Russell notes that this is the dominant mode of the progressive fantasy of the zombie film: the old order is overturned without anything being offered in its place (Book of the Dead, 83)."
093 Marx: "For Marx, the efficiency of large-scale industry relies on the division of labor that is accomplished 'by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine.' "
093 Zombie appropriate for US nonsubject
"The zombie, we feel, is a more pessimistic but nonetheless more appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for America in a global economy, where we feed off the products of the rest of the planet, and, alienated from our own humanity, stumble forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose."
093 n. 21 Adorno and Horkheimer argue "self" is tool which "enforces the self-alienation of individuals"
" 'In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self; for some this labor is supposed to yield increased capital, for others the strength for extra work. But the more this process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul' (in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23). "
094 Zombie is both "subject" and "nonsubject"
"[. . .]:it takes the subject and nonsubject, and makes these terms obsolete because it is inherently both at once. The zombiis lack of consciousness does not make it pure object but rather opens up the possibility of a negation of the subject/object divide."
094 Zombie offers no (third) alternative between subject/object
"[. . .] the zombie, by its very definition, is anticatharsis, antiresolution: it proposes no third term reconciling the subject/object split, the lacuna between life and death."
094 n. 24 Discards Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming" [mistakenly?] asserting they treat werewolves, vampires, and zombies.
095 Body of zombii is the "interminable boundary" between subject and object.
095 neither/nor category of the zombii
095 zombii is not a metaphor
096 Figure of zombii answers Adorno and Horkheimer's warning that capitalism uses individual to further its own ends
"heimer and Adorno suggest, the individual is a fiction conjured by the economic structure to ensure greater domination, then for us the only answer to this bind comes in the form of the zombiia literalization of what has already happened: the death of the individual that continues to lumber forward."
096 n. 29 BB: Annalee Newitz, Pretend Were Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)
097 Acknowledgment of reading zombie metonym as neo-imperialism
097 Parallel between Haitian history and moribund body of the zombi/e
"Similarly, the zombi/e seems to embody this kind of disappointment: it only symbolically defies mortality, and woefully at that: even the zombies survival of death is anticelebratory, for it remains trapped in a corpse body."
097 Zombie is an assemblage
"incarnations, the zombie has a fluid body that transgresses its borders by infecting those it bites; the Haitian zombi could only be created by a nonzombi. Thus, in its articulation of Western fears of the infectious spirit of rebellion, this trend manifests itself in the cinematic zombie in a metaphor of ubiquitous contagion."
097 n. 32 origin of the word "zombie"
"32. The origin of the word zombie is debatable. Some speculate it comes from the French ombres (shadows); most believe it has African origins, and that the Bonda word zumbi came to Haiti via Portuguese slave traders. See Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 18."
098 Encapsulated history of Haitian revolution and zombie lore
099 Contrast between Haitian zombie and postmodern zombie
"Despite the Haitian zombis roots as imperial slave, the Hollywood zombie of today does not produce anything except more zombies."
099 Zombie blur boundary of reproduction and consumption
"The zombies reproductive drive, in the service of zombie society (if it can be classified as such), is either an unconscious urge or a mere side effect of its own hunger, for it is through its bite that the zombie reproduces itself. Therefore, the zombie cannot even really be said to have two separate functionsconsumption and reproductionfor the zombie reproduces as it consumes."
099 Zombie mouth metaphor for "indeterminable boundary"
"However, if the contemporary zombie body is an indeterminable boundary, no site is perhaps more emblematic of that omnipresent permeability, and insatiable hunger, than the zombies mouth. For it is always at the mouth that the zombie feeds, and it is where the physical boundary between zombie and not-zombie is effaced, through its bite."
100 Dramatization of zombie's overtaking public spaces
"This danger is evident in the figure of the cinematic zombie and its infection of public space. The zombie body is often seen in the public sphere: town squares, cemeteries, schools, streets, and even in mallspro- viding overt social critique. The fear that the public realm is being invaded by pure necessity, or pure consumption, is expressed through the drama of the inhuman, ever-consuming zombie."
100 Zombie allows for neither transfer or catharsis of condition, only replication
"their state: the zombie does not attack other zombies. It seeks to transfer its burden, but the result is only a multiplication of its condition: no zombie body is relieved of its condition by passing it on. Therefore the zombie once again deters the possibility of catharsis. The boundary between man and slave that allows one to shift the burden of necessity onto the other whether in ancient Greek society or in the global capitalist superstructure of todayis threatened by the zombie: no appetite is sated, all become slaves."
101 Zombie produces distinction between individuation and swarm organism
" The zombie speaks to humanitys anxiety about its isolation within the individual body, and our mortality is burlesqued by the zombies grotesque defiance of the humans finite existence, thus calling into question which is more terrifying: our ultimate separation from our fellow humans, or the dystopic fantasy of a swarm organism."
102 Zombie (partially) represents "lived human condition"
"In imagining that humans are burdened with their own deaths, we can come to see one of the various ways that the zombie terrifies: not as an apocalyptic vision but as a representation of the lived human condition."
102 n. 47 Reads Mary Wollstonecraft's death of pueperal fever as instance of "real-life" zombie; Mary Shelley produces "zombie" in _Frankenstein_
"One such zombie, a real-life woman who was destroyed by puerperal fever, was Mary Wollstonecraft. It is not without significance that her daughter, Mary Shelley, went on to produce a literary zombie, Frankensteins monster: a man who was a composite of living and dead tissues."
103 Agamben: Identification of people whose only value is to be exterminated
"As Giorgio Agamben notes, incurable idiots were on the Nazis list of those who occupy the indeterminate state wherein they could be supposed to have neither the will to live nor the desire to die; this is used as justification for their exter- mination."
103 n. 50 Agamben on _Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived_
"Giorgio Agambens discussion of incurable idiots stems from his analysis of the Nazi document Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived (1920) the first appearance on the European juridical scene of the concept of life that does not deserve to be livedin Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137."
BB: Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life / Giorgio Agamben ; Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Vol. Introduction 1. Stanford, Calif. :: Stanford University Press, 1998.
103 n. 52 Foucault (_Madness and Civilization_) on embalming body to protect mind
"Herbs typically used to preserve the dead, like myrrh and aloe, were administered to the patients. Thus the living body was ritually embalmed to prevent the decay of the mind, as the dead are preserved after death, including treatment with bitters, vinegar, and soap, as well as bloodlettings and the cauterization of open sores. See Michel Foucault, Mad- ness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1988), 163."
104 Relationship between cyborg and zombies, culminating in example of Terry Schiavo
"The embalmed madmen are real-life zombies: like the women with puerperal fever, who were contaminated with the bacteria that infest corpses, these were real bodies that straddled the civic and social bor- der which determines the difference between the living and the dead. Just as the cyborg is a body implemented with or affected by technology, these real-life zombies also, on a microlevel, contain within their forms the attributes of the corpse. In the example of the embalmed madmen, we see how the social death of the mentally ill, deemed inferior, is translated into a literal transgression of these vital boundaries, as the living are construed as already dead and treated accordingly. There is yet a third real live zombie that we want to put forth, one that is a contemporary example and that we might claim as both a cyborg and a zombie, thus bearing fruitful discussion of the overlap between these two categories: Terri Schiavo."
104 n. 53 Agamben asserts "life and death are now merely biopolitical concepts"
"example of pure zo, or pure life. But rather than seeing this pure, merely biological life as an essential form of the living, Agamben identifies Quinlan as death in motion and tells us that life and death are now merely biopolitical concepts (Homo Sacer, 186)."
105 Zombie is not a voluntary position [Implication is that cyborg is also not voluntarily chosen]
"Haraway thus requires a moment of cognition, a moment of consciousness, that always insists upon subjectivity. The zombie may entail a material collision of living and dead tissues, as with the women with puerperal fever, or it may merely be a symbolic or figurative construction, as we might say of the Schiavo zombie, a comparison that was certainly bandied about in online blogs. Regardless, in the zombiis purest form as an ontic/hauntic object, transformation must be created outside the body, proclaimed by others. The zombii cannot see itself as such, much less claim a zombie identity for itself."
105 n. 56 Proximity of cyborg and zombie, of "automaton and animate corpse"
"Some might claim Schiavo as a cyborg simply because her body was dependent upon machines to sustain her life, but both the zombie and the cyborg are often figured as having suspect consciousness; the automaton and the animate corpse may be the kissing cousins of the fantasy world."
106 Argues zombii is end of capitalism [For me, zombie is capitalism's instrument and continuation.]
"What the zombii reveals, therefore, is that the inauguration of the posthuman can only be the end of capitalism. This is not a utopic vision, nor is it a call to arms. We are merely noting that capitalism and posthumanism are more linked than has been previously articulated: one has to die so that the other can begin. The zombii knows (of course, the zombii knows nothing) that the posthuman is endgame: it is a becoming that is the end of becomings. This is why the zombii must remain antiresolution, anticatharsis, and cannot speak."
107 Reads chained infected of _28 Days Later_ as figure of Haitian zombie
108 Condition of zombie cannot be known to zombie, its accession unidentifiable
"Therefore, when we truly become posthuman, we wont even know it."
(top of item notes)
Loudermilk, A.. Eating 'Dawn' in the Dark. Journal of Consumer Culture. 3.1 (2003): 83-108. (show item notes)
1 084 n. 1 Excellent synopsis of stake in NotLD regarding Ben's blackness.
"Other than the wider conflict between humans and zombies, the primary conflict in Night is over control of the farmhouse, the protagonists’ temporary shelter from the newly plagued world. In casting ‘the best actor for the part’ who happened to be black, this struggle for power between the heroic black character and the white patriarchal male ended up reflecting the tense politics of integration at the time. Night ends with only the black character surviving, until he is mistaken for a ‘zombie other’ and shot by the white and militaristic posse who seem to be restoring order to the world."
085 Explicit violence prevents people from seeing film but "almost everyone ‘gets’ the irony of zombies at the shopping mall, an irony that neither winks nor blinks when our capitalist mode of consumption is overthrown by cannibal consumption."
085 "Romero’s magnum opus – itself a commodity – has earned a place in the American imagination by undermining that very imagination’s dependence on commodity culture."
086 Notes Edna Aizenberg reveals how "Hollywood’s zombie is thoroughly enclosed within a colonialist discourse that usurps history and identity.(pp.461–2)"
086 The relationship between uncomplaining, soulless workers and emotionless (and so loveless) women, the worker construed as desirable for capitalist entrepreneur and the other not, but the ideological message is that workers are never soulless enough and objects of desire (brides to be) are too emotional.
087 Romero's DotD zombifies consumer as Halperin's _White Zombie_ transforms black Haitians.
087 Through Nicholas Daly, makes connection between mummmy and "archeological commodity that rises to walk without human agency."
087 Daly: value of mummy is "fundamentally irrational—or, in other words desire-drive"
088 Connecting _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ to Romero's _DotD_.
088 Discusses Shaviro's use of the term "postmodern zombie" and the way in which they are a "near-perfect allegory for capitalism"
088 Zombies and pod people both dissemble their desire for commodity fetishism or roles within capitalist organization.
089 Zombies multiply because they only eat small portion of victims (much in the same way that capitalist consumers do not fully eat the meals they procure). Quotes DotD commentator.
090 n. 5 BB: Murphy,Patricia L.(2000) ‘The Commodified Self in Consumer Culture: A Cross- Cultural Perspective’,Journal of Social Psychology,October,140(5):636–738.
Discussion of the dependence of the self on objects of commodity fetishism in capitalism.
090 n. 7 via Thomas Hine, discussion of the interchangeability between commodity and identity: "consume/ consumable and consumer identity/commdified identity/commodified self-concept.
090 n. 8 Notes the progressivism of Romero's Dead series as represented in miscegenation in them. [Note use of the term "implied hero" for Peter and Fran.]
091 Suggestion of opening of DotD is that militaristic power gives way to racist abuse of power.
092 Desire to overconsume in Roger and Stephen (or to maintain selfish access to material threatens life: "Peter and Fran survive because they resist – better than the others – the consumption of comforts that can never solve their problems." Fran rejects rings and Peter takes rings off (which might interfere with his shooting.
092 "When they find the keys to the mall shops, however, Roger calls them “the keys to the kingdom”and the ‘Spam key’is put to shame."
What Loudermilk hamhandedly fails to point out is the fact that Roger calls Fran out on her elitism ~Don't knock it. It's got its own key.~
093 Peter, Fran, Stephen, and Roger enact roles of wealth they could not manage when society was aggregated, when networks were in place.
093 Loudermilk admits to being tempted as a consumer (and who wasn't also attracted to the apocalyptic emptiness of the ocean, the sea, and the entire world as depicted in Geoff Murphy's _The Quiet Earth_ (1985)?
each character indulges in this consumer utopia and I can’t help but indulge my own fantasy. I would play all the gun fighting and duckhunting and car crashing video games as they did, with an eternity of tokens. And I would go ice skating like Fran with no-one else on the whole rink ever. And I would try caviar. Mink myself in three-way mirrors. And even as I had a hundred television sets how I would miss TV. “Great,” Fran ruins my shutterbugging with her sarcasm,“when you finish the roll we’ll drop it off at the drug store.”And we would wallow in cash and mock the security cameras just as I start to feel oh so insecure.
093 Autobiographical insertion of envying characters their experiential indulgences: fails to engage theoretically, reader not entertained, narrator not further fleshed.
093 [Poorly made (though good) point: consumption of flesh by zombies mirrors consumption of commodities by characters. What this can signify is that though consumers are not nourished by their consumption of commodities, there is a deep, irresistible need in the human organism to "consume" such commodities, where consumption is the production, acquisition, utilization, maintenance, and ownership of material commodities, consumer goods, market fetishes.]
094 Raiders' vandalism a mode of consumption that enacts class resentment. Their behavior can be paralleled to zombies'.
094 Asserts Peter and Fran have lost something of their morality for having killed zombies to gratify their materialistic greed uninhibited. Explore this idea in terms of residue of human staining zombies' reanimated existence.
095 This is just embarrassing his admitting to web-research regarding Romeor and finding a(n unidentified) site title "_Dawn of the Dead_ Mall: Today."
which appliances and knock-off fashions reign supreme.As well,Romero’s choice of African ‘tribal’music to play over the speakers in the mall’s gun shop – his camera focusing on bullet boxes whose packaging features safari- typical animals – codes the gun shop as linked to the very colonialism that the voodoo zombie emerges from. If the mall owners knew that Romero
095 "As well,Romero’s choice of African ‘tribal’music to play over the speakers in the mall’s gun shop – his camera focusing on bullet boxes whose packaging features safari- typical animals – codes the gun shop as linked to the very colonialism that the voodoo zombie emerges from."
095 Provides example of capitalist culture easily appropriating zombie metaphor. What this indicates is that zombie behavior not only represents human subjectivity in the condition of late capitalism, but it also provides humans with models for understanding their role in late capitalism. Hence, it would behoove cultural historians to glean the representational lessons are presented and latent within academic, spontaneous, and cultural instances of zombies. This is difficult to the extent zombies represent on many level "obvious" representational allegories. For example, zombies easily represent duped and dazed consumers, have represented automaton soldiers, laborers, rednecks, lesbians, neighbors, undergraduates, and the like. What zombies can teach us that is new and unexpected are the ways acknowledging pack (contra mass) organization can advantage (?) posthuman subjects.
[Will I be able to tie any of this to the moments when the media surface fractures: Ben's lynching, hallucination and intoxication in Pericles Lewnes _Redneck Zombies_ (1987).
I am thinking about Jameson here.]
096 Types of otherness (that not embodied/figured within realm of advertising) Romero leaves untouched.
096 DotD not an easily marketed film.
097 Romero's DotD is an object lesson in the success to be had in critiquing consumer culture.
097 "Above and beyond copyright law and its own profit margin,Dawn’s impact on consumer norms can be considered in terms of its widespread appro- priation." [I would argue this in terms of its use in ad campaigns and the widespread familiarity consumers/people have with figure of zombie. The zombie is dead-face, blackface, comparable to the "the robot" as a kinaesthetic style.
097 Identifies proliferation of films and ad campaigns as exploitation of franchise.
[
While it certainly is this, it is also interpretable as the extension of an ideological network at the same time it can be read as the presence of that network or the capitalist intentionality and qualities of a movie production house, an auteur, the cinematic charisma.
(What precisely are the qualities of the assemblage associated and responsible for the dissemination of zombie film/ideology? Is it akin to Jes Grew?) What I also need to answer is the "why is this important?" My answer is that insofar as it reflects, prompts, incites, or suggests genocidal behavior it should be understood. Next to nuclear holocaust, the secular Western world's most recognizable apocalypse myth is zombie outbreak.
After images of nuclear holocaust, zombie representation (lore) is the most recognizable vision of apocalypse in the secular Western world.
]
097-098 Cautionary tale (which Loudermilk aggressively attributes to DotD) of consumer culture which provides a "false security" (98).
Cites Simpsons Halloween episode where the Simpsons "are thankful -- as their eyes glaze over -- that 'at least' [they're] not zombies" (97).
exploited but more: as a tale disseminated, an allegory mutated, an anti- commodity serially re-commodi ied into an ideological trend.
098 Empty verbiage: "A canvassing of these films should illuminate Dawn of the Deadas a masterpiece exploited but more: as a tale disseminated, an allegory mutated, an anti-commodity serially re-commodified into an ideological trend."
098 n. 12 Loudermilk's nominating films "rip-offs" reveals something about his politics, that the "believes" in the importance of class distinction when talking about popular culture.
12 098 Critique of middle-class values in Robert Scott's _The Video Dead_ (1986).
098 "Punk and zombie anarchies collided a year earlier in" Interesting use of the work anarchies. "Zombie anarchies". Hm.
099 "with original script written by John Russo (co-writer of Night),this horror-comedy invited a legal suitagainst the film over its title – i.e.a court battle over appropriation/commodification."
099 _Thee Stuff_ (Larry Cohen, 1985) is about inserting a "natural resource" into "the consumer structure".
100 The "forsaking of all other products but The Stuff" is a way of visually communicating that all objects in consumer culture operate similarly.
100 n. 14 Sanitized violence in mainstream (TV) serves as normalizing force for high levels of lived violence.
100 Critique of materialism in Ellis's _American Psycho_ can be seen in near-equal weights given over to descriptions of beauty products, name-brand clothing, and killing.
101 Quotes Linda Kauffman quoting David Cronenberg (in her review of _American Psycho_).: "system ... but’, horror director David Cronenberg interprets Ellis’s novel,‘inside that mind there is an awareness that it is all meaningless and artificial ... And the murders, the hideousness, are an attempt to break out of that,to try to shatter it and connect with some- thing real’ (Kauffman, 2001: 42)."
102 Marketing controversy over Harron's _American Psycho_ which, ironically, makes it a "commercially relevant" product.
103 n. 16 Autobiographical note of correspondence between post-nuclear apocalypse landscape and scenery depicted in Romero's Dead films.
104 "More so than the body-snatched,than the everyday serial killer, the postmodern zombie is the postmodern identity completely disengaged from a system of commodities-as-code for humanity,a system I depend on to declare who I am in a consumer culture of ‘individuals’."
(top of item notes)
Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead : George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006.
—. Introduction. Gospel of the Living Dead : George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006. 1-26. (show item notes)
001 n. 2
Use of unknown actors may heighten suspense.
002 "zombie movies may also usefully and constructively inform our ideas about human beings and God."
002 BB: Shaviro, Steven. "Contagious Allegories: George Romero." The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 83-105.
002 n. 6 Shaviro comments on aesthetic pleasure of meditating on the representation of destruction which, according to Shaviro, Benjamin poses as a corrective to "fascist exaltation."
002 n. 7 Justifies (also in main body) the educative function of literature, "where shocking violence and depravity are used to disorient and reorient the audience, disturbing them in order ot make some unsettling point, usualy a sociological, anthropological, or theological one."
002-005 Convergent characteristics of zombies as pioneered by Romero.
003 "Both nuclear zombies and bioterror zombies are then a symbol of our own mad urges to destroy ourselves, and a terrifying portent that we might succeed."
003 Cites Jaime Russell's _Book of the Dead_ for explanation regarding the relevance of zombies to contemporary social anxiety: "Whatever the answer, it's apparent that the revival of the genre has coincided with a historical moment that the zombie seems more suited to than vampires, werewolves, serial killers or any of the other usual horror monsters. The genre's traditional use of biochemical warfare and toxic spills as the starting point for its living dead apocalypses have an added impetus today after anthrax scares, concerns about weapons of mass destruction and fears about a 'dirty bomb' being released in a major metropolitan center." (192) Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead : The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. 1st ed. Godalming, England: FAB, 2005.
003 n. 11 Discussion of cultural and cinematic origins of zombies, most of which can be traced to Haitian vodou culture.
004 Zombie cannibalism is symbolic since they receive no nourishment from it. [Touches on idea that the interaction between living humans is also a representation of how they "prey on each other."
004 [Does the representation of infection in zombie films parallel unscientific beliefs about contagion?]
004 n. 12 Citing Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead : The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. 1st ed. Godalming, England: FAB, 2005: 67-68, 69: By introducing concept of cannibalism to zombies, Romero makes flesh abject.
005 Zombies are context in which interactions between individuals become major source of suspense and threat.
005-006 Difference in zombie films which demonstrate "development in the genre.": speed and agility; fear(lessness) of fire; behavior toward living non-humans, especially intraspecies violence; zombies lack intelligence, becoming increasingly intelligent in recent films.
006 Meaning of human violence which unlike other species is curbed within species.
007 Modern movie monsters are hybrids, combining "worst but most potent qualities of both species: brute strength, diabolical intellect, deceit, lechery, lust for power, and savage disregard for life."
007 Zombie films heighten overlap between zombies and humans. What are humans other than "slightly smart zombies, a tribe of deranged, self-destructive cannibals preying on one another?"
008 Living corpses are at once human and not human and so belong to a class of creature that are at once mundane and sacred.
008 n. 15 Notes Dillard, Richard H. W. "Night of the Living Dead: "It's Not Like Just a Wind That's Passing Through."" Horror Films. New York: Monarch Press, 1976: 14-29, esp. 15 and Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985: 277 for discussion of corpses. Dillard treats of fear of "dead kindred" and Waller of the unconscious projections of hostility from undead.
008 n. 16 Versatility of zombies as symbol. Quotes Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead : The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. 1st ed. Godalming, England: FAB, 2005: 190.
" 'What's striking is the fluidity of Romero's living dead metaphor. Previously styled in the series as the dead of Vietnam, the silent majority of the Nixon era, vapid consumers and now an oppressed (ethnic) underclass, Romero's zombies have a symbolic potential unmatched by any other horror movie monster.' "
008-009 Normal-ish appearance and lack of superhuman powers enables zombies to catch victims unaware.
009 "it is more subtly and insidiously horrible to imagine the human characters in the movies slaughtering hundreds of zombies who look, and, to some extent, still act, exactly like human beings." [This is the crux of the terror which inspires "protective" acts of killing.]
009 "what is especially terrifying with zombies is that their monstrous state *is* their human state, it never transforms or goes away."
009 Twitchell's slavish comparison of Romero's zombies to vampires is tedious. Zombies are not transformed vampires but transformed humans, which is Paffenroth's argument.
009 Zombies are fearsome because "we identify and sympathize with them in a way that we never could with more powerful and demonic monsters."
009-010 Argues depictions of violence against human characters by zombies in Romero's movies "obey certain limits of decency," manifesting a moral economy which penalizes humans who "have been behaving either foolishly, or despicably toward the other characters.)
010 "the point in the movies is that zombies are human, and humans are zombie-like[. . . .]"
010 Acknowledges that "more recent directors probably want to draw parallels with the modern situation of terrorism, to which 'civilized' countries ceded some of their 'civilization' when they fall into the rhetoric and behavior of, 'We've got to get them before they get us, no matter what it takes.' "
010 Appearance of zombies "may force us to act as barbarically and impetuously as they do."
010 Conventional morality is "discarded as irrelevant and unfeasible" in face of zombie outbreak [which leads one to consider other circumstances in which conventional morality is irrelevant] where one could be attacked by human-seeming zombie.
Movies like _28 Days Later_ make explicit reference to the idea "that infected humans and zombies must be 'exterminated' " words usually used for "nonhuman pestilence, like cockroaches or rabid dogs".
011 "Zombies are essentially primitive humans, humans wihtrout, or without much, reason and intellect."
011 Possibility of zombies would verify there is something about human consciousness that is immaterial. [I can grant this but not without noting that to imagine something is not to make it real.]
012 Humans have an intellect which allows them to be "more petty, predatory, and selfish than any zombie could be" [More morally culpable than zombies as zombies cannot even be said to have intellect or awareness. This definitely can be combined with work on P. K. Dick.]
012 Notes "zombies also clearly straddle the line between living and dead in a perverted version of the Christian idea of bodily resurrection."
012 Selfish and predatory behavior of human characters is what "makes these movies more inappropriate for younger viewers than does the bloodshed" [Concern with children.]
012 [Ambiguity between living and dead distresses human society no more than viruses which are neither living nor dead distress human society. It is the behavior of humans in the face of zombies and the overwhelming force they represent which threaten human society.]
012 n. 26 Quotes Shaviro that humans are afraid of being "swept away by mimesis—of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves." [This is not much different than worrying about one's fate after death.]
013 Apocalyptic in sense of revealing "terrible truths about human nature, existence, and sin."
013 Presence of zombies rob people of "their chance to experience normal feelings of grief, mortality, or sacredness, and forcing them to substitute callous, unthinking, reflexive violence."
013 Zombies seem to short-circuit the circle of life.
014 Laughableness of zombies hearkens back to religious spectacles such as passion plays.
014 Liminality of zombies, citing:
Dargis, Manohla. "Not Just Roaming, Zombies Rise Up." Rev. of Land of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 2005. New York Times 24 June 2005: n.p.
Loudermilk, A. "Eating 'Dawn' in the Dark." Journal of Consumer Culture 3.1 (2003): 85-86.
Shaviro, Steven. "Contagious Allegories: George Romero." The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 104.
014 Zombie movies do not take themselves seriously. [Though NotLD seems to do so, as does DayD and LotD.]
015 Humorousness of zombies "stands in a long tradition of laughing at evil, defusing its power and its hold on us through laughter."
015 n. 33 Cites John Fraser "Watching Horror Movies" who compares contemporary horror film to Renaissance drama.
016 Game of assassination in _Shaun of the Dead_ is sign of class envy.
017 Collapse of human civilization due to zombies is a reversal, the clumsy and imbecilic besting humans full of "hubris, arrogance".
017 n. 37 Anti-authoritarian impulse of splatter-film makers as discussed in Fraser, John. "Watching Horror Movies." Michigan Quarterly Review 29.1 (1990): 48-49.
"NotLD was the first horror film to be overtly subversive. Previously, all social criticism was veiled or half-hearted." This overlooks, for one example, Ishiro Honda's 1954 _Gojira_. Newman, Kim. Nightmare Movies : A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films. 1st American ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1988: 5
017 n. 38 Critical sources which argue Romero's quartet are about the United States. See esp: Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London ; New York: Wallflower Press, 2003: 21, 32
017 n. 39 Tony Williams: "Old Glory" will be transformed into "Old Gory."
017-018 "Romero and the other filmmakers use the fantastical 'disease' of zombies to criticize the very real diseases of racism, sexism, materialism, and individualism that would make any society easy prey for barbarian hordes."
018 Reads zombies "in a way more peaceable and communitarian" with regard to race than living.
018 Romero's LotD witnesses Cholo and black zombie "Big Daddy" "bring bout an end o the evil, racist human empire."
018 Shaviro argues that figures in Romero movies do not represent social forces but are themselves "directly animated and possessed, even in their allegorical distance from beyond the grave, by such forces" Shaviro, Steven. "Contagious Allegories: George Romero." The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 87
Also Noël Carroll argues Romero's Dead movies are anti-racist. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990: 198.
018 n. 44 Incomplete but useful list of sources which cite racial narrative of NotLD.
Higashi, Sumiko. "Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film About the Horrors of the Vietnam Era." From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. Eds. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990: 184
Hutchings, Peter. The Horror Film. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2004: 112.
Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985: 295.
018 n. 46 Contradictory opinions in criticism regarding hetero- or homogeneity of zombies, esp. in LotD.
019 "In zombie movies sexism does not seem to taint and damn human society as poisonously as racism does: it just makes men expect women to act like idiots, while blinding them to their own foolishness."
019 Argues characters in Romero films create a kind of "Noah's ark."
019 Romero's eye for feminist portrayal not as strong as "his instinct for social satire [which] treats his material with real wit and subtlety."
019 n. 49 Different critical opinions regarding sexuality of zombies with Shaviro's opinion that audience is "seduced" by zombies (96-97), Higashi seeing "cannibalism as a perverted kind of sexuality (179-80).
Paffenroth himself notes aliens in Alien (1979) "are really impregnating them, presumably in a way that brings sexual gratification to the alien."
Notes Waller's (276) and Caputi's (103) distinguishing sexless zombies from hypersexualized vampires.
019-020 Men in Romero films behave as if mere materialism is enough, neglecting new experiences, relationships, and even ideas.
020 Snyder's DotD shows characters letting go of materialism, unlike Romero's films.
020 Zombies exhibit materialism in their undead desire to get inside the mall in DotD: "motorized instinct."
"[. . .] the zombies are the class envious and outraged have-nots, toppling the spoiled and decadent haves."
021 "It is not just because of the dismemberments, decapitations, and disembowelments that these films are not 'feel good' movies, but because of their stinging critique of our society."
021 Inexplicably, Paffenroth argues about better preparedness of Americans for zombie outbreak due to gun ownership.
Turns to Hurricane Katrina and firing upon rescue workers as example of failed individualism.
021 n. 51 Quotes Shaviro on exposing of macho individualism as "stupid and dysfunctional"
022 Imagery in Romero films to some extent drawn from Dante's _Inferno_. People live hellish existence.
022 Significant discussion of the coincidence of Christian values and the critique of American society present in the zombie films.
022 n. 53 Dante describes residents of hell "the suffering race of souls who lost good of intellect" which could describe zombies.
023 Deadly sins indulged by living characters.
023 Zombies exhibit gluttony, rage (wrath), and sloth. [To some extent contradicts earlier discussion of the peaceable and communitarian nature of zombies.]
024 Boredom and repetition is the truly horrifying part of Dante's hell and a zombie-infesteed Earth. Notes Shaviro reads zombies as "quintessential media images, since they are vacuous, mimetic replications of the human beings they once were."
024 Dante's "hell is primarily internal, of our own making."
024 Fraudulence worst of all deadly sins. [Where does this fit in development?]
025 Dante and Romero's film "asking us uncomfortably whether such an afterlife sounds more like heaven, or more like hell."
(top of item notes)
—. Night of the Living Dead (1968): Romero's First Look at Hell, Sin, and Human Nature. Gospel of the Living Dead : George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006. 027-044. (load item notes)
Romero, George A.. Preface. . Ed. John Russo. New York: Harmony Books, 1985. 6-7. (load item notes)
Shaviro, Steven. Contagious Allegories: George Romero. . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 83-105. (show item notes)
083 "They [films in Romero's living dead trilogy] are crass exploitation movies, pop left-wing action cartoons, exercises in cynical nihilism, and sophisticated political allegories of late capitalist American."
083 "Romero's zombies seem almost natural in a society in which the material comforts of the middle class coexist with repressive conformism, mind-numbing media manipulation, and the more blatant violence of poverty, sexism, racism, and militarism."
084 "The life-in-death of the zombie is a a nearly perfect allegory for the inner logic of capitalism[. . . .]"
084 "They [zombies] mark the rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation. Their emergence--and this is one of the thrills of watching these films--reminds s of the derisory gratuitousness of death, and of Bataille's equation of death with expenditure and waste. Our society endeavors to transform death into value, but the zombie enact a radical refusal and destruction of value."
085 "Romero's zombies could almost be said to be quintessential media images, since they are vacuous, mimetic replications of the human beings they once were." [This could be compared to the representation of the undead in Abel Gance's 1919 _J'Accuse_ or Robert Scott's 1987 _The Video Dead_.]
086 The zombies are in a sense all body: they have brains but not minds. That is to say, they are nonholistic, deorganicized bodies: lumps of flesh that still experience the cravings of the flesh, but without the organic articulations and teleological focus that we are prone to attribute to ourselves and to all living things."
086 "These strange beings, at once alive and dead, grotesquely literal and blatantly artificial, cannot be encompassed by an ordinary logic of representation."
087 Defines allegory according to Walter Benjamin's _The Origin of German Tragic Drama_ and refers Owens and Olalquiaga for discussions of relevance of Benjaminian allegory to postmodernism.
087 Claims Romero's film is "subversive transformation."
086 Zombies are not about threat of social order, but about its production and maintenance.
087 Zombies "are directly animated and possessed" by repressive social forces (forces of order), thus as representation they cross from allegory to mimesis, which is also the "passage for passive reanimation to active, raging contagion."
087 "They can be regarded both as monstrous symptoms of a violent, manipulative, exploitative society and as potential remedies for its ills--all this by virtue of their apocalyptically destructive, yet oddly innocuous, counterviolence."
088 [After roundup of scholarly discussions of how human struggle in face of zombies is treated "in a manner that defies conventional expectations."]
"In both _Dawn_ and _Day_, the women end up establishing tactical alliances with black men who are not blindly self-centered in the manner of their white counterparts."
088 "All three fils have women or blacks as their cheif protagonists, the only characters with whom the audience positively identifies as they struggle to remain alive and to resist and escape the zombies. The black man in _Night_ is the sole character in the film who is both sympathetic and capable of reasoned action."
089 Macho behavior imperils survivors.
090 Contra Clover, survival in zombie films cannot be equated to triumph. Issues raised by zombies and consequent human behavior not settled by bare fact of surviving.
090 "The three films progressing the direction of ever-greater contiguities and similarities between the living and the nonliving, between seduction and horror, and between desire and dread. In consequence, identities and identifications are increasingly dissolved, even within the framework of conventional, ostensibly sutured narrative."
090 "In this context, the zombies seem a logical outgrowth of, or response to, patriarchal norms. They are the disavowed residues of the ego-producing mechanisms of internalization and identification. They figure the infinite emptiness of desire, insofar as it is shaped by, and made conterminous [sic] with, Oedipal repression."
091 "Even as dread pulses to a climax, as plans of action and escape fail, and as characters we expect to survive are eliminated, we are denied the opportunity of imposing redemptive or compensatory meanings. There is no mythology of doomed, heroic resistance, no exalted sense of pure, apocalyptic negativity."
091 Romero uses production constraints to "depsychologize the drama and emphasize the artificiality and gruesome arbitrariness of spectacle" As a result, "Our anxieties are focused upon events rather than characters, upon the violent fragmentation of cinematic process (with a deliberate clumsiness that mimes the shuffling movement of the zombies themselves) rather than the supposed integrity of any single protagonist's subjectivity."
092 Dismisses that DotD is about (mock) family and more about consumerism.
092 Consumption of flesh parallels "consumption of useless commodities by the American middle class. Commodity fetishism is a mode of desire that is not grounded in repression; rather, it is directly incited, multiplied, and affirmed by artificial means."
093 BB: "Morris, Meaghan. No title. _Camera Obscura_ (May-Sep 1989)." Special issue: "The Spectatrix." Janet Bergstrom and Mary Anne Doane eds.
092-094 "The zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism's logic of endless consumption and ever-expanding accumulation precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess."
094 "the soldier's abusive, macho posturings and empty assertions of authority clash with the scientists' futile, misguided efforts to discover the cause of the zombie plague, and to devise remedies for it. All that remains of postmodern society is the military-scientific complex, its chief mechanism for producing power and knowledge."
095 DayD is mainly concerned with "the social production of boundaries, limits, and compartmentalizations, and their subsequent affirmative disruption."
095 "This success suggests that discipline and training, whether in child rearing or in the military, is itself only a restrictiive appropriation of the zombies mimetic energy."
095 "From both inside and outside, mimetic resemblances proliferate and threaten to overturn the hierarchy of living and dead."
096 "The zombies proliferate by contiguity, attraction, imitation, and agglomerate into large groups. The uncanny power of Romero's films comes from the fact that these intradiegetic processes of mimetic participation are the same one that, on another level, serve to bind viewers to the events unfolding across the screen."
097 ""pattern of compulsive, fascinated waiting"
098 Characters (in DotD) are more concerned about "being swept away by mimesis". [I think a better way of putting it is that they do not want their bodies to reanimate.]
098 "To die is precisely to give up one's will, and thus to find oneself drawn, irresistibly, into a passive, zombified state."
099 "Instead of the spectator projecting him- or herself into the actions unfolding on the screen, an on-screen character lapses into a quasi-spectatorial position." This is the point at which dread slips into obsession, the moment when unfulfilled threats turn into seductive promises. Fear becomes indistinguishable from an incomprehensible, intense, but objectless craving. This is the zombie state *par excellence*: an abject vacancy, a passive emptying of the self."
099 "The allure of zombiehood cannot be represented directly--it is a kind of mimetic transference that exceeds and destroys all structures of representation"
099 "The hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our own selves."
100 "These films literalize obscenity." [Excellent discussion of the spectatorial experience of cinematic violence.]
101 "Horror shares with pornography the frankly avowed goal of physically *arousing* the audience. [. . . .] They exceed the boundaries usually assigned to mass entertainment, by ludicrously hyperbolizing and literalizing what are supposed to be merely the secondary, deferred, compensatory satisfactions of fantasy."
102 Open embrace of "technological means of manipulation" [special effects] in Romero's living dead films is "cynicism on the plane of expression" which, like the zombies who exist between life and death, provokes meaning that exists in "the boundaries between humor and horror, between intense conviction and ludicrous exaggeration."
102 Horror has a transgressive [Bakhtinian] function.
103 "The zombie potlatch marks a democratic, communal leveling of all individual distinctions; it is an ephemeral instant of universal participation and communication."
103 "I find myself giving in to an insidious, hidden, deeply shameful passion for abject self-disintegration." [Speak for yourself, Shaviro.]
103-104 " On a formal no less than on a thematic level, the 'living dead' trilogy destabilizes structures of power and domination. It accomplishes this by being absurdly reactive, by pushing to an outrageous extreme the consequences of manipulation, victimization, and Nietzschean 'slave morality.' "
104 "It does not negate but appropriates and redirects, the simulationist technologies of postmodern control."
104 "deindividuated subjectivity"
105 Still unclear what "a politics of mimetic debasement, a subtle and never-completed opening to abjection" means.
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Twitchell, James B.. How I Bought My Red Miata. Reason. 32.4 (2000): 24. (load item notes)
Waller, Gregory A.. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.
—. Stories of the Living and the Dead. . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. 3-26. (load item notes)
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—. Into the Twentieth Century. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker's Dracula to Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. 29-73. (load item notes)
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* —. Land of the Living Dead. . Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. 272-330. (show item notes)
272 "Night of the Living Dead does not assume that knowledge is power, at least not for the people in the film whose fate we are most concerned with."
273 farmhouse magically draws dead
273 Overlooks the fact the title of the film announces the fact that the film knows it is a horror movie and the characters behave "as if" they are in a horror film.
276 First zombie appears to be human and "is a man before he is a thing." In this way, one could argue that the figure is degraded, dehumanized, by the cinematic representation itself, perhaps a tension between the visual signifier and the narrative machinery.
277 From Totem and Taboo, concept of unconscious hostility which emanates from dead as evil impulses but which are really projections by living upon dead. Cf. Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead : George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006: 6 n. 15.
277 discussion of concept of the Freud's concept of the primal horde.
277-279 relationship of NotLD to Matheson's
278 The living dead do not revolt against the status quo because they are the representation of the status quo.
279 Members of Le Bon's crowd become automatons.
279 The leader in Le Bon's work is multiplied in the very fact of embodied consciousness, a living human who draws the dead magnetically.
280 desire "to escape from freedom as well as from death."
280 Living dead "and their simulacrum of immortality holds no promise of pleasure or privilege, just work and more work."
281 Characterstics such as terror, fear, violent tendencies come to seem quintessentially human because they are expressed only by the living.
281 Johnny a "classic malcontent," undutiful who flouts paying respect to the dead.
283 Barbara's Christian faith is of no advantage or utility in a situation such as Night of the Living Dead.
284 Ben is an example "of the modern American hero-as-amateur."
284 Ben's barricading of house is the start of its destruction, the degradation of private property which can no longer safely harbor humans.
284 Killikg of undead [cinematically] multiplies their presence, the suggestion being that kiling produce more of the undead.
286 Irony of film is that best plan for survival comes from egotistical coward and heroism is paired with foolhardiness.
286 Men in film are accompanied by a dependent woman.
288 Tom's cooperative and selfless behavior makes him a model draftee; his and Judy's behavior is uncharactrersitc of teenagers for the time period.
289 Dillard reads ending pessimistically, while Waller reads messages about human perserverance even in the face of failure.
289 Monsters do not lack individuality but personality. ]Is there a difference?]
290 Power failure immediate commences attack of monsters against barricades.
290 Telecasts set in daytime.
291 Ben's shooting of Harry characterized as act of murder, product of human foible to which monsters are not subject.
292 NotLD signals death of family, marriage, and lovers.
293 Mentions incestuous embrace between Barbara and Johnny.
295 Ben mistaken for monster just as monster is mistaken for living at movie's opening.
295 McClelland's group outnumber monsters because it symbolically and narratively replaces them.
295 Racism present in Ben's death echoed in opening of DotD
297 Films which reference NotLD: Horror Express (1972), Fear No Evil (1981), One Dark Night (1982), Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)
298 Confrontation between doctor and announcer conducting interview [suspicion on intelligentsia].
298 Report of "everything under control" at end of NotLD gives way in DotD to TV station chaos.
299 Cut from reference to "specially equipped squads of the National Guard" to "shoot-oiut reminiscent of a 1960s urban riot."
299 Trained members of S.W.A.T. team always about to disintegrate into separate individuals.
300 Extermination a game for rednecks
301 Peter and Roger represent continued investigation of figure of hero [this time a professional].
302 Scene of extermination of zombies in tenement basement. [Waller doesn not mention Peter's crying.]
303 Encounter of civil defense supplies [also suggests that this is a post-apocalyptic world.]
305 Distance shots deindividuate monsters "to make the creatures--inner-city blacks as well as suburban whites--all part of one homgeneous mass."
305 DotD individuates monsters by color and facial expression.
306 Film itself seems to "fail" at its end with the succession of grainy images. R. H. W. Dillard Romero "abruptly shatters the film's smooth forward motion."
306 Grainy images suggest mortality of members of posse.
306 Living dead comical, instinct draws them to significant types of while-living behavior. [Comparable to children.]
306 McClelland is the "final survivor" "more successful than Ben at being the boss."
307 Humans superior to monsters in every way except numbers.
310 Films which stage caper stories where an objective is executed that "is logical, imaginative, and difficult to carry out," in this case of securing a mall against tide of zombies
310 Roger narratively punised as he "endangers himself and the entire group as son as he begins to kill for the sake of pleasure or revenge, for the sake of killing itself."
311 ?
311 Roger and Peter form a pack of masculinized professionals, Stephen the amateur, the sissy, the wimp. Fran is the mother.
312 Roger and group behave "Like the winners of some fabulous free shopping spree, Roger and the others have the run of the mall and the choice of all its seemingly endless variety of products."
312 Scenes of no longer relevant gestures of transaction. The gestures are empty. The capital has evaporated. [This movie takes a look at various situations under which capital miraculously evaporates, the relations between people when capital has seemingly no value. It is an effect of the zombie horror genre.]
313 Fran and Stephen embody transfixed humans, with forward zombie-like stare.
313 Juxtaposed against the scene during which Roger's reanimated body is exterminated, the postapocalyptic television scientist/commentator (hysterically) asserts "we've got to remain rational, logical."
313 Killing of loved ones (genocidal imperative) demanded of those who would survive. Devoid of spiritual (or patriotic) redemption, act is empty, pure horror, inevitable outcome, necessary action. Before dying, Roger testifies that he will attempt to withhold, prevent, refrain from reanimation. However, this implies the willful part of Roger, the ego who testifies, will exist beyond the point of death, a paradox.
314 Fran recognizes disturbing unreality of situation over dinner [after she and Stephen have fallen to arguing over the television. This is a condition of contemporary life (before families routinely had multiple televisions) for many people.]
314 Fran's growing awareness she is falling victim to consumer mentality, prey of a jail she has helped make.
314-315 Waller assumes that the quartet of "comfortable human beings inside this fortress have the freedome to choose, now that it 'it really is all over' " when the zombies are only a reflection of their inability to choose.
315 n. 50 Wood: "The possibility of the development of Fascism out of breakdown and chaos" dramatized by McClelland's posse and the motorcycle gang in DotD
315 posse verfies civilization continues whereas raiders are evidence of social chaos
317 Violence of killing undead demytholigized in zombie films:no escape or heroes.
318 Raiders offer unviable alternative to quartet's descent into besieged domesticity
318 Zombies quickly become dangerous at the end of raid, though they had been pathetic laughable creatures moments before
319 Zombies once again in mall parodically repeat earlier actions of quartet.
320 Distinguishes between Roger and Stephen who never were faced with temptation to give up from Fran and Peter who were. [Does not seem aware original ending called for both characters to commit suicide.]
320 n. 53 Helicopter escape calls to mind departure fromm civilization in Westerns (overlaid with Vietnam imagery). Compared to helicopter in _The Poseidon Adventure_ which signals a return to normalcy.
321 glancing remark regarding the prospects of continuation representeed by Fran and Peter.
321 Insightful remarks regarding Peter's transformation from a masked trooper who kills zombies, his zombified friends, and the mauraders to [a surrogate father] who gives up his gun to board the helicopter.
20070607 It is difficult to read using Adobe Acrobat, impossible to take significant notes.
307 Living Dead always a threat, no matter how ludicrous they appear.
307 The camera identifies with the living dead when Roger and Peter shoot zombies in the basement and in the killing of Hare Krishna (among others).
307 [One logic which pervades the zombie films is that anyone can be transformed into one of the undead. Living humans may have to act decisively and aggressively to protect their own lives, their own interests. Once humans recognize the presence of the “living dead,” an oxymoron at best, they can legitimately, rationally, according to the rules of the narrative, the logic of the social structure, exterminate every single one of them. The exhiliration, disgust, and terror of identifying the presence of the living dead is the terror and exhiliration of identifying a group of people who must be killed, must be extirpated, whose very existence is a threat to life. They are not even responsible for evil. Exterminating them is the only “rational” choice, the only “logical” choice. It is the call of fascism.]
308 Wood identifies a quote by Fran that should be verified: “ ‘You’re hypnotized by this place,’ she tells Stephen, ‘it’s so bright and neatly wrapped. You don’t see that it’s a prison too.’ ”
308 n. 43 Remarks Romero’s architectural structures stand in contrast to class “haunted house.”
308 Peter’s knowledge of abortion technique.
309 Warning that living in private residences dangerous no matter how well protected. [In what places and under what conditions has it been illegal for a population to live in a private residence? Answer: Jews in Nazi Germany.]
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Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.
* —. A Director and His Traditions. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. 004-020. (load item notes)
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* —. Night of the Living Dead. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. 021-032. (show item notes)
021-022 Discussion of race and its representations in EC comics. BB: Dyer's _White_ on _Night of the Living Dead_
" _Night of the Living Dead_ broke many taboos. It lacked a 'happy ending' and left none of its central characters alive at the climax. No hero and heroine walked into the sunset after the cessation of the monstrous threat. Also, well before the emergence of the so-called 'blaxploitation' genre, _Night of the Living Dead's_ leading character was black, a fact Romero still ascribes today to mere coincidence. However, the film's culturally-influential predecessors, such as _Mad_ and 1950s EC Comics also contained leading characters including Afro-Americans, Jews and even North Koreans, who were often depicted as victims of contemporary society. These ethnic figures also occasionally appeared in more heroic role unlike their counterparts in more mainstream forms of representations who were conspicuous by their very cultural absence."
031 Relates grainy images at end of NotLD to "concentration camp that footage" suggests the forces depicted in the film could be compared to the effect of concentration camps which "reduced living human beings capable of culture and speech to basic material component elements of ash and dust."
—. Dawn of the Dead. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. 084-098. (show item notes)
—. Day of the Dead. The Cinema of George A. Romero : Knight of the Living Dead. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. 128-140. (show item notes)
Williams, Tony. White Zombie: Haitian Horror. Jump cut. (1983): 18-20. (show item notes)
018
Argument " According to certain critics it is impossible to produce films made within capitalist institutions which criticize imperialist practices." anticipates Spivak's
[" 'No perspective *critical* of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self' (253, emphasis in the original)." BB: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." _Critical Inquiry_, 12:1 (1985) pp. 243-61.
qtd. in Aizenberg, Edna. "`I Walked with a Zombie': The Pleasures and Perils of Postcolonial Hybridity." _World Literature Today_ 73.3 (1999): 465.]
018 "It [_White Zombie_] addresses itself to a concrete case of U.S. imperialism and is implicitly grounded in a disguised critique based on the devices of condensation and displacement."
018 Cites Judith Hess's theory that genre fiction is politically conservative, dealing with political and social problems only indirectly and setting time of occurrence in non-present.
018 Invokes Eckert's discussion of the psychoanalytic mechanisms of condensation and displacement to anatomize the unresolved conflicts in horror film.
018 Traces screenplay of _White Zombie_ by Garnett Weston to William B. Seabrook's _The Magic Island_ (1929), "an investigation of contemporary voodoo practices in Haiti."
019 "Black zombie slavery in the film thus represents a macabre version of the forced labor system which the U.S. inflicted on the Haitian population in 1918."
019 "Legendre's mill thus not only echoes the earlier forced labor system that the U.S. imposed on the native population but the contemporary miserable servitude of Negro Haitians."
019 BB: Hans Schmidt. _The American Occupation of Haiti._ (1971).
019 Film's location "undermines the stereotyped functions the characters are supposed to play out on the film's manifest level."
019 History of American interventionist history regarding Haiti 1915-1934.
019 In 1932 Haiti was occupied by the US (under American occupation 1915-34).
019 Labor organization in Legendre's mill reflects Haitian colonial power relations. [A little too direct and too pat.]
019 Neil's objection to Madeline being in hands of blacks is that she be better dead. [Good interpretation.]
019 Reads Beaumont's British affectations as signals of American hatred of England between the wars.
019 Reads Legendre as allegorical/symoblic stand-in for U.S. control of Haitian political/economic hierarchy.
020 " In genre terms, Madeline appears as the archetypal white female victim, the vulnerable feminine aspect of American matriarchy always in danger from Indians, monsters, flying saucers, foreign invaders or internal subversives such as reds, black panthers, and hippies."
020 "In Haiti, slaves used voodoo to maintain a common identity and provide a cloak for conspiratorial liaisons. Like all efficient dictators Legendre realizes the importance of mobilizing the religious factor as a prop for his regime, and the magician's Negro appearance is by no means accidental." [What Williams neglects is that in the cinematic context, Legendre does in fact have magical powers.]
020 "Legendre represents a distorted embodiment of U.S. guilt feeligns concerning the occupation."
020 Historical and cinematic importance of Haitian executioner.
020 Legendre reaction toward Beaumont is a crystallization of class resentment felt by Americans at large during depression era: the shaking of hands, Legendre's gaining control over Beaumont.
020 Reads Madeline as someone who "represents Haiti itself". Convincing in terms of reading course of Madeline's zombification which parallels the colonial position Haiti is subjected to during American occupation.
020 _White Zombie_ displaces history of Haitian political struggle "on to the levels of the personal, sexual property rights, and magic-voodoo."
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Wood, Robin. Apocalypse Now: Notes on the Living Dead. American Nightmare : Essays on the Horror Film. Ed. Andrew Britton. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. 91-97. (load item notes)
—. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan-- and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
—. The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 70s. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan-- and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 041-062. (load item notes)
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—. The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan-- and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 063-084. (show item notes)
063
Disturbance enacted and caused by 70s American horror film important to the concept of he "incoherent text".
063 BB: Horowitz, Gad. Repression : Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory : Freud, Reich, and Marcuse. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977.
Discussion of concept of basic and surplus repression.
064 "The struggle for liberation is not utopian, but a practical necessity.
064 The most immediately obvious characteristics of life in our culture are frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, greed, possessiveness, jealousy, neuroticism: no more than what psychoanalytic theory shows to be the logical product of patriarchal capital."
064-065 Society construes ideal person as one who "is as close as possible to an automaton in whom both sexual and intellectual energy has been reduced to a minimum."
064-066 Types of repression perpetrated by mainstream culture: 1) of sexuality, 2) bisexuality, 3) female agency, 4) child sexuality, 5) the Other
065-066 Bourgeois ideology rejects otherness dealing with it by 1) rejecting and annihilating it or 2) by domesticating and assimilating it, "converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself."
066 Disavowal and repudiation of femininity by males in a male-dominated culture.
066 Freedom and autonomy of partner is perceived as a threat to the possession/dependence which makes the relationship possible.
066 What is repressed in self is projected onto the Other so that it can be disavowed and, then, eliminated.
069 Horror film audiences comprised of obsessives; great disregard of horror film by reviewer-critics. Disregard at odds with popularity and commercial success.
070 Disreputability of horror films confer upon them the psychic structure of nightmare: "The conditions under which a dream becomes a nightmare are that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and that it is so strong and powerful as to constitutes a serious threat."
070 Labeled as "entertainment" (genre) films can be more effective vehicles of social critique "than works of conscious social criticism".
071 "in a society built on monogamy and family there will be an enormous surplus of repressed sexual energy, and that what is repressed must always strive to return."
071 Defines horror film as one in which "normality is threatened by the Monster".
071 Normality is invariable. [However, if normality itself is monstrous, the representation might become something like that found in Romero's zombie films.]
071 Relationship between normality and monster "has one privileged form: the figure of the doppelgänger, alter ego, or double". Provides a list of examples.
072 Ambivalence motivates horror films' "fullfillment of our nightmare wish to smas the norms that opprress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere."
073-075 Reads _Murders in the Rue Morgue_ (Dir. Robert Florey 1932) within framework articulated in pages previous.
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—. Day of the Dead: The Woman's Nightmare. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan-- and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 287-294. (show item notes)
287
" It is perhaps the lingering intellectual distrust of the horror genre that has prevented George Romero's 'living dead' trilogy from receiving full recognition for what it undoubtedly is: one of the most remarkable and audacious achievements of modern American cinema, and the most uncompromising critique of contemporary America (and, by extension, Western capitalist society in general) that is possible within the terms and conditions of a 'popular entertainment' medium."
—. The Return of the Repressed. Film Comment. 14.4 (1978): 24-32. (load item notes)
Yakir, Dan. Morning Becomes Romero. Film Comment. 15.3 (1979): 60-65. (load item notes)
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Zizek, Slavoj. Guilty Pleasures: Slavoj Zizek. Film Comment. 42.1 (2006): 12-13. (load item notes)
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry. October. (1989): 30-55. (show item notes)
038 n. 5 "5. This paradox of the 'impossible knowledge' inscribed in to the way person react on screen is far more interesting than it may appear at first sight. For example, it offers us a clue to the logic of Hitchcock's cameo appearances in his own films. In _Topaz_, without doubt his worst film, Hitchcock appears in a wheelchair in an airport lounge, as if wishing to inform s that his creative power is crippled. In his last film, _Family Plot_, he appears as a shadow on the windowpane of the death registry office, as if wishing to inform us that he is already close to death. Every one of his came appearances reveals such an 'impossible knowledge,' as if Hitchcock were capable of assuming from an instant a position of pure meta-language, of taking an 'objective look' at himself and locating himself in the picture."
—. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
—. The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew". The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. 016-067. (show item notes)
021-022 pre-Kantian universe deals with human and non-human while Kantian universe and German idealism "excess to be fought is absolutely immanent"
" Perhaps the best way to describe the Kantian break toward this new dimension is with regard to the chaaged status of the notion of the "inhuman." Ka¡t introduced a key distinction berween negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment'f the soul is mortal" can be negated in two ways: when a predicate is denied to the subject ("the soul is not mortal"), and when a non-predicate is affirmed ("the soul is non- mortal")-the difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, berween "he is not dead" and "he is r¡n-dead."The indefinite judgment opens up a thi-rd domain which undermines the under
022 Access to noumenal world would deprive people of "spontaneity", would turn them into automata, "thinking machines"
022 In gap of introduced by Kantian infinitude
Comparable to Balibar collapsing into equaliberty
" what, then, is this new dimension that emerges irr the gap itself? It is that of the transcendental i itself, of its "spontaneity": the ultimate parallax, the third space be- tween phenomena and the noumenon itself, is the subiect's freedom/spontaneity, which-although, of course, it is not the property of a phenomenal entit¡ so that it cannot be dismissed as a false appearance which conceals the noumenal fact that we are totally caught in an i¡raccessible necessity-i5 ¿156 ¡6¡ 5imply noumenal' In a mys- "
041 Leader slipping on banana peel is funny precisely because leader carries on with dignity unaffected
" garity of ordinary life, with its petty passions and weaknesses; the proPerly comic pro- cedure, however, is not simply to undermi¡e the dignified mask (or task or sublime passion) through the intrusion of everyday realit¡ but to enact a kind of srucrural short circuit or, rather, exchange of places berween the two in which the very digni- fied mask,/task/passion appears as a pathetic idiosyncrasy, an utterly human weakness. Think of the standard generic comic heroes (Miser, Drunkard, Seducer): it is this very attachment to some excessive task/passion which moka them humm. This is why Chap- Iin was right in his Greot Dictotor: Hitler's hubris was not "inhuman," out of the range of sympathy for ordinary pleasures and weaknesses-Hitler was "human, all too hu- man," his political hubris was an "all too human" idiosyncrasy which makes him ridiculous. In short, Hitler was a burlesque figure of Evil Dictator .,rrho belongs into the same series as Seducer, Miser, and Deceiving Servant. "
043 Proliferation of heads regarding Terror "and that preoccupied both literatre adn medical science from the 1970s"
"living death to which life had seemingly been reduced—thus the proliferation of blushing heads, talking heads, suffering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed, returned the gaze, the disembodied parts, detached writing hands, the ghosts and ghouls and zombies that would fill the pages of gothic novels throughout Europe."
[check 1970s: BB: Combay, "Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror" (386)]
044 Constitutive gap which serves as " 'vanishing mediator' between Nature and Culture" (appears at 3 levels)
058 n. 88 Circulation of capital in terms of Kantian ethics (duty for duty's sake)
059-060 Money (as capital) is self-positing (self-generating, Marx's example of father and begotten son)
" This arcane circular movement of self-positing is then equated with the central chris- tian renet of the identity of God-the-Father alld his Son, of the Immaculate Conception by means of which the single Father dìrectly (without a female spouse) begets his only son, and thus forms what is arguably the ultimate single-parent family "
Material (commodities) becomes conduit to amplify money.
The idea capital is self-positing/-generating is a fantasy that obscures the extraction of surplus labor from human beings.
061 *objet petit a* in relation to drive is "loss as object"
061 Distinction between aim and goal of drive
"(Here we should bear in mind Lacan's well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.)"
061 Relationship between desire (constituted by lack) and drive (which circulates around a hole)
062 "Death drive" is the undead drive to enjoy life in excess
"The paradox of the Freudian 'death drive' is therefore that it is Freud's name for its very opposite, for the way immortaiity appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncafìny excess oflife, for an 'undead' urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle oflife and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never 'just life': humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy Ìife in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things."
063 Being "human" is not sublimating animal desires but elevating narrow focus to source of satisfaction
"[. . .] the radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of a minor activity into an end in itself We become 'humans' when we get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it."
063 Being "human" is not sublimating animal desires but elevating narrow focus to source of satisfaction
"[. . .] the radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of a minor activity into an end in itself We become 'humans' when we get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it."
063 Drive "turns failure into triumpg" (repetition)
"[. . .] a drive, as it were, turns failure into triumph—in it, the very failure to reach its goal, the repetition of this failure, the endless circulation around the object, generates a satisfaction of its own."
063 Drive literally effort "*to break All of continuity in which we are embedded*"
063 Rotational inner torsion of drive which characterizes "human": curvature of libidinal space
"This shift from desire to drive is crucial if we are fully to grasp the crux of the 'minimal difference': at its most fundamental. the minimal difference is not the unfathomable X which elevates an ordinary object into an object of desire, but, rather, the inner torsion which curves the libidinal space, and thus transforms instinct into drive."
064 Reptition of sexual movement (in and out) fails to understand "satisfaction from the indecision itself, from repeated oscillation."
064 [end of notes 20080830]
(top of item notes)
—. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
—. The Seven Veils of Fantasy. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. 003-044. (load item notes)
(top of item notes)
—. Love Thy Neighbour? No, Thanks!. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. 045-085. (show item notes)
045 fool supplement to existing order and knave a neoconservative
046 Social critic in the position of fool who doesn't hold the balls of the Master, who acheives "hysterical satisfaction of snatching a little piece of *jouissance* away from the Master."
046 n. 2 Object which denunciates hegemony may in fact function smoothly within it
047 "Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges wlnen the aery qmbolic¡t ¡ Litnùation of this Loss giues rise to a pleasure of its owm."
047 Surplus enjoyment in cry of pain
048 Lacan: something about existence is so improbable its reality is always in question
049 *Jouissance* is the "place" of the subject
Zizek links it to dasein
049 sinthom in which "the subject encounters the density of being"
050 Injunction to "enjoy" can only be answered "I hear"
050 agalma and jouissance
The experience is perceived as encounter with irreducible divinity and it cannot be expressed in words. The "unique" experience is, paradoxically, "that which always remains the same"; "unique ineffable kernel which cannot be shared by others"
051 Excellent decription of *femme fatale*
"(the Weiningerian image of woman as inherently evil; as the embodiment of a cosmic corruption, a fundamental flaw in the very ontological structure of the universe; as the seductress whose hatred and destruction of men express, in a perverted way, her awareness of how her identity depends on the male gaze, and who, therefore, secretly longs for her own annihilation as her only means of liberation)"
053 History (and access to it) is a continuous struggle
"Are not the patient's deadlocks so many monu- Iil*rìts to the traumatic character of our entry into the domain of synbolic llietory, so many prooß that this enrry can also fail (as in psychosis)? In short, what the historicists accept as primordially given, as the 'nature of things' ('in social life, everything results from the process of contingent contruction'), is that which is at stake in a difficult uphill struggle; [. . . .]"
053-054 Issue of *enjoyment* explaining academic work to non-academics
" livcs one needs only the eyes to see it. the rare occasions when, {}wing to various kinds of social obligaúons, I cannot avoid meeting my t'r:latives who have nothing to do with Lacanian theory (or with theory in ¡;;cneral), sooner or later the conversation always takes the same rrnpleasant turn: with barely concealed hostility and envy lurking beneath ir polite surface, they ask me how much I earn by my writing and ¡trrblishing abroad, and giving lectures around the world. surprisingly, whichever answer I give sounds wrong to them: if I admit that I earn [page break] what, in their eyes, is a considerable sum of money, they consider it-unjust that I earn so much for my empty philosophizing, while they'-who are Joing 'real work', have to sweat ior a much lesser reward; if I tell them a small sum, they asiert, with deep satisfaction, that even this is too much - whoneedsmykindofphilosophizinginthesetimesofsocialcrisis?Why should we spend t^*puy.rr' *o.t.y on it? The under
054 German population knew horros of the Holocaust
BB: Goldhagen, Daniel J. _Hitler's Willing Executioner's_.
054 Immigrant workers subject of *jouissance*, at once overworking and lazy
"(In an analogous way, in the eyes of a racist, immigrant workers who steal our jobs are simultaneously lazy and overdiligent: they work excessively for low wages yet, simultaneously, they seem to work too little, to exploit our healthcare and welfare systems.)"
055 Hannah Arendt "Banality of Evil" inadequate
Misses *jouissance* which combines with bureaucratization of killing, sadistic pleasure in activities which officially produce benefit but which, experientially and intuitively, produce suffering.
057 Presence of shame in Nazi executioner's evidence of surplus enjoyment
"A close reading of the testimonials from his irìvtr bc¡ok none the less demonstrates how the executioners ex
057 Problem of "forced choice"
" *iXt*rlt' at least - we are dealing here with a situation or furced, choàce? For lliltl. t'eason, this choice was in a way even worse than open coercion] not *itrly were the subjects forced to participate in repulsive obscene acts of Tiolcnce, they even had to pretend they were doing it freely and willingly. i;\ minority which refused to participate was probably tolerated precisely l¡r ruaint¿in t}:.e semblanc¿ of free choice.) But, again, our point is that this iirrlltlc coercion under the guise of free choice (you are free to choose ¡r¡!{l to reject participation, on condition that you make the right choice ;urr[ clecide freely to participate) in no way abolishes the subject's responsibility: [. . .]"
058 Difference between Fasicst paranoiac and Stalinist pervert
" St¿linist pervert. With regard to 'being. observed" for example' thc paranoiac is convinced thai he is observeã during his sexual activity - hc 'sees a gaze where, in reality, there is no-ne' - while the Pervert himsell' o.g^ nirË, the other's gaze tá accompany.his sexual activity (say' he asks it friend or an unkno*r,:ft"ot' to wuith úim making love to his wife) ' Ancl "
058 Fascist (pervert) accepts applause; Stalinist (subject) compelled to applause
058 Nazis believe, Stalinists invent
"Nazis really believed in the Jewish conspiracy, while the perverted Stalinists actively organized/invented 'counterrevolutionary conspiracies' as pre-emptive strikes. The greatesst surprise for the Stalinist Investigator was to discover that the subject accused of being a German or American spy really was a spy: In Stalinism proper, confessions counted only in so far as they were false and extorted . . . ."
059 Nazi Fascism condensed in anti-Semitism while Stalinist threat pervaded social body
060 BB: Emir Kusturica _Underground_ (film on Bosnian war)
060 Stalinist purges example of perverse implication (*désêtre* as opposed to authentic *désastre*)
061 _Underground_ "stages the 'apolitical' phantasmic background of the post-Yugslav ethnic cleansing and war cruelties—how?
062 Defining point of acceptable vs. unacceptable nationalism reproduces genocidal impulse
"The weak point of the universal multiculturalist gaze does not reside in its incapacity to 'throw out the bathwater without losing the baby too': it is deeply wrong to assert that when one throws out the nationalist dirty water ('excessive' fanaticism), one should be careful not to lose the baby of the 'healthy' national identity—that is to say, one should trace the line of separation between the proper degree of 'healthy' nationalism which guarantees the necessary minimum of national identity, and and 'excessive' (xenophobic, aggressive) nationalism. Such a common-sense distinction *reproduces the very nationalist reasoning which aims at getting rid of the 'impure' excess*."
Psychoanalytic procedure does not seek to retain consistency of self outside of disruptions of symptoms, but to dissolve the Self and present the patient with the "dirty bathwater" without the shield of the self.
062 Suspension of understanding and comprehension necessary to analyze stakes of post-Yugoslav crisis
"[. . .] one should accomplish a kind of inverted phenomenological reduction and put in parenthesis the multitude of *meanings*, the wealth of the spectres of the past which allow us to 'understand' the situation. One should resist the temptation to 'understand', and accomplish a gesture analogous to turning off the sound of a TV: all of a sudden' the movements of the people on screen, deprived of their vocal support, look-like meaningless, ridiculous gesticulations."
065 Masturbation wrong because its object is created in the mind of the masturbator.
065 zero form (degree) of human sexuality is "*masturbation with fantasizing*"
066 Dependence of sexual desire upon phantasmic
Phantasmic frame holds reality together. With dissolution of phantasmic, everything seems to be "irreal."
Examples: Kieslowski _Short Film about Love_, Shakespeare _Hamlet_
066-067 "*decomposition* of the fantasy-frame" with masked people at ball deprives characters of life rendering them undead
": desubjectivized living dead, frail spectres deprived of their material substance."
067 How does normal subject negotiate balance between sublimity and reality?
"[. . .] the true enigma is, rather, how a 'normal' subject succeeds in covering it up and negotiating a fragile balance lrtrtween the sublime image of the beloved and her real presence, so that the fìesh-and-blood person can continue to occupy the sublime place and avoid the sad fate of turning into a repulsive excrement . . . . "
067 Schumann's alienation from fantasy due to Clara's proximity and the dream of having her nearby.
068 Giving too much of oneself is to turn that gift into excrement, more than one bargained for
Reference to _Citizen Kane_
068 excremental excess = Lacanian "*lamella*, they mythical pre-subjective 'undead' life-substance, libido as an organ."
069 An admired figure (and friend) cannot be told everything
070 Gay marriage and its disturbing the meaning of straight marriage
070 Substance of ethnic identity "stolen" by strangers who appropriate actions
" At the level of ethnic identity, something similar happens when a subject who is not 'one of us' learns our language and endeavours to speak it, to behave as part of 'our' community: the automatic reaction of any proper racist is that the stranger, by doing this, steals from us the substance of our identity."
070 right object in wrong place vs. wrong object in right place
innocent engaged in profanities vs. grotesque engaged in "sublime religious ritual" (dogs playing cards)
071 Sexuality is not a traumatic substance, but "the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity."
071 Sexualization of power due to amiguity of power structure [top and bottom]
072 Laibach (and _Dune) is not fascistic "in so far as it publicly displays the underlying obscene phantasmic support of 'totalitarianism' in all its inconsistency."
072 Repetitive motion (shaking hands) becomes obscenely sexualized [robotic motion, undead lurching]
072 Sexual attraction is a distortion caused by power (imbalance)
073 Eric Santner theorizes Schreber unable to assume role of judge which initiates his psychotic delirium
073 Hardwired woman which presents an inconsistent combination of traits (non-castrated woman and feminist rebellion against patriarchal system)
073 Schreber's idnetification with "obscene phantasmic support of the Fascists edifice" prevents him from being totalitarian
074 Phantasmic support of beer commercial is frog embracing bottle of beer
Zizek's reading overlooks the "coaching" of males to believe that bottles of beer are really beautiful women, the reverse would be a young man kissing a bottle of beer which turns into a woman and the woman who kisses the man who then turns into the frog. The so-called phantasmic relation relies on the assumption that the woman wants a man out of a frog, a stereotypically sexist text.
075 n. 29 Adorno's rejection of jazz as humiliation of blacks who display their suffering for the entertainment of whites
076 Kantian "negative magnitude" and its paragon the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew
077 Anamorphic shift which shows prohibition as constitutive of subjectivity
077 Individual must feel outside grasp of ideology in order for ideology to be effective
078 Nicholas Malebranche assertion Fall necessary for Christ to incarnate as savior
078 Victimhood of others preferable to their success
"It is much much more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to lose the status of victim and perhaps become even more succesful than ourselves . . . ."
079 God a natural process, like nature "with no inherent meeting"
079 Kirkegaard analysis of Christian love demanding hate of family members if required by law
081 "while *objet petit a* designates that which remains of the Thing after it has undergone the process of symbolization."
081 Object can be root cause of desire only if it is a metonymy of lack
082 Articulation of tennis volleys into game, set, and match is what makes reptition of play interesting
082 Lacan's objection that hetero- and homosexuality "dissumulates the true opposition between hetero-(lesbian) and homosexuality, which is futher subdivided into gay and 'straight' sexuality."
(top of item notes)
—. Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. 086-126. (show item notes)
087 *tableaux vivants
088 Spectral quality of "moving image" which brings dead image to life
"What lurks in the background is the dialectical paradox of the dialectical paradox of the phenomenology of our perception: the immobility of the statues is implicitly conceived as the state of a living being frozen into immobility in an infinite pain; while the moving image is a dead, immobile object which magically comes alive—in both cases the barrier which separates the living from the dead is transgressed. Cinema is a 'moving image', the continuum of dead images which give the impression of life by running at the proper speed; the dead image is a 'still', 'freeze-frame'—that is, a stiffened movement."
087 Roentgen X-ray "allow us to see a person who is still alive *as if here wre already dead*"
088 "machine in the ghost" and "ghost in the machine"
"Thus horror cuts both ways: what provokes horror is not only the discovery that what we took for a living human being is a dead mechanical doll (Hoffmann's Olympia) but also—perhaps even more the traumatic discovery that what we took for a dead entity (a house, the wall of a cave . . . ) is actually alive—all of a sudden it starts to trickle, tremble, move, speak, act with (an evil) intent . . . . So we have on the one side, the 'machine in the ghost' (a ship which sails by itself, with no crew; an animal or a human being which is revealed to be a complex mechanism of joints and wheels), and, on the other, the 'ghost in the machine' (some sign of *plus-dejouir089 "desubjectivized horror of the pure drive"
"In literary fiction, one often encounters a person who appears to be just another person within the diegetic space, but is effectively a 'No-Man', the desubjectivized horror of the pure drive disguised as a normal individual."
088 Gaze which immobilizes
089 Caught between being "dead while alive" (colonized by dead symbolic order) and "alive while dead" (embodying Life-Substance which escapes symoblization)
089 Lacanian death drive which involves splitting of life and death into two parallel tracks
"What defines the death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition between life and death, but the split of life itself into 'normal' life and horrifying 'undead' life, and the split of the dead into 'ordinary' dead and the 'undead' machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which 'behaves as if it possesses a life of its own') and its its counterpoint, the 'living dead' (the monstrous Life-Substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic) — this split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive."
089 No "death-anxiety [*Todesangst*] in our unconscious, which is why the very phenomenon of 'consciousness' is grounded in our awareness of our mortality."
089 n. 8 Compulsive neurotic escapes life and becomes a " 'living dead', the life of disavowed, mortified desire."
090 Kirkegaard's "sickness unto death", subject unable to escape who is "condemned to eternal life"
090 Lacan's *futur antérieur091 Future anterior as "frozen gaze" of staring "too hard" [*troppo fisso*]
093 Sets up possibility that subject is not autonomous compared to objects
" In the standard notion of the opposition between subject and object, the subject is conceived as the dynamic pole, as the active agent able to transcend every fixed situation, to 'create' its universe, to adapt itself to every new condition, and so on, in contrast to the fixed, inert domain of objects."
094 Empty signifiers that prop up plastic signified content
095 Fixation on traumatic kernel enables symbolization ("primordial repression" of reality
097 Antinomy between "naive historical realism" and "discursive idealism"
" The false alternative between 'naive historicist realism' and 'discursive idealism', both sides accuse each other of 'fetishism': for historicist realists, discursive idealism fetishizes the 'prison-house of language, while for discursivists, every notion of pre-discursive reality is to be denounced as a 'fetish'."
097 an object's external material being as "directly identical to itself" is a fetish, "In-itself" both a false appearance and a foreign dimension
098 Lacan supports German Idealist argument which "external reality" cannot be referenced since all experiences of reality are mediated
099 Fetishism of material object(s) which are basis of money, material which conducts/transmits capital
100 "relative determination" as a means to distinguish network effects (mis)perceived as propoerties of individuals
"[. . .] we must introduce a further distinction, the notion of a certain 'fetishism' which is independent of the opposition between 'people' and 'objects': it designates the state in which the effect of a 'structure', of a network, is (mis)perceived as the direct property of an individual entity: in the case of commodity fetishism, the fact that a certain commodity functions as a 'general equivalent' is (mis)perceived as its direct pseudo-natural property, as with interpersonal relations in which (the example is Marx's own) subjects who hail a certain person as a King are not aware that this person is a King only in so far as they treat him as one, not vice versa."
100 Commodity fetishism is placed upon " '(social) relations between things' "
100 Outlines "fetishist miscrecognition" in chain of acts which lead to "America bombed Iraq". Argues symbolic structure must be accounted.
101 Money (for example) is materialization of symbolic institution where institution is not only relations between people
101 symbolic structure must be accounted
"— an even more tricky 'fetishist reification' is at work when we (mis)perceive the situation as simply involving 'relations between people', and fail to take into account the invisible symbolic structure which regulates these relations."
102 Fetishization of production process
102 Laying bare of process of production in postmodernity
" The central paradox (and perhaps the most succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as the fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is of the social *mode102 Postmodern "gradual dissipation of the very materiality of the fetish"
103 Capital is "sublime irrepresentable Thing"
"Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit."
103 Comments on "immaterial computer code" which enables "electronic money": I'd like to see *that*
103-104 Fetish and phobic object the same except for topology.
104 Fetishist illusion prevails when obejct conferred natural properties which "results from the strucutral place of money within the complex network of socioeconomic relations".
106 Need to believe in Big Other who believes in the subject's place
107 Belief, unlike knowledge, is reflective: belief in the belief [of others].
107 One supposed to believe: ritual of Santa Claus
108 Displacment (of belief) is original and constitutive
108 Jansenist miracle which appears mundane to infidels and miraculous to believers
109 Compares construction of screen persona to professional mourners and canned laughter
109 Professional mourners
It's amazing how closely this chapter seems to follow some of the insights of DeLillo's _White Noise_. Here is a passage on professional mourners mirrored: "They came out of the small bright lobby onto the street. It was cold, empty and dark. The boy walked next to his mother, holding her hand, still crying, and they seemed a picture of such amateurish sadness and calamity that I nearly started laughing—laughing not at the sadness but at the picture they made of it, at the disparity between their grief and its appearances. My feelings of tendemess and pity were undermined by the sight of them crossing the sidewalk in their bundled clothing, the child determinedly weeping, his mother drooping as she walked, wild-haired, a wretched and pathetic pair. They were inadequate to the spoken grief, the great single-minded anguish. Does this explain the existence of professional mourners? They keep a wake from lapsing into comic pathos." (DeLillo 76)
109 n. 26 Attempts to prove God reveal doubt in God's existence
110 Freedom gained through subjecting oneself to discipline
"The Foucauldian motif of the interconnection between discipline and subjective freedom thus appears in a different light by submitting myself to some disciplinary machine, I, as it were, transfer to the other the responsibility of maintaining the smooth running of things, and thus gain precious space in which to exercise my freedom."
110 Performatives are mechanical, subjects the "living embodiment of the symbolic institution"
111 Academic upper-middle-class interpassivity
"In all these cases, they have continued to lead their undisturbed upper-middle-class aca- elemic existence, while doing their progressive duty *through the other*."
111 Differential formal structure is the replacement of signifieds by signifiers
"In other words, the structure is always, by definition, a *signifying111 Reads $ as symbol for barred subject
112 Interactivity on its other side, interpassivity, deprives subject of enjoyment and transfers it to object
112 Interpassive viewing of films by acquiring them in video library
112 Interpassivity allows people (academics) to experience suffering "while calmly pursuing one's academic career"
114 Relief from superegoistic injunction to enjoy
115 Interpassivity allows subject to remain active while being passive through the other.
"in the case of interpassivity, *I am passive through the other115 n. 32 Activity which produces perfect state of passivity, where one acts as a medium
I think this is tied to the idea that people are in fact products of the network, that their energies are not properties of themselves but the product of their position within the network
116 Object is scene where subject sees oneself passively enduring
118 Shift from determining reflection to refelective determination
119 Interpassivity as it affects male ability to experience through woman (object)
119 Unconscious racism is an example of "objectively subjective" state, or fantasy
120 Behaving as if something existed produces "objective semblance"
121 Subject of signifier appears only when experience becomes *inaccessible*, when it is primordially repressed
121 Subjectively objective versus objectively subjective
122 "the so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that *they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for the midnless frenetic activity*."
122 Lacanian barred subject is "pure void of negativity" whose innermost psychic content (laughter, belief) can be done by big Other
(top of item notes)
Zombie, Rob. Guilty Pleasures: Rob Zombie. Film Comment. 41.5 (2005): 9. (load item notes)
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The Crazies. Dir. George A. Romero. 1973.
*Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 1978.
Dawn of the Dead. Dir. Zack Snyder. 2004.
Day of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 1985.
Dead of Night. Dir. Bob Clark. 1972.
Diary of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 2008.
*I Drink Your Blood. Dir. David E. Durston. 1971.
*I Eat Your Skin. Dir. Del Tenney. 1971.
*I Walked with a Zombie. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. 1943.
I Was a Teenage Zombie. Dir. John Elias Michalakias. 1987.
*J'accuse!. Dir. Abel Gance. 1918.
*King of the Zombies. Dir. Jean Yarbrough. 1941.
Land of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 2005.
The Last Man on Earth. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1964.
Lifeforce. Dir. Tobe Hooper. 1985.
The Living Dead Girl. Dir. Jean Rollin. 1983.
*The Mummy. Dir. Karl Freund. 1932.
*Night of the Comet. Dir. Thom Eberhardt. 1984.
*Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. 1968.
Night of the Living Dead. Dir. Tom Savini. 1990.
Nightmare City. Dir. Umberto Lenzi. 1980.
Oasis of the Zombies. Dir. Jesús Franco. 1981.
The Omega Man. Dir. Boris Sagal. 1971.
Plaga Zombie: Mutant Zone. Dir. Pablo Parés. 2001.
The Plague of the Zombies. Dir. John Gilling. 1966.
Planet Terror. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. 2007.
The Quiet Earth. Dir. Geoff Murphy. 1985.
Return of the Living Dead. Dir. Dan O'Bannon. 1984.
Return of the Living Dead Part 2. Dir. Ken Wiederhorn. 1988.
Revolt of the Zombies. Dir. Victor Halperin. 1936.
Serenity. Dir. Joss Whedon. 2005.
*The Serpent and the Rainbow. Dir. Wes Craven. 1987.
Shaun of the Dead. Dir. Edgar Wright. 2004.
Shivers. Dir. David Cronenberg. 1974.
Sugar Hill. Dir. Paul Maslansky. 1974.
The Video Dead. Dir. Robert Scott. 1987.
Virus. Dir. Bruno Mattei. 1980.
*Voodoo Man. Dir. William Beaudine. 1944.
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*White Zombie. Dir. Victor Halperin. 1932.
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Zombie Honeymoon. Dir. David Gebroe. 2004.