Introduction: On Economic Horror
Section I: Mental Monstrosity
Chapter One: Consuming Images of Death and Serial Killers
Chapter Two: Mad Doctors, or How Professional Middle-Class Labor Makes You Lose Your Mind
Section II: Bodily Monstrosity
Chapter Three: Undead Races, Weird Tales, and the Revenge of the Colonized
Chapter Four: Robots and Cyborgs in Love: Fantasies of a Future for Capitalism
Section III: Narrative Monstrosity
Chapter Five: Reading Monsters: William Faulkner, Anne Rice, and the Literary Construction of Despicable Audiences
Conclusion: Some Concerns About Horror as Social Criticism
When We Pretend That We're Dead begins with a section about "mental monstrosity" in stories featuring serial killers and mad doctors, people who go insane because they lead lives which they perceive as forced on them by profit-driven institutions. I argue that the serial killer is a figure whose brutality condemns methods of capitalist production by taking them to their extreme, ultimately mass producing dead bodies. This grisly mass production is what drives the "publicity machine" in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. As Mailer details how serial killer Gary Gilmore turned himself into a commodity-image for the culture industry with his public pleas for execution, it becomes clear that the professional media are an integral part of Gilmore's homicidal mania. I consider The Executioner's Song in the historical context of naturalist fiction, especially Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, and in light of movies about serial killers made during and after the 1970s. Tracing their aesthetic origin to Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs of dead bodies, I ascribe the relevance of films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Private Parts to a continuing cultural association between image consumption and the act of serial killing. I turn next to the madness of doctors in narratives that are about the importance of professional middle-class work. Doctors in the Jekyll/Hyde tradition (in which I include Frank Norris' crazed dentist from McTeague) are driven mad partly because they feel they must be at work all the time, performing intellectual labor which involves selling off onešs ideas to professional institutions. To express their non-professional sides, they make monsters of themselves.
The second section of the dissertation focuses on the bodily monstrosity of zombies, ghosts, and cyborgs, beings who are, in many cases, physically disfigured by the very economic practices which grant them immortality and superhuman powers. The undead, in my analysis of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft and a variety of zombie movies, stand in for oppressed minority groups whose degraded bodies return to threaten and invade the bodies of people who have killed or hurt them. Comparing these fanciful treatments with those in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, I explore how stereotypes of the pathological, monstrous "other" inform movies where the undead are nightmarish versions of impoverished minority groups trying to "steal the lives" of middle-class whites. Cyborgs are also marked as physically "other," but not in a racial sense. They are a "lower class," usually cast as the new manual laborers in a global capitalist future. Having assimilated technology into its body, or vice versa, the cyborg is a monster who is programmed and manufactured to serve a specific purpose: usually, its job is to perform intensive labor and to fight for a human society which does not view cyborgs as human equals. Beginning my analysis with Charles Chaplin's Modern Times and Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot, and continuing with contemporary movies like 2001 and cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, Rudy Rucker and Marge Piercy, I connect representations of the cyborg's mechanical body to its degraded class status. I conclude my chapters on the undead and cyborgs with an analysis of how both monsters are portrayed as engaging in revolutionary acts aimed at overthrowing the people who have killed and/or built them.
The dissertation ends with a section on narrative monstrosity in the work of William Faulkner and Anne Rice. Using what one critic of Faulkner has called "cruel" language, and implicating readers in the loathsomeness of what they read, Rice and Faulkner demonstrate how the act of storytelling can be a horrifying force which incites audiences to violence. Narrative itself, and audiences who consume it, are the "monsters" in these books. Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom! and Rice's The Witching Hour suggest that class warfare is responsible for the dangerous uses we make of stories in America, as well as for the disturbing conditions under which we try to tell them. When We Pretend That We're Dead is ultimately an extended meditation on how works written and filmed in the horror tradition represent economic crisis. The extreme monstrosity we see in economic horror--involving graphic depictions of death, mutilation, and mental anguish--is one way popular and literary fictions allegorize extremes of economic boom and bust in the United States during the past century.
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