Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work 9781477327227

Citation preview

Labors of Fear

Labors of Fear THE MODERN HORROR FILM GOES TO WORK Edited by Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2023 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Briefel, Aviva, editor. | Middleton, Jason, 1971- editor. Title: Labors of fear : the modern horror film goes to work / edited by Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033681 ISBN 978-1-4773-2721-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2722-7 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4773-2723-4 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Horror films—History and criticism. | Labor in motion pictures. | Work in motion pictures. | Horror films—Themes, motives. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H6 L24 2023 | DDC 791.43/6164—dc23/ eng/20220825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033681 doi:10.7560/327210

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Jason Middleton and Aviva Briefel



Part I. How Horror Works: Killing, Dying, Surviving

Chapter 1. Tools of the Trade: A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware  15 Marc Olivier

Chapter 2. Every Ritual Has Its Purpose: Laboring Bodies in The Autopsy of Jane Doe 37 David Church

Chapter 3. George A. Romero and the Work of Survival  57 Adam Lowenstein

Part II. Working from Home: Domestic, Gendered, and Emotional Labor Chapter 4. Sonic Gothic: Listening to the Exhaustion of Gendered Domestic Labor in The Babadook and The Swerve 77 Lisa Coulthard

Chapter 5. No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar 95 Jason Middleton

Chapter 6. Reproductive Technics and Time: Ectogestational Labor, Biotechnological Horror, Social Reproduction 113 Alanna Thain

Part III. Stolen Work, Stolen Play: Race and Racialized Labor Chapter 7. “We Want to Take Our Time”: The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us 133 Aviva Briefel

Chapter 8. Racing Work and Working Race in Buppie Horror  151 Mikal J. Gaines

Chapter 9. The Horror of Stagnation; or, The Perspectival Dread of It Follows 169 Joel Burges

Chapter 10. Fieldwork: Anthropology and Intellectual Labor in Ari Aster’s Midsommar 187 Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Afterword: The Work of Horror after Get Out 205 Catherine Zimmer

List of Contributors  217 Index 221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank our contributors, who signed on to a book about fearsome labors at a time when the nascent COVID-19 pandemic was fearsomely changing what we all thought we knew about work, how we got it done, and what it meant to us. We are grateful to our sponsoring editor at the University of Texas Press, Jim Burr, and to editorial assistant Mia Uribe Kozlovsky for their support and guidance on the project. We would also like to express our appreciation to Abby Webber for her meticulous editing. Jason would like to thank his colleagues in the Film and Media Studies Program, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, and the Department of English at the University of Rochester and is especially grateful to the undergraduate and graduate students who have made his horror seminars deeply rewarding and generative. He is thankful to his parents for their support over the years and for being overly permissive about scary movies when he was a kid. As with all his work, Jason has benefited immeasurably on this book from expansive conversations and incisive feedback from Eden Osucha. And he has found his way through the time of the project’s creation with Marek and Laszlo, who created stop-motion Lego movies, handmade books and comics, and backyard battles, reimagining their world as infused by the fantastic realms of Tolkien, Star Wars, and Gravity Falls. Aviva would like to express her undying gratitude to Monica Miller and Marilyn Reizbaum for making the terrors of real life a bit more bearable (which is a lot). She also wants to thank the Departments of English and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin (with a special shout-out to her Mass Hall second-floor peeps, Aaron Kitch and Maggie Solberg) and her students for their inspiration over the years. She sends lots of love to her parents, who had to deal with how much she was afraid of everything as a child. Most of all, she is so thankful and grateful to her husband, David Hecht, and to her children, Jonah and Zara. Despite his continuing dislike of horror, David has watched many horror films under semiduress and has even come to appreciate some of them. Jonah has an amazing eye for cinematic detail and is the best film companion a maman could ask for. And last but not least, Zara is becoming quite a female Gothic writer in her own right. Aviva can’t wait to read what she comes up with next. vii

Labors of Fear

INTRODUCTION Jason Middleton and Aviva Briefel

It is widely acknowledged that a 1979 essay collection coedited by Robin Wood, The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, essentially inaugurated the academic field of horror film scholarship.1 In particular, in his essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Wood applied Freudian and Marxist ideas to the cycle of American horror films that began a decade prior with Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) and Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), developing key concepts for the critical analysis of horror cinema’s psychic and social dimensions.2 A surprisingly overlooked detail of Wood’s influential collection is how its title is the obverse of the phrase “the American dream,” thus casting the modern horror films of the 1970s as a cinema of economic decline and disappearing opportunity for American workers. Wood identifies the working class as one of his many categories of oppressed social Other. But Wood’s own work and the large body of scholarship that has emerged in its wake has left underexamined the significant impact upon horror cinema of the social fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality. The essays collected in the following pages restore economic and labor issues to a critical understanding of how horror cinema from the 1970s to the present has rendered “the American nightmare” of our times. Certain critical methods and issues have dominated academic scholarship on horror cinema. In particular, psychoanalysis, feminism, cognitive theory, and reception studies have informed the widely cited works in the field. More recently, queer theory, disability studies, and affect theory have opened up new avenues of inquiry. The essays here engage with these existing approaches while expanding horror scholarship’s critical framework to address not only the aforementioned forms of economic restructuring that defined the 1970s and 1980s but also the modes and conditions of labor that have emerged or gained greater recognition since that period: domestic and reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, the digital economy, social media 1

2 

introduction

and self-branding, intellectual and imaginative labor, service work, and precarity and underemployment. The collection considers these issues in the broader sociopolitical context of the twenty-first century: the slow violence of environmental degradation, toxicity in built environments, the global resurgence of right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism and police violence, and the #MeToo movement’s reckoning with the structural and institutional normalization of sexual assault and harassment. The mid-twentieth-century ideal of the American dream positioned work as a source of personal and familial pride, happiness, and boundless opportunity: that is, work as fundamentally meaningful. In recent years, however, a competing account of work as meaningless and harmful has gained public traction. David Graeber’s bestseller Bullshit Jobs is a prominent example, but numerous other mainstream books, with titles such as Worked Over and Work Won’t Love You Back, have pushed for a radical rethinking of the societal and personal value of work as we know it.3 This cultural dialogue has, in effect, begun to catch up with a case that horror cinema has made throughout its existence concerning the monstrousness of work itself. The paradigmatic—indeed, often the only—form of work represented in the classic horror film is, of course, mad science. These scientists are positioned in a liminal status between the categories of normality and the monster. Their experimentation consistently breaks with prosocial values and becomes libidinal, monomaniacal, and nefarious. We never see them performing routine lab work toward a goal such as curing an illness. Their research is always already antisocial, producing an implicit pathologization of work itself. By contrast, the aristocratic patriarchs who seek to secure the young scientists’ positions as patrilinear successors don’t perform everyday work but instead occupy elite social roles, such as wealthy landowner (Baron von Frankenstein) or military commander (Dr. Jekyll’s fiancée’s father). By making mad science the privileged example of work itself, the classic horror film casts a dark shadow over “work” as a category. As John David Rhodes has valuably summarized, both Marx and Hannah Arendt have drawn key distinctions between the categories of work and labor. Labor is associated with repetition and often with drudgery, whereas work may be fulfilling and even ennobling. Labor disappears into its products, whether these be an agricultural harvest or a factory-made tool. For Arendt, work has occurred “when an entirely new thing with enough durability to remain in the world as an independent entity has been added to the human artifice” (qtd. in Rhodes 49). She argues that work alters human life in some way, rather than simply facilitating its continuance. Interestingly, the quality of visibility that privileges work over labor in this formulation is shared by the example

introduction 

3

of a faulty object in Marx’s analysis. The work of an individual laborer does not disappear in the product if the object is flawed or poorly made; Marx gives the example of “a knife which fails to cut” (qtd. in Rhodes 53). The products or results of mad science conjoin these two seemingly disparate qualities that make work visible: they represent something entirely new brought into the world that embodies the vision of its creators, but they are also failed products, dangerous perversions of their creators’ initially more noble ideals. The modern horror film as inaugurated by Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) proliferates the forms of work and labor admissible to its narratives and themes, but it carries over from classic horror’s mad science a fundamental ambivalence about work itself: either it is invisible or it becomes visible in dangerous and monstrous forms. With its gothic mansion on the hill looming incongruously over the functional midcentury design of the Bates Motel, Psycho bridges horror’s classic and modern settings, and it introduces in Norman Bates a new version of Wood’s monstrous double. Norman’s doubled status as both boy next door and predatory murderer unfolds in his perpetual relay between the conjoined spheres of home and workplace and the role of caretaker for an (apparently) aged mother as well as a dying business. During his questioning by the arrogant and somewhat obtuse private investigator Arbogast, Norman says he needs to proceed with changing the sheets in the cabins, explaining that he continues to maintain these daily work routines even in the absence of regular customers. Arbogast declines Norman’s offer to join him in his rounds, the detective evincing a distaste at the idea of such (boring, feminized) labor. Like Arbogast, the viewer never joins Norman Bates for the repetitive labors of motel upkeep that he has apparently performed, alone, for years. Norman’s labor only moves from off-scene to on at the moment of its pathologization. Following the iconic shower murder, Hitchcock abruptly slows down the pace of the film by showing Norman methodically cleaning up the mess in the bathroom. Viewers are forced to watch the painstaking details of his work as he scrubs the bathtub, mops the floor, and carefully wraps Marion’s body in a shower curtain. The scene suspends a viewer shocked by the visual and narrative fragmentation of the shower murder in the monotony of someone else’s job, reminding us that Norman’s efforts in this scene are honed by years of daily housekeeping in the motel. In this formative moment for the modern horror film, the killer’s violence is conjoined with his caretaking, his antisocial pathology with his routine responsibility. Work becomes visible as it becomes horrifying. Norman’s futile, repetitive efforts to sustain a dying business presage how,

4 

introduction

in the modern horror film, workers fail at, and are failed by, work itself. Rural and blue-collar workers are dispossessed by resource exploitation and automation, as shown by the horrific actions of the unemployed slaughterhouse workers in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and other rural horror films. Middle-class men aspiring to create an artistic “work” in Hannah Arendt’s sense, to make an individual and lasting mark upon the world, are drawn through these efforts into evil and madness.4 One sees examples of this phenomenon in the travails of Guy Woodhouse’s acting career in Rosemary’s Baby, which motivate the film’s satanic plot; or in Jack Torrance’s failed writerly labors, contrasted with Wendy’s physical maintenance of the hotel, in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Only white-collar work itself, often cast precisely as exploitative and parasitic, seems to bring financial reward. But, as with Steve Freeling’s shady real- estate development deals in Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), this type of work will likely entail horrific consequences as well. Across this range of class-based figurations of late twentieth-century work and labor in the modern horror film, the act of work itself continues to remain off-scene until it is seen in horrific form. We never witness the family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre performing routine slaughterhouse labor; we only see them repeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims. We never see Guy Woodhouse acting onstage or Jack Torrance completing a publishable story; all the work that Jack has put into his novel is manifested in the revelation of the horrific nature of the work of art itself, its voluminous repetition of a single complaint about work indexing the protagonist’s descent into madness and monstrosity. Consistent with the paradigmatic form of mad science, work, in all these examples, is bound up with the horrific unrepression of pathological and violent impulses. Across this range of figurations, work shifts from linchpin of American society and the nuclear family to a destabilizing force that makes men into monsters, families into victims, and social classes into violent combatants. While academic scholarship has paid sporadic attention to the role of work in horror cinema, this volume is the first to position work as thematically central to the genre and its cultural significance. Scholarship has addressed work in horror primarily as one of the qualities that mark racialized, gendered, and classed subjects as monstrously Other. Thus, the slave labor that subtends the figure of the zombie has been a significant topic in scholarship on race in the horror film. Sarah Lauro has analyzed the ways in which the zombie’s “dual metaphorization of slavery and rebellion” from its inception in an Afro-Caribbean context pervades later cinematic representations, despite Western processes of appropriation that erase this crucial origin story (31).

introduction 

5

In turn, the figure of the zombie has also been used as a walking embodiment of the dehumanizing processes of capitalism; as Lars Bang Larsen writes, “Zombification is easily applied to the notion that capital eats up the body and mind of the worker and that the living are exploited through dead labor” (158). The tethering of the figure of the zombie with slave labor and capitalist fantasies of a tireless working body is captured in a line from Victor Halperin’s film White Zombie (1932): “They work faithfully, they are not worried about long hours” (qtd. in Coleman 51).5 Women’s reproductive labor of pregnancy and childbirth is a key element in analysis of horror’s “monstrous-feminine,” a term first introduced by Barbara Creed and that has since become one of the central concepts of feminist horror scholarship. Reproductive and domestic labors have long been a concern of the horror film, most famously, perhaps, in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979).6 Maternal horror has thrived in the twenty-first century with “prestige” films such as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). Johanna Isaacson argues that the horror film’s recent surge in concern with reproductive labor is inseparable from its capitalist critique: “Contemporary horror film insists that feminized reproductive work is not ancillary but central to contemporary capitalism, and that immiseration and exploitation must be understood through this expanded account of contemporary labor” (436). This idea is engaged with and expanded by the essays in the third section of our collection, which examine the material conditions and social relations that produce and exploit reproductive bodies. Manual labor defines the monstrous working-class characters in rural horrors such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as well as monsters of the suburban underclass such as Freddy Krueger (janitor) and Jason Voorhees (son of the summer camp’s cook). Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai have argued that fear in the first slasher cycle of the 1970s and 1980s is figured as a kind of privilege, a property right claimed by the ownership class—which, in these films, is also uniformly white. The class and racial homogeneity of the haunted/victim characters in this cycle casts its scenarios as a “survival narrative” for property owners, indexing “white middle-class anxiety over the racial diversification of suburban enclaves due to trends in upward mobility” and related factors (73). Briefel and Ngai’s argument thus significantly updates and nuances, but remains within the rubric of, Wood’s “basic formula” for the horror film: “normality is threatened by the Monster” (Wood 133). More recent horror films and scholarship have expanded their focus to the spatialization of working-class precarity, drawing attention to the urban ruination that accompanies neoliberal ideology and policies. Referencing horror films

6 

introduction

such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005), and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), Benjamin Balthaser writes that “the abandoned factory no longer produces products for market but rather a murderous evil that bedevils the white middle class who were once the product’s consumers. Here factories produce evil plots, primordial monsters, and the violent deaths of characters: they are also images of industrial horror, uncannily similar to the actual brutality of industrial production” (142). The essays in this volume focus primarily on twenty-first-century horror films in which widespread economic precarity and a largely disappeared middle class constitute a new “normality” that is “threatened by” new monsters in new ways. With sections focused on race and gender, respectively, the book explores the terrifying experiences of trying to cling to an economic stability that is quickly slipping away (for middle-class white people) or of trying to gain access to previously inaccessible class status (for Black people). It frames work not as a marker of monstrous difference from “normality” (as it is for such figures as the Caribbean zombie, The Brood’s Nola, Leatherface, and Freddy Krueger) but as the painful and often fearsome obligation to sustain a fleeting sense of normality or to try to create a better one, a burden disproportionately borne by women and people of color. From the dangers of trying to enter the economic enclaves of wealthy housing markets and vacation spots or the cultural enclaves of academia, to the maintenance of a veneer of middle-class stability amid unpaid bills and ungrateful family members, recent horror cinema reconfigures the genre’s monstrous elements as functions of the lived experiences of raced and gendered labors and the precarities that attend them. Establishing a broader framework for the subsequent sections on gender and race, the book’s first section, “How Horror Works: Killing, Dying, Surviving,” reorients scholarly perspectives on fundamental elements of the genre’s mise-en-scène and narratives: weapons and the work of killing, postmortem work and the figure of the corpse, and the small group and the work of survival. Further, each essay suggests that the films under discussion work in particular ways to reorient the viewer’s perspective on larger philosophical and existential topics: the life of the quotidian objects that surround us, our fear of death, and the prospects for long-term survival of the planet. In chapter 1, “Tools of the Trade: A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware,” Marc Olivier provides an unprecedented inquiry into the kinds of tools that are weaponized in the slasher subgenre: sledgehammers, drills, nail guns, among many others. With data gleaned from an empirical analysis of over one hundred slasher films, Olivier demonstrates that killing is its own mode of manual labor, which exposes the gender and class politics of the

introduction 

7

genre. Through his statistical analysis of weapons and their usage, he also warns against the confirmation bias that has long prioritized chain saws as the preferred tool of the slasher villain. Olivier demonstrates how the human (and monstrous) characters who have occupied so much attention in scholarship may be better seen as stock figures that animate and reveal new sides of everyday objects. In chapter 2, “Every Ritual Has Its Purpose: Laboring Bodies in The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” David Church turns to the often “invisibilized” role of postmortem laborers (such as ambulance drivers, forensic investigators, and morgue attendants) in horror. While these figures should be essential to horror as a genre in which bodies and their wastes proliferate, they tend to be pushed to the margins of the narrative, resulting in an erasure of the labor that emerges around death and dying. An important exception to this, Church argues, is André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), a horror film that centers on postmortem work to reflect on the genre’s own emotional labor: to reassure its viewers that identities may extend beyond death. This section concludes with Adam Lowenstein’s “George A. Romero and the Work of Survival,” which examines the work of small groups in the director’s Living Dead series of six zombie films. Lowenstein contends that the last film in the series, Survival of the Dead (2009), marks a significant shift in considering the zombies’ need to alter their own labor practices in order to survive. This change signals a larger transition in Romero’s work from a concern with thinking about the survival of small groups to the broader questions of cumulative trauma and species survival. Lowenstein suggests that the film and Romero’s novel The Living Dead (2020) refigure the work of survival from the question of whether humans can survive the zombies to whether zombies, and the planet as a whole, can survive humanity. The book’s second section, “Working from Home: Domestic, Gendered, and Emotional Labor,” employs topical concepts in feminist theory to critically examine the genre’s treatment of the horrors of “women’s work.” The conventional female characters of horror—the mothers, the love interests, and the Final Girls (who often work as babysitters or camp counselors)—are united by their performance of caregiving labor. They become monstrous when they endanger their children (The Brood’s Nola, Carrie’s Margaret White) or heroic when they protect the children in their care (Halloween’s Laurie, the Alien series’ Ripley). Much feminist horror scholarship has delineated how such figures provoke or assuage male castration anxiety and masochistic fantasies: in other words, how “women’s work” works for male viewers. The essays in this section shift the focus to the genre’s conveyance of the lived horrors of women’s caregiving work itself. Examining, respectively, the domestic labors of marriage and motherhood, the emotion

8 

introduction

work entailed in sustaining a heterosexual relationship, and the reproductive labor of pregnancy and childbirth, the essays argue that horror conventions reveal the fearsomeness that has always inhered in these gendered labors. In “Sonic Gothic: Listening to the Exhaustion of Gendered Domestic Labor in The Babadook and The Swerve,” Lisa Coulthard examines a recent strain of domestic horror that functions through “haptic aurality,” which she defines as “the way that sound becomes something felt as much as heard.” Sonic moments in films such as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Dean Kapsalis’s The Swerve (2018) draw the viewer into the female protagonist’s experience, compelling one to feel the deadening impact of domestic work and familial pressures. In the next chapter, “No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar,” Jason Middleton argues that Ari Aster’s acclaimed sophomore effort uses its folk-horror plot and mise-en-scène to critically examine two related concepts with relevance for feminist thinking about intimacy: “emotion work” and “no drama.” Middleton contends that through folk horror’s “doubled Othering” of protagonists and antagonists, in which neither aligns easily with the side of normality or the monster, Midsommar mounts a critique of “no drama” as a contemporary form of toxic masculinity that gaslights women into emotional isolation. In “Reproductive Technics and Time: Ectogestational Labor, Biotechnological Horror, Social Reproduction,” Alanna Thain looks back to the films of the 1970s genre of reproductive horror, including Embryo (Ralph Nelson, 1976) and The Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), which position women’s reproductive labor as labor. Thain argues that the fear underlying such films is less the future’s undoing of “natural” reproductive processes than “the horror of what fails to change.” That is, technology’s promised liberation of the female body from the work of pregnancy disguises how this ostensible new freedom means the freedom to work all the time. The expectation that domestic and reproductive work will be performed around the clock is not solved by technological futures; rather, it prefigures the more broadly pervasive conditions of 24/7 work in highly technologized late-capitalist environments. The final section of the book, “Stolen Work, Stolen Play: Race and Racialized Labor,” centers on horror’s ability to expose the racial politics of American structures of work and leisure. In particular, the essays analyze recent manifestations of the long-standing intersection between race and economic inequality: the racial inflections of economic stagnation, downward mobility, and barriers to upward mobility. In “‘We Want to Take Our Time’: The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us,” Aviva Briefel argues that Peele’s film draws on the interrelated significance of the amusement park as a site of dehumanization and racial trauma to present the capitalist untethering of

introduction 

9

leisure from work as a form of horror. She bases her analysis both on the film’s troubled representation of play and on its unexpected allusions to another film that situates racial and gendered trauma in an amusement park: Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life. In the next chapter, “Racing Work and Working Race in Buppie Horror,” Mikal Gaines identifies “buppie horror” as a subgenre that challenges the representational framework of domestic horror. Films such as Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace (2008), Steve Shill’s Obsessed (2009), and Deon Taylor’s The Intruder (2019) provide racial reversals that rewrite domestic horror’s conventional focus on home invasions and other endangerments faced by white, affluent families. Through these revisions, buppie horror also exposes the “tenuousness” of the American dream for the Black middle class. The precarity of white working-class identity is at the center of Joel Burges’s chapter, “The Horror of Stagnation; or, The Perspectival Dread of It Follows,” which discusses the cinematic strategies through which David Mitchell’s 2014 film foregrounds the horrors of socioeconomic stagnation and underemployment. Burges argues that through the use of a rotating camera that does not allow for audience attachment—or “suturing,” in Kaja Silverman’s sense of the term—the film represents the horrors of stagnation and the dread experienced by the young adults inhabiting Detroit’s postindustrial landscape. This section of the book closes with Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s “Fieldwork: Anthropology and Intellectual Labor in Ari Aster’s Midsommar,” which focuses on the precarities of racial academic labor. The film features anthropology students who find themselves ensnared in the horrific center of their research as they are apprehended by a murderous pagan cult. For the Black academic in this group, this horror is accompanied by another threat: the theft of his labor through plagiarism. Raza Kolb contends that through these dynamics, Midsommar underscores the racialization of academic labor as well as a recent nativist turn in European and American politics. The volume as a whole concludes with an afterword by Catherine Zimmer, who discusses the significance of the thematics of work examined throughout the volume in relation to the emergence of the “renaissance” of Black horror. Zimmer uses Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) as case studies for considering the work that Black horror can accomplish in the context of Black Lives Matter. Zimmer argues that new answers to a question long posed by film scholars—“Why horror?”—have emerged through the work of Black creators in the genre and their responses to “White supremacy and the violence inflicted on Black people’s bodies.” Zimmer suggests that the representation of work’s manifold brutalities has been one exception to the genre’s long-standing investment in metaphor. Her analysis illuminates the ways in which work as a theme has enabled recent

10 

introduction

Black horror cinema to collapse the line between horror’s metaphors and horrific lived realities. Horror, as many have noted, is the one genre named for the response it is meant to provoke in the viewer. While viewers often judge whether a film “worked” based upon its success or failure in producing the genre’s eponymous effect, the work of horror film of course extends beyond this simple metric. Much of the influential scholarship on the modern horror film has suggested that it destabilizes conventional structures of cinematic spectatorship and identification. To name just a few major examples of this line of thinking: for Kaja Silverman, Psycho “deliberately exposes the negations upon which filmic plenitude is predicated” (206), forcing the viewer into uncomfortable positions and sudden shifts in identification; for Carol Clover, the slasher film is constructed to enable a form of cross-gender identification whose pleasures are fundamentally masochistic; and for Linda Williams, horror, as one of the three “body genres,” produces an “almost involuntary mimicry” between body on-screen and body of spectator linked to fluidity and oscillation in gendered viewing positions and pleasures (4). The work of horror film, then, has often been understood as the productive undoing of the work of other, more conventionally elevated genres. But the following essays demonstrate how recent entries in the genre productively undo viewer expectations and scholarly assumptions about horror. Zimmer’s afterword, for example, argues that new Black horror films have exposed the racialized safety of the genre’s ostensibly fluid and unstable viewing positions, reworking genre conventions to make horror “no longer a psychoanalytic safe space” for white viewers. As we have foregrounded in this introduction, the cinematic nightmares explored in this volume make visible the forms and conditions of labor in a time of precarity, radical inequality, and the fearsome vanishing of “the American dream” of futurity and a better life.

Notes 1. The collection was developed in conjunction with, and sold at the screenings for, a program of sixty horror films that Wood and Richard Lippe assembled for the Toronto International Film Festival (then called the Festival of Festivals) in 1979 (Grant vii). 2. When the essay was later reprinted in Wood’s own essay collection, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, it was renamed with the original collection’s title, “The American Nightmare.” 3. Also of note is the best-selling status of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 4. An interesting aspect of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is how the mon-

introduction 

11

strous family, from the very opening cemetery shots, is shown to consistently engage in forms of artistic creation (Arendt’s “work” rather than “labor”) using the tools and training of their routine, formerly invisible slaughterhouse work. Indeed, even the sausage they make from human victims can be seen as a perverse form of artisanal work. 5. For scholarly discussions of the zombie in relation to capitalism and labor, see, for example, the essays in Lauro’s Zombie Theory (especially Comaroff and Comaroff; Larsen; and Vint); Coleman 47–56; Kyle; and Oloff. 6. See Arnold and Greven for their work on maternal horror.

Works Cited Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Balthaser, Benjamin. “Horror Cities: Contesting the Ruins of Capitalism in Contemporary Genre Cinema.” Camera Obscura, vol. 35, no. 1, 2020, pp. 139–159. Briefel, Aviva, and Sianne Ngai. “‘How Much Did You Pay for This Place?’ Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman.” Camera Obscura, vol. 13, no. 1, 1996, pp. 69–91. Britton, Andrew, Robin Wood, and Richard Lippe. The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Festival of Festivals, 1979. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1993. Coleman, Robin R. Means. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism.” Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 137–156. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon and Schuster, 2018. Grant, Barry Keith. Foreword. Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018, pp. vii–x. Greven, David. Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Isaacson, Johanna. “Riot Horror: Rape-Revenge and Reproductive Labor in American Mary.” Theory and Event, vol. 22, no. 2, 2019, pp. 436–450. Jaffe, Sarah. Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Bold Type Books, 2021. Kyle, William Bishop. “The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 234–248. Larsen, Lars Bang. “Zombies of Immaterial Labor: The Modern Monster and

12 

introduction

the Consumption of the Self.” Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 157–170. Lauro, Sarah Juliet. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. Rutgers UP, 2015. ———, editor. Zombie Theory: A Reader. U of Minnesota P, 2017. McCallum, Jamie K. Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream. Basic Books, 2020. Oloff, Kerstin. “From Sugar to Oil: The Ecology of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 3, 2017, pp. 316–328. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press, 2014. Rhodes, John David. “Belabored: Style as Work.” Framework, vol. 53, no. 1, spring 2012, pp. 47–64. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford UP, 1983. Vint, Sherryl. “Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Zombies.” Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 171–181. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, summer 1991, pp. 2–13. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Columbia UP, 1986.

CHAPTER 1

TOOLS OF THE TRADE A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware Marc Olivier

Only one person dies by chain saw in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). A more accurate title might be The Texas Cattle Hammer Massacre, given that Leatherface wields the specialized sledgehammer for two of his four kills. Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Jeff Burr, 1990) likewise includes only one death by chain saw but two by sledgehammer. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1994) depicts no deaths by chain saw. In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) sees Leatherface kill two people by chain saw, but Texas Chainsaw (John Luessenhop, 2013) reverts to the single kill of the original. In total, across that sample of five films and forty deaths, only five characters are killed with the infamous weaponized tool. Perhaps film titles, posters, advertisements, trailers, sonic effects, and screen time featuring the chain saw encourage a confirmation bias that leaves viewers with the impression of having seen more deaths by chain saw than the actual paltry average of one per film. The evocative allure of the chain saw outweighs the facts. The device looms large over the genre despite its rare use in slasher deaths.1 In fact, shards of glass are weaponized in slashers as frequently as chain saws, while swords account for nearly three times as many deaths as the chain saw, despite scholarly claims that they do not appear at all because they lack “closeness and tactility” (Clover 32).2 Many influential and beloved studies of the genre fall prey to what might be called the chain-saw effect: a phenomenon, usually driven by the affective impact of select objects or scenes, that leads to broad assertions about slashers that ring true but do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. The best-known victim of the chain-saw effect may well be Carol Clover’s aptly titled book Men, Women, and Chain Saws. In the preface to the 2015 edition of the influential book, Clover bemoans 15

16 

marc olivier

the fact that the Final Girl has eclipsed many other aspects of Clover’s work and has become “a rough sketch of her former self” (x). Indeed, the Final Girl trope identified by Clover has been cemented in the public imagination as a sexually innocent, resourceful, somewhat boyish figure saved from the killer by both her virtue and her acquisition of phallic tools. Only a handful of empirical studies of North American slashers have tested those and other suppositions about gender, violence, and the Final Girl in a manner that adds nuance to Clover’s assertions and not only retrieves the complexity of final characters but productively complicates them. A 1990 analysis of fifty-six slashers randomly sampled from local video outlets found that contrary to popular belief, women were more likely than men to survive in slashers, although chances of survival diminished for sexualized women and for men who exhibited negative behaviors or attitudes (Cowan and O’Brien 195). An analysis of thirty top-grossing slashers from 1980 to 2009 revealed on-screen nudity to be a better predictor of mortality than sexual experience. No relation was found between sexual behavior and death, but 100 percent of characters appearing nude or partially nude were killed (Ménard et al. 631–632). Another study based on the same corpus found Final Girls no more likely to be virgins than other characters. Final Girls never appeared nude and were found to be more androgynous (per Clover’s claim) than other female characters (Weaver et al. 38–39). The authors of that study also noticed that more than half of the films included a Final Boy in the company of the Final Girl (40). Another study of fifty randomly chosen slashers from 1960 to 2009 found that among sexually active characters, women were more likely to be punished for carnal transgressions than men (Welsh 770). A smaller study of only ten slashers observed that although male characters endured violent acts twice as frequently, female characters were shown in peril on-screen for longer periods of time (Sapolsky et al. 29, 35). Finally, among the more recent monographs about the genre, two stand out for their empirical support. The first of these is Richard Nowell’s Blood Money, which convincingly contextualizes the early slasher films (1978–1982) within industry practices to discredit the notion that the films were no more than “vehicles of horrifying male-on-female violence to be consumed exclusively by the young male patrons of ‘drive-ins and exploitation houses’” (3–4). The second is Sotiris Petridis’s Anatomy of the Slasher Film, which uses data from a corpus of seventy-four top-grossing North American slashers from 1974 to 2013 to establish three slasher cycles (classical, 1974–1993; self-referential, 1994–2000; neoslasher, 2001–2013) based on syntactic and semantic elements of the genre (2). Clover may be wrong about several of her original assertions, but she

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

17

is certainly right about the disproportionate amount of attention the Final Girl has received compared to the five other themes she presents as main ingredients of a slasher: killer, terrible place, weapons, victims, and shock. Arguably, the human (or human-adjacent) components listed are covered by most Final Girl studies, but neither nonhuman element (terrible place or weapons) has been examined empirically until now. Weapons, above all, present a curious gap in scholarship, considering the genre is named after blade-assisted violence. As I have argued in Household Horror, objectcentered readings of cinematic horror reveal the complex and ongoing negotiations behind our coexistence with the nonhuman (Olivier 8). With that in mind, I have conducted the first empirical study of slasher weapons, based on a corpus of 119 US- or Canadian-produced (or coproduced) slashers from 1974 to 2019.3 Rather than focus solely on mainstream box office hits, I have created a corpus that represents popular franchises, cult classics, and low-budget films that only a die-hard horror fan could love. I have included fourteen films from the 1970s, beginning with Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), followed by forty-two films that represent the prolific golden era of the 1980s, twenty from the 1990s, twenty-three from the 2000s, and twenty from the 2010s. I have avoided overrepresenting franchises by limiting the number of films from the same series to no more than three per decade. In total, I have recorded 1,177 deaths, from which I have excluded eleven suicides and thirty-six accidental deaths, for a total of 1,130.4 I tracked tools used by the aggressor (the villain) and the attacked (the victim) for each kill and for the fighting sequences leading to each kill. Among other details, I recorded kill locations and the gender, age range, social class, race or ethnicity, and sexual orientation of the aggressor and the attacked. In adopting a data-driven approach, I aim to eliminate the chain-saw effect and to do for weapons, and items repurposed as such, what other studies have done for the Final Girl: namely, to demystify the received slasher “rules” and to question ideas that have been overdetermined by confirmation bias. In what follows, I present a quantitative and qualitative assessment of several key findings along with illustrative examples from the corpus.

Driller Killers, Toolbox Murderers, and Lumberjack Chic After watching a few dozen slashers, I began to notice a trend in the sartorial preferences of villains: plaid flannel shirts. Although I did not formally track clothing, I quickly found that in whodunit-style slashers such as The Prowler

18 

marc olivier

(Joseph Zito, 1981), a lone character in plaid flannel is a dead giveaway to a villain’s identity. In the slasher genre, where killers lurk in darkness or hide behind masks, the murderous figure often functions as a blank slate on which to project signifiers of our fears. Clothes may not make the murderer, but they conspire with the objects of death to embody a nonhuman, classcoded, anxiety-generating machine: axe-wielding revenge wrapped in flannel; deformity with a machete, burlap, and coveralls; psychosis with a chef’s knife and a pin-striped Valentino suit. Character development is replaced by object elaboration. The diminished personhood of the killer enables the expansion of object vitality. Clothing is therefore either a congruent or a disjunctive amplification of object identity. Slashing is a murderous craft typically performed by a white (96.0%), heterosexual (90.5%), male (84.2%) killer in clothing associated with the working class and using tools connected to working-class trades.5 Even Chucky, the doll from Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988), comes with his own tool kit and wears overalls with a saw, hammer, and hard-hat print pattern and appliqué. Nearly half (45.0%) of slasher villains are working class, while half (49.7%) of slasher victims are middle class. The class warfare that undergirds the genre is reinforced by weaponized tools meant for wood chopping, carpentry, agriculture, mining, and other blue-collar work. Villains from poor and working classes kill with agricultural tools more often (11.9% and 11.1% of the time, respectively) than killers from the middle class (8.42%) and upper class (1.6%). Similarly, the use of carpentry tools decreases as class level increases (21.8% poor, 10.6% working class, 6.3% middle class, and 6.3% upper class). In contrast, upper-class killers use knives more than any other group (43.3% upper, 31.2% middle, 18.7% working, 25.7% poor) and are less likely than killers of other classes to repurpose tools as weapons, preferring instead to wield implements designed to be weapons (36.2% upper, 14.0% middle, 14.6% working, 18.8% poor). The number of working-class killers would increase if “code-switching” through clothing or tools were factored into the equation. Michael Myers, for example, is a child from a middle-class home when he commits his first murder. Once grown into a homicidal mental-hospital escapee also known as the Shape (and later the Boogeyman), he prefers the look of a mechanic—so much so that he wears coveralls as his signature outfit for the entire franchise. The original Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) shows a dead, undressed mechanic at the side of the road, as if the choice were haphazard. Forty years later, in Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018), killing a mechanic to acquire coveralls seems to have become a time-honored tradition.6 Thanks

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

19

to the coveralls, the Shape is not just any silhouette but specifically one coded as working class. The Shape’s generic uniform is as important to his persona as his blank white mask. His signature weapon, however, is neither a wrench nor a screwdriver nor any other mechanic’s tools but rather a chef’s knife—a kitchen tool used more often by the middle class (13.1%) than the poor (1.0%), the working class (8.2%), or the upper class (8.6%). When Michael Meyers arrives in Haddonfield in Halloween (2018), he searches for a toolshed and picks up a hammer. He then immediately enters a home where a white woman in curlers is making a ham sandwich with the help of a chef’s knife. The hammer is but a means to an end. The killer strikes the woman in the head with the hammer off-screen, retrieves the knife, and leaves. His persona complete, the iconic Shape now hovers between classes: working-class uniform and middle-class weapon. Sourcing his knife from a middle-class kitchen ties the Shape to the young, middle-class Michael Myers of the first kill. A signature weapon defines a killer. Who is Freddy Krueger without the glove of finger-knives crafted in his boiler room? Less handy killers must resort to ready-made tools, but hardware-store slasher villains are no less marked by their choices. The titular murderer in The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979) is a New York City artist struggling to finish his next major painting. Although poor, Reno Miller has prior gallery experience and a good working relationship with his agent. Miller’s only occupation is his art. Late one night, a television commercial for the “Porto-Pack” portable battery catches his eye. The battery pack promises to power anything from hair dryers to electric tools for only $19.95. The next day, Miller stands mesmerized in front of a hardware-store window display, sees the Porto-Pack sign, and makes his purchase. Corded drill in hand and Porto-Pack at his side, the Driller Killer is born. The Porto-Pack fuels a murderous drilling rampage of homeless men, roommates, and acquaintances. Miller’s battery-operated homicidal hobby reinvigorates his work. His mechanical killings fuse with his art as he smears blood into what he believes to be his masterpiece. He puts on his best shirt and tie to present the painting to his agent, who calls the work “a piece of shit” and then yells the most damning words an agent can say to an artist: “The worst thing that can happen to a painter is happening to you. You’re becoming simply a technician!” Like a sick punch line, the worst part of becoming the Driller Killer, it turns out, is not the descent into madness but the ensuing Icarian fall from high art to working-class “technician.” As Miller becomes a murder-by-numbers Driller Killer, he also becomes a paint-by-numbers artist.

20 

marc olivier

Slasher films fetishize tools for their latent power to serve as weapons. In the tradition of the giallo thriller, the slasher points the viewer’s eye to the instruments of death while the human wielding the weapon hovers in darkness or occupies only a portion of the screen. The killer is a broken human, a fractured, partial being that draws out the violent potential of a fireplace poker, a nail gun, an ice pick, an axe, a hammer, a pitchfork, pruning shears, a scythe, a drill, and other objects that were never designed to be weapons. The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978), like The Driller Killer or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, foregrounds tools rather than the person wielding them. In the long opening sequence, the killer is seen as not much more than a pair of driving gloves, a darkened figure steering a Mercedes along the streets of Los Angeles to the sounds of a Christian radio talk-show host’s hellfire-and-brimstone sermon. Shots of the Mercedes hood ornament emphasize the wealth of the driver, making the toolbox that he pulls from his trunk feel out of place, seemingly a prop in a repairman disguise meant to fool residents of an apartment complex. We see the toolbox in close-up on the floor of the elevator and then at the feet of the killer as he enters the apartment of his first victim. “Oh, you,” says a drunk woman, unfazed as the man opens the toolbox and places a wood-boring drill bit in his cordless drill. The shots alternate between killer POV and reverse shots of the drill getting ever closer to its victim. The drunk woman improvises a weapon by smashing her bottle on a countertop, but the killer grabs her arm and drills through it. More shot/reverse shots alternate between bloody victim and bloody drill bit as the woman makes her way down the hallway and into the bathroom. A close-up of the drill bit piercing the already unlocked wooden door allows the audience to see the tool doing what it was designed to do in order to better highlight its perverse use on human flesh. Each kill in The Toolbox Murders calls attention to the deadly potential held in a toolbox. The second murder uses the claws of a hammer; the third, a screwdriver; and the fourth, a nail gun. The murderer is eventually revealed to be not a common repairman but Vance Kingsley, the owner of the “Camelot” apartment complex. He is another “code-switching” killer: a wealthy landlord with a murderous blue-collar alter ego. This is not to imply that a landlord cannot also do repairs, but the split between Kingsley as a Mercedes-driving, upper-class man and as a toolbox-carrying murderer is coded as if the latter were a disguise. As a maniac with tools, Kingsley is abstracted, shown partially or in a worker’s coat, dark pants, and a ski mask. Like Michael Myers, he is a blue-collar “Shape” rather than a complete human. Dressed in black and emptied of humanity, he murders as if

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

21

Figure 1.1. The deadly toolbox in The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978)

puppeteering a show about the hidden life of sinister tools. He is defined almost entirely by his objects. Even more than the bourgeois Vance Kingsley in The Toolbox Murders, the Wall Street ladder climber Patrick Bateman, the titular character of American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000), is simply “not there,” or rather, he is defined almost entirely by his objects. Unlike The Toolbox Murders, American Psycho does not crop out the villain to focus on tools. Instead, the killer is but one more object in a display of glossy but soulless perfection. Bateman’s Manhattan apartment is less a dwelling than a minimalist showroom of curated design pieces. A Mackintosh Hill House chair sits in its own alcove, Mies van der Rohe Barcelona furniture adorns the living space, and a collection of murder tools in exquisitely pristine condition (an axe, a nail gun, duct tape, a chain saw, a hook) is stored in a butler’s pantry for special occasions. A meat cleaver and two expensive chef’s knives are on display in the kitchen on a magnetic, triangular stand not far from the Ultraline Professional stainless-steel refrigerator–freezer that seems to hold nothing other than a severed head and a container of sorbet. Bateman’s apartment removes tools from normal use in order to better appreciate their deadly potential. Bateman’s plastic perfection makes him a living mannequin in a museum of slasher weapons, complete with video-rental-inspired kills and a television playing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While Vance Kingsley dresses down for the kill, Patrick Bateman never wavers from his luxury-obsessed persona.

22 

marc olivier

Figure 1.2. Patrick Bateman and his pristine axe in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000)

The dissonance between his designer suit and his working-class tools says less about Bateman than it does about the inability of a working-class person to inhabit that space. Moreover, the tools insist that horror belongs to the working class and can be appropriated or discarded at will by those with the means to do so.

Men, Women, and Chef’s Knives In addition to class bias, slasher weapons reveal a gender imbalance that makes the use of weapons somewhat less empowering for women than is commonly believed. Overall (aggressors and attacked combined), women use cooking tools nearly twice as often as men when making a kill (women, 12.4%; men, 8.2%). During a fight, women use cooking tools nearly three times more often than men (women, 26%; men, 9.5%), and the gender split is even greater when the numbers exclude the aggressors (attacked women, 29.3%; attacked men, 6.1%).7 Adding all household categories (cooking, small appliances, furniture, and other household items) shows that women under attack use household items 49.3 percent of the time, significantly more than men under attack, who improvise weapons with household items a mere 15.94 percent of the time. Similarly, male and female villains show an imbalance when it comes to household goods as a weapon choice (women, 38.1%; men, 28.7%). When under attack, men prefer firearms 45.1 percent of the time, whereas women do so only 16 percent of the time.

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

23

Men also prefer carpentry tools more than women do (women aggressors and attacked combined, 6.2%; men combined, 11.2%). Even in life-or-death struggles, women in slashers have limited access to objects that fall outside of the domestic realm. The gender imbalance in the use of household items leads to scenes of mismatched power between male villains and female victims: a woman with a vase fights a man with a nail gun in The Toolbox Murders (1978); a woman with a broom takes on a man with a gun in The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977); Laurie Strode uses knitting needles and a wire hanger to fight Michael Myers and his knife in Halloween (1978); a woman uses a figurine against a man with a knife in The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982); a woman with a telephone and a kitchen knife fights Ghostface and his hunting knife in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996); a woman uses a vase and a bicycle against the villain in Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997); and a woman uses furniture against a hunting knife in Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000). Most victims are taken by surprise and do not get a chance to arm themselves with any object to fight back. In fact, out of 1,130 kill scenes, only 159 show the attacked using objects of any kind to retaliate. When the attacked do fight back, men are the most likely to arm themselves with objects designed to be weapons, such as swords, spears, daggers, and switchblades (men, 29.3%; women, 16%), and with firearms (men, 45.3%, women, 12.7%), while women are left to improvise with household objects, such as cooking tools and furniture. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Scott Glosserman, 2006) parodies the supposed phallic empowerment of women with tools when the would-be slasher-villain extraordinaire explains to a documentary camera crew the significance of a woman’s trip to the toolshed: “It’s the pivotal moment when she makes the transition from victim to heroine. This is visually manifested when she reaches for a big, long, hard weapon. You know what I’m talking about.” Some cases support that narrative, such as The Slumber Party Massacre, in which a machete stands comically erect below the waist of a supine woman just in time to impale the leaping villain. Halloween (1978) is more complicated, since Laurie Strode alternates between improvised household weapons and a long chef’s knife. After stabbing Michael in the neck with a knitting needle, Laurie throws the needle down and picks up Michael’s knife, only to cast it aside seconds later. Michael retrieves the knife for the closet attack, but drops it when Laurie stabs him in the eye with a wire hanger. Once again, Laurie picks up the fallen knife, this time stabbing Michael once before throwing it to the floor a second time. After Dr. Loomis bursts in with a gun to save the day, Laurie cowers and sobs about the Boogeyman, more childlike than empowered.

24 

marc olivier

Gun at a Knife Fight According to Clover, “In the hands of the killer, at least, guns have no place in slasher films.” Victims sometimes use guns, she says, but they “fail in a pinch” (31). The reality is more complicated. The aggressor does, in fact, use guns for the kill 8.3 percent of the time, placing firearms seventh among the top categories of tools used by the killer. When the attacked defeats the aggressor, firearms are to thank 25.5 percent of the time. Overall (whether the attacker wins or is killed), the attacked turn to guns more frequently than any other weapon (30.8%). Regardless of who wins, knives earn the top spot for the villain during a fight (29.1%), but firearms still take sixth place (11.1%), just below carpentry tools (12.4%). Clearly, guns play a significant role in slasher films, even if their comparative lack of novelty makes them less memorable than other weapons. Despite frequent gun use in slashers, scenes that promote ambivalence or hostility toward firearms are not uncommon. Although the attacked end up using guns the most frequently when they win (25.5%), they use knives (36.2%) or cooking tools (25.9%) more often than guns (20.7) during the fight. Arguably, the gap between using a gun in a fight and succeeding at making a kill with a gun complicates the story. Consider a few examples from the Halloween franchise. In the first Halloween, Loomis empties six rounds from his Smith and Wesson Model 15, resulting in Michael’s fall out the window and a “kill” that is sufficient to end the film but not to permanently defeat the villain. Guns are everywhere in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight H. Little, 1988), but they are ineffective (Michael takes out an entire station of armed officers), are dangerous in the wrong hands (angry locals shoot an innocent man), and are explicitly rejected by Michael twice: first, when he uses a shotgun barrel as a spear rather than as a device for shooting, and second, when he throws a gun contemptuously over a bannister. Although the film ends in a barrage of gunfire, Michael rises again and uncharacteristically tries out a series of agricultural tools as weapons in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Dominique OtheninGirard, 1989). After forty years, one might think that Laurie Strode would have a little less faith in firearms, but in Halloween (2018), Laurie’s bunker may as well be a gun store showroom. “Pick your poison,” she tells her daughter, Karen, and son-in-law, Ray. “I like the revolver. They never jam.” She hands a Winchester rifle to her daughter: “This has accuracy and stopping power.” Then, handing a Mossberg 500 Cruiser to Ray: “This is tactical.” And yet, for all the talk of firearms, a cast-iron skillet and a kitchen knife are the final weapons used to push Michael into a cage for incineration. Not surprisingly, the trap door is in the kitchen.

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

25

Symbolic repudiations of firearms in slashers offer anecdotal support for the spirit of Clover’s claim that guns have no place in the genre, even if the data prove otherwise. The opening sequence of Maniac Cop (William Lustig, 1988) features a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver, fully creating the expectation that the gun will be the killer’s weapon of choice. Nevertheless, after the opening credits, the gun remains holstered for the duration of the movie. Instead, the Maniac Cop uses a dagger that he keeps sheathed at his side like a police baton. In Destroyer (Robert Kirk, 1988), a killer lowers a jackhammer on a gun just as a police officer is reaching for it. Final Exam (Jimmy Huston, 1981) foreshadows gun violence early in the film by referencing the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman, but in the climactic campus tower scene, the only weapons used are a knife and a bow and arrow. The adage “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” is bad advice in a slasher, where blades beat bullets more often than logic would dictate. A gun loses to a sword in The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (Constantine S. Gochis, 1978); a machete bests a gun in Blood Rage (John Grissmer, 1987); a priest with a bladed crucifix kills an armed high school boy in Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Clay Borris, 1991); a pickaxe beats a gun in The Hills Run Red (Dave Parker, 2009); a scythe kills a man with a gun in Silent Night (Steven C. Miller, 2012); a retired cop’s Colt Python can’t save him from primitive weapons in The Hills Have Eyes (1977); and in See No Evil (Gregory Dark, 2006), a gun is no match for a maniac with a meat hook. Given that knives are the top weapon for kills by both the aggressor and the attacked, and guns are the fourth-most-used weapons by both sides, knives make a compelling statement against guns. Nevertheless, to say that guns have no place in slashers is clearly inaccurate. When ranked by specific weapon used for kills rather than by categories, hunting knives and kitchen knives take first and second place, but handguns are just behind in third place, and long guns take fifth place, just after drills. Slasher weapons such as machetes, pickaxes, hooks, swords, scythes, and pitchforks appear in far fewer kills than guns.

The Final Weapons Slasher kills are usually one-sided. Eighty-six percent of slasher deaths happen without the attacked fighting back with any object whatsoever. Sustained, weapons-heavy fight scenes are often reserved for the villains and the final characters. Big franchises such as the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Scream series reliably provide spectacular face-off finales during which resourceful survivors employ multiple objects to defeat the villain. Those fights allow the heroes to distinguish themselves from the typical hapless victims not only by

26 

marc olivier

using and creating weapons but by using more of them than the killer. Nearly one-third (31.9%) of the films studied (38 of 119) include a final fight scene during which the attacked wields at least one more weapon than the killer. In twenty-seven of those scenes (22.7% of the corpus), the attacked employs at least two more weapons than the killer. The high-profile franchises provide the template for the conventional Final Girl narrative, even though they do not constitute the majority of slasher endings. Villains win or escape in 28.6 percent (34 of 119) of the films, and in the remaining victories, the killer is either defeated with an evenly matched number of weapons or is captured. Final battles vary in their levels of empowerment. Scream 2 and Scream 3 follow the Halloween (1978) model of a final fight scene wherein a Final Girl uses a combination of weapons and weaponized objects but is ultimately saved by a man with a gun. In Scream 2, Sidney Prescott uses a hunting knife, a bottle, an axe, and stage decor and lighting in her fight with Debbie Loomis, who has a hunting knife and a handgun, but Cotton Weary defeats Loomis with a gun. In Scream 3, Sidney uses a hunting knife, a handgun, an ice pick, a vase, a candlestick, and furniture in her fight with Roman Bridger, but in the end, Dewey makes the kill with his gun. In Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980), Jamie Lee Curtis plays a Final Girl who fights the villain with a sword, a receipt spike, and a fire extinguisher but is saved by a conductor who hits the killer out of the speeding train with a shovel.8 The Friday the 13th films in the corpus feature a large number of tools during the final fights, usually demonstrating a final character’s resourcefulness with household items and proficiency with the same weapons used by the killer. Thus, when Final Girl Chris fights Jason in Friday the 13th Part 3 (Steve Miner, 1982), she uses a chair, a bookshelf, firewood, a knife, a shovel, a van, a rope and pulley, a machete, and an axe. In Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), Alice fights Pamela with a fireplace poker, an iron skillet, a ball of twine, an oar, and a shotgun, but she beheads the villain with a machete. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) has a lengthy tool deliberation scene at a basement workbench where Valerie considers every tool—drill, hacksaw, wire cutters, T-bar, scissors, jumper cables, hammer, circular power saw—but like Alice in Friday the 13th, she finds the machete to be the most effective for the kill. Bearing in mind that fewer than one-quarter of slashers culminate in allout displays of clever weaponry, final battles merit attention nonetheless as reminders of the centrality of objects in the genre. Slashers are formulaic, but the Final Girl is not the most essential part of the formula. As indicated by the name “slasher,” weapons define the genre. Villains, too, are defined by their weapons, and consequently, the tools of their trade shape our fears. Only martial arts movies rival the slasher in alluding to the latent violence of

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

27

common objects. Yet while a martial arts hero exhibits split-second situational awareness and taps into the potential of any environment with graceful agility, slasher survivors are often frantic and clumsy in their desperate attempts to weaponize their surroundings. Thus, while one marvels at the elegance of the martial arts hero, one identifies with the distress of a slasher character who frantically inventories the kitchen while wondering if a ladle makes a better weapon than a frying pan. Since houses and apartments are by far the most common locations for slasher violence (23.7%), followed by domestic exteriors (8.9%), and cars (7.7%), one can also relate to the spaces of slasher kills. One need not be a teen at summer camp to identify with a victim. In fact, most victims are nineteen to twenty-five years old (33.0%) or twenty-six to thirty-five (23.7%). In third place, teens (16.7%) are only marginally more represented than people thirty-six to fifty years old (16.1%). This means that slasher audiences will often encounter adults in domestic settings where the choice of possible weapons requires imagination. And that object-focused imagination is what survives the film, even when the victims do not. The chain-saw effect—the confirmation bias that privileges affect in such a way that certain slasher objects (such as the chain saw) occupy a more important role than data would suggest—does not negate the affective power of weapons on the viewer. The fact that there are only 9 kills by chain saw across the 1,130 kills tracked for this study demonstrates the need for more empirical inquiries concerning the role of objects in horror. In other words, if firearms are responsible for 111 slasher kills and chain saws for only 9, it may be worth investigating why Men, Women, and Firearms would never be as effective a title as Men, Women, and Chain Saws. My study has focused on the number of appearances of objects in fights and kills and has tracked those objects individually and by category. The data accounts for location of use, as well as the gender, age, race or ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation of the user. And yet much remains to be done. I have not collected data such as object appearances in trailers and posters, the screen time of objects that are not part of kill scenes, the audible presence of objects (e.g., the buzzing of a chain saw), and other cinematic manifestations that might establish a different hierarchical list, perhaps one in which the chain saw reigns empirically supreme as signifier of slasher horror. Slasher studies need empirical research to recalibrate the relation between human and nonhuman actors. To date, Final Girls and Boys have enjoyed nearly all of the attention in matters of data-driven slasher studies. And although those data have resulted in a more complex and nuanced view of gender and violence on-screen, they have also reinforced anthropocentrism

28 

marc olivier

by neglecting other key features of slashers, such as weaponry and location. To better account for the work performed by objects, one must move beyond the conventional view of objects as props for humans and consider instead how humans (and monsters) serve as props for objects. For the purpose of an object-centered analysis, it may therefore be fruitful to say that Final Girls and Boys, like slasher villains, are often stock figures that serve a common cause: they animate the objects that share our living spaces, clutter our closets, hide in our basements and sheds, or go camping with us. They demonstrate how those objects can turn against us or save us. Slashers are as much about the repairman as the Boogeyman. A slasher turns a kitchen into an armory, a toolbox into an arsenal. In the end, our fear of Leatherface might fade with the credits, but lurking in sheds everywhere are chain saws that will never be the same.

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

29

Table 1.1. Top eighteen tool categories used in fight sequences, by gender (aggressor and attacked combined) Men

Women

Weapon

Number of uses

Weapon

Number of uses

Knives

71

Knives

32

Firearms

61

Cooking tools

25

Hunting

58

Hunting objects

19

Weapon

55

Household furnishings

15

Carpentry tools

32

Weapons

15

Hands and feet*

31

Firearms

14

Wood-chopping tools

30

Other household items

11

Other household items

27

Agricultural implements

8

Cooking tools

27

Wood-chopping tools

8

Agricultural implements

16

Hands and feet*

8

Household furnishings

13

Simple household tools

7

Construction items

11

Carpentry tools

6

Medical implements

10

Sporting goods

6

Sporting goods

9

Cars/vehicles

6

Religious/supernatural items

9

Building materials

4

Industrial food tools**

7

Fire or electric shock

3

Cars/vehicles

6

Animals and nature

3

Simple household tools

5

Construction items

2

Notes: Table entries represent the number of altercations in which a given tool category was used in a survey of 119 horror films. There was insufficient information to identify the gender of the person involved in 50 out of 1,130 altercations. *Hands and feet, though not tools, are included for reference. **“Industrial food” refers to meat hooks, industrial freezers, ice picks, industrial meat and nut grinders, and cider presses.

30 

marc olivier

Table 1.2. Tool categories used for the kill, by gender (aggressor and attacked combined) Men

Women

Weapon

Number of uses

Weapon

Number of uses

Knives

218

Knives

51

Weapon

154

Hunting objects

33

Hunting

110

Cooking tools

23

Carpentry tools

103

Weapons

20

Hands and feet*

93

Agricultural implements 19

Firearms

86

Wood-chopping tools

17

Agricultural implements

71

Firearms

17

Cooking tools

69

Other household items

14

Wood-chopping tools

50

Household furnishings

10

Mining tools

34

Cars/vehicles

9

Other household items

28

Carpentry tools

8

Industrial food tools

28

Construction items

7

Household furnishings

25

Hands and feet*

7

Religious/supernatural items

21

Industrial food

6

Construction items

17

Simple household tools

5

Medical implements

15

Mining tools

4

Cars/vehicles

15

Sporting goods

3

Sporting goods

14

Religious/supernatural items

3

Note: Table entries represent the number of altercations in which a given tool category was used to kill in a survey of 119 horror films. There was insufficient information to identify the gender of the person involved in 50 out of 1,130 altercations. *Hands and feet, though not tools, are included for reference.

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

31

Table 1.3. Social class among aggressors and attacked Class

Aggressor

Attacked

Poor

130 (11.5)

44 (3.9)

Working

509 (45.0)

394 (34.9)

Middle

296 (26.2)

562 (49.7)

Upper

138 (12.2)

102 (9.0)

Indeterminate*

57 (5.0)

28 (2.5)

Note: Social class was determined from information about profession, housing, clothing, etc. Table entries, n (%), represent the number of aggressors or attacked in the given social class based on 1,130 altercations.

32 

marc olivier

Table 1.4. Top eighteen tools used to kill Tools

Kills

Hunting knife

85 (7.3)

Kitchen knife*

76 (6.6)

Handgun

61 (5.3)

Drill

47 (4.1)

Long gun

45 (3.9)

Machete

45 (3.9)

Custom-made knife (or assemblage)

38 (3.3)

Axe

37 (3.2)

Pickaxe

33 (2.9)

Fire (gas or other non-blowtorch)

31 (2.7)

Meat hook (or other large hook)

25 (2.2)

Sword

24 (2.1)

Car or truck

20 (1.7)

Mallet

17 (1.5)

Rope

17 (1.5)

Switchblade

17 (1.5)

Supernatural power

16 (1.4)

Scythe

15 (1.3)

Note: In 1,130 altercations observed in a survey of 119 horror movies, 153 unique tools were used a total of 1,157 times in 1,130 kills made by either the aggressor or the attacked. Table entries, n (%), represent the number of times a specific tool was used with the percent (relative to the 1,157 unique uses of tools in kills). The top 15 tools were used in 649 of the altercations. The other 134 tools were each used fewer than 15 times; 65 tools were each used only one time. *Hands (for strangulation or blunt force), while not a tool, were also used for 76 kills.

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

33

Notes 1. There are only 9 kills by chain saw across the 1,117 deaths I tracked for this study. 2. Swords accounted for twenty-four deaths in my study, or two and a half times as many deaths as chain saws, which accounted for nine deaths. 3. Like a slasher villain, I owe a great debt of gratitude to blades, although in my case I mean Associate Professor of Statistics Natalie Blades. Thanks to our team-taught course on algorithms and creativity, I was empowered to undertake this immense study with the resources to ensure proper coding and quality control. 4. The elimination of suicides and accidents was done to focus solely on aggressor-versus-attacked homicides in the films. 5. The sexual orientation of slasher villains, however, is complicated by queer coding that can vary from one installment of a franchise to the next. In fact, one could argue that queerness is an identity feature of most slasher villains. The “heterosexuality” of villains is therefore highly debatable compared to the clearer orientation of slasher victims. I label characters as bisexual, lesbian, or gay in the data only when dialogue and behavior explicitly move beyond coding (e.g., Jennifer in Jennifer’s Body [Karyn Kusama, 2009]). 6. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988, Dwight H. Little) also includes a dead mechanic whose coveralls Michael has taken. 7. When splitting into attacked and aggressor categories, “attacked” always refers to the “good guys” and “aggressor” always refers to the “bad guys.” 8. A total of nineteen kills (1.6% of 1,177 total deaths) involve a third party. For the sake of clarity between aggressor-versus-attacked fights, only the attacked is included in the statistics. Most of the third-party involvement is either a group effort with tools already included in the statistics or a male character with a gun, which at most would increase total gun use by a very small margin.

Filmography Used as Corpus Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole, USA) All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006, Jonathan Levine, USA) American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron, USA/Canada) American Psycho II: All American Girl (2002, Morgan J. Freeman, USA) Aquaslash (2019, Renaud Gauthier, Canada) Basket Case 2 (1990, Frank Henenlotter, USA) Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006, Scott Glosserman, USA) Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clark, Canada) Black Christmas (2019, Sophia Takal, USA / New Zealand) Blood Harvest (1987, Bill Rebane, USA) Blood Rage (1987, John Grissmer, USA) Bloody Birthday (1981, Ed Hunt, USA) Bride of Chucky (1998, Ronny Yu, USA/Canada)

34 

marc olivier

Brightburn (2019, David Yarovesky, USA) The Burning (1981, Tony Maylam, USA) Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose, USA/UK) Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995, Bill Condon, USA/UK) The Carpenter (1988, David Wellington, Canada) Child’s Play (1988, Tom Holland, USA) Child’s Play 2 (1990, John Lafia, USA) ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011, Robert Hall, USA) Cult of Chucky (2017, Don Mancini, USA) Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, Frank De Felitta, USA) Destroyer (1988, Robert Kirk, USA) Don’t Go in the House (1979, Joseph Ellison, USA) Don’t Go in the Woods (1981, James Bryan, USA) Don’t Look (2018, Luciana Faulhaber, USA) The Driller Killer (1979, Abel Ferrara, USA) Drive-In Massacre (1976, Stu Segall, USA) Final Destination 5 (2011, Steven Quale, USA / Canada / Singapore / Hong Kong) Final Exam (1981, Jimmy Huston, USA) Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, Rachel Talalay, USA) Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham, USA) Friday the 13th (2009, Marcus Nispel, USA) Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981, Steve Miner, USA) Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982, Steve Miner, USA) Graduation Day (1981, Herb Freed, USA) Halloween (1978, John Carpenter, USA) Halloween (2018, David Gordon Green, USA/UK) Halloween II (1981, Rick Rosenthal, USA) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Meyers (1988, Dwight H. Little, USA) Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989, Dominique OtheninGirard, USA) Hatchet (2006, Adam Green, USA) Hell Night (1981, Tom DeSimone, USA) The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven, USA) The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexandre Aja, USA/France/Romania) The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007, Martin Weisz, USA) The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984, Wes Craven, USA) The Hills Run Red (2009, Dave Parker, USA) House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie, USA) House of Wax (2005, Jaume Collet-Serra, Australia/USA) Ice Cream Man (1995, Norman Apstein, USA) I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, Jim Gillespie, USA) I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998, Danny Cannon, USA/Mexico) Jack Frost (1997, Michael Cooney, USA/UK) Jennifer’s Body (2009, Karyn Kusama, USA/Canada) Laid to Rest (2009, Robert Hall, USA) Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990, Jeff Burr, USA) Madman (1981, Joe Giannone, USA)

a s tat i s t i c a l a n a ly s i s o f s l a s h e r h a r d w a r e  

35

Maniac (1980, William Lustig, USA) Maniac (2012, Franck Khalfoun, France/USA) Maniac Cop (1988, William Lustig, USA) Mardi Gras Massacre (1978, Jack Weis, USA) Masked Mutilator (2019, Brick Bronsky, USA) The Midnight Meat Train (2008, Ryûhei Kitamura, USA/UK) Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1983, Jim McCullough Sr., USA) The Mutilator (1984, Buddy Cooper and John Douglass, USA) My Bloody Valentine (1981, George Mihalka, Canada) My Bloody Valentine (2009, Patrick Lussier, USA/Canada) My Little Eye (2002, Marc Evans, UK/USA/France/Canada) New Year’s Evil (1980, Emmett Alston, USA) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Wes Craven, USA) Pledge Night (1988, Paul Ziller, USA) Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch, Canada) Prom Night (2008, Nelson McCormick, USA/Canada) Prom Night II (1987, Bruce Pittman, Canada) Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1991, Clay Borris, Canada) The Prowler (1981, Joseph Zito, USA) Random Acts of Violence (2019, Jay Baruchel, USA/Canada) The Ranger (2018, Jenn Wexler, USA) The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (1978, Constantine S. Gochis, USA) Savage Weekend (1979, David Paulsen and John Mason Kirby, USA) Scream (1996, Wes Craven, USA) Scream 2 (1997, Wes Craven, USA) Scream 3 (2000, Wes Craven, USA) See No Evil (2006, Gregory Dark, USA/Australia) See No Evil 2 (2014, Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska, USA/Canada) Shocker (1989, Wes Craven, USA) Silent Night (2012, Steven C. Miller, USA/Canada) The Silent Scream (1979, Denny Harris, USA) Skinner (1993, Ivan Nagy, USA) Sledgehammer (1983, David A. Prior, USA) Sleepaway Camp (1983, Robert Hiltzik, USA) Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988, Michael A. Simpson, USA) Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989, Michael A. Simpson, USA) The Slumber Party Massacre (1982, Amy Holden Jones, USA) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987, Deborah Brock, USA) Slumber Party Massacre III (1990, Sally Mattison, USA) The Stepfather (1987, Joseph Ruben, UK/Canada/USA) The Stepfather (2009, Nelson McCormick, USA) Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy (1989, Jeff Burr, USA) Sweet Sixteen (1983, Jim Sotos, USA) Terrifier (2016, Damien Leone, USA) Terror Train (1980, Roger Spottiswoode, Canada) Texas Chainsaw (2013, John Luessenhop, USA) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper, USA)

36 

marc olivier

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, Marcus Nispel, USA) Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994, Kim Henkel, USA) The Toolbox Murders (1978, Dennis Donnelly, USA) Toolbox Murders (2004, Tobe Hooper, USA) Tourist Trap (1979, David Schmoeller, USA) The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, USA) The Undertaker (1988, Frank Avianca and Steve Bono, USA) Urban Legend (1998, Jamie Blanks, USA/Canada) Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000, John Ottman, USA/Canada) Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven, USA) We Summon the Darkness (2019, Marc Meyers, USA/Canada/UK) You’re Next (2011, Adam Wingard, USA/UK)

Works Cited Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton Classics ed., Princeton UP, 2015. Cowan, Gloria, and Margaret O’Brien. “Gender and Survival vs. Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis.” Sex Roles, vol. 23, no. 3, 1990, pp. 187–196. Ménard, A. Dana, et al. “‘There Are Certain Rules That One Must Abide By’: Predictors of Mortality in Slasher Films.” Sexuality and Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, 2019, pp. 621–640. Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Continuum, 2011. Olivier, Marc. Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects. Indiana UP, 2020. Petridis, Sotiris. Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis. McFarland, 2019. Sapolsky, Barry S., et al. “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Re-examining the Assumptions.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2003, pp. 28–38. Weaver, Angela D., et al. “Embodying the Moral Code? Thirty Years of Final Girls in Slasher Films.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015, pp. 31–46. Welsh, Andrew. “On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film: Gender Differences in the Association between Sexual Activity and Survival.” Sex Roles, vol. 62, no. 11–12, 2010, pp. 762–773.

CHAPTER 2

EVERY RITUAL HAS ITS PURPOSE Laboring Bodies in The Autopsy of Jane Doe David Church

Viewers of the horror genre will have seen, but perhaps barely registered, many undistinguished appearances by ambulance crews, forensic investigators, medical examiners, morgue attendants, funeral home operators, cemetery staff, and other practitioners of what might broadly be called “postmortem labor.” In the wake of the monster’s deeds, a panoply of professions comes into the picture to effectively “clean up” the mess left behind when violent or mysterious deaths occur. Some of these roles are directly tied to the larger criminal-justice system, such as gathering evidence for use in prosecutions, while others are more discretely rooted in what the US Department of Commerce calls the “death-care industry,” including the goods and services associated with funerals, burials, and cremations. (Coroners, who are often elected officials, bridge these two sectors, first by ordering autopsies to determine a cause of death and then by legally releasing a body for its eventual disposal.) It would not be a stretch to claim that horror, more than any other genre of film, implicitly depends on the many forms of postmortem labor that attend to decedents in the time span between the crime-scene investigation and the body’s final disposal. Yet most of these jobs are largely “invisibilized” within the genre itself, pushed to the narrative margins as professions that either come on-scene after the major narrative events or appear as a brief bridge between narrative segments while the monster is still at large. At first glance, this might seem an overly broad claim (and notable exceptions will always exist), but when postmortem labor appears more than superficially, it most often does so in horror films that mix with adjacent genres. Although morgues, funeral homes, and cemeteries commonly appear as settings in horror movies, it is often only in passing, such as when a loved one must identify a body or bury a relative. In Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes 37

38 

d av i d c h u r c h

Craven, 1994), for example, Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) visits a morgue to confirm her husband’s death in an apparent car crash, but the morgue attendant refuses to lower the white sheet far enough to reveal deep slashes in the decedent’s chest, as if maintaining complicity with what is actually Freddy Krueger’s handiwork. Even when such settings do figure more prominently—for example, in Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979), Funeral Home (William Fruet, 1980), Night of the Demons (Kevin Tenney, 1988), and See No Evil 2 (Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska, 2014)—they tend to be figured more as spooky settings, without much attention paid to the actual types of labor performed therein. While there are certainly a handful of horror films that depict death-care workers as monstrous antagonists—The Hearse (George Bowers, 1980), Dead and Buried (Gary Sherman, 1981), Mortuary (Howard Avedis, 1983), and The Undertaker (Frank Avianca and Steve Bono, 1988), among others—workers in or near to the death-care industry feature less often as protagonists in their own right. When they do, it is often in horror-comedy films—such as The Undertaker and His Pals (T. L. P. Swicegood, 1966), Re-animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985), The Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985), Nekromantik (Jörg Buttgereit, 1987), Body Bags (John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, 1993), and Cemetery Man (Michele Soavi, 1994)—that depict their close contact with corpses as a source of carnivalesque humor. Mortuary workers, for instance, tend to be depicted as bumbling oafs, perverse necrophiliacs, or morbid weirdos rather than competent professionals whose labor helps give comfort to grieving survivors. Much as films set in and around the death-care industry generically mix horror with comedy, major characters on the criminal-justice side of postmortem professions tend to appear in horror films that border on the thriller or mystery genres, such as the many police-procedural films about serial killers that became mainstream Hollywood fodder following the success of The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and Se7en (David Fincher, 1995). This cycle continued on through the late 2000s, when serial-killer films began focusing less on police or detectives as protagonists than on increasingly humanized depictions of the killers themselves (Simpson 119–124). Even the giallo-esque film Nightwatch (Ole Bornedal, 1994; Ole Bornedal, 1997 [US remake])—in which a night watchperson at a morgue becomes implicated in a serial killer’s ongoing murders and becomes an amateur detective to clear himself of suspicion—more closely resembles a “thriller” than a straight horror film. Mark Jancovich argues that such serial-killer films achieved critical and popular success in part because having narratives structured around the process of detection seemingly distanced them from

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

39

the horror genre’s lowbrow connotations of supernatural monstrosity and gratuitous violence, thereby allowing wider audiences to justify their consumption of these films via a more respectable genre label than “horror” (156–159). Indeed, as such procedural narratives began to wane in popularity at theaters, they increasingly migrated to television, with the popular series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony E. Zuiker, 2000–2015) and its many generic kin effectively justifying their scenes of graphic violence (e.g., computer-generated “fly-throughs” of extreme bodily trauma) through the moral reassurance that, week in and week out, forensic experts can solve even the most bizarre crimes in under an hour of screen time. Overall, then, sustained and substantial depictions of postmortem labor are more likely to appear in films that border on genres other than the horror genre proper—which prompts the question of why a genre so intensely focused on death would seem to push these critical roles toward its representational margins. In this chapter, I examine André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) as a rare example of a critically acclaimed horror film that structures its narrative around the very process of conducting its titular act via a story that blends the criminal-justice and death-care spheres of postmortem labor, albeit without tonally departing into an adjacent genre such as thriller or comedy. Rather, by remaining squarely in the same generic territory occupied by witches and zombies, The Autopsy of Jane Doe depicts the professional labor of a father-son mortuary team overlapping with the genre’s broader representations of endangered bodies struggling to survive. By commingling its depiction of postmortem labor with the protagonists’ physical and emotional labor of trying to stay alive, the film points toward one of the horror genre’s deepest ritual functions: reassuring viewers that the actual (unrepresentable) passage into death does not come easily and is not truly the end. Although The Autopsy of Jane Doe does bring on-scene a job that typically gets too close for comfort to the brute facticity of death when rendered soberly and realistically, it does so to suggest that decedents can continue to narrate their experiences from beyond the grave, hence providing fodder for future horror films.

Gendered Preliminaries The Autopsy of Jane Doe opens at the scene of a gory multiple murder in Grantham, Virginia, where a forensic investigation finds that the Douglas family were killed apparently while attempting to break out of their own home instead of during a break-in. Unlike the partially or wholly opened

40 

d av i d c h u r c h

Figure 2.1. Finding the woman’s body in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016)

bodies strewn throughout the house, however, the semi-unearthed body of a young woman (Olwen Kelly), her nude form free of decomposition and her face serenely restful, is found in a hole dug in the basement floor. Although local officer Sheriff Burke (Michael McElhatton) initially suspects that a construction worker, also found dead inside the home, killed the unidentified woman elsewhere and attempted to hide the body beneath the Douglas family’s basement, he cannot explain how this “Jane Doe” became such a strangely pristine corpse. The film thus begins very similarly to a police procedural, but after this prologue, the action quickly shifts away from the site of criminal-justice labor to the family-owned mortuary where the rest of the more generically horrific narrative will unfold. We are introduced to the Tilden Morgue and Crematory via a montage of an autopsy in progress, as Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox) and his trainee son, Austin (Emile Hirsch), dissect the fire-scorched body of one Otis Howard. Set to upbeat rock music, the montage emphasizes the smooth and efficient professionalism that the father is imparting to his son, while also emphasizing that even with a corpse being opened on the slab, a morgue is not an inherently “creepy” setting but rather a place for highly skilled labor. Austin hypothesizes that smoke inhalation killed the man, but Tommy locates the true cause of death as a subdural hematoma in the cranium. “Every body has its secret. Some just hide them better than others,” Tommy says, reassuring his son and foreshadowing Burke’s unexpected arrival with Jane Doe. Needing to tell the press something more substantial about the Douglas family murders, Burke asks Tommy to stay past closing time to uncover Jane Doe’s cause of death, hoping that the mysterious woman will be the key to unlocking the crime scene.

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

41

Although forensic pathologists or medical examiners typically perform autopsies at a hospital or other public health facility, it is not uncommon for funeral home operators to moonlight as local coroners in small rural communities that may lack medically trained pathologists—even if this necessitates shipping some bodies to a private medical examiner for autopsy (Weisheit et al. 90). While it is somewhat unrealistic for a family-run business specializing in such particular tasks as autopsies and cremation (as opposed to broader funeral services) to economically survive for multiple generations in a rural Virginia town, the Tilden establishment collapses these two professions (identifying causes of death and cremating bodies) under the same roof for the sake of narrative expediency. Hence, the Tilden Morgue and Crematory conflates different sides of the postmortem labor spectrum, from medical-cum-criminal investigation to death care, which are typically separate businesses. On the other hand, however, because Tommy is not depicted as a funeral home director, the screenwriters are less obligated to depict him with a funeral director’s requisite degree of emotional warmth and empathy toward bereaved visitors. Rather, the morgue, located in the basement of his home, figures as Tommy’s masculine domain, a more clinical place where he can excel at his professional duties. Significantly, women have begun entering the death-care industry in far greater numbers since the early 2000s, engendering growing public curiosity about how they inhabit these traditionally male-dominated professions, especially given the association of female labor with emotional labor. This shift is evidenced by a handful of prominent memoirs and media representations, from Caitlin Doughty’s YouTube series “Ask a Mortician” (2011–) to fictional characters such as funeral home operator Shirley Crain (Elizabeth Reaser) in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House (Mike Flanagan, 2018).1 While part of this curiosity surely derives from traditionally gendered assumptions that women would not want to muck around in close proximity to death and decay, it arguably gives such jobs a “kinder, gentler” face associated with women’s culturally prescribed role as nurturers. Although Tommy is depicted as an encouraging father, his professionalism is clearly based in a coldly medical empiricism that also manifests as a stereotypically masculine stoicism born of emotional repression. “Down here, if you can’t see it, [or] touch it, it doesn’t matter,” he remarks, trying to dissuade Austin from making speculative leaps beyond ascertaining cause of death. As we soon learn, Tommy may be very apt when examining dead bodies, but he was blind to the emotional strain his work life was placing on his wife, who killed herself two years earlier. Meanwhile, Austin is torn between wanting to support his father but also hoping to pursue just about

42 

d av i d c h u r c h

any other profession, away from the family morgue. Still, even though he does not need to stay for the Jane Doe autopsy, Austin abruptly cancels his date with his girlfriend, Emma (Ophelia Lovibond), to assist his father, hinting that he is also inheriting his father’s neglect toward (living) women. The film thus opens by rooting its emotional stakes in the two men’s attitudes toward their work and whether they prioritize (masculine) professional futures over (feminine) romantic ones. This tension between the cultural associations of “masculine” rationality and “feminine” emotionality is highlighted when Emma, visiting the morgue for the first time, asks to see one of the bodies and is shown an apparent “suicide” (whose actual cause of death was murder by poison, covered up by a posthumous shotgun blast). She asks Tommy why someone poisoned the man, but he scoffs at the question: “Leave the why to the cops and the shrinks. We’re just here to find cause of death. No more, no less.” Not only does he maintain that they perform a very compartmentalized role, tied far more strongly to science than psychology, but he jokingly compares Emma’s question to Austin’s earlier comment that the elderly Otis Howard “was all alone. That’s why he died.” (“He died because he fell and hit his head,” Tommy corrected him.) According to Tommy, then, opening up to the less empirically grounded realm of emotion—and, as will soon be revealed, the supernatural—is more closely aligned with femininity, much as Carol Clover argues that horror films about supernatural possession are typically built upon a gendered conflict between male representatives of (Western) “White Science” and female representatives of “Black Magic” (70–85, 98, 109). Because women’s bodies, since biblical times, have been seen as more “open” to supernatural invasion, they most often figure as the bodies called upon “to give literal and visible evidence” in possession films, typically via a battery of inconclusive medical tests to determine what is “occulted” away inside their bodies (82). Indeed, when Tommy answers Emma’s query about why he ties a small bell to decedents’ toes (his homage to an antiquated practice for preventing the premature burial of cataleptics), he shrugs and calls himself a “traditionalist,” which also implicitly describes his gendered attitude toward his job. Although his nod to tradition may indicate a touch of sentimentality on his part, it still pays loving tribute to a male-dominated past, well before the recent influx of women into death-care professions. Meanwhile, Austin’s cancellation of his date suggests a necrophilic eschewal of his girlfriend, Emma, for the beautiful nude corpse. The film would have a different tenor were the mysterious corpse badly decomposed, but Jane Doe’s sleeping-beauty appearance, resembling one of Poe’s many female objects of desire (as Tommy’s allusion to catalepsy makes more

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

43

Figure 2.2. The passive female corpse in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016)

explicit), invites the viewer to share a necrophilic eroticism that overlaps with a clinical male gaze.2 Barbara Creed notes that “the ultimate in abjection is the corpse,” not only because the decaying body often renders visible the various fluids and organs expected to remain within the body’s corporeal boundaries but also because of religious prohibitions against a body without a soul (9–10). Yet the figure of the dead woman—especially the young, beautiful white woman—has served as a common object of aesthetic contemplation since the eighteenth century (again, see Poe) and has since become a latter-day cultural fetish (see true-crime narratives) that simultaneously condemns and mourns the woman as a figure of lost privilege and potential. To quote Elisabeth Bronfen, The Autopsy of Jane Doe’s initial “image of a feminine corpse presents a concept of beauty which places the work of death into the service of the aesthetic process, for this form of beauty is contingent on the translation of an animate body into a deanimated one” (5). That is, the corpse of a beautiful woman serves as an idealized blank slate for the male pathologist to work his own magic upon, but this idealization is only possible because she is already dead (3–14). Although physically opened up, Jane Doe is depicted less as a source of repulsion than as one of the many “dead-but-not-gone women” whose posthumous “pseudoagency” in contemporary pop-culture narratives may pay lip service to a “feminist logic” of retribution but is “ultimately contained and reinscribed in an androcentric order that refuses to accept responsibility for the injustices and powerlessness that women collectively endure” (Clarke Dillman 11). Indeed, through a

44 

d av i d c h u r c h

preponderance of overhead medium shots and close-ups, Jane Doe is offered up for a (heterosexual) male gaze as an ostensibly passive female object on the slab, her porcelain skin and internal organs overexposed by the glow of the operating room lights, with her blank, clouded eyes seemingly unable to return the gaze. Yet she soon demonstrates a surreptitious resistance to the medico-patriarchal power of her male examiners (albeit to less certain ends). Although The Autopsy of Jane Doe centers postmortem labor via a far more procedural narrative than in most other horror films, its gendered tensions between White Science and Black Magic, as well as its Gothic preoccupation with an eroticized dead woman and her implicit voice from beyond the grave, all strongly resonate with long-standing genre tropes.

External and Internal Clues Beginning nineteen minutes into the film’s duration, the eponymous autopsy follows the overall trajectory of real autopsies, with the film’s remaining narrative unfolding across the four standard stages of examination (external, internal, organs, and brain) that have been more methodically depicted elsewhere, whether in true-crime shows such as Autopsy (Arthur Ginsberg, 1994–2008) or “shockumentaries” such as Autopsy: Voices of Death (Michael Kriegsman, 2000).3 Carla Valentine, an anatomical pathology technologist who served as a consultant on The Autopsy of Jane Doe, recalls that the examination-room set and makeup prosthetics were largely realistic, save such notable exceptions as the filmmakers’ depiction of rib shears as oversized bolt cutters and their initial plans to depict brain extraction as requiring sawing off the whole skull cap rather than peeling back the facial skin and scalp to access only the rear of the skull (the latter prosthetic was revamped, at Valentine’s insistence, for the sake of accuracy) (19–24, 27–33).4 There is, then, still a strong element of the procedural in the film’s narrative progression as the Tildens attempt to solve the cause-of-death mystery, but these elements are increasingly interrupted as supernatural events begin to occur, shifting the film more squarely toward horror territory. The lab’s radio keeps reporting on a dangerous thunderstorm growing outside (interrupted at times by the creepy leitmotif of Stuart Hamblen’s 1954 Christian-revival song “Open Up Your Heart [and Let the Sunshine In],” which recurs as radio interference), eventually leading to power outages in the basement morgue, and further lending the film a properly “dark and stormy night” setting more akin to the Gothic horror film than the conventional procedural. Because Jane Doe’s ankles and wrists had been shattered and her tongue

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

45

crudely severed, Tommy initially suspects that she might have been the silenced victim of a sex-trafficking ring, a hypothesis consonant with the contemporary “dead white girl” trope. Other clues, however, seem to scramble the temporal stages of decomposition: for example, her clouded eyes suggest a body that has already been dead for days, despite how the blood pouring from the Y-incision in her torso would only occur in a very fresh decedent. Tommy tries to explain away these anomalies through reference to past cases, but he cannot explain why Jane Doe’s internal organs are badly scarred and her lungs blackened, without any external signs of trauma to her torso. As the autopsy moves deeper into the corpse, the film moves deeper into the unexplained, requiring Tommy to begin confronting the bounds of his scientific knowledge—a process that also begins softening up his emotionally cold persona. The internal examination phase, for example, is interrupted when Austin discovers his late mother’s cat (another Poe allusion) mortally wounded in the basement’s air ducts; Tommy euthanizes and cremates the cat, asking for a moment alone because the pet reminded him of his dead wife. Much as Father Karras (Jason Miller) in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) opens up to the possibility of supernatural instead of psychiatric explanations while simultaneously confronting his guilt over having neglected his dying mother, Tommy is increasingly confronted with reminders of his past mistakes as a man—all part of Jane Doe’s soon-to-be-revealed retribution toward the living. This is, then, a cogent example of Clover’s argument that “in the world of satanic or spirit films, the horror of being too open [as a woman] is matched only by the horror of being too closed” when a man fails to acknowledge the supernatural or arrives at the truth too late to save himself (90). The film’s adherence to the possession subgenre also comes into focus through its superficial similarity to several other films of the same period, especially The Possession of Hannah Grace (Diederik Van Rooijen, 2018), in which an ex-cop (Shay Mitchell) takes a night watch job at a Boston morgue, where the still-possessed corpse of Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson), a young woman killed during a failed exorcism, begins orchestrating supernatural mayhem. Originally titled “Cadaver,” the film was retitled by Sony to cash in on its similarity to the earlier Sony hit The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Scott Derrickson, 2005), which was loosely based on the real-life case of Anneliese Michel (1952–1976), a young German woman who died during an attempted exorcism (her “possessed” state likely attributable to temporal lobe epilepsy). Although the anonymity of the placeholder name “Jane Doe” lacks the same specificity, The Autopsy of Jane Doe’s use of a person’s name in its title nevertheless recalls not only Emily Rose and Hannah Grace but also

46 

d av i d c h u r c h

other possession films of the same period (including The Taking of Deborah Logan [Adam Robitel, 2014] and The Possession of Michael King [David Jung, 2014]), which a prospective viewer might think or want to imagine represents a tantalizing, real-world case file. If the first two stages of the autopsy could plausibly remain in the realm of White Science, the latter two stages reveal how the heart of the mystery resides in Black Magic. As Austin remarks, “Whatever happened in here, we are way past possible.” Examining Jane Doe’s stomach contents, they find jimsonweed—a member of the nightshade family whose anesthetic effects have, in other contexts, been used as a pharmacological ingredient for creating the zombis of Haitian Vodou (Davis 164–165)—plus one of the woman’s extracted teeth, wrapped in a cloth parchment inscribed with Roman numerals. Increasingly convinced that Jane Doe was the victim of some sort of ritual torture, Austin meanwhile pleads with his father to talk to him about Austin’s deceased mother, Tommy’s wife; with the dead woman finally beginning to reveal her dark secret, the film also becomes, to a lesser extent, an “autopsy” of male emotions. Finally, the men peel back her skin, revealing on the underside a pattern of symbols that seem to be of religious or demonological origin, at which point the overhead lights shatter and the morgue is plunged into darkness as the storm swells outside. As the film tips wholly into the horror genre, the Tildens soon flee from the morgue’s three other corpses (including Otis Howard), which have risen from their refrigerated niches to shamble through the basement as zombies. Jane Doe herself, however, remains stationary on the examination table throughout these and other scenes, her clouded eyes blankly staring into space. When Austin and Tommy resolve to break the spell by cremating the body, not only does the examination-room door lock them in, but their attempt to immolate Jane Doe’s body with flammable chemicals leads to little more than a huge fireball and the body itself left magically untouched. Meanwhile, one of the risen bodies, an elderly woman whose lips have been sutured shut, now straining these stitches to moan at the men through a peephole, visually alludes to how Jane Doe is a dead woman finally “speaking out,” even if the men do not yet fully understand what she is saying. In one sense, the idea of the autopsied body “speaking” its experience to knowledgeable interpreters is such a familiar trope that it figures in the names of both nonfictional and fictional procedural series, such as Autopsy 2: Voices from the Dead (Arthur Ginsberg, 1995), Silent Witness (multiple directors, 1996–), and Autopsy 7: Dead Men Talking (Arthur Ginsberg, 2001). Yet Jane Doe’s apparent ability to conjure the undead is just one example of how she is able to plant hallucinations in the Tildens’ heads, which also includes

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

47

a vision of Emma suddenly returning to the morgue (just in time to be accidentally killed with a hatchet when mistaken for a zombie) as well as the thunderstorm raging outside. (Over the film’s closing images, we hear a radio broadcast noting an uninterrupted string of sunny days, which confirms that the storm was another supernatural hallucination affecting only the immediate recipients of Jane Doe’s wrath.) Through her magical power to make things (seem to) happen, Jane Doe arguably emerges as the narrative’s true author/narrator figure (Lopes), a causal agent who demonstrates far greater agency than the two men by surreptitiously pulling the strings as she exacts her revenge. Austin’s apparent killing of Emma, for instance, reminds Tommy of his wife’s premature death, and he finally admits to his emotional neglect as they sit together catching their breath. Nevertheless, even as Jane Doe’s machinations inflict this overwhelming guilt upon the men and encourage them to emotionally open up, the conflict between rationality and emotion is not yet resolved, since Austin recommits to finishing the autopsy. Hoping that finding the uncanny body’s true cause of death will finally unlock the secret of how to stop her, he therefore effectively combines his emotional sensitivity to the “whys” of death with his father’s faith in medical and empirical causality. But whether his emotional attunement will be sufficient to dispel the monster’s threat is not yet made apparent.

Finishing the Job The final act of The Autopsy of Jane Doe corresponds with the procedure’s final stage, the brain, and the film is especially distinctive in its depiction of workers faithfully returning to complete their original job, even after the long digression into more action-oriented horror scenes. Having already found peat under her fingernails and various signs of ritual torture, the Tildens examine a sample of brain matter under the microscope and revisit the archaic parchment. They discover that Jane Doe’s cause of death is so elusive because her brain is, in fact, still alive (or rather, undead) and that the parchment refers to the date 1693 and Leviticus 20:27, a biblical prescription to kill witches and wizards. Finally comprehending that Jane Doe was a victim of the Salem witch trials, one of the foundational events behind American culture’s obsession with the “dead white girl” (Marcus; Bolin 16), Tommy reminds Austin that the women (and men) executed at Salem were all falsely accused, but he asks, “What if the ritual, performed on an innocent, accidentally created the very thing they were trying to destroy?” While this explanation is a rather quick hypothesis for such an empirically

48 

d av i d c h u r c h

minded character to reach, it nevertheless represents how Tommy has finally opened up to the existence of “Black Magic,” as well as echoes Robin Wood’s Freudian argument that sociocultural repression creates society’s monsters instead of destroying them. Or, as Clover says, “Cause a girl enough pain, repress enough of her rage, and—no matter how fundamentally decent she may be—she perforce becomes a witch” (71). The film thus nods to what Laurel Zwissler calls the second-wave-feminist recuperation of the persecuted premodern “witch” as a protofeminist figure of political resistance, even as the film partly reasserts Jane Doe’s demonization by depicting her as a horrific force to be defeated. (By contrast, in The Possession of Hannah Grace, the titular corpse is still possessed by a powerful male demon, and therefore its agentive acts never elicit even partial sympathy from the audience.) Yet, whereas ghosts typically operate in the horror genre as disembodied representatives of history’s unresolved pains, Jane Doe’s undecomposed corpse quite literally embodies her far more material status as an anachronistic reminder of historical injustice. While the Tildens view their newly discovered status as trans-historical-revenge proxies as merely “stops along the way” (that is, collateral damage), they fail to recognize not only how Jane Doe seems to hold men corporately responsible for what happened to her but also their very role as latter-day representatives of the male-dominated medico-juridical complex that committed such historical crimes. In this respect, they are not “essentially ‘innocents’” (Kern 20) who have simply been given the wrong job, but complicit in a larger patriarchal system whose collateral damage has arguably been the women in the Tilden men’s lives. Indeed, because Jane Doe’s brain is still alive, they suspect that she can feel the very autopsy being conducted upon her—as though they are reenacting, in a medicalized context, the ritual torture she experienced back in 1693.5 Although the actual Salem witch trials did not feature physical torture (with the notable exception of Giles Corey’s death by pressing) or burning at the stake, the influential, notoriously misogynistic 1486 witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum recommended such medieval torments and presumably influenced the film’s screenwriters in this regard.6 Ultimately, Tommy ends up much like Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist, sacrificing himself by inviting the witch to enter him in order to save a child who symbolizes the future; locking eyes with the corpse, Tommy silently opens himself to her influence, and her milky eyes turn clear as his vision suddenly clouds over. The physical signs of Jane Doe’s external and internal tortures begin manifesting in Tommy, vanishing from her body as they painfully transfer to his, so Austin puts his father out of his misery with

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

49

a nearby scalpel. Despite Tommy’s self-sacrifice, however, even Austin does not escape from Jane Doe’s wrath, falling to his death from the basement’s spiral staircase when his now-zombified father pops up behind him. Again, Clover’s schema fits only too well here: whereas the woman at the end of the possession film typically goes back to her original state, as if nothing happened, the male character is utterly transformed (sometimes fatally) by his acquiescence to the “feminine” forces of Black Magic that have circumvented White Science’s authority (98–99). Hence the Tildens, like the Douglas family before them, lie dead when Sheriff Burke arrives the next morning, while Jane Doe’s body seems to have been left untouched, its Y-incision now vanished. With another unexplainably violent crime scene on his hands, Burke merely shunts the unidentified woman off to be autopsied in a different county’s jurisdiction.

Ritual Purposes “Every ritual has its purpose,” Tommy remarks upon finding evidence of Jane Doe’s torture, though his observation applies as much to the torments she underwent during her trial as to the secular ceremony of the autopsy itself, further suggesting the historical inheritance from one part of the medico-juridical complex to another. Indeed, autopsy practitioners frequently describe their work as not just a service to legal authorities but a solace to surviving loved ones. It is an almost ceremonial means of confronting abjection by breaking down the body’s integrity in order to find what originally caused it to perish; yet its status as a highly skilled and in-demand job also transforms formerly living bodies into routine tasks on a daily to-do list. In one of the most famous cinematic depictions of this tension, the experimental short The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), Stan Brakhage filmed four different autopsies in a Pittsburgh morgue. Partly made to confront his own fear of morgues, the filming process led to nightmares about anguished conversations with the opened corpses, a premise that strangely recalls The Autopsy of Jane Doe, while Brakhage’s assemblage of the film eschewed his stylistic trademarks of physically manipulated celluloid and rapid montage in favor of a much more documentary approach (Kase 6–11). Almost as striking as the bodies themselves, however, are the images of pathologists nonchalantly chatting, smoking cigarettes, and otherwise treating this seemingly ceremonial space like any other work site. Ara Osterweil observes, “Unlike the slasher films that typically debut around Halloween, Brakhage’s film explores the secrets of the opened body

50 

d av i d c h u r c h

without any assistance from make-up artists, special effects sorcerers, or editing wizards” (125).7 Yet before its 2003 DVD release on the Criterion Collection’s By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One, it was scarcely available outside bootleg video versions circulating through the paracinema catalogs examined by Joan Hawkins, where examples of “high art” and “trash culture” (such as gory horror movies) commingled through their shared ability to generate strong visceral affect (5–6). Writing in the early 1970s, Amos Vogel argued that Brakhage’s film helped break cinema’s final taboo, the depiction of death itself: “This final demystification of man—an unforgettable reminder of our physicality, fragility, mortality—robs us of metaphysics only to reintroduce it on another level, for the more physical we are seen to be, the more marvelous becomes the mystery” (267). An evocative assessment, to be sure, especially in terms of how a fictional film like The Autopsy of Jane Doe plays upon this idea of the autopsy as a “marvelous” and “mysterious” act, in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of “the marvelous” as fantastic fiction that confirms the existence of the supernatural (as opposed to “uncanny” narratives that ultimately offer rational and scientific explanations for seemingly supernatural happenings). Still, for all its relative verisimilitude, Øvredal’s film never uses real autopsy footage of the sort seen in Brakhage’s film, much as The Act of Seeing does not actually capture the metaphysical passage from life to death—an inherently unfilmable transition, for which the taboo of postmortem footage can only offer a partial substitute (Bazin 30–31). Although sharing a similar interest in the “mystery” of the corpse, both films run up against definite limits in what can be cinematically represented. The Act of Seeing silently presents several anonymous autopsies without any commentary, soberly confronting the viewer with further bodily fragmentation via Brakhage’s depersonified, handheld cinematography, while The Autopsy of Jane Doe instead opts to humanize the plight of a body whose postmortem state should seemingly evacuate her humanity. For a more sustained attempt to capture the “indexical whammy” (Nichols 39) of actual death in itself, one must briefly look to a cinematic realm that at first glance seems a world away from the highfalutin avant-garde tradition associated with Brakhage and his peers. Mikita Brottman describes the “mondo” or “shockumentary” film (sensationalistic compilations of real or documentary-style footage, ranging from culturally Other customs to real deaths) as the horror genre’s own “repressed” underside, an adjacent mode that the voluminous scholarship on horror subgenres such as slasher and zombie films generally tends to obscure or disavow (158). Real autopsy footage has remained a staple ingredient in such films over the decades, from

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

51

Mondo cane oggi (Stelvio Massi, 1985) and the notorious Faces of Death series (John Alan Schwartz, 1978–1990) to such imitators as True Gore (M. Dixon Causey, 1987), Traces of Death (Damon Fox, 1993), and Phases of Death, Phase One: Through the Coroner’s Eyes (Jim Meyers, 1996). But even more than visualizing the already deceased body, the footage in these films aims to capture the very moment of death, as in Africa addio (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1966), Des morts (Jean-Pol Ferbus, Dominique Garny, and Thierry Zéno, 1979), The Killing of America (Sheldon Renan, 1984), and many others.8 Once a relatively “underground” sector of the direct-to-video market, such content has since widely proliferated in volume and overall accessibility during the digital era; today, the use of mondo-like imagery ranges very widely, from staging graphic beheadings in ISIS propaganda videos to documenting the acts of police violence that have fueled the Black Lives Matter movement (Middleton). Still, if mondo or shockumentary films represent the horror genre’s own monstrously repressed discontents, they do so less in terms of taste and ethics; Brottman, for example, reclaims them in the tradition of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, citing their frequent use of gallows humor (e.g., ghoulish voiceover narration, incongruous soundtrack music) to “uncrown” death and therefore make it less dreadful (151–158). Rather, what these films actually reveal to us—contrary to the horror genre’s extended scenes of victimized people struggling (and mostly failing) to survive—is the existential fear that real death, as captured on film, has a shockingly mundane appearance. In so many documentary images of actual death, the person cannot or does not valiantly fight back, go through death throes, or display the “cinematic language of dying” that Michele Aaron describes as so familiar from narrative films; the body bereft of life often simply collapses or abruptly stops moving, losing consciousness like a light going out. What is so disturbing about such footage is not so much the “taboo” of showing a real death—since the personal experience of death is, after all, a biological reality we will all eventually face—but rather its incredibly understated quality, compared to the sheer ubiquity of fictional depictions across so many genres (but especially horror) that overly dramatize the act of dying. In other words, the horror film is itself a sort of ritual that doth protest too much, focusing so intently on depictions of death in order to inoculate viewers with the more comforting illusion of human consciousness that does not slip so easily and unceremoniously into oblivion. Despite its visualization of postmortem labor, then, this is the reassuring illusion that The Autopsy of Jane Doe still maintains, whether framed via Jane Doe’s posthumous agency or through Tommy and Austin’s own strenuous-but-doomed efforts to survive the night.

52 

d av i d c h u r c h

Although it is a more or less accepted truism that for many horror viewers, the genre is rooted in “counterphobic” pleasures of vicariously confronting images of death in order to conquer them, the genre’s own ritual function is limited by its generalized adherence to the melodramatic mode undergirding most popular American film genres. Linda Williams argues that melodrama operates as a sort of ur-genre, a narrative mode that provides a basic, morally inflected vernacular (e.g., sympathetic/victimized hero versus immoral villain) present in most genres. These moral oppositions typically reach a narrative climax that solidifies the suffering protagonist’s goodness and that then either dwells on the resulting spectacle of pathos (as in the “weepie”) or leads to more action-oriented scenes of a final chase/rescue/fight where good typically triumphs over evil (“Melodrama” 50, 58–62). Unlike the horror genre’s most disposable characters, its nonmonstrous protagonists typically undergo the latter trials, which may include more lachrymal moments as well. In The Autopsy of Jane Doe, for example, the scenes of Tommy finally opening up to Austin about his guilt over his wife’s suicide and of Austin tearfully killing his father after Tommy masochistically absorbs Jane Doe’s pain both exemplify this generic proximity between horror and melodrama—especially if the horror film already shares the weepie’s goal of inducing some measure of mimesis (shudders and tears, respectively) between the on-screen bodies and the viewer’s own body (Williams, “Film Bodies” 3–9). Much as Michele Aaron describes action cinema as a genre that generates suspense because its protagonists flirt with possible death, horror’s more empathetic protagonists (unlike its more quickly dispatched victims) frequently undergo almost superhuman physical trials while attempting to survive. It is in this image of the desperate fight—with the survivors (or near survivors) of the horror film often emerging exhausted, losing no small amount of sweat and blood in the process—that so many of the heroically struggling bodies in horror films most closely resemble bodies subjected to very heavy, strenuous manual labor. Recall that The Autopsy of Jane Doe’s final acts, once the dead begin to rise, correspond with the last two stages of the autopsy itself, as the Tildens’ efforts to complete the dissection quite literally overlap with the more generically common images of living bodies laboring to survive a monstrous threat. Although medical pathology is a predominantly middle-class profession, the Tildens resume the autopsy looking more like they have just stepped in from a backbreaking, working-class job. Part of their own nightmarish experience, then, is visually signaled through a state of physical strain more often associated with “lower” types of unskilled labor. Much as we do not know the circumstances of Jane Doe’s death (“Salem” serves as metonym enough for the historical injustices of a patriarchal

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

53

Figure 2.3. Mysterious autopsy in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016)

society), the film does less to answer the question of whether her vengeance ever could be assuaged. Although she fatally transfers her tortures into Tommy’s body, her own corporeal form is apparently healed up and ready for the next examiner and film—as the jingle of the bell on her toe, while her corpse is transported to the next county in the film’s final shot, makes only too apparent. On one hand, the fact that her vengeance does not stop with Tommy but also extends to his son, Austin, suggests that her true target is the generational continuance of the medico-juridical complex that originally put her to death. On the other hand, the fact that dead women are present in the Douglas home (a family with no apparent ties to the fields of law or medicine) implies that her retribution is ultimately more personal than political, so even the recent influx of women into postmortem labor positions would likely prove no safer from her dark magic. Hence, much as the film overlays images of postmortem labor onto generically conventional images of the Tildens melodramatically struggling to survive the autopsy job itself, Jane Doe’s own ritual opens the door for a potential sequel that would no doubt include similar depictions of living people laboring to survive the monster(s). Rather than truly confronting the mundaneness of what real deaths so often look like, then, the almost inevitable turn toward such ritualized images of premortem bodies rests upon a culturally reassuring fantasy that undergirds most horror films: that death cannot stop us from telling our stories—even if these are horror stories (as Jane Doe’s premature demise certainly was)—or at least that death does not greet us before we can melodramatically rage against the dying light. Perhaps this is why Jane Doe gets the last laugh in the end: “speaking” indefinitely from beyond the grave, her labor as the film’s silent author and narrator figure is that which truly drives the horror genre toward future narratives.

54 

d av i d c h u r c h

Like so many other monsters—sometimes defeated, sometimes not—her story will always recur in some other generic form (another witch, another zombie, etc.), helping the rest of us to disavow the uncomfortable facticity of the undramatic, routinized deaths that real-world postmortem laborers deal with day in and day out. If every ritual truly has its purpose, then keeping postmortem labor largely hidden from view only seems to help the horror genre in doing its own deeper cultural work.

Notes 1. Also see Doughty 200; Valentine 79. 2. For a more elaborate reading of the film in the Poe tradition, see Lopes. 3. Nevertheless, even commercially available videos claiming to show real autopsies from beginning to end very rarely depict the entire process, often skipping over the pelvic organs, neck organs, bone biopsies, and so on in favor of more spectacularly visible steps. For comparison, see Collins and Hutchins. 4. Much like The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Valentine’s memoir is also structured via the process of the autopsy, proceeding through the four stages. 5. This revelation recalls Aldo Lado’s 1971 giallo film Short Night of Glass Dolls, whose narrative unfolds as the flashbacks of a still-live man who, unable to communicate in his cataleptic state, is about to undergo a premature autopsy. 6. Defenders of chattel slavery in the antebellum South spread the myth that witch burnings were carried out at Salem, attempting to discredit Northern abolitionists’ claims of moral superiority (Baker 267–268). 7. Real or rumored autopsy footage has, however, occasionally been used in horror films in place of special effects, including in Autopsy (Armando Crispino, 1973), Hunchback of the Morgue (Javier Aguirre, 1973), Beyond the Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1979), and Men behind the Sun (Mou Tun-fei, 1988). 8. See Goodall; Kerekes and Slater.

Works Cited Aaron, Michele. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh UP, 2014. The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Directed by André Øvredal, 42 / IM 42/IM Global/ Imposter Pictures, 2016. Baker, Emerson W. A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. Oxford UP, 2015. Bazin, André. “Death Every Afternoon.” Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, edited by Ivone Margulies, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 27–31.

laboring bodies in the autopsy of jane doe 

55

Bolin, Alice. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession. HarperCollins, 2018. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Routledge, 1992. Brottman, Mikita. Offensive Films. Vanderbilt UP, 2005. Clarke Dillman, Joanne. Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead but Not Gone. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992. Collins, Kim A., and Grover M. Hutchins. An Introduction to Autopsy Technique. 2nd ed., College of American Pathologists, 2005. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. Simon and Schuster, 1985. Doughty, Caitlin. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory. Norton, 2014. Goodall, Mark. Sweet and Savage: The World through the Shockumentary Film Lens. Headpress, 2006. Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde. U of Minnesota P, 2000. Jancovich, Mark. “Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in the Mediation of The Silence of the Lambs.” Horror: The Film Reader, edited by Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 151–161. Kase, Juan Carlos. “Encounters with the Real: Historicizing Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.” Moving Image, vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–17. Kerekes, David, and David Slater. Killing for Culture, from Edison to ISIS: A New History of Death on Film. Headpress, 2016. Kern, Laura. “Back on the Slab.” Film Comment, Jan./Feb. 2017, pp. 20–21. Lopes, Elisabete. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Revisited in André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016).” Everything Is a Story: Creative Interactions in Anglo-American Studies, edited by Maria Antónia Lima, Edições Húmus, 2019, pp. 125–136. Marcus, Greil. “Picturing America.” Threepenny Review, fall 2006, https://​ www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marcus_f06.html. Middleton, Jason. “Spectacles of Atrocity: Mondo Video in the ‘War on Terror.’” Afterimage, vol. 39, no. 1–2, 2011, pp. 21–24. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana UP, 2001. Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Cinema. Manchester UP, 2014. Simpson, Philip L. “Whither the Serial Killer Movie?” American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Steffen Hantke, UP of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 119–141. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard, Cornell UP, 1975. Valentine, Carla. The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death behind Mortuary Doors. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

56 

d av i d c h u r c h

Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. Random House, 1974. Weisheit, Ralph A., et al. Crime and Policing in Rural and Small-Town America. 3rd ed., Waveland Press, 2006. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13. ———. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, U of California P, 1998, pp. 42–88. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Columbia UP, 2003. Zwissler, Laurel. “‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, and Not Surviving Patriarchy.” Journal of Religion and Film, vol. 22, no. 3, 2018, https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/6.

CHAPTER 3

GEORGE A. ROMERO AND THE WORK OF SURVIVAL Adam Lowenstein

When it comes to envisioning what the world looks like once it stops working, George A. Romero has no peer. The six films of his Living Dead series, from Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Survival of the Dead (2009), have become some of the most influential horror films ever produced precisely because they imagine large-scale social disintegration in such vivid and compelling ways.1 For Romero, the work of institutions such as the family (Night of the Living Dead), the marketplace (Dawn of the Dead [1979]), the military (Day of the Dead [1985]), the government (Land of the Dead [2005]), and the media (Diary of the Dead [2008]) cannot be trusted to withstand the sort of existential threat to the capitalist order represented by zombies who rise from the dead to eat the living. The work Romero places more faith in, however temporarily and precariously, is the work of small groups.2 Makeshift bands of resourceful survivors, existing outside the institutional structures of the old capitalist system, stand more of a chance to live than those attached to yesterday’s world of work. At their best, these small groups survive by incorporating the work of those social others often denied full access to the benefits of the traditional workforce: Black and brown people, women, people with addictions, people with disabilities, and queer individuals. Romero believes in the worth of the work these small groups accomplish, even if he refuses to grant them any sort of utopian status; they often unravel through the sorts of infighting that testify to residual, outmoded commitments to the old capitalist system. In other words, the small group may work in the frame of short-term survival, but it often fails to reckon adequately with the long-term demands of a new social order. In this essay, I focus on Romero’s final and underappreciated entry in his Living Dead film series, Survival of the Dead, for its ambitious attempt to shift the terms of this work of survival. In this film, the small group of 57

58 

adam lowenstein

human survivors ultimately gives way to a vision of the zombies themselves as a threatened species. With humanity no longer equipped to survive even on the modest scale of the small group, the zombies must change their work habits in the face of unemployment: eating humans will no longer do, so eating animals will have to suffice. Embedded within this scenario is the sharpening of Romero’s career-spanning engagement with questions of cumulative trauma, which can be understood as quieter, subtler forms of trauma rooted in social processes (such as economic decline or institutional discrimination) rather than the sudden, overpowering forms of collective trauma connected to distinct events (such as war or assassination).3 Romero’s investments in cumulative trauma reach a point in Survival of the Dead where questions of long-term species survival overshadow the short-term survival of small groups, with the attendant specters of the Anthropocene’s “slow violence,” such as climate change and environmental degradation, coming to the fore (Nixon 2011). When Romero pivots from the question of what work humanity can do to survive the zombies to what work the zombies can do to survive humanity, he challenges perceptions of the horror film’s relation to labor by refiguring the work of survival. If survival is no longer defined in human terms exclusively, then how does one understand the work necessary to achieve it? Romero followed Survival of the Dead not with another film but with a novel, The Living Dead. This novel, left unfinished when Romero died in 2017, was then completed by Daniel Kraus and published in 2020. The Living Dead sees Romero pivoting yet again, after Survival of the Dead, to a question of how the zombies can revive humanity’s dead capacity for empathy. While pursuing this question, Romero presents his most detailed examples of communities that work, exploring forms of survival that transcend the very distinction between the living and the dead to suggest that the category of the “living dead” potentially encompasses us all, human and zombie, as well as the forms of labor that define us as the living, the dead, or the living dead. In this essay’s second half, I place The Living Dead alongside Survival of the Dead as Romero’s final, and perhaps most poignant, meditation on the work of zombies and humanity—against each other, for each other, as each other.

Survival of the Dead The small group at the heart of Survival of the Dead is a band of soldiers whose leader, Sarge (Alan Van Sprang), appeared briefly in Romero’s previous series entry, Diary of the Dead. Sarge’s group includes his white friend

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

59

Kenny (Eric Woolfe), the Latinx Francisco (Stefano DiMatteo), and the mixed-race lesbian Tomboy (Athena Karkanis). Later they are joined by Boy (Devon Bostick), a white teenager captured by a group of violent rednecks that Sarge’s band kills during a shoot-out. Following a lead on the internet, Sarge’s group travels to Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware. There they find a place that is isolated enough to have a relatively small and manageable zombie population but that is riven by animosity between two Irish families who control separate halves of the island according to different ideologies concerning the zombies. The O’Flynns, led by their patriarch, Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), believe that the zombies must be exterminated in all circumstances in order to preserve humanity. The Muldoons, led by their patriarch, Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), believe that the zombies should be enslaved and trained so that they can be taught to live with humans rather than consume them. Sarge’s group winds up caught between the two families, along with Patrick O’Flynn’s identical twin daughters (both played by Kathleen Munroe): Janet, who is estranged from her father, and Jane, a zombie who is difficult to catch because she rides a horse. In the film’s climax, a pitched gun battle between the O’Flynns and the Muldoons results in Janet being bitten by Jane, as well as the deaths of both patriarchs. Prior to his death, Patrick O’Flynn executes the bitten Janet before she can share the news that could change everything for everyone: that her zombie sister, Jane, has led a group of zombies to join her in eating a horse, proving that the zombies are indeed capable of learning and of consuming something other than human flesh. No human will ever know this, however, because Sarge’s group, now reduced to just Boy, Tomboy, and Sarge, has fled the island and left it to the zombies. The film’s final image shows Patrick O’Flynn and Seamus Muldoon, both now zombies themselves, staggering toward each other and firing their empty guns futilely, as obsessed with mutual hatred in death as they were in life. Survival of the Dead sees Romero channeling his passions for themes and forms beyond the horror genre into the structure of his Living Dead series. Chief among these is the western, with William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958) an explicit source of inspiration that Romero screened for his crew during production (Williams, “Romero on Survival” 179). The echoes of the western icon John Ford are also present, particularly through the Irish heritage of the warring families (Ford’s Irish romance The Quiet Man [1952] was one of Romero’s favorite films). What Romero gains by turning to the western, that most legendarily American of film genres, is a cinematic space where questions of horror and work resonate with issues of American identity itself.

60 

adam lowenstein

Figure 3.1. The warring patriarchs, now zombies, at the end of Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2009)

Comparisons between Survival of the Dead and The Big Country are instructive. Wyler, working at the late peak of classical Hollywood’s power and influence, crafts an epic production thinkable only through traditional Hollywood studio might. In this sprawling western, the Terrill and Hannassey families fight each other tooth and nail for dominance on an American frontier beyond the law. Wyler’s film is “big” in every way, from its stable of stars—including Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, and Burl Ives (in an Academy Award–winning performance)—to its majestic score, its dazzlingly photographed landscapes, and its running time of nearly three hours. Romero’s film is decidedly “small” by contrast. A low-budget, largely starless affair shot in Canada without major studio support, Survival of the Dead resembles the independent films of modest means but fiercely original vision that established Romero’s career in the first place, such as Night of the Living Dead and Martin (1978). What Survival of the Dead inherits from The Big Country is not production values but a commitment to the belief that a tale of two warring families can tell an allegorical story about America itself. In both films, the story revolves around how America works. At a very basic level, the Terrills and the Muldoons are rich, while the Hannasseys and the O’Flynns are poor. In The Big Country, the two families fight over a precious natural resource: access to the Big Muddy, a swath of land that divides their two properties and includes a river where each family’s cattle can drink life-sustaining water. In Survival of the Dead, the natural resources are humans and zombies themselves, so the war between the families becomes a battle of ideologies around how to preserve those resources. But the inequities between rich and poor as mapped onto natural

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

61

resources anchor both films, even if more subtly in Survival of the Dead (the O’Flynns are hand-to-mouth fishermen, while the Muldoons are established ranchers and farmers). Both films include third parties who intervene in the war between the families. The Big Country’s third party is an individual, the idealistic easterner Jim McKay (Peck), who unites financially and romantically with Julie Maragon (Simmons), the owner of the Big Muddy, to maintain peace between the two families. Survival of the Dead’s third party is Sarge’s band of soldiers, who support the O’Flynns long enough to even the odds with the Muldoons but who achieve nothing like McKay’s resolution of lasting peace. Wyler’s film ends with McKay and Maragon on horseback, together in the expansive landscape of the big country that they have now tamed by establishing peace following the mutual destruction of the warring family patriarchs. Romero’s film ends with the abandonment of Plum Island by Sarge’s depleted group, the land now inherited by the zombies and specifically by the warring patriarchs, who are no longer alive but are still at war. The darkness of Romero’s vision compared to Wyler’s is stark, painting a disturbing portrait of a real, conflicted America that Wyler’s fanciful, wishful America pales beside. But Romero’s vision is not hopeless; he just insists on hope as a more provisional, ambiguous, and confrontational matter that viewers themselves must work harder for. Wyler’s America works because the civilized forces of good (the idealistic man, the spiritually aligned couple) triumph over the savage forces of evil (violent resentments rooted in social difference and economic inequality). Romero’s America does not work because there is no magical way to dissociate good from evil, civilized from savage, just from unjust. O’Flynn’s work of zombie extermination is proven wrong when he executes his daughter Janet in cold blood, killing her before the zombie bite she has sustained has even affected her ability to speak and think; this is murder, not self-preservation. Yet Muldoon’s work of zombie “training” is also proven wrong, given that the training is really just enslavement that serves Muldoon’s own selfish ends. Muldoon insists on literally chaining the zombies to their old human professions. Examples include a uniformed zombie mailman condemned to walk back and forth endlessly to the mailbox he is attached to by manacles, and Muldoon’s own zombie wife, who is chained to the place Muldoon’s conservative religious beliefs assign her: the kitchen, endlessly cooking. In a wonderful comic gesture that testifies to Muldoon’s blind devotion to his ideology, Tomboy spits out the inedible zombie-cooked food while Muldoon digs in heartily. In short, Wyler solves the problem of his warring patriarchs through the union of Jim McKay and Julie Maragon, while Romero dwells within the problem itself.

62 

adam lowenstein

Sarge and his comrades are no McKay and Maragon. They do not deliver a magical solution to the warring ideologies of the family patriarchs. The work they accomplish is ultimately survival alone, and at the steep price of losing Kenny and Francisco. The odds seem long even for their temporary survival continuing to work, since part of the glue that holds them together is a shared preoccupation with a stash of $1 million they have acquired from a stolen armored truck. But what good is money in this new world of the living dead? Isn’t the selfish worship of money part of what made the living into the living dead even before the zombies arrived? Boy signals as much when he asks Sarge whether there will ever come a time when the two of them will end up at each other’s throats. Sarge acknowledges that risk, replying that this is what will happen if either of them falls into the trap of becoming “full grown.” For Romero, “full grown” is akin to selling out, to surrendering to the sorts of old, rigid belief systems that characterize the mutually destructive stances of O’Flynn and Muldoon. Instead, Romero believes in the capacity for learning and empathy as the means toward a survival that works. But this sort of survival proves exceedingly difficult to achieve. The film’s closing image of the dueling zombie patriarchs captures the utter absence of learning and empathy. These are men whose hatred for one another not only destroyed them in life but continues to drive them even in death. It is a hatred that crosses species lines, demonstrating once again how the category “living dead” in Romero’s series applies not only to zombies but to humans who are incapable of learning and empathy. In this sense, O’Flynn and Muldoon have been dead all along, and they remain so at the film’s conclusion. These living-as-dead patriarchs in Survival of the Dead recall so many of those ostensibly living but emotionally dead characters from Romero’s previous entries in the series: the embittered family units in Night of the Living Dead, the consumeristobsessed protagonists in Dawn of the Dead, the military fascists in Day of the Dead, the corrupt “president” in Land of the Dead, and the media-fixated filmmaker in Diary of the Dead. In each of these cases, the living-as-dead status of such characters anchors Romero’s critique of the institutions they represent as fundamentally broken, as edifices that have been hollowed out through the evaporation of learning and empathy. What shifts in Survival of the Dead—in a move prefigured by the survival of the lead zombie, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), in Land of the Dead—is that the survivors who remain at the end of the film and carry the most promise for change are no longer human. In Survival of the Dead, it is the culminating image of the zombie Jane leading her brethren to eat her horse that stands in opposition to the culminating image of the two living-as-dead

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

63

Figure 3.2. Zombies feasting on a horse in Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2009)

patriarchs. The latter image is a literal “dead end,” portraying survival made unworkable through imperviousness to change. The former image suggests a kind of survival that works by incorporating learning and empathy, however horrifying these forms of work may at first appear. It is certainly shocking to see the zombie Jane lead her fellow zombies to feast on the flesh of her horse. Romero, one of cinema’s most gifted gore auteurs, spares nothing in the graphic presentation of this spectacle. The zombies eat the horse alive with hungry, rending abandon. But one’s shock at the horror of this image eventually gives way to awareness that something new is happening: change has occurred, which learning and empathy have made possible. Jane has learned to make the individual sacrifice indicated by biting her beloved horse in the empathetic, collective interest of the survival of her fellow zombies. Her sacrifice is motivated by the need for and the understanding of change that works. Humans, in their ceaselessly self-destructive hatred for each other, have now become an unreliable food source for the zombies. When the film concludes, humans appear to have killed each other off to the point of extinction on Plum Island. If the zombies are going to survive, they need to find something else to sustain them. Jane shows them the way, even though it means letting go of the individual possession, her horse, that meant so much to her in life that she continued to ride it after she died. But unlike O’Flynn and Muldoon, frozen in their mutual hatred and incapable of change, even across species lines, Jane achieves change. She sacrifices her individual possession for the good of the collective and heeds the call for a species-level empathy. In other words, she has engaged in the work of survival. Romero refuses to idealize Jane, even though she comes closest to being

64 

adam lowenstein

a model for the work of survival in his film. In addition to the horrifying spectacle of the horse’s consumption that her bite enables, there is also the act of biting her sister, Janet, to consider. Like the bloody fate of the horse, this bite initially prompts a feeling of horror. Janet appears to trust and love her zombie sister enough to reach out to her, and Jane bites her in return. But again, a closer look at this moment generates a different sort of awareness. Initially, Janet approaches her sister in what seems to be a selfless act, an attempt to forge connection across species lines. But Janet’s motivations are ultimately revealed as selfish when she explains why she feels comfortable coming so close to Jane: “She knows me,” Janet tells the crowd assembled around her. In other words, Janet is not empathizing with Jane but rather projecting onto Jane her own wishes of what she wants Jane to see. In this sense, Jane’s bite is a reminder to Janet that she has failed to achieve selfless empathy, realizing only selfish projection. Janet’s response to the bite underlines this failure: “You fucking bitch!” she screams and attempts to shoot her, conveying indignant outrage that Jane has refused to accept her own projection. Romero heightens the visual stakes of this misrecognition by making Janet and Jane identical twins portrayed by the same actress, a casting decision that literally doubles down on Romero’s perennial theme of ingrained human selfishness: tragedy ensues when humans refuse to recognize that their formerly individual human comrades have now become members of the zombie collective. One can almost imagine how Janet would forget that Jane is a zombie: after all, they look so much alike (Sarge even merges Janet’s and Jane’s identities in a hallucinatory moment). But what Romero wants to teach us about the work of survival, and particularly its difficulty, is that selfish projection cannot be substituted for selfless empathy, despite how similar those things may look on the surface. Janet needs to understand Jane’s difference from her as a zombie, that they are no longer and indeed never have been “identical.” Janet’s account to her father of their family’s troubled history reveals that Janet resents both her sister and her father for their shared abandonment of Janet when her mother died. But O’Flynn insists that Janet has misunderstood this family history. In his mind, it is Janet who is most like himself, not Jane. In other words, it is Janet, like O’Flynn, who must learn empathy, not Jane. O’Flynn never learns empathy and never achieves change, but Jane’s bite finally catalyzes this learning and change on Janet’s part. After the bite, Janet gains an understanding of who Jane really is: not the “bitch” she resents but a zombie willing to forgo her individual desires for the good of the collective. Janet becomes the first (and sadly, only) human to recognize the significance

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

65

of what Jane’s biting of her horse represents. Zombies can learn, zombies can change, zombies can empathize with each other in ways that might just save humanity if humans could learn from their example. The fact that Romero stages Jane’s biting of Janet and the subsequent biting of her horse in such similar ways hammers home what most likely escapes us at first: that Jane’s bites are not simply acts of violent aggression and mindless consumption but gestures that inspire understanding for those lacking in their ability to learn and empathize. As strange as it might seem, Jane’s bites are not only a death sentence to be feared but also an opportunity for enlightenment on the part of Janet as well as Jane’s fellow zombies. Indeed, Janet devotes what remains of her human life to selflessly helping others, attempting to spread the news of Jane’s accomplishment—news with the potential to change the entire antagonistic relationship between humans and zombies. The tragedy is not only that Janet is prevented from sharing this news but that her own father executes her in a blind commitment to his unbending ideology of zombie extermination. O’Flynn kills her not because Janet poses a threat to anyone but because he feels the need to prove that his ideology is right, that he is willing to stand by it in any circumstance. In short, O’Flynn denies who Janet really is, refusing to learn from her or to empathize with her. But even if O’Flynn snuffs out the change in Janet, he cannot snuff out the change in Jane. Jane’s work of survival lives on, both within the film as a new form of sustenance for her zombie brethren and outside the film as a form of knowledge that we, the audience, must ourselves carry. Similarly, the unjust murder of Ben (Duane Jones), an allegorical lynching of a Black man, at the conclusion of Night of the Living Dead is a story no one within the film has survived to tell; the responsibility falls on the audience to tell Ben’s story, along with the stories of everyone else in that farmhouse whom the world will never know. Night of the Living Dead is the only entry in Romero’s series that refuses to provide the audience with survivors at the film’s conclusion who have lived to tell the tale, but each of the sequels also underlines the work of survival by asking hard questions about how tenable the future for these survivors really is. Does the helicopter have enough gas to reach safety in Dawn of the Dead? Does the apparent escape to a deserted island actually transpire in Day of the Dead? Where exactly will the refugees go in Land of the Dead? How long can people live while locked in a panic room in Diary of the Dead? In this way, Romero ensures that the work of survival is not just a theme articulated within his films but an invitation to his viewers to acknowledge their involvement as well, to imagine their own spectatorship as an essential element of this work. Again, Romero insists on

66 

adam lowenstein

reminding us that this work of survival, along with this work of spectatorship, is not easy. To learn and to empathize is much easier to conceptualize than it is to enact. Hence the abrupt, unforgiving shock of Ben’s murder, as well as the disturbing, gut-wrenching spectacle of a horse being eaten alive. These are moments when Romero confronts us with the difficulty of the work of survival, as well as how much responsibility we, the viewers, bear when it comes to getting it done. In the more than forty years and four zombie films between Night of the Living Dead and Survival of the Dead, Romero has revised and sharpened his definition of the work of survival many times over. The small groups who survive or who appear to survive at the end of these films (with the exception of Night of the Living Dead) have offered at least temporary opportunities to imagine how the work of survival actually works, how learning and empathy eke out an existence beyond hatred and selfishness. But by Survival of the Dead, humanity’s stubborn inability to take advantage of these opportunities has reached a point where it is zombie survival, when faced with humanity’s self-inflicted extinction, that comes to the fore. The specter of human extinction, with its resonances of slow environmental degradation and climate change, seeps out of images in Survival of the Dead such as the demise of the horse. Contained within the shock of this image is the conviction that human life, even as a food source for zombies, has become as unsustainable as the abuse of the planet that is humanity’s only home. When the zombies eat the horse, the image confronts us not only with the pain demanded by the work of survival but also with an unforgettable visualization of our own ravaging of the planet, a ravaging that often remains outside of human visibility because of the slow, cumulative trauma of environmental catastrophe rather than its crystallization in any one discrete event. If what the zombies do to the horse strikes us as frightening, savage, or unfeeling, then we may begin to see just how frightening, savage, and unfeeling our own participation in the cumulative trauma of environmental catastrophe has become. The zombies are committed to the work of survival that will save their species. Are we?

The Living Dead A number of key themes and tropes present in Survival of the Dead undergo further transformation in Romero’s subsequent novel, The Living Dead.4 The novel presents further opportunities to explore the work of survival according to Romero’s vision. This vision, of course, has changed the modern horror

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

67

film as we know it and remains equally ambitious when it migrates to a literary form. Indeed, The Living Dead proves to be an essential companion to Survival of the Dead. The novel expands the film’s definition of the work of survival, with the needs for learning, empathy, and change now imagined at a planetary scale that unlocks Romero’s decades-long investment in the zombie—a figure that ultimately teaches us more about the work of living than the horror of dying. The Living Dead is a sprawling novel, over six hundred pages long, that chronicles events from the very first moments of the zombie pandemic to its apparent end some fifteen years later. As is the practice in most of Romero’s previous zombie films (with Survival of the Dead as an exception), characters do not return from earlier installments; it is the situation of the zombie pandemic itself that lends continuity to Romero’s vision. The novel introduces a wide range of characters who experience the pandemic separately but who eventually come together in the novel’s final act. Luis Acocella and Charlene “Charlie” Rutkowski are medical examiners whose daily work revolves around autopsies on corpses. They are the first to report the phenomenon of a corpse returning to life; Charlie, who has always loved the married Luis, survives while her beloved Luis dies. Etta Hoffmann is a statistician with autism who works on an official government database that records information on individual deaths across the nation. She is the first to receive the unprecedented report from Luis and Charlie. Greer Morgan is a young Black woman who narrowly escapes with her life once her impoverished trailer park becomes a zombie-infested death trap. She trains herself in the skills of hunting passed down from her father, especially with a bow and arrow, in order to survive. On the road she meets Muse King, a successful Black blues musician dedicated to peace at all costs; the couple become known as the Lion and the Dove. Karl Nishimura is a senior US naval officer of Japanese American heritage on an aircraft carrier that becomes a floating wasteland at sea after the zombies overrun it. He escapes on the jet once flown by the Latinx fighter pilot Jenny Pagán, who saves his life but dies in the process. Chuck Corso, nicknamed the “Face” for his smoothly perfect looks that keep him on the air as a television news anchor even though his skills as a journalist are limited, sustains a horrific facial mutilation during the zombie pandemic that leaves him unrecognizable. Even though he became something of a national hero during the pandemic by staying on the air longer and reporting the news more honestly than anyone else, after his disfigurement he drops his given name and previous identity and is known only as the Face, a quiet man dedicated to speaking the truth alone.

68 

adam lowenstein

All of these survivors eventually converge to help found a new community in Toronto on the grounds of Fort York, nicknamed “Old Muddy” (in an echo of the Big Muddy from The Big Country; the novel is littered with references to Romero’s previous work and favorite films). Old Muddy functions as a small town, composed of survivors from all over North America dedicated to a renewal of life fifteen years after the dead arose. That renewal entails an unspoken truce with the zombies based on mutual respect. After fifteen years, many of the zombies are literally falling apart, their bodies disintegrating, as corpses do. The citizens of Old Muddy devote an area of Toronto to the zombies alone, dubbed “Slowtown” because of their slow-moving condition and gradual decomposition. Small groups patrol Slowtown cautiously, but not to hunt zombies. Instead, they use stretchers to rescue “softies,” zombies who have decomposed to the point of immobility. They transport the softies back to Old Muddy, where they are cared for in a hospice until they decompose completely. The zombies seem to respect and appreciate this arrangement with the living, because they stay in Slowtown voluntarily and do not attack the humans who visit there. Old Muddy works because it is built on learning, empathy, and the recognized need for change. Humans respect the life and death of zombies, even though they are different from themselves, and the zombies do likewise. This fragile arrangement permits a modest, sustainable renewal of communal life in Old Muddy, with patchwork rebuilding of institutions, including a library and an archive, along with such necessities as a clock and soap. The fact that a hospice for the zombies figures among these essential resources demonstrates a commitment to a different kind of life and work rather than a simple restoration of prepandemic norms. Another commitment in this direction is the communal decision to house all guns and rare luxury items (such as canned food) in an armory where their distribution is controlled collectively. Computers and the internet are long gone and unmourned, but a group of Old Muddy’s young residents have cobbled together enough old gadgets to generate the beginnings of a filmmaking unit. With Old Muddy, Romero provides his most elaborate vision of the work of survival. It is a community founded not only on the values he feels are at the heart of a society that works (learning, empathy, change) but also on the quiet recognition of cumulative trauma. The beauty of the novel’s structure is that by the time our protagonists converge at Old Muddy, we know the traumatic stories that brought them to this place and enabled them to commit to the new life they work to establish there. They all understand each other through the lens of shared trauma, an empathy that extends to the zombies as well. Old Muddy could not exist without Slowtown, a community based just

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

69

as powerfully on the values of learning, empathy, and change. The zombies of Slowtown respect their neighbors at Old Muddy because they see them recognizing the right to a dignified existence for the zombies themselves: the hospice testifies to an empathy for death itself, for the end of life, and thus the value of life across species lines. This mutual empathy that unites Old Muddy and Slowtown reveals the true nature of the zombie pandemic. In the end, it is not a plague visited on humanity but an opportunity for humans to regain their humanity: to recognize and recover so many things they have lost in a world built on hatred, greed, rapacity, and indifference toward each other and even the planet itself. Another significant innovation to Romero’s zombie mythos in The Living Dead is the revelation that as the zombie pandemic progresses over time, it affects not only humans but also other animal species with a notable capacity for empathy: chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs, rats, chickens. But these zombie animals do not attack and feed on the living versions of their own species; they attack only humans. This fact suggests that although the zombie pandemic may appear to be an antihuman virus, it is actually an attempt at the planetary level to vaccinate humanity against inhuman behavior. Some of the most striking passages in The Living Dead describe a planet not in postapocalyptic decline but in the process of a vibrant natural rebirth. With humanity now humbled and sidelined, the natural world returns in stunning ways; flora and fauna thrive in a manner unimaginable on a humanity-first planet. The cumulative trauma of gradual environmental degradation, always so difficult to capture in images, began to be envisioned in Survival of the Dead. In The Living Dead, this imagery flowers fully in reverse through descriptions like this one: “Blankets of birdsong were stitched of distinctive threads, and symphonies of insect sibilance were played by a billion tiny legs and feelers. And the trees! Trees were like a great, looming race, their branches creaking in coos of childlike curiosity, rustling leaves in satisfied exhales, the tsks of their twigs the gentle chiding humans deserved” (Romero and Kraus 450).5 Romero extends the core concerns of Survival of the Dead through this imagery of a natural world reborn that stands in such marked contrast to a human world choking to death through the cumulative trauma of environmental degradation and humanity’s inhumaneness. But he also returns in The Living Dead to a specific image in Survival of the Dead that challenged us to imagine the work of survival in new ways: the zombie bite that enlightens rather than destroys. As I discussed, the zombie Jane’s biting of both her sister and her horse in Survival of the Dead functioned in this way. Near the conclusion of The Living Dead, Charlie is bitten by the Chief, Slowtown’s

70 

adam lowenstein

mercurial zombie sage. Charlie is then rushed by her comrades to the hospice, where established procedures will be followed: tender care to make the last moments of life most meaningful and then a quick, merciful death once the inevitable zombie transformation sets in. But the final transformation never comes. Instead, Charlie reaches the brink of dying but then experiences a quite literally orgasmic spiritual communion with death, with the oneness of all life, and then returns to life, not as a zombie, but as herself. She is the planet’s new Eve, the first human to survive a zombie bite, the living proof that the zombie pandemic has ended at last. What Charlie experiences during that revelatory passage from life to death to life again, to a new life informed by an intimacy with death previously impossible to imagine, is an all-encompassing empathy. She sees and feels what the novel has described as “you-ness,” a subjectivity liberated from the us-versus-them mentality undergirding so much human fear and hatred, including the fear and hatred of zombies and of death itself. Instead of perceiving the world in terms of us versus them or self versus other, Charlie’s revelatory experience of “you-ness” posits the world as an endlessly extending series of “yous.” You as yourself, you as others, others as yourself, yourself as others. The Living Dead prefigures Charlie’s experience in earlier passages of the novel that take place inside zombie subjectivity; such awareness is expressed as a sense of oneself as a zombie in relation to other “yous” rather than other individuals. The printed page itself assumes a whole different format and typeface, with many versions of “you” appearing in almost handwritten form and fanning out across the page (Romero and Kraus 252–254). Each “you” represents awareness of another zombie as another self, not another other,6 the end of us versus them in an all-encompassing empathy. Charlie cannot put her experience into words for her comrades, and there is precious little time to attempt such communication anyway. As it turns out, Charlie’s experience coincides with the destruction of Old Muddy. A fascist rabble-rouser named Richard Lindhof has whipped many of Old Muddy’s residents into a frenzy of fear and hatred, reigniting the old fires of selfishness, resentment, and violence that were temporarily extinguished to establish the settlement. But it all comes roaring back with a savage vengeance as Old Muddy burns, both literally and figuratively. Humans unleash their bloodlust against each other, against the zombies, against the very settlement that has given them refuge. The news of Charlie’s revelation, and with it the news of the end of the zombie pandemic, slips into oblivion—just as the news of the zombies eating something other than human flesh fails to be recognized in

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

71

Survival of the Dead. In classic Romero fashion, the promise of empathy, learning, and change proves to be fleeting and must be committed to not just once but over and over again in the face of eternally encroaching fear, hatred, and selfishness. The work of survival is a fragile, always ongoing project rather than a solid, incontrovertible edifice. It requires agile movement, not immobile stasis; an ability to “walk away” (as Muse King’s last song phrases it) rather than to “stay and fight.” When Old Muddy burns, many of the novel’s central characters go with it. But Charlie and Etta survive. Together, they constitute the future hope (Charlie as new Eve) and past conscience (Etta as historian) that animated the promise of Old Muddy. For now, they get to walk away, even though marauders from a neighboring settlement already appear to be closing in. It is significant that Etta’s full name is an homage to E. T. A. Hoffmann, who authored the stories behind a film that inspired Romero to become a filmmaker in the first place. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) changed the trajectory of Romero’s creative life, so Etta’s name gestures toward the artistic impulse itself as something that can spark the work of survival. Indeed, the final images of The Living Dead are devoted to a realization of Etta’s vision, giving her something like the last word. Throughout the novel, Etta has fixated on learning more about the unfinished story of Annie Teller and Tawna Maydew, two friends who met only once before the pandemic hit but built a long-distance love for each other so deep that they promised they would meet on the banks of the La Brea Tar Pits if the world ever stopped working. The Living Dead ends with the two women honoring their promise to each other and the love they share by meeting at the tar pits. But this is no standard romantic reunion. After fifteen years of the zombie pandemic, their differences have become profound. Annie is now a zombie who has worked tirelessly by walking hundreds of miles from the East Coast to the West Coast in order to meet Tawna. Her legs, replaced with prosthetic metal blades, have enabled her to survive the punishing journey, but they give her the barely recognizable appearance of a zombie cyborg where there was once the human Annie. Tawna, waiting patiently for fifteen years at their chosen spot near where she lives, hoping each day for Annie’s arrival, is still human but is almost zombielike after so much solitary waiting. As Romero describes it, Tawna could not be more opposite from Annie: “Perhaps she’d been here the whole time, standing, standing, standing, while Annie had been walking, walking, walking” (Romero and Kraus 633). Yet these two opposite beings, separated for so long, instantly recognize

72 

adam lowenstein

each other and the love that binds them together. As they move wordlessly into the tar pits to embrace at last, Annie and Tawna’s differences melt away and they become one. They live and die together in a union of “you-ness” that echoes Charlie’s revelatory life-death-life experience: As the sun rises higher, you realize the two of you are not alone. Over there is another you, and over there, another. You look and see yous to the left, and yous to the right, and you can hear before, behind, and all around you, yous closing in. . . . The yous are not only two-legged. Yous come with four legs, and tails, and claws, and fangs, and snouts, and forked tongues, and pointy ears, and antlers, and horns, and fur, and scales. Finally, the yous with feathers drop in and bite off parts of you and you and you, and spirit them into the air to be scattered all around, so you will be planted everywhere. In time, you will grow back. (Romero and Kraus 634–635) With this image, Romero returns to and revises the conclusion of Survival of the Dead. Instead of the two zombie patriarchs, forever divided in hatred and consumed by the need to kill each other even though they are already dead, we see two women whose love for each other runs so deep that any differences that could divide them wash away in shared “you-ness.” This “you-ness” conquers every stripe of us-versus-them distinctions, from human versus zombie to flesh versus metal to woman versus animal. In this way, the union of Annie and Tawna presents an image of the work of survival that counters the patriarchal, literally “dead end” of Survival of the Dead. It also brings to fruition what is implied in Survival of the Dead’s image of the eaten horse: that learning, empathy, and change are possible, no matter how disturbing or doomed things might seem on the surface. And that with this possibility of change, the cumulative trauma of environmental degradation can be converted to a form of recognition, where all of us—human, zombie, animal, plant, living, dead, living dead—see each other as ourselves, and see ourselves as each other. This is the work of survival. So perhaps in the end we must shift our understanding of Romero’s zombie films. They are no longer simply harrowing chronicles of what a world that stops working looks like. They are also opportunities to recognize the value of work too often left undone, unacknowledged, or unimagined. From Night of the Living Dead to The Living Dead, Romero has returned again and again to his zombies, not to repeat himself but to revise himself. To give us one more chance, one more variation, one more vision, so that we might see what the work of survival looks like and perhaps even begin to engage in it

g e o r g e a . r o m e r o a n d t h e w o r k o f s u r v i va l  

73

ourselves. Romero, our poet laureate of zombie horror, is also our champion of hope for human life in its fullest sense. Above all, he is committed to the work of survival, and he invites us to do the same.

Notes 1. For overviews of Romero’s career, see Gagne; Williams, Cinema of Romero. For further discussion of the significance and influence of Romero’s Living Dead series, see, for example, Lowenstein, “Living Dead”; Lauro; Wood. 2. For further consideration of this aspect of Romero’s films as a matter of working “professionalism,” see Grant. 3. For further analysis of this distinction as applied to Romero’s films, see Lowenstein, “Translating Trauma.” 4. As is the case with most collaborations, any attempt to isolate Romero’s contributions from Kraus’s is beside the point; when I speak of “Romero” as the author of The Living Dead, I am referring to the collaborative authorship of Romero and Kraus. Indeed, Kraus’s illuminating afterword reveals the foundation of this posthumous collaboration as a deeply felt and deeply researched tribute on Kraus’s part to Romero’s lifelong influence on his own career. See Kraus. 5. Passages such as this suggest that The Living Dead could be usefully linked to critical debates concerning ecocinema and ecohorror. Space does not permit further exploration of that linkage here, but for overviews of these debates, see Rust et al.; Tidwell and Soles. 6. For further exploration of this idea of “transformative otherness” in the horror film, see Lowenstein, Horror Film.

Works Cited Gagne, Paul R. The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero. Dodd, Mead, 1987. Grant, Barry Keith. “Taking Back the Night of the Living Dead: George Romero, Feminism, and the Horror Film.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, 2nd ed., edited by Grant, U of Texas P, 2015, pp. 228–240. Kraus, Daniel. “Stay Scared: A Coauthor’s Note.” The Living Dead, by George A. Romero and Kraus, Tor, 2020, pp. 637–651. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, editor. Zombie Theory: A Reader. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Lowenstein, Adam. Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia UP, 2022. ———. “Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film.” Representations, vol. 110, spring 2010, pp. 105–128.

74 

adam lowenstein

———. “Translating Individual and Collective Trauma through Horror: The Case of George A. Romero’s Martin (1978).” Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media, edited by Peter Leese et al., U of Toronto P, 2021, pp. 293–309. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Romero, George A., and Daniel Kraus. The Living Dead. Tor, 2020. Rust, Stephen, et al., editors. Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Routledge, 2013. Survival of the Dead. Directed by George A. Romero, Blank of the Dead/ Devonshire/New Romero/Sudden Storm, 2009. Tidwell, Christy, and Carter Soles, editors. Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Pennsylvania State UP, 2021. Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead. 2nd ed., Wallflower, 2015. ———. “George A. Romero on Survival of the Dead.” George A. Romero: Interviews, edited by Tony Williams, UP of Mississippi, 2011, pp. 178– 183. Wood, Robin. Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018.

CHAPTER 4

SONIC GOTHIC Listening to the Exhaustion of Gendered Domestic Labor in The Babadook and The Swerve Lisa Coulthard

Addressing gendered domestic labor, a new wave of female-focused horror cinema interrogates the inherently schizophrenic societal expectations placed on working mothers. Focusing on maternal ambivalence, undervalued female labor, and the entrapment and dissociation wrought by claustrophobic and demoralizing home spaces, these films engage with motherhood (The Swerve [Dean Kapsalis, 2018], The Babadook [Jennifer Kent, 2014]); with the horrors and strains of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, or the incoherent grief of a child’s death (Lyle [Stewart Thorndike, 2014], A Dark Song [Liam Gavin, 2016], Prevenge [Alice Lowe, 2016], Antichrist [Lars von Trier, 2009]); and with the fear of demon-seed children (We Need to Talk About Kevin [Lynne Ramsay, 2011], Hereditary [Ari Aster, 2018], Goodnight Mommy [Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014], The Lodge [Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2019]). While pregnancy, childbirth, and the figure of the mother have long been tropes of horror cinema, these films shift the focus through a heightened subjectivity of, and empathy for, their female characters’ work as caregivers and mothers. These narratives do not merely articulate maternal ambivalence. They go further to expose the exhaustion, frustration, and mental distress at the heart of social constructs of maternal domesticity, work, and feminized emotional labor in a postfeminist era. Between “new momism” (Douglas and Michaels) and “intensive mothering” (Hays), the working mother in the new millennium is pulled in a multitude of directions and seen to fail on all fronts. Highlighting maternal ambivalence and the stresses of new momism through genre tropes drawn from the Gothic, these films call attention to the demands of undervalued gendered work both at home and in the outside workforce. Foregrounding the alienation, disorientation, and mental distress of feminized labor and 77

78 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

drawing on a long Gothic history of the home space as a site of terror, these films take a pointed look at the toll of caretaking: the emotional and physical burdens of gendered domestic labor that can lead to distress, psychosis, or dissociation. In this female-focused domestic horror, it is not the haunted home space but the demands of homelife itself that create the sense of overwhelming dread; the family and its demands are the locus for, rather than the victims of, Gothic terror. Where the home space has frequently been threatening in horror cinema, its demands on female time are now psychologically damaging, suicidal, and murderous. Moreover, in many of these films, gendered domestic and maternal labor associated with the home is compounded by undervalued labor burdens of women in the workforce, particularly in precarious professions such as nursing, teaching, art making, or writing. This paid labor exacerbates the burdens associated with unpaid gendered domestic work. With offices in the home or jobs requiring caretaking, the mirroring of work space and home space aggravates distress, overwork, and precarity. These tensions can be seen in female characters who are artists, writers, or public personalities who struggle to balance childcare and creative pursuits (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Hereditary, The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, Antichrist, Shirley [Josephine Decker, 2020]). It is even more evident in films featuring workers in caring professions doubly burdened by emotional labor at work and at home (The Swerve, The Babadook). In both instances, the split nature and negative effects of undervalued and unseen female labor are exposed through Gothic tropes foregrounding the domestic as a haunted space damaging to women. The Gothic genre is a perfect home for these films’ critiques of caretaking demands because of the genre’s focus on gender, the home space, and madness. In what follows, I frame the psychologically damaging effects of caretaking labor in The Swerve and The Babadook through what I term the “sonic Gothic,” a mode of the genre that uses sound to highlight female dissociation and breakdown. In particular, I examine the way that music, noise, and vocality manifest caretaking labor’s emotional demands and psychological burdens. Sound has always been intimately tied to the Gothic genre’s focus on female emotionality and psychosis: these films extend sonic Gothic tropes in order to foreground the strains of work itself. From the cacophony of child-rearing, to the deafening silence of isolated and isolating domestic labor, to the emotional weight of empathetic listening, sound highlights the imperilment of female workers whose inner experiences literally go unheard. Using sonic Gothic tropes to highlight the madness of gendered labor, The Babadook and The Swerve draw on what I have elsewhere termed

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

79

“haptic aurality,” or the way that sound becomes something felt as much as heard. By drawing the audioviewer into the experiences of exhaustion, the mind-numbing repetition of chores, and the amplified incessancy of demands on time and attention, these films make palpable the unease, fatigue, and madness they address. Moreover, by foregrounding the stress and strain of listening itself, a struggle viscerally felt by the films’ audioviewers, they gesture to the way that audition is tied to the emotional toll of gendered caring professions. Pointing to female empathetic listening as an incessant demand and to patriarchal interruptive noise as an oppressive force, these films ask us to listen to feminized labor and to rethink the psychological toll and imperilment wrought by its demands.

Listening to the Madness of Gendered Domestic Labor Helen Hester uses the term “social reproduction” to describe the kinds of domestic and emotional labor that fall on women. This category includes “caring directly for oneself and others . . . [and] maintaining physical spaces and organising resources as part of . . . the processes of species reproduction” (345). These quotidian tasks, the labor involved in “staying alive and helping others stay alive,” are traditionally the burden of women and are performed for no or low wages (345). Lauren Berlant similarly analyzes this “feminized labor” tied to social reproduction, particularly in relation to reproductive labors; in a roundtable on precarity, Berlant asks what “it mean[s] that, for so many, the labor of reproducing life itself exhausts the bodies that perform it” (Puar 171). For Berlant, precarity points “to the ways that capitalist forms of labor make bodies and minds precarious, holding out the promise of flourishing while wearing out the corpus we drag around” (Puar 166). This precarity is not only economic but affective and intimate, tied to structures of feeling and promises of the “good life” defined through capitalist fantasies of abundance and familial bliss shaped by kinship normativity. These fantasies, Berlant notes, are inseparable from the unrealistic demands of feminized labor, which creates subjects that are worn out “partly by overstimulation, partly by understimulation, and partly by the incoherence with which alienation is lived as exhaustion plus saturating intensity” (Puar 166). Alienation and exhaustion are integral to the precarity of feminized emotional and caring labor, and they can lead to mental distress, hopelessness, and depression. The films I noted in my introduction abound with dissociation, psychosis, emotional suffering, and psychological instability: in short, madness. I use the term “madness” here deliberately. The burgeoning

80 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

field of “mad studies” has sought to eschew the political and ideological impulse of phrases such as “mental health” that carry with them normative expectations and pressures of wellness. Anna Harpin defends her use of the term “madness” because it allows for a generative capacity and “wears its contentious uncertainty on its sleeve” in a way that opens dialogue (3). The term, she argues, foregrounds the subjective and interpretive qualities of this field and allows for the consideration of “non-normative psychological experiences” in a frame other than medicalization or pathology (12). Madness, of course, has a long history in the Gothic, a genre that tends to focus on “states of mind and modes of consciousness” (Day 180) as well as on emotions such as “guilt, fear, [and] madness” (Howells 5). While Xavier Aldana Reyes argues that new Gothic horror has intensified a focus on embodiment “as the prime site of fear and uncertainty” (394), there is also a case to be made for a sharpened focus on psychological states of trauma, mental distress, and psychosis, especially as they pertain to female characters. Tania Modleski argues that the Gothic ties female mental distress to oppressive masculine power. And yet, in the films I am grouping together here, it is not masculine violence that is the threat so much as the domestic itself. In the majority of these films, the husband, lover, or love interest is dead, absent, or totally clueless: put simply, he is not as threatening as the exhaustion of gendered domestic labor. For example, although one can read the absent father in The Babadook as a monstrous incarnation, one can equally argue that the monster represents the madness of single parenting itself. Except for Hereditary, the madness of these mothers and caretaking figures is not supernatural but rather a direct result of their overwork and their undervalued socially reproductive toil. Indeed, the madness of these characters is arguably merely exhaustion. In the films I have mentioned, we see a compendium of weariness: sleeplessness and sleep disorders (sleepwalking, lack of sleep, prescription pills to aid sleep); incessant emotional demands made by husbands, siblings, parents, and children; repetitive, dull, and weary scenes of domestic labor, including grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, and vacuuming; and draining scenes of empathetic labor (listening, consoling, supporting, mediating). Notably, we also see numerous scenes of domestic contagion (mice, cockroaches, flies, blood), a manifestation of the impossible expectations that constitute these demands. The imperfect house is here the first sign that something is not right in this normative world of gendered labor. Portraying the home and the family as a form of entrapped labor, this recent cluster of domestic horror highlights the added pressures of working mothers, whether that work echoes domestic labor (care professions) or is

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

81

distinct from it (artists, writers). For instance, in Hereditary’s story of transgenerational demonic hauntings and possession, it is Annie’s impending art installation deadline that is particularly stressful for her, evident in the sticky notes reminding her of deadlines and callbacks. Her art is also rendered suspect, as it is seen to be somehow predictive or causative of the horrors that ensue. As Katherine Fusco points out, the film’s events suggest that “Annie’s relentless and steely pursuit of her work . . . hurts her family.” Her art is not only tied to the occultist craft-making of her mother and daughter, but it is further viewed as something she is doing when she should be paying attention to her family. It is also noteworthy that her art is not tied to domestic escapism; rather, her art’s domestic, feminized focus (miniatures of home spaces and narratives of family) can be aligned with the exacerbating effects of the caring professions we see in The Swerve and The Babadook. There is no escape from family and domestic labor for Annie, even in her art. Moreover, with a home studio, Annie is constantly interrupted: she is barged in on, drawn away from her work, or criticized for doing her art rather than, for instance, making dinner or consoling her children. Fusco notes, “It’s not clear whether the film finds these mundane disturbances as egregious as the demonic ones, but I did.” This disturbance of female work is paralleled in films that articulate gendered madness wrought by a lack of privacy and a lack of time. These factors are even more egregious when outside labor is dead-end, precarious, low paying, and high stress. The Gothic generally has an abundance of female-focused jobs that echo and aggravate the tensions of work in the home: teachers, governesses, nannies, nurses and health-care workers, home-care nurses, and the like populate the genre. This is equally true in these more recent films where the female characters’ work life outside the home mirrors their domestic labor. With jobs, homes, and families, these characters seem in some ways to have Berlant’s fantasy of the domestic “good life” available to them, but it is a fantasy shadowed by madness because of gendered labor’s unrealistic and self-abnegating demands. One sees this highlighted in the space of the home itself: in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor cared for her dying mother, only to find herself without a home for herself and thus available for the hauntings that drive her mad; in The Babadook, Amelia has given up her past creative work as a writer to care for her family, only to find this past creativity returning to haunt and destroy her home space. The Gothic genre stresses this relationship between women and their domestic spaces. If one thinks of The Haunting of Hill House or Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), for instance, the house assaults, whispers to, and claws out and grabs

82 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

at the victimized heroines. This threat of domicile violence is tied to the madness of hearing imagined sounds, inner voices, and mysterious noises. In the domestic spaces of the Gothic, the spectral and the supernatural are primarily auditory. The characters hear things they do not see; they speak but are not listened to. Hillel Schwartz notes that the Gothic is filled with noise: “Unrecognizable sounds, inaudible or inchoate. Sounds suspiciously delayed or muffled or screened and uncoupled from their source. Sounds cut short or distended. Sounds outrageously intensified by echo and expectation. Sounds abominable, ear-curdling. In other words, noise. Noise was the aural correlate of every other kind of distortion upon which the Gothic played—the gnarled, the tortured, the grotesque” (149). From strange sounds in the night, to whispers in the dark, to screams or violent loudness, noise is tied to the uncanny, the sublime, and the supernatural. This is particularly true for female characters: music, sound, and hearing have long been framed in gendered terms that associate women with irrationality and hypersensitivity. The sound theorist Michel Chion comments that “female characters are frequently endowed with hyperacousia, a hypersensitivity to sounds, including inaudible ones” (314), and if one looks at the history of the Gothic, this assertion rings true. Hearing things that “the male partner does not hear or doesn’t want to hear” (314), women are frequently the victims of auditory hallucinations: from Eleanor and Theodora in The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), to Miss Giddens in The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961), to Carol in Repulsion, the sounds that haunt women are not heard or validated by the men around them. Chion further points out that this sonic threat can become murderous, as female “hyperacousia can be used by other characters, or by fate, to do them in” (314), as in Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944). Hallucinatory and threatening hyperacousia plagues Eleanor and Theodora in The Haunting of Hill House. Eleanor in particular is terrorized by the voices and laughter that she exclusively hears: “A thin little giggle came, in a breath of air through the room, a little mad rising laugh, the smallest whisper of a laugh, and Eleanor heard it all up and down her back” (97); “From the room next door, the room which until that morning had been Theodora’s, came the steady low sound of a voice babbling, too low for words to be understood, too steady for disbelief” (119). As Jackson’s novel progresses, the line between outer and inner voices becomes blurred: “Now we are going to have a new noise, Eleanor thought, listening to the inside of her head; it is changing. . . . Am I doing it? she wondered quickly, is that me? And heard the tiny laughter beyond the door, mocking her” (149). Eleanor is also cursed with a hyperacousia that becomes entwined with

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

83

her auditory hallucinations and her sense of becoming one with the house: “Somewhere upstairs a door swung quietly shut; a bird touched the tower briefly and flew off. In the kitchen the stove was settling and cooling, with little soft creakings. An animal—a rabbit?—moved through the bushes by the summerhouse” (165). As David Toop neatly summarizes it, Hill House is a “sonic menace” (132). Jackson’s novel is an important precursor to the films I am grouping together here insofar as it brings together strands of female-focused Gothicism: female exhaustion, domestic labor, the home space, madness, and an emphasis on sound as an expression of mental distress—the noises that keep Eleanor awake, the voices that trouble her, the sound phenomena that make it difficult to tell reality from fiction. But distinct from this novel and its film and television adaptations, the films I address here zero in on labor as a crucial detail in the exhausted madness of female characters. It is the burden of domestic work that comes to the foreground as a haunting presence; it is labor rather than just the house itself that drives these women mad. Indebted to the sonic menace of Gothic madness, this recent cycle of films focuses on the mundane and quotidian nature of domestic labor and its maddening effects. Annie’s missed art deadlines in Hereditary, Shirley’s thwarted writing in Shirley, the forced childcare in The Lodge, the abandoned thesis in Antichrist—contemporary horror and Gothic cinema abounds with female workers who descend into hallucinatory madness because of the conflicting demands of domestic labor and outside work. In Shirley, this conflict is made explicit by splitting the character in two: the housebound domestic laborer and mother-to-be Rose (who can be interpreted as an imagined, spectral presence) and the productive literary writer Shirley. Shirley, like many of the other films noted here, expresses this split through dissociative music. In addition to the prevalence of discordant and atonal music, these films use sound to underscore the madness of domestic labor: shouting family members; interruptive noises; screaming children; condescending and dominating male voices; the claustrophobic, stifling sounds of everyday chores; the lowfrequency drones and buzzes of the home spaces themselves; and the sounds of one’s own thoughts to which one increasingly turns because no one else is listening. In this new sonic Gothic, the supernatural sounds of the night are less chilling than the noise of demanding children and less alienating than a society that ignores and refuses to hear the struggles of working women. In what follows, I focus on two films that tie Gothic sonic menace to female madness and emotional labor through an interrogation of the exhaustion of sleeplessness. Insomnia, sleep disturbance, and sleeplessness are the final markers of exhaustion. As Gilles Deleuze notes, exhaustion is “a lot more

84 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

than tired. . . . [It] exhausts all of the possible” (3). This hopelessness is taken up by Elena Gorfinkel in her analysis of the gestures and affects of female weariness in art cinema, where one observes working women’s bodies in states of “drift, dispossession, and ‘enduration’” (314). More than “enduration,” though, these films push exhaustion and weariness into the realm of madness, delving into extreme psychological states brought on by sleepless nights and crushing daily work.

“Nothing Five Years of Sleep Wouldn’t Fix”: The Noise of Domestic Exhaustion in The Babadook and The Swerve The Babadook and The Swerve feature female characters suffering from sleeplessness, sleep disturbance, nightmares, and insomnia tied to the demands of both paid and unpaid caring labor. Both films use sound to articulate these tensions in ways that draw the audioviewer into exhaustion in experiential and haptically charged ways. Inviting the listener to share in noisy vocality, abrasive atonality, and psychotic hyperacousia, these films not only manifest the experience of “losing one’s marbles” but viscerally communicate the stressors that lead to this dissociation. Transforming the oppression of domestic labor into disruptive and haptic sound, these films offer a pointed critique: they highlight the feminized burdens of caring by asking us to listen to and with these characters. In The Babadook, Amelia is struggling to raise her emotionally traumatized son, Samuel, in the aftermath of the death of her husband, who was killed in a violent car crash as he was driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth to their son. Almost seven years later, both Amelia and Samuel are having difficulty dealing with the loss, which seems to have permeated the blue-and-gray-toned house and furnishings. With the washed-out and blue-dominant color palette, it is, as Amanda Greer has pointed out, as if the film itself “has the blues” (35). Into this drab setting, a bright-red book mysteriously arrives on Samuel’s nightstand, and by the time Amelia has read the first few pages out loud, the monster figure has already taken hold of their lives. Whether it is a figment of Amelia’s imagination, an extended nightmare, a hallucination from lack of sleep, a metaphor for trauma and grief, or an actual supernatural evil, the Babadook brings fear and violence to the lives of Amelia, Samuel, and, most fatally, their dog, Bugsy. Despite the Babadook’s captivating appearance (black coat and top hat, recalling both Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920] and Georges Méliès’s The Magician [1898], which Amelia watches on TV), the real threat is sonic: the

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

85

ASMR-adjacent crackles, rustles, and whispers on the phone, in the house, in the car, or in Amelia’s sleep; the growls, screams, and yells in the final battle; the insect-like buzzing and ticking heard every time the Babadook appears, whether on the page or in the shadows. Throughout the film, the Babadook is a sonic threat. The film positions us to pay close attention to the acoustic quality of our unseen monster, who becomes decreasingly visible and increasingly audible over the course of the film: what starts with written language and an identifiable image turns into shadow and sound, and finally into sound alone. The opening of the film readies us for sonic monstrosity: we open with Amelia’s nightmare of the car crash. The sequence features low-frequency rumbling, high-pitched strings, and silence where the sound effects of a car crash (crunching metal, breaking glass, screams) would normally be. The nightmarish tone of this sequence is broken by Samuel’s sharply intruding yells demanding his mother’s attention because he had a bad dream. What follows is the first of several scenes with staccato cuts showing recurrent actions without dialogue that, as Aviva Briefel points out, drive home the fact that these are repeated maternal rituals (4). The suggestion is clear: every night Amelia checks the room for monsters, reads Samuel a book to help him fall asleep, and lies awake listening to the abrasively haptic sounds of Samuel’s sleeping body in her bed. All of these rituals point to the crucial takeaway of this opening sequence: Amelia is dangerously sleep deprived and thoroughly exhausted. Paula Quigley develops this exhausted Gothic maternity in her analysis of the film, in which she argues that the maternal self-abnegation of the Gothic melodrama has been replaced by an increased emphasis “on the mother’s, rather than the child’s, perspective” (191): “the figure of the mother and her ambivalent experience of motherhood becomes the focal point” (192). This maternal ambivalence in The Babadook is tied to its haptic and material aesthetics. Jason Middleton and Meredith Bak note that the film’s aesthetics are analog and imperfect: the old technologies of silent or classic film, pop-up books, and handmade weapons work in concert with the film’s attention to surface (we see the paint chips on the walls, the texture of the plaster, the peeling wallpaper). This tactility extends to the book itself: pop-up books require touching, but more than this, the book is handled, hidden, ripped up, and set alight during the film. In fact, the film has a surfeit of touching, most of it unpleasant: Samuel’s unwanted clinging, touches, and hugs; his pushing and kicking; Amelia’s constant massaging of her own jaw with its sore tooth. Amplified in the sound mix, these touches are excessive, overly present, and smothering. A child’s slumbering movements take on the disturbance of noisy

86 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

clamor, his touches the sonic characteristics of sandpaper: we haptically feel and hear the tactile magnitude of these small (and primarily silent in real life) movements. All of this physicality spotlights Amelia’s traumatic loneliness, notable when she watches a couple kissing in their car or a tame classical-Hollywood-era kiss on the TV. But it is also tied to her domestic labors. Whether it is making dinner, cleaning the kitchen, or performing the ritualistic checking for monsters, her maternal labor is heavily haptic: we hear the sounds of her work loudly and in great detail. The film has two sonic modes: the highly charged and sonically emphatic presence of the Babadook, which includes voice, effects, and music; and the more mundane daily life of Amelia. The routinized elements of her daily life stand out against the sonic selectivity of her dream and sleep soundscapes that silence almost all diegetic sounds. In contrast, the tactility of her labors in the kitchen and the home render her routine labors abrasive, discordant, and irritating in their repetition: the sonic iteration of quick cuts of open and closed cabinets, food preparation, cleaning, and bedtime rituals are like the tedious monotony of the bingo balls endlessly clicking as they circle around in the game room of the assisted-living facility where she works. The routine nature of Amelia’s household chores is equally evident in her work as a nurse in a dementia ward. The same way that her ritualistic household chores create a sense of mindless repetition without change, her professional work reveals the same sense of pointless labor: calling out bingo numbers for a game no one will ever win, or remembering the tea order for someone who does not themselves remember how they like it. There is a troubling seamlessness between Amelia’s work- and homelife, with the labors of care dominating both. Even at home, her blouse-skirt-sweater combination mirrors her work uniform with its muted pinks and pastels. These parallels create further insult in a scene with her sister and her sister’s friends, during which Amelia’s care work is deemed not important enough to even comment on by the other mothers, who are much more interested in her previous career as a writer. Caring labor is beneath notice, disparaged and ignored. This erasure of Amelia’s labor is exacerbated by her postfeminist failures to fit in with the new momism and intensive mothering that surround her. The extreme high-frequency shouts and screams of Samuel make her struggle palpable to the audioviewer: we feel the stress of this sonic assault. Added to this is the fact that no one is listening to the pain and suffering of her exhaustion as both a worker and a mother: “I don’t have time for this,” her sister says as she abruptly cuts her off. Director Jennifer Kent comments that the film addresses the “unspoken” issue of maternal ambivalence and

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

87

the pressures of domestic labor: “I wanted to show a real woman who was drowning in that environment” (MacInnes). Pairing Amelia’s stressful parenting with a similarly thankless profession equally reliant on empathy, feeling, and affective engagement, the film uses sound to haptically draw the audioviewer into this feeling of drowning: rather than just witnessing Amelia’s sleep-deprived state, we feel her exhaustion, irritation, and psychological distress. Dean Kapsalis’s debut feature, The Swerve, similarly pairs a profession associated with caring with thankless and ambivalent mothering. Focusing on a beleaguered and weary schoolteacher and mother, Holly, the film follows her intensifying dissatisfaction, dissolution, and derailment as she suffers from chronic insomnia and is increasingly burdened by her family’s demands. Skinny, gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes, Holly is constantly at the mercy of her thankless and rude boys, her possibly philandering husband who repeatedly works late, and her volatile sister who insists on ridiculing her. Even Holly’s mother bosses her around. Things come to a head with three compounding scenes of antagonism and intrusion: Holly finds a mouse in the kitchen (an echo of the cockroaches Amelia finds in The Babadook), which requires the extra labor of thoroughly cleaning the kitchen and setting out traps; she bakes a pie for her sister’s homecoming and receives ridicule and criticism in return; and then, after suddenly driving away from her sister’s party, she is passed by a car of young men who scream and yell at her, at which point she snaps, swerves toward them, and watches as their car goes off the road. We hear the next morning that the youths died in the crash, but along with the other hallucinatory elements of the film, it is not totally clear whether this event actually occurred. With these events and others, Holly is increasingly rendered invisible and denigrated, which, when coupled with her exhaustion, leads her to a suicide attempt that results in accidental filicide. Holly bakes a pie with rat poison, eats two pieces, and passes out in the bathroom; while she is unconscious, her two thoughtless and selfish boys devour the remainder of the pie and are found dead or dying by the distraught Holly, who then travels to her husband’s store and shoots herself in the chest in front of him. Articulating the paradoxical relationship between the essential labor Holly performs that keeps her family functioning and its erasure of her in the process, the film culminates in a literal expression of what happens when Holly isn’t there: her sons eat poison and die. The Swerve is a much quieter film than The Babadook, which is integral to its portrait of an invisible woman. The film is not sonically abrasive, loud, or noisy; the music and soundscape are, for the most part, subtle, nuanced, and minimal. Like Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the preamble

88 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

to suicide in this film is quiet and mundane, filled with the small sounds of everyday life. In many ways, it is a normal week for Holly, a week of small irritations, microaggressions, constant demands, and invisibility; the quiet of the soundtrack reflects this by focusing on the small details. It is these small details that lead to the tragic outcomes of the film; they are the culmination of a lifetime of such quotidian cruelties. Her suicide is incremental, fed by the small details of her increasing invisibility. Our first introduction to Holly is the prelude to her suicide as she drives to the grocery store accompanied by elegiac music: this flash-forward is interrupted by the music suddenly cutting out, and we see Holly lying awake and sleepless in bed. As the jarring alarm sounds, we watch as she wakes up, feeds, answers to, dresses, and organizes the three men in her house, calms her anxious mother on the phone, and breaks up sibling conflicts—all before she herself gets ready for work. This routine is repeated, with variation, across the following week: abuse and criticism from her family; unappreciated cooking, cleaning, and chores; daily showers and pill taking; sleepless nights; assuaging issues between her mom and sister; and being tormented by the mouse in her house. The mouse’s presence is never validated by those around her, and thus it works as both an indicator of Holly’s deteriorating mental health and a sign that something is gnawing at the cleanliness and efficiency of her homelife. It also stands as a metaphor for Holly herself: in addition to her own “mousey” physical presence, Holly, like the mouse, is unseen or unnoticed by others. Marked by Mark Korven’s score of high ponticello strings with ominous winds underneath, and the supervising sound editor Coll Anderson’s high-frequency squeaks, the mouse is a discordant and disturbing sonic presence. It is also tied to the traumatic stain of the possibly imagined car accident through an auditory incursion: as we watch Holly sleep, we hear low screams on the track resonant of her previous nightmare about the accident. We don’t share the nightmare, but the sound alone alerts us as we see her wake and focus on the mouse in the room. Sleep disturbance, violence, and fear coalesce in the presence of the mouse, which is sonically emphasized through nondiegetic music and scurrying, high-pitched sound effects. In short, the mouse is a monstrous manifestation of something wrong in the home space, and its presence is akin to the sonic menace of the Babadook, even though its character is more muted and less supernatural. In contrast to the interruptive moments featuring the mouse, the soundscape as a whole tends toward a sparseness and a subtlety that allows for moments of silence and quiet to breathe. Holly meanders through a grocery store, taking her time rolling the cart up and down the aisles as the soothing store Muzak plays; she listens to classical music in her van as she drives the

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

89

boys to school and sits for a moment in its quiet space after the boys exit and slam the doors. These moments work to align us with the everyday demands on Holly’s time, energy, and emotional availability. Throughout the film, Holly is our focalizer; we do not have a scene without her and her repeated locales: her sleepless bed, the bathroom with its pills behind the mirror, the kitchen, her classroom, and her car. The kitchen is the most repeated location, with seven kitchen scenes spread throughout the film. These scenes highlight both Holly’s cooking skills and her labor, but also her overwhelming responsibility for the functioning of the family: we see her eating only once, at the end, with her poison pie as her meal. It is the quotidian nature of these tasks that forms the tension in the film: the big events carry with them an unreality, whereas the realism of the daily cruelties mount and their stress is palpably felt. We feel the determination of her efforts while we listen to her slicing apples for the pie, we hear the fork against her teeth as she eats it with a resigned grimace, we sense her resolution through the sounds of her labored chewing and swallowing. For most of the film, Holly’s presence is stripped down to her gestures and movements, but around her is a constant and noisy vocality: we hear her boys yelling the mantra of “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, mom” every time they want something, demands echoed in her husband’s complaints and insults and her sister’s humiliating storytelling. This cruelty of language renders Holly increasingly invisible with each utterance: the abuse hurled at her by her family (“Get your goddamn meds checked”; “You’re bleeding, you psycho!”); the verbal attacks by strangers (“Move it, you stupid cunt!”). This last abuse inspires the film’s titular action; after being harassed by young men in a car behind her, Holly responds by screaming, “I’m here!” and swerves at their car. Although the lines between fantasy and reality are fluid in the film (in one scene Rob asks Holly, “Are you even awake?” to which she responds, “I don’t know”), this accident is the point at which Holly’s mental state fully unravels. It is also, however, the first time Holly sleeps. Like Amelia’s sleep, which finally comes only after she medicates her son, Holly’s sleep after the accident is framed as subversive, dubious, and even slightly sordid. The essential rest they both need is, like their labors, devalued and rendered suspect. Although Holly’s descent into hallucinatory and suicidal madness is tragic, it is also to some extent an example of the liberating and generative state of nonnormative psychological experiences discussed by Harpin. And this liberation is palpable in Holly’s scream asserting her existence: “I’m here!” It also parallels her later scream of “Look at me!” aimed at her husband while she has sex with her student in a parking lot. These shouts of rage

90 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

are contrasted with the repetitive sounds of her chores (baking, vacuuming, cleaning, cooking) and the incessant demanding barrage of noise that comes from her sons, which are both offset by the peaceful quiet of her death. As Holly enters the grocery store barefoot and silent, the final scene of her suicide drops out diegetic sound: we don’t hear her husband Rob’s voice or the other people in the grocery store; rather, the only audible sound is a percussive, machinic beat ramping up the tension to her final act of shooting herself, at which point the music drops off and diegetic sound returns. The film then ends with a melodic theme associated with Holly earlier in the film as it reveals a sketch of her done by her student: this final shot stresses her simple desire to be seen, to be recognized, and to be heard.

Conclusion: Sonic Oppression and the Noise of Patriarchy Without The Babadook’s externalized monster, the sound and the horror of The Swerve are more muted but equally disturbing and uncanny. The disorienting silences, the uncanniness of the low-played discordant tracks and low-frequency drones and rumbles, in addition to the high-pitched and disturbing strings, creates a sonic uncanniness that is more pervasive than The Babadook’s noise. Korven’s score for The Swerve starts with more identifiable themes and melodies that become increasingly discordant, dissonant, and fragmented as Holly’s mental health deteriorates. Amelia’s sonic presence in The Babadook, in contrast, increases in clarity and intensity as the film progresses. But both of these films use sound to address the erasure of the mother in the labor of mothering and the deletion of the exhaustive labor of social reproduction. Sound in these films weighs heavily on its female characters. From the loudness of screaming male children and spouses, to the ignored and silenced maternal voice, to the encroaching noise interrupting thought and creativity, to the disordered or traumatized inner voices of the self, to the crushing banality of the noise of everyday chores, sound in these films literally entraps these characters through noisy atonality and haptic aurality. It also exhausts the female subjects, who are quite clearly drained and consumed by the noisy, tactile demands of their domestic entrapment. With soundscapes amplifying the grating everyday sounds of alarm clocks, children’s voices, food preparation, and background TV, these films make palpable the labor demands of running a home and caring for family. They also both blend music and sound effects so that nondiegetic music appears in subtle and very selective ways to create a generalized sense of uncanny and unnerving dread: low-frequency drones or repetitive percussive sounds

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

91

play low in the mixes, ramping up tension and creating a sense of oppressive claustrophobia. And, finally, both films foreground the sonic nature of blurred realities by using dissociative, fragmented, and selectively silenced sound to communicate the blurring of dreaming and waking states. Where cinematic Gothic texts frequently use sound effects, vocality, and music to signal supernatural or uncanny events, the films I discussed here create a more pervasive and experiential sense of something wrong in the home space. These are not the musical stabs or high-frequency shock tactics one finds in many horror films but rather a presentation of the everyday—and, in these instances, an everyday defined by female sleeplessness, exhaustion, and overwork—as inherently uncanny and threatening. Greg Hainge notes that noise is “something that is threatening, a danger to the autonomy and integrity of the organism” (25). Noise is that which annoys, which works against clear communication, which irritates in its persistence. But where Hainge contends that horror “is dependent upon the destabilisation of the homely, banal or everyday” (97), these films posit the horror of these things in themselves through the prominence of Gothic noise. In an article analyzing American Horror Story, Dawn Keetley develops the phrase “entropic Gothic” to describe the genre’s engagement with dissipation, death, and “entropic drift.” Indeed, the history of the Gothic genre is one shaped by languor, hypersensitivity, inertia, and immobility. But more than languor or inertia, these films articulate a concrete sense of exhaustion, a fatigue tied to sleep-deprived psychosis, irrationality, and terrifying states of mind, such as auditory and visual hallucinations. The new sonic Gothic is less invested in internal voices or supernatural thumps in the night and more interested in how daily life itself is rendered sonically strange, uncanny, even psychotic, through the noise of repetitious demands on female caretaking labor.

Works Cited The Babadook. Directed by Jennifer Kent, Screen Australia, 2014. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Briefel, Aviva. “Parenting through Horror: Reassurance in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.” Camera Obscura, vol. 32, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–27, https://doi​ .org/10.1215/02705346-3924628. Chion, Michel. Film, a Sound Art, translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia UP, 2009. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. U of Chicago P, 1985. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Exhausted.” Translated by Anthony Uhlmann,

92 

l i s a c o u lt h a r d

SubStance, vol. 24, no. 3, 1995, pp. 3–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable​ /3685005. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. Free Press, 2004. Fusco, Katherine. “Hereditary and the Monstrousness of Creative Moms.” Atlantic, 11 July 2018, theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07​ /hereditary-and-the-monstrousness-of-creative-moms/564815/. Gorfinkel, Elena. “Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies.” Discourse, vol. 34, no. 2–3, 2012, pp. 311–347. Greer, Amanda. Mother Feels Best: Mobilizing Negative Maternal Affect as Postfeminist Critique in Contemporary Horror Cinema. U of British Columbia, MA thesis, 2017. Hainge, Greg. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Harpin, Anna. Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness. Routledge, 2018. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale UP, 1996. Hereditary. Directed by Ari Aster, A24, 2018. Hester, Helen. “Care Under Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘Women’s Work.’” IPPR Progressive Review, vol. 24, no. 4, 2018, pp. 343–352, https://doi.org/10​ .1111/newe.12074. Howells, Coral Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. Athlone, 1978. Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Classics, 2006. Keetley, Dawn. “Stillborn: The Entropic Gothic of American Horror Story.” Gothic Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, https://doi.org/10.7227/GS.15.2.6. MacInnes, Paul. “The Babadook: ‘I Wanted to Talk about the Need to Face Darkness in Ourselves.’” Guardian, 18 Oct. 2014, theguardian.com/film​ /2014/oct/18/the-babadook-jennifer-kent. Middleton, Jason, and Meredith A. Bak. “Struggling for Recognition: Intensive Mothering’s ‘Practical Effects’ in The Babadook.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 37, no. 3, 2020, pp. 203–226, https://doi ​.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1633169. Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Archon Books, 1982. Puar, Jasbir, editor. “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović.” TDR, vol. 56, no. 4, 2012, pp. 163–177, https://www.jstor.org​ /stable/23362779. Quigley, Paula. “The Babadook (2014), Maternal Gothic, and the ‘Woman’s Horror Film.’” Gothic Heroines on Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Inquiry, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances A. Kamm, Routledge, 2019, pp. 184–198. Reyes, Xavier Aldana. “Gothic Horror Film, 1960–Present.” The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, Routledge, 2014, pp. 388–398.

gendered domestic labor in the babadook and the swerve 

93

Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. Zone Books, 2011. The Swerve. Directed by Dean Kapsalis, Spark Chamber, 2018. Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. Continuum, 2010.

CHAPTER 5

NO DRAMA Emotion Work in Midsommar Jason Middleton

Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2018) uses its overarching folk-horror plot and mise-en-scène to critically examine two related concepts with contemporary cultural currency and relevance for feminist thinking about intimacy: “emotion work” and “no drama.” The sociologist Arlie Hochschild developed the terms “emotion work” and “emotional labor” to describe the work that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (7). It often involves the management of one’s own difficult or disturbing feelings so that others may feel good. While the popularization of the term “emotional labor” in recent years has led to the conflation of this concept with “emotion work” (as well as, in Hochschild’s view, a cultural misunderstanding of the terms’ analytical precision and thus a loss of their critical efficacy), Hochschild draws a distinction between the two (Beck). Emotional labor is performed in professional contexts; it is “sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value.” Emotion work refers to the same management of feeling for the sake of others but is performed in a private context where it may have use value but not specifically exchange value (Hochschild 7). In this essay, I will use the term “emotion work” to describe the effort expended by the protagonist Dani throughout Midsommar to sustain and manage her relationship with her boyfriend, Christian, in the wake of the horrific murder-suicide of her parents and sister and in the increasingly gruesome environment of the Hårga community in rural Sweden. My second term with cultural currency, “no drama,” names a troubling trend in online dating profiles recently identified by the New York Times and other media outlets, in which people, predominantly straight men, specify that they will accept only partners who bring “no drama” to a relationship (Hilgers). Trying to inhabit and sustain a relationship under the demand of 95

96 

jason middleton

“no drama” is a specific form of emotion work. Any feeling that might be construed by a romantic partner as producing a demand upon their emotional resources must be suppressed or transmuted into feelings that are perceived as requiring no effort on the part of the partner. In other words, it is a form of intensive work whose product is the illusion, for the partner’s sake, that the relationship requires no work at all. April Soetarman’s satirical piece in McSweeney’s, “Advanced Calculations for Women in Heterosexual Relationships,” aptly characterizes this form of male heterosexual desire as one of several word problems for the reader to solve: “If Mary stays silent about her needs (emotional, physical, etc.) and anything that is bothering her, John will think she is ‘super chill,’ ‘low-maintenance,’ ‘independent,’ and that their relationship is going well. ‘X’ is the cost of Mary’s silence. Solve for X.” Ari Aster has downplayed the influence of the folk-horror tradition on Midsommar, claiming that it is first and foremost a breakup film and citing examples such as Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981) (Ransome). In terms of its semantic elements, Midsommar actually reminds me even more of contemporary women’s breakup films, including Eat Pray Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010) and Under the Tuscan Sun (Audrey Wells, 2003). These films emphasize the personal transformation of freeing oneself from the weight of a breakup through highly tactile, physical experiences and pleasures. These pleasures are associated with locations and peoples marked as less modernized than the secular, urban, Western milieux from which the protagonists emerge. These connections between Midsommar and contemporary versions of the “woman’s film” also suggest how, at a deeper structural level, the film follows Sirkian melodrama conventions of linking exterior to interior, casting mise-en-scène as expression of characters’ inner states.1 Midsommar thus frames its horrors as visualizations of what the agonizing process of a breakup actually feels like, as opposed to the mostly fun and comforting way the process comes across in films such as Eat Pray Love. The shared semantic elements of travel, ritual, food, and sex join the two seemingly disparate subgenres of folk horror and breakup travel film, darkly reimagining the conventional narrative of the latter. In films such as Eat Pray Love, the process of breakup and recovery is distinctly frictionless. Everything and everyone that the protagonist encounters seem to work naturally in the service of her transformative experience, but the protagonist herself never needs to do any real work. Rachel Cusk writes in a review of the novel, in a description that applies equally well to the film, that the three words of the book’s title refer to a “highly schematised year of [the author-protagonist’s] life, in which she lived consecutively in three different countries . . . to fulfil that title more or less on demand.

emotion work in midsommar 

97

. . . Nowhere is it suggested that fate was anything other than malleable to this plan.” In other words, in these films the path to emotional well-being feels fated and requires little work on the protagonist’s part. Midsommar reimagines the protagonist’s path to emotional well-being as excruciating and laborious rather than pleasurable and easy. But the film’s folk-horror plot ensures that the trajectory still feels fated. As Dawn Keetley summarizes, the fates of the protagonists in folk horror tend to be “written from the opening”: they are trapped in a plan of which they are unaware, and the plot marches them inexorably toward their often gruesome ends (Keetley). Taking the paradigmatic folk-horror example of Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), the viewer never really expects things to end well for him: the question for anyone unfamiliar with the famous ending is only how his fate will ultimately be sealed. Midsommar almost hyperbolically renders the convention of showing the protagonists’ fate to be written from the opening: the Hårga’s plans for the group of Americans are literally depicted by diegetic folk art throughout the mise-en-scène and are displayed prominently in the film’s opening credits. The narrative arc of Midsommar is structured according to the stages of Dani’s self-extrication from a toxic relationship, the climax represented by her cathartic final break from Christian. The film’s folk-horror elements serve as catalysts moving Dani along toward this outcome. The folk-horror convention of presenting the characters’ fate as “written from the opening” contributes to Midsommar’s construction of this arc as one in which Dani needs to perform long and difficult work in order to eventually see and come to terms with what should have been clear to her from the beginning: Christian’s emotional vacuity and the toxicity of their relationship. The film derives from the tradition of the female Gothic a portrayal of Christian’s gaslighting of Dani that initially prevents her from gaining the critical perspective on their relationship afforded to the viewer. Midsommar suggests that the ideology of no-drama is predicated on a particular form of gaslighting that dismisses and denigrates valid concerns and fears in order to dictate that emotions remain repressed, interiorized, and silent, experienced in isolation. The Hårga community inverts these precepts: feeling is collective, externalized, and expressed through ritual and pageantry. Christian demands no-drama, but among the Hårga, feelings are essentially nothing if not dramatic. The progression of the narrative is marked by a series of shifts in Dani’s predominant affects, these affects produced or mediated by her relationship with Christian. I break the film down into four affective segments: the prologue leading up to the opening credits centers on anxiety; the segment from the murder-suicide of Dani’s sister and parents through the Ättestupa ritual

98 

jason middleton

in the Hårga community focuses on grief and isolation; the segment from the Ättestupa through Dani’s crowning as May queen shows distancing and anger; and the film’s conclusion demonstrates pain and catharsis. Each of these major affects is registered through shots of Dani’s face, often in close-up, establishing her face as a recurrent affection image throughout the film.2

Anxiety (I) and Grief/Isolation (II) The film’s opening phone call between Dani and Christian economically and painfully establishes the dynamics of the no-drama ideology in an intimate relationship, demonstrating the form of gaslighting upon which no-drama depends and portraying the emotion work that no-drama solicits from Dani. Following an email exchange that provides Dani with strong evidence that because of mental health issues, her sister Terri is in danger and is a danger, Dani struggles with whether to make another phone call to Christian. The film registers in close-ups of her face the conflicting feelings, what Deleuze describes as the “little solicitations or impulsions” (88), produced by the simultaneity of her fear at Terri’s threatening language, her need to reach out to someone for support, and her hesitation and anxiousness to seem overly demanding or dramatic. Christian’s response dismissively frames a woman’s epistemology as paranoia in a manner that echoes the female Gothic, trying to convince Dani that what she knows to be true cannot possibly be real: that her sister’s messages are just a “ploy for attention.”3 Christian’s discourse systematically refuses caregiving effort while requiring significant emotion work from Dani in the process of doing so: Dani knows she must avoid coming across as what he would perceive as overbearing or needy while still hoping to convey to him the gravity of the situation. Florence Pugh masterfully renders the vocal modulations Dani must perform in her attempt to accomplish these painfully contradictory goals, and her face in close-up registers her hurt, disappointment, and frustration even as she has to suppress her own troubling feelings in order to produce the “right” feeling in Christian: she thanks him, tells him she is lucky to have him, and says she loves him. Through its depiction of Christian convincing Dani that her well-founded fears cannot be valid, the scene demonstrates a form of gaslighting whose goal is not a genre-traditional object such as access to a family fortune but, rather, the maintenance of a relationship that requires no caregiving or emotional reciprocity. The horrific inciting incident that follows interrupts the sexist, homosocial discourse of Christian and his friends, drinking at a bar, who encourage him

emotion work in midsommar 

99

to break up with Dani and characterize her emotional needs as “literally abuse.” Reminiscent of the climactic scene of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), high- and low-angle tracking shots lead the viewer through a nightmarish process of discovering the asphyxiated bodies of Dani’s family and the ugly but effective method of Terri’s murder-suicide plan. The gliding camerawork, hellish red lighting created by emergency vehicles outside the house, and dissonant nondiegetic music all lend the scene a surreal quality that contrasts with the preceding scenes’ tense but naturalistic presentation of Dani and Christian’s relationship troubles. Dani has only a threatening but vague email from Terri on which to base her fear of imminent danger, emphasized for the viewer through a shot/reverse shot sequence with her computer screen. The static shots and quotidian mise-en-scène of Dani’s apartment and the bar seem initially to lend subtle credence to Christian’s gaslighting attempts to convince Dani that everything is fine and that her sister is fabricating drama. But the abrupt stylistic shift to the murder-suicide blows up any possible credibility of Christian’s case: in effect, the horror genre itself is on Dani’s side, providing a grotesque rejoinder to Christian’s no-drama ideology with a scene that not only realizes but exceeds Dani’s worst fears. The scene-ending dolly-in on Terri’s computer screen to a close-up revealing a series of unread emails from Dani punctuates the message that attributing friends’ or loved ones’ pleas for help to just so much dramatic attention seeking may have unimaginably fearsome consequences. As Christian slowly walks to Dani’s apartment to ostensibly comfort her, his vacant, apprehensive expression suggests shock at having been wrong more than worry and care for his girlfriend’s traumatic experience. Indeed, the shot implies a dawning awareness for Christian of how this incident may lock him into staying in the relationship out of guilt and providing emotional support to Dani in the process. The following shot of Dani sobbing, held unconvincingly by Christian, inaugurates the second affective segment of the story, centering on grief and isolation. In the scenes that follow, starting a few months after the tragedy, the film demonstrates a heightened toxic dynamic in Christian and Dani’s relationship, in which he purports to provide care for her while actually demanding an even greater level of emotion work from her. For example, when Dani learns at a party that Christian has planned to join his friends’ summer trip to Sweden, it leads to a fight in which she winds up apologizing to him for even expressing surprise that he didn’t tell her of his plans.4 Combined with the indifference toward Dani and her trauma shown by Christian’s friends, the scenes in this sequence demonstrate the no-drama ideology’s resilience: before

100 

jason middleton

the tragedy, Dani was positioned as dramatic for expressing fears that were dismissed as not real; after these fears were proven to be horrifically valid, her relationship with Christian demands that Dani conceal the emotional aftershocks to the point that nothing might as well have happened. One of the major functions of gaslighting is to isolate the victim, and this second segment of the film, spanning the murder-suicide through the Ättestupa ritual, emphasizes the inward turning of Dani’s grief and the isolation that results from her inability to have this grief recognized and shared by Christian and his friends (with the exception of the Hårga community member Pelle, to whom I’ll return). Dani’s grief in isolation is expressed by the recurrent image of her removing herself from the presence of Christian and the others in order to release her tears and pain: in the airline bathroom on the way to Sweden; in the small cabin to which she flees during a bad mushroom trip on their first night in Sweden; and walking away from the Ättestupa ritual alone, deserted by Christian, her trauma around her family’s violent death triggered by the Hårga’s spectacular ritual senicide. In each of these moments, Dani’s withdrawal from the social field is prompted by conversations or events that surface thoughts of her family and the horrific manner of their deaths. Repeatedly, these incidents foreground the illegibility of Dani’s grief and trauma to her partner and (ostensible) friends, confronting her with an ongoing experience of emotional isolation. The first of these three incidents in the plot demonstrates how Dani’s emotion work extends beyond her relationship with Christian to her larger social group. Dani comes over to Christian’s apartment, where he is gathered with his same group of friends from the opening bar scene: Pelle, along with Josh (intellectual, serious) and Mark (caustic, unserious). Christian’s ongoing gaslighting of Dani establishes the scene as he first enlists his friends’ complicity in his gambit of inviting Dani along for the Sweden trip with the expectation that she won’t actually come. Even without understanding the extent of Christian’s duplicitousness, Dani still enters the space to an awkward reception from the men, aware that she must act solicitously about the trip, contritely explaining that she does plan to come “if that’s not completely ruining you guys’ plans.” Emotion work is inherently isolating in that it requires sequestering one’s own feelings in order to produce the “right” (desired, demanded) feelings in others. In this scene Dani must perform an upbeat but undemanding attitude while being collectively gaslit, compounding the isolation produced by her grief in the absence of care from Christian. Pelle exacerbates the group’s apparent inattention to Dani’s trauma by asking how she has been, as if it were a normal end of semester, leaving it to

emotion work in midsommar 

101

her to do the work of alluding to her family’s death (by explaining that the university allowed her to defer finals). For motivations the viewer can better understand later, Pelle becomes apologetic and warm, showing Dani pictures of the Hårga community and affirming with apparent sincerity that he is very glad she is coming on the trip. The scene shifts to an intimate shot/reverse shot between the characters seated closely together during this conversation, as Pelle goes on to explain how he never had a chance to tell Dani how sorry he was for her loss and further reveals that he lost his parents as well. But the film presents the moment as destabilizing rather than comforting for Dani. She appears taken aback by Pelle’s unexpected performance of care, and her expression signals her grief rapidly rising to the surface as she excuses herself from the conversation to use the bathroom. Here, the film formally highlights Dani’s sense of emotional dislocation through a match on action cut that bridges Christian’s apartment with the flight to Sweden days later, as Dani enters the plane’s bathroom and breaks down, sobbing, in a frontal medium shot that emphasizes the pain she has been holding in. The film suggests that Dani’s response to Pelle’s expression of empathy is based not only upon how it raises the experience of her traumatic loss but also upon how it highlights, as an exception, the thoroughgoing absence of care in her relationship with Christian and her social environment. By demonstrating how a modicum of empathy from an acquaintance undoes her, the film focalizes the perpetually isolated experience of Dani’s grief, and the match cut bridging different time frames reinforces this point by suggesting that isolating herself for emotional release in private, claustrophobic spaces (such as bathrooms) is an ongoing necessity for the character at this point. We see a structurally similar sequence emphasizing Dani’s emotional isolation during the characters’ first night in Sweden, after they have taken psychedelic mushrooms. As in the scene in Christian’s apartment, Dani begins the scene among the group of friends; here they all lie under a tree as the mushrooms begin to take effect. Hallucinatory point-of-view shots and unrealistically amplified sounds of wind in the tree and grass emphasize Dani’s subjective experience of the moment, until Mark makes a comment that, like Pelle’s earlier reference to the loss of his own parents, triggers Dani’s memory of her loss and provokes her need to self-isolate from the group: “You guys are like my family,” declares an extremely high Mark. “You’re like my real, actual family.” The sound abruptly cuts out, and Dani quickly sits up midway through Mark’s solipsistic and insensitive remark, her face conveying the onset of feelings she knows she needs to conceal in order to protect everyone else’s visionary good time. Dani excuses herself from the group, performing the requisite emotion work of apologizing and

102 

jason middleton

reassuring Christian and the others that she is “good,” before walking away and trying to maintain a composure that the drugs, a strange and unfamiliar environment, and her recent trauma are all conspiring to derail. After Pelle’s friend Ulf tries briefly to reassure Dani and invite her to meet some friends, requiring Dani to again apologize as she declines his offer, the film cuts to the affection image that dominates this segment: Dani in a frontal medium close-up shot that registers her grief in isolation. Ending in a manner that echoes and builds upon the end of the apartment/plane sequence, the scene leads Dani to flee into a small structure (likely an outhouse), where she looks into a mirror and hallucinates the image of her sister from the murder-suicide tableau, standing behind her. With the gruesome prop of the mask and tubing duct-taped to her face through which Terri self-asphyxiated, the image signifies the violent death that Dani blames herself for failing to prevent. But the film’s opening sequence has suggested to the viewer the significant role of Christian’s denialism and gaslighting in potentially blunting Dani’s interventions with her sister. The film thus imbricates the problem of Dani’s grief and trauma with the problem of her dependency on Christian and ongoing emotion work on his behalf. The third moment that features the affection image depicting Dani’s grief in isolation follows the brutal Ättestupa ritual, a scene that also extends the motif in which images of Dani’s family’s murder-suicide intrude upon her vision in the present. The Ättestupa is a ceremonial senicide in which elderly members of the Hårga step voluntarily off a cliff while the community gathers to watch. Significantly, the ritual spectacularizes the deaths of an elderly white man and woman who in a general sense resemble Dani’s parents. A series of tightly framed, shallow-focus shots on Dani’s face repeatedly isolate her from Christian and from the larger crowd during the ritual. In conjunction with these shots, the sound editing works to convey Dani’s subjective experience of the event and to suggest how it activates the traumatic experience of her family’s death. Just before the woman jumps, shot/reverse shot editing seems to establish an exchange of gazes between her and Dani, and then, as in the mushroom trip scene, there is an abrupt shift in the soundscape. This aural break as the woman jumps accompanies a shallow-focus medium close-up on Dani’s stunned face, shifting the remainder of the scene into a highly subjective register with a predominance of point-of-view shots for Dani and reaction shots of her face. Christian abandons Dani after the ceremony for self-interested reasons, and, like the two others I’ve discussed, the scene ends with Dani isolated in her grief. Another frontal shot emphasizing her facial registration of surfacing trauma tracks Dani as she walks alone beside an imposing Hårga A-frame structure until she doubles over in psychic pain,

emotion work in midsommar 

103

Figure 5.1. Dani after the senicide in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

mirroring her position in the airplane bathroom. By interrupting Dani’s forward movement in space and visually evoking this earlier moment in the film, the scene’s ending conveys how Dani is stuck in her grief and in an intimate relationship that does nothing to ameliorate it. I have suggested that Midsommar follows the model of Sirkian melodrama by using mise-en-scène to express characters’ internal states. The Ättestupa ritual, the first explicitly violent event of the film’s folk-horror framework following the characters’ arrival in Sweden, functions as an externalization of Dani’s psychic space at this stage of the narrative. As a gruesome and arbitrary killing of an elderly man and woman, the event echoes the circumstances of her parents’ death, and, as I’ve argued, the cinematography and sound convey the scene in an intensely subjective manner for Dani. This fusion of Dani’s personal trauma and the gory spectacle she witnesses is reinforced in the nightmare she has later that night. Images of her dead family members are first juxtaposed with horrific scenes from the Ättestupa ritual, and in the dream’s final image her family’s dead bodies are arrayed at the foot of the cliff—the scene of her trauma visually integrated with the mise-en-scène of the Ättestupa. Preceding these images in Dani’s nightmare, she envisions Christian and his friends sneaking out at night and driving away to leave her with the Hårga, a visualization of her sense of emotional abandonment by Christian throughout her grieving in this segment of the film. But this sequence that includes the Ättestupa ritual and Dani’s subsequent nightmare, coming about halfway through the film, also marks a transition for Dani’s governing affects—a movement away from the centrality of grief in isolation. The opportunistic Pelle, whose ultimate goal is the social status

104 

jason middleton

and protection conferred by bringing in a new May queen, sits Dani down after the ceremony to try to calm her and talk her out of leaving. Pelle’s efforts with Dani build upon earlier moments of his courting her—or perhaps grooming her—for her eventual role in the Hårga: his early expression of sympathy for Dani’s loss, affirmation of her joining the trip to Sweden, and gift of a beautifully drawn portrait of her for the birthday that Christian forgot. Despite his manipulativeness, what Pelle gets right when he sits Dani down after the Ättestupa ritual is that her apparent shock at what she has just witnessed reveals and is inextricable from her underlying personal trauma. Dani tearfully protests, “No, that is not what I’m talking about, I’m not talking about my family, I’m talking about . . .” and she gestures outward to indicate the Ättestupa ritual. But Pelle reaches her by describing (again, misleadingly) the loss of his own parents “in a fire” and how he was able to weather it by being supported by a collective, the Hårga family. With this, Pelle homes in on Dani’s real problem, asking, while knowing the implicit negative answer, if she feels held by Christian and if Christian feels like home to her. Pelle correctly reads Dani here, but I do want to resist a reading of the film that has emerged in popular criticism, on sites such as Screen Rant, which suggests that the Hårga community represents a form of true belonging for Dani, healing her by “showing her it [death] is not something to fear and allowing her to find peace in the death of her family” (Lerman). Right after Pelle’s emotional plea for Dani to let herself be held by a family, the film cuts abruptly to a gruesome close-up of the two dead elders from the Ättestupa ritual. The film doesn’t make heroes of the Hårga; rather, it follows the folk-horror convention summarized by Keetley of a “doubled othering,” or a permeable boundary between normality and the monster, in which neither the ostensible protagonists nor the antagonists align easily with the viewer’s sympathy and identification (19–20). I have shown how Christian’s no-drama ideology gaslights Dani, dismissing first her fears and then her grief as unsupportable. But Pelle is subtly deceptive and manipulative as well: for example, when he pretends to act surprised that Christian has forgotten Dani’s birthday. Indeed, the elders of the Hårga could be said to gaslight the Americans in general, deceptively confronting them with the lie that Josh and Mark have disappeared and stolen the scriptural Rubi Radr, when in fact they have both been murdered. The Hårga community is generally patriarchal, is gender segregated, and is brutal not only to the reprehensible Christian and Mark but also to the very likeable Simon and Connie. I disagree with the idea that Dani’s experience with the Hårga enables her to heal from the violent death of her family; in particular, Dani’s hallucination of her mother

emotion work in midsommar 

105

among a crowd of the Hårga late in the film calls this theory into question (a point to which I’ll return). On the other hand, what does evolve after the Ättestupa and Dani’s conversation with Pelle is her feelings about Christian, which brings me to the film’s third affective segment, centering on distancing and anger.

Distancing/Anger (III) and Pain/Catharsis (IV) The third segment of the film features a new visual motif focused on Dani’s facial expressions, signifying a change in her predominant affects. Repeatedly in segment three, Dani stares intently at Christian while he is speaking vacuously, her face registering a shift in perception of and feelings about him. The day after the Ättestupa, Christian, now pathetically attempting to steal Josh’s research project, interviews a Hårga man as Dani approaches Christian regarding her concern over Simon’s inexplicable disappearance in which he has left Connie behind. Christian simply calls Simon’s purported flight a “dick move” and then continues to ask the man his banal questions. In a long take, with no reverse shots, the camera lingers on Dani’s reaction. She glances back and forth between the two men. Subtly, her face shifts from worry for Connie to a slow realization that, whatever may be going on, concern for Connie and Simon doesn’t register for Christian at all. Nor will he make any effort to engage with and support Dani’s significant worry; for Christian, as with Dani’s sister’s threatening emails, this is just another drama to be ignored and dismissed. The long take, combined with subtle changes of expression, connotes a character figuring something out. Minus Robert Surtees’s unsubtle focus pull, it reminds me of the long take on Elaine’s face in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) as she slowly realizes who has been Ben’s lover. But Dani’s insight here is less about narrative revelation than about affective shifting; it is the facial registration of an increasing awareness that the emotion work she does on Christian’s behalf may be a pointless exercise. Up to this point, the film’s narration reveals to the viewer some of Christian’s most egregious behavior, of which Dani has remained unaware. For example, following the Ättestupa, Christian shamelessly asserts to Josh that he plans to write his dissertation on the Hårga, although Josh’s long-standing research in this area serves as basis for the trip itself. Christian’s characteristic blend of obtuseness and privilege in this scene suggests a lack of both awareness and caring that his action represents theft of the intellectual labor of a colleague of color.5 The visual motif of Dani’s negative facial reactions

106 

jason middleton

Figure 5.2. Dani reacts to Christian in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

to Christian in this segment therefore represents how Dani’s perception of Christian becomes increasingly aligned with the viewer’s critical perspective on him. Indeed, another example of this motif in this segment of the film comes in a scene that demonstrates directly to Dani the vacuousness of Christian’s response to the Ättestupa. Compared to the reactions of Josh and Simon, the other two visiting men present at the ceremony, Christian’s reaction represents the worst of both worlds. Josh is fascinated and intellectually energized; Simon is ethically and emotionally horrified and outraged.6 Failing both intellectually and ethically, Christian tries to analyze it without understanding it and evinces shock without actually being bothered at all. Dani’s locked gaze upon Christian implies her growing awareness of his character—not so much what he is capable of, as in the heroine’s new understanding of her bad husband in the female Gothic, but rather how little he is really capable of doing, or even feeling. The visual motif depicting Dani’s increasingly disdainful gaze is used again at the next meal scene, when Simon’s disappearance comes up and Dani for the first time releases some pent-up anger by suggesting that she could imagine Christian deserting her. The shot is used once more when Christian throws Josh under the bus when confronted by the elders about the ostensibly missing scriptural book, the Rubi Radr. As in the female Gothic or the slasher, in Midsommar the female gaze is linked to gaining agency, but for different reasons than those associated with these subgenres. Mary Ann Doane and Jonathan Markovitz analyze the narrative and thematic importance of paranoia as a sign of women’s destabilized or undermined epistemologies in the female Gothic (or what Doane terms

emotion work in midsommar 

107

the “paranoid woman’s film”) and the slasher, respectively. Doane positions the female protagonist’s paranoia in relation to the linked factors of male violence and the voyeuristic male gaze, arguing that “the female protagonist is constantly . . . seeing herself being seen” and that the narratives often unfold through a “dialectic between the heroine’s active assumption of a gaze and intense fear of being subjected to the gaze” (125, 127). Markovitz argues that for the Final Girls of slasher films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, embracing and learning from paranoid thoughts dismissed and denigrated by male characters provides the key to female agency and survival. I have suggested that the gaslighting of Christian’s no-drama ideology undermines Dani’s epistemology. But Dani’s active gaze upon Christian in the second segment of Midsommar is not part of a dialectic with a fear of being subjected to the (male) gaze, as Doane puts it. Rather, it marks a recognition of Christian’s own absence of agency (buttressed by his white male privilege). This distinction from the female Gothic is formally highlighted by how, in this visual motif—and really throughout the film—Christian doesn’t gaze upon Dani at all. Dani’s active gaze upon Christian is not primarily about recognizing the existence and nature of the threat, as in the female Gothic or the slasher. Dani’s complex and ambivalent relationship to what she sees and experiences among the Hårga includes feelings ranging from deep disturbance to joy and release. But what all of her varied experiences in the Hårga consistently focalize for her is Christian’s emotional void, the fundamental narcissism that prevents him from caring not only for her but for anyone else around him. The third segment of the film depicts Dani turning her affect outward. The inward-directed grief we have seen repeatedly registered on Dani’s face in the second segment is gradually superseded by astonishment and anger toward Christian. I position the Maypole dance as the start of the film’s final segment, which centers on pain and catharsis. Dani doesn’t smile much throughout Midsommar, giving her gradual smile in the film’s final shot all the more impact. One significant earlier smile comes after Dani realizes she is a finalist in the dance contest, but this smile fades when she sees that Christian isn’t looking back at her at all. I want to highlight what I see as the significant moments that get us from this fallen smile to Dani’s sustained smile in the film’s instantly iconic closing shot. At the pivotal moment when Dani wins the contest and becomes May queen, in contrast to the ebullient faces of the Hårga community that crowds around her, Dani mostly looks bewildered and anxious. Two significant point-of-view shots for Dani follow immediately. First, now clothed identically to the Hårga women and crowned with flowers, Dani is surrounded by the community for a group photo, and she

108 

jason middleton

looks out to see Christian in a long shot, isolated in the empty field, visually separated from Dani and the Hårga members. Second, as she is led through the celebratory crowd, Dani hallucinates her mother walking past her and giving her a reproachful look. These consecutive moments foreground two things. First, we have arrived at the beginning of the end of Dani and Christian’s relationship, though Dani herself is not quite prepared for this yet—a point emphasized after the subsequent feast when she asks if Christian can accompany her to bless the crops. Second, her experience with the Hårga has enabled a process of turning painfully interior feelings outward and extricating herself from a dependency upon Christian, but it has not created much opportunity for grieving her lost family. Her mother’s almost angry expression in Dani’s hallucination connotes the idea that Dani has neglected her, that Dani’s emotional process of a breakup has taken precedence over the act of mourning. That said, I think the film suggests that the former will enable the latter; the emotion work that Dani has perpetually had to do for Christian has been the barrier to fully entering a space of mourning her family. The imbrication of these two forms of emotional process—coming to terms with a relationship’s breakup and with the deaths of loved ones—is depicted in the well-known scene of shared wailing among the women after Dani sees Christian having ritualized sex with Maja. The film draws explicit parallels between this scene and the scene with Christian in Dani’s apartment after she has learned of her family’s death. Dani’s first words after seeing Christian’s betrayal, and the only actual words she utters in this scene, which soon turn into nonlinguistic wailing, are “no, no, no, no”—exactly the words we hear her say as she sobs in Christian’s arms after her family’s death. But this repeated dialogue embedded in the parallel images of Dani breaking down into uncontrolled sobbing foregrounds the significant contrasts between these two scenes from early and late in the film. In the first, despite Christian’s presence, Dani may as well be alone. She faces away from him, and, as the preceding scenes allow the viewer to understand, the comfort he gives her is perfunctory, guilty, and conflicted for him. This apartment scene inaugurates the turning inward of Dani’s feelings and the phase of grief in isolation that dominates the second segment of the film. In the scene with the Hårga women, by contrast, the group consistently makes eye contact with Dani, and they mirror and share her vocalizations of pain and grief. This scene thus approaches the culmination of the turning outward of Dani’s feelings, her emotions here projected to and shared by others.7 While the spectacle of Christian’s betrayal serves as the immediate trigger for her feelings, the parallels with the early scene in Dani’s apartment suggest how imbricated

emotion work in midsommar 

109

Figure 5.3. The May queen’s smile in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

her pain about Christian has become with her pain over her family’s death. The film suggests that this moment marks a final break from emotional attachment to Christian, which in turn should enable a more productive process of mourning her family once she can redirect resources away from the painful and unrewarding emotion work of the relationship. This provides the key to understanding the film’s final image of Dani’s smile. As Linda Williams has long since established, one of the qualities linking melodrama to horror is their shared excess at the level of narrative and mise-en-scène, and also in terms of the viewer’s intended response. Midsommar’s climax is nothing if not visually and affectively excessive. As the Hårga fill the ceremonial temple with the dead and living bodies of the chosen sacrificial victims, the film provokes a range of emotions, from horror and sadness at the sight of sympathetic Connie reduced to a drowned corpse pushed in a wheelbarrow, to the gruesome yet almost comical images of the reprehensible Mark and Christian, now clothed in the garb of a jester and the literal skin of a bear, respectively. The swelling but incongruously gentle and melodic nondiegetic music mixes with the shared vocalizations of victims and onlookers—the pained screams of the sacrificial figures in the temple and the mimetic wailing of the Hårga onlookers—creating a cacophonous soundscape. Between the twinned spectacles of the huge burning temple and the bodies of the Hårga community writhing and gesticulating as if possessed, Dani drags her body, encumbered by an absurd excess of flowers that makes her look almost inhuman. The Hårga’s collective wailing and Dani’s pained expression position the scene as the outcome and culmination of the earlier scene of shared

110 

jason middleton

vocalization among Dani and the women after Christian’s betrayal. But here, Dani doesn’t join in the wailing, suggesting that she has moved past the need to plug her personal pain over Christian into the Hårga’s collective affective network. Instead, she straightens up and directs her gaze at the burning A-frame building, the pained grimace she has worn throughout most of this final segment of the film beginning to soften. The moment does not exactly suggest that Dani has found belonging among the Hårga, as much popular criticism suggests.8 The Hårga’s affect and its ritual expressions are always collective and culturally traditional; Dani’s affect and its expressions remain individual and rooted in her relationship struggles and personal trauma throughout the film. Rather, the ending exemplifies melodrama’s isomorphism between internal emotional states and external visuals: the dramatic climax of the Hårga’s midsummer ritual festivities aligns with and expresses the cathartic release in the culmination of Dani’s emotional trajectory of breaking up with Christian. Midsommar frames no-drama as a gendered ideology, a contemporary form of toxic masculinity, calling for a feminist critique of women’s emotion work in intimate relationships. What the Hårga provide for Dani is not a feminist alternative but the starring role of princess in a horrific fairy tale, constructed by Pelle as a manipulative Prince Charming, culminating in crowning and pageantry, and even featuring a carriage ride right out of “Cinderella.” In other words, what the Hårga community does offer to Dani as a rejoinder to the emotional isolation and entrapment of her relationship with Christian is precisely drama itself: a collective, external, over-the-top pageantry of shared feelings. While Dani actually wears a grimace throughout most of the sequence between her crowning as May queen and the film’s final shot, her smile at this moment marks her felt recognition that she has finally achieved her own freedom from drama—the drama of emotion work that was actually caused not by her but by Christian himself all along.

Notes 1. As Aster puts it, citing the influence of melodrama, “The point is to tie an emotional experience with the physical reality of what’s being presented. I looked to match the exterior to the interior” (Ransome). See also Elsaesser. 2. Deleuze terms close-up shots that focus on expressions of feeling “affection images.” He breaks down facial close-ups into two categories: “faceification,” which emphasizes the unity of the face, often fixed in admiration upon an object, and “faceicity,” in which the parts of the face take on “a kind of momentary independence” as an expression of feeling and desire. I situate

emotion work in midsommar 

111

Midsommar’s repeated shots of Dani’s face as an example of faceicity, as they tend to emphasize the different parts of her face in tension, expressing internally conflicting feelings. See Deleuze, especially chapter 6, “The Affection-Image: Face and Close-up.” 3. See, for example, Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of the “paranoid woman’s film” in “Paranoia and the Specular.” 4. This exchange between Dani and Christian illustrates Hochschild’s concept of “feeling rules” that subtend acts of emotion work (which she also terms emotion management): “Acts of emotion management are not simply private acts; they are used in exchanges under the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling” (18). But in this scene, the feeling rules are established entirely by Christian; Dani must attempt a recovery from her deviation from these rules in their relationship. 5. In chapter 10 of this volume, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb analyzes Christian’s theft of Josh’s research project “as being Midsommar’s most significant contribution to a strain in early-millennium horror that looks directly and indirectly at the ongoing white exploitation of nonwhite people’s labor, both intellectual and otherwise.” 6. As Raza Kolb puts it in chapter 10 of this volume, Simon’s reaction presumably speaks to “a Black Briton’s lifelong experience of calling out abuse when he sees it.” 7. The scene epitomizes how the Hårga culturally normalize and valorize what Teresa Brennan terms “the transmission of affect”: “A process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect. . . . These affects do not only arise within a particular person but . . . come via an interaction with other people and an environment. . . . The emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (3). More specifically, it seems to represent the process neurologists term “entrainment,” “whereby one person’s or one group’s nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another’s” (Brennan 9). 8. For example, Anne Cohen describes how Dani’s crowning as May queen demonstrates her “position at the core of the community” and suggests that her smile in the closing shot indicates that “she has finally found her tribe.”

Works Cited Beck, Julie. “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor.’” Atlantic, 26 Nov. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild​ -housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004. Cohen, Anne. “So, What Really Happens at the End of Midsommar?” Refinery 29, 3 July 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/midsommar​ -ending-explained-may-queen-bear. Cusk, Rachel. “Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.” Guardian, 24 Sept.

112 

jason middleton

2010, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/25/elizabeth-gilbert​ -rachel-cusk-rereading. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, U of Minnesota P, 1986. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Indiana UP, 1987. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry Keith Grant, U of Texas P, 2012, pp. 433–462. Hilgers, Laura. “The Ridiculous Fantasy of a ‘No Drama’ Relationship.” New York Times, 20 July 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion​ /sunday/tinder-bumble-okcupid-drama.html Hochschild, Arlie. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. U of California P, 2012. Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Defining Folk Horror.” Folk Horror, special issue of Revenant, no. 5, Mar. 2020, http://www.revenantjournal.com​ /issues/folk-horror-guest-editor-dawn-keetley/. Lerman, Elizabeth. “Midsommar: Why Dani always Belonged with the Hårga Cultists.” Screen Rant, 30 July 2020, https://screenrant.com​ /midsommar-movie-dani-belonging-harga-cultists-reason/. Markovitz, Jonathan. “Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in A Nightmare on Elm Street?” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 17, no. 3, 2000, pp. 211–220. Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster, A24, 2019. Ransome, Noel. “Ari Aster Wants ‘Midsommar’ to Be Your Favorite Breakup Movie.” Vice, 2 July 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/bj9k5m/ari​ -aster-wants-midsommar-to-be-your-favorite-breakup-movie. Soetarman, April. “Advanced Calculations for Women in Heterosexual Relationships.” McSweeney’s, 22 July 2020, https://www.mcsweeneys.net​ /articles/advanced-calculations-for-women-in-heterosexual-relationships. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 7th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Coen, Oxford UP, 2009.

CHAPTER 6

REPRODUCTIVE TECHNICS AND TIME Ectogestational Labor, Biotechnological Horror, Social Reproduction Alanna Thain

The 2017 speculative design project Par-tu-ri-ent (from the word “parturient,” or “about to give birth”), created for the Museum of Modern Art’s Biodesign Challenge Summit, captures a key quality of labor today through its proposition for a chic, discreet artificial womb suited to any spread on ApartmentTherapy.com. While Par-tu-ri-ent proposes to let a machine perform the labor of gestational embodiment, the tongue-in-cheek promotional videos for its solution to gestation’s unruly interruptions of life and work invite us instead to look again at how gestational labor is both visible and invisible as 24/7 labor. Par-tu-ri-ent’s tastefully bland website frames its techno-potential in two familiar ways. First, as transgression: that new reproductive habits and technologies (“technicities”) might extend the limits of humanity itself. Second, as biopolitical extraction: “life can be created and harvested in a new way” (“Par-tu-ri-ent”). Here, “ectogestation,” the capacity to support fetal life outside of the human body, as domestic design element extends two contemporary labor trends: first, the relocalizing of waged labor beyond the nondomestic workplace and into life’s off-hours, and second, the biopolitical targeting of somatic and social reproduction’s unwaged labor (including gestation) in the domestic sphere. Par-tu-ri-ent’s “ectogestational convenience” compartmentalizes reproductive labor into small tasks and cute devices, allowing parents to “live and work as they normally do, whilst also being able to bond with their child.” The future parent and CEO Martha jiggles her portable care pod/fanny pack from anywhere to remotely send and receive movements to and from the womb. The

113

114 

alanna thain

fetal container’s transparent dome reveals a luminescent webbed structure of soothing pastels and doubles as mood lighting. The gap between art and pragmatism can make the intent behind this project, as a work of speculative design, difficult to pin down. Is it satire of the extremes of a “live to work” culture or a sincere attempt to imagine better living through design that could tackle global problems such as gender inequity, climate change, work-life balance, and more through technology? One of the project’s scientific advisors describes it as a “roller coaster ride between utopia and horror” (Par-tu-ri-ent). Less of a thrill, though, the tension between gestation’s modularity and its pervasiveness in this project actually provokes a more anxious horror affect: creep. “Creep” names the uneasy threshold between what is understood as undesirable or unsettling and what becomes pervasive through almost imperceptible movement. Thus, what feels “modern”—that automated gestation promotes a “progressive” and utopic labor future, especially for working women—only slowly registers as horrific, less from ectogestation’s transgression of nature than from the dawning awareness that gestation’s 24/7 labor parallels the “freedom” to work all the time, rooted in the labor of being a body. Par-tu-ri-ent’s creep factor is the slow realization that what feels novel might in fact have much longer roots. Conflating reproductive and waged labor, how do this work’s horror affects make gestation perceptible as the unruly and uncompensated labor of being a body? Can horror’s dystopian take on the utopic potential of ectogestation transform everyday horrors of reproductive injustice and endless labor? Assessing the state of ectogestational technologies in 2020, the bioethicists Elselijn Kingma and Suki Finn remark, “Although the promise of a genuine artificial womb remains sci-fi, its lure is understandable; what pregnant person has not wished—albeit only briefly—that they could leave their ‘body in its bulk and weight’; or that she could ‘park her fetus on a shelf’—and run, drink, smoke, jump, dance, work or make love ad libitum, free from the risks, burdens and moral and physical constraints that actual gestation entails?” (355). Par-tu-ri-ent models the limits of such a fantasy, as the womb mostly seems to free a person up to keep working. Reading Par-tu-ri-ent through the lens of horror, I attend to how reproductive labor (both social and biological) can shift the normative coordinates of a nature/technology binary toward the ambivalent metrics of the slow, transformational creep of pervasive work. The first critical lesson of a feminist approach to technohorror is not the fear of future difference but the horror of what fails to change. In Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family, Sophie Lewis argues that “capitalist biotech does nothing at all to

reproductive technics and time 

115

solve the problem of pregnancy per se”—its 24/7 labor—because “that is not the problem it is addressing” (4). Framing ectogestation as what “frees” a person to keep working ignores the more radical question: “What if we reimagined pregnancy, and not just its prescribed aftermath, as work under capitalism—that is, as something to be struggled in and against toward a utopian horizon free of work and free of value?” (Lewis, Full Surrogacy 9). Casting our gaze backward from Par-tu-ri-ent’s speculative futurity while bearing in mind the implications of its vision of socially and biologically reproductive labor, this chapter now turns to a previous moment of ectogestational speculation in the 1976 technohorror film Embryo (Ralph Nelson). The film’s home lab and the experimental body of its titular subject invite us to assess the biopolitical stakes of gestation’s work-life creep. In Embryo, the scientist Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) successfully harvests and artificially gestates a pup to adulthood from a pregnant Doberman he runs over on a dark and stormy night, finally getting to try out the experimental ectogestational system he developed with his deceased wife and former research assistant, whose repeated miscarriages inspired this work. Emboldened, he secretly pursues his work with a twelve-week-old fetus harvested without consent from a woman who died by suicide. His embryo husbandry techniques spur an uncontrolled growth spurt: the fetus develops into an adult woman, Victoria (Barbara Carrera), in just four and a half weeks. Brilliant and beautiful, like a sensitive human computer in her intelligence, learning capacity, and charming social awkwardness, she becomes Paul’s lover and is passed off as his new assistant. Soon, though, she secretly begins to unravel at the cellular and mental levels, aging rapidly and being driven to experimentation and murder in a desperate attempt to save her own life. Paul ultimately tries to kill her, but he is dragged off of Victoria’s now elderly body by bystanders and paramedics, who cry out in shock that Victoria is in labor. The film ends by returning us to the black box of gestation: the screen cuts to black and we hear a newborn’s cry. The suspense of the ending in the off-screen birth of Paul and the aged Victoria’s child—the traditional marker of a threshold crossed into human subjectivity—signals instead an open future of uncertainty around who and what will count as human. This ethical irresolution is the result of the film’s redistribution of the work of assisted gestation, destabilizing social relations unhinged from the heteronormative human family.1 The film, I contend, comments on the 1970s as a period in which automation denaturalized social reproduction. Examining it from a twenty-firstcentury perspective, one can consider how its representation of “domesticated” medical and computing technologies prefigures today’s conditions of pervasive work. In particular, it illuminates the ways in which progressive

116 

alanna thain

technologies obscure conditions of exploitation, inequity, and social isolation. Drawing on Lewis’s contention that “all reproduction is assisted” (“Mothering”), which asks why gestation has gone unrecognized as labor, I consider how Embryo’s total technological gestational environment both reveals and obscures the work of caring for life itself. When the work of gestation is relocated elsewhere or rendered otherwise, the horrific spectacularity of gestation gone awry might distract from another creeping horror with a more attenuated affect: the gestational body as the new oppressive norm of 24/7 work in the context of automation and somatic extractivism.

From Artificial Womb to Man Cave Between the “sexual revolution” and Reaganomics, the late 1970s was a tumultuous period of shifting social norms around labor, gender, technology, and life. Feminist theorists such as Silvia Federici and movements such as “Wages for Housework” identified and analyzed social reproduction as unwaged labor under capitalism (the work of feeding, breeding, cleaning, and fucking that sustains both actual and future waged workers) but that fails to register as labor; their revolutionary demand for wages was doubled by the insistence that no wage would ever suffice. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) proposed automating and outsourcing all reproduction to machines—“artificial wombs”—to liberate women from the inequitable responsibility for reproducing the species, in the service of what she termed a “cybernetic socialism” (208). Ectogestation was part of a wave of intimate automations, speculative and real, that set the stage for bodies in crisis between “feminized labor” and a nonhuman machinic ecology. Ectogestation has recently returned to view thanks to recent successes in animal experiments with transplanting lamb fetuses into artificial environments (in one case dubbed a “biobag”) capable of supporting the different physiological needs of a mammalian fetus (Partridge et al.; Horn 177). The fetal container—rescripted in the visual culture of transparency, from babies in bottles, to the increasingly autonomous fetal “subjects,” to the positivist objectivity of test tubes and incubators, to Par-tu-ri-ent’s compartmentalized design—invisibilizes many aspects of reproductive labor (see Stabile; Squier). Like Kingma and Finn, the legal expert Claire Horn remains skeptical of a techno-utopianism that sees artificial biology as a means to undercut the normative hierarchy of the gender binary, as in Par-tu-ri-ent’s promise of shared gestational care and uninterrupted wage labor. Horn points to the critical

reproductive technics and time 

117

amnesia that accompanies the “novelty” claims of such technologies and echoes Lewis’s demands for full surrogacy now by asking, “Who is already doing this work[?]” Horn argues that while novel technologies may get all the attention for their challenge to the “traditional male-dominated family structure, many families, and many pregnant people, have long disrupted these norms”; one would do better to focus on “contemporary legal and social practices that enforce essentialising, binary ways of thinking about reproductive bodies” and that bind gestation and women’s bodies in essentializing terms, thus obscuring the ongoing, everyday labor of sustaining relations of care (788). Embryo’s offspring, in the form of Victoria, exposes such labor with a vengeance, dragging invisible labor into horrific, grueling view. The film captures this volatile moment at the intersection of assisted reproductive technologies, the increasing importance of computers, automation, and shifting norms around socially reproductive labor, just before the historical break of the first successful “test tube baby” (Louise Brown, born in 1978) made flesh the fantasy of babies in bottles. Lewis writes that “dreams of artificial wombs may have been largely abandoned in the 1960s, but ever since the perfection of IVF techniques enabled a body to gestate entirely foreign material, living humans have become the sexless ‘technology’ component of the euphemism Assisted Reproductive Technology [ART]” (Full Surrogacy 24). Two years before IVF’s success, Embryo’s ectogestation modeled this transition, living human as technology, via the experimental subject (Victoria) as both assistant and technology. Embryo animates to fatal ends the “fetal container” or uterine vessel (Kingma and Finn) model of gestation. Since the 1960s, this model has both spectacularized and erased gestating bodies, via a visual imaginary of transparent and unentangled reproduction. Horror affects such as creep make palpable partialities, animacies, and absences that trouble, like the work of gestation itself, fetal autonomy. The at-home experimentalism of Embryo also conveys the slow creep of life/work contagion and its gendered differential, showcasing how the feminist critique of reproductive labor mirrors changing discourse around both assisted reproductive technologies and gendered work. As Victoria’s accelerated growth hastens her initiation into her work as lab assistant and her labor as lover, her lack of off-hours from work only slowly reveals the horror of the extent to which her time, labor, and body have been completely co-opted by the patriarchal order. Dennis Lensing claims that “a sense of oppressive enclosure is a crucial distinguishing characteristic of the 1970s movie dystopia” (99). In Embryo, ectogestational transparency— “babies in bottles”—is imaged as distorted and captive space. As Dr. Holliston’s face peers at a growing fetus nakedly

118 

alanna thain

on display, scientific objectivity is warped by horror affects even as his face is warped by the curved glass. Embryo tells the story of Paul Holliston’s quest to develop a treatment to “save” premature, nonviable fetuses. After his successful salvation of the puppy, he uses his professional connections at a local hospital to procure a fetus, telling them, “I’m not asking for anything that has a chance of life on its own.” This entitled possessiveness will pervade Victoria’s entire existence; Paul claims absolute control over her life and death. His lab is located in his sprawling mansion, where he lives with his sister-in-law, Martha (Diane Ladd), who is also his housekeeper. His lab is a DIY man cave that claims the entire domestic sphere as experimental site, recoding masculine “work from home” to “play” as a form of reproductive labor. In this lab space to grow a human, predictably decorated with a replica of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, we also find the dog’s bed and Paul smoking and eating. When the human experiment begins, the fetus is alternately dosed with placental lactogen, a pregnancy hormone that speeds development and growth, and methotrexate, a cancer drug, immunosuppressant, and abortifacient, in a desperate gamble by Paul to use this “dangerous and addictive” drug to manage the fetus’s wildly accelerated growth and aging. Once viable, Victoria is transferred to an incubator and kept sedated as Paul struggles to prevent her from rapidly aging directly into death. He also starts “programming” her “in the womb” by playing her recordings of mathematical tables; imitations of these will be her first words, and she will be repeatedly portrayed as “part computer.” He falls asleep, and when he awakens, Victoria has emerged from her glass incubator, fully grown and naked. Victoria absorbs knowledge like a sponge, though her largely theoretical understanding of the world is often played for laughs. Paul tells her not to speak of her origin and warns that if something goes wrong, he’ll have to “take her to the clinic,” the ART equivalent of being sent to live “on a farm.” At her request, he starts to take her out into the world. After Victoria’s “debut” at a party at the house of Helen (Paul’s pregnant daughter-in-law), they return home, and Victoria asks Paul to continue her education by sleeping with her. He doesn’t hesitate. She awakens in the night, and admiring her naked body in the mirror, she doubles over in pain. Her body has once again begun rapidly aging. She hides this from Paul and starts injecting herself with methotrexate, after secretly scouring Paul’s research notes for a cure. Knowing this is only a stopgap, she consults a megacomputer, discovering that the only solution requires the pituitary gland of a five-to-six-month-old fetus, a threshold for harvest that Paul deems too murderous. Victoria tries to acquire her own fetus, first through hiring a pregnant sex worker and then

reproductive technics and time 

119

by drugging and performing a C-section on Helen. When Paul discovers this gruesome scene, and Victoria’s rapid aging, he immediately wants to kill her, and he injects her with a massive dose of placental lactogen to hasten her demise. She flees, a car chase ensues, and when she crashes, Paul pursues and tries to drown her. A crowd rescues the now elderly Victoria. When the paramedics arrive, they realize she is in labor—“It’s your child, Paul!”—and Paul again tries to kill her. We fade to black, and a baby’s cry rings out. Looping back to birth, the primary driver of Paul’s experimental impulse, Embryo’s ending undercuts the myth of progress even as the “successful” birth testifies to its potential. This tension between repetition and futurity prompts one to ask what falls out of view in this scenario. While technohorror films exploit transgressions of the technology/nature binary for thrills, they can also expose and critique the normative assumptions underpinning standard narratives of progress. Thus, it might be less what changes as what remains the same, in the face of ectogestation’s spectacular novelty, that becomes the disturbing undercurrent in dystopian reproductive horror. Firestone underscores this in her own imagining of ectogestation, drawing parallels between uteruses and homes as gendered enclosures of labor and arguing for the necessity of automation to more equitably redistribute work and care beyond the duration of gestation. Firestone argues that inequity is rooted in how the entire burden of reproducing the species is placed on women; no stopgap measures, such as universal day care to reintegrate working women, will ever go far enough to redress this. Technological advances provide a real opportunity, she argues, to overcome both the “natural” disadvantages of biology that hold gestators hostage and the cultural expression of that oppression in a gendered division of labor. Feminist revolution must include outsourcing the biological labor of reproduction to machines for gestation and, after birth, to parenting collectives and an open architecture where children can circulate at will between homes. As with Embryo’s final scene, Firestone knows that the problem of gendered labor doesn’t end at birth. Cybernation’s potential was for leisure or revolution, though she insists that utopia lies in the option to use such technologies and not in the technologies themselves. Nonetheless, technological advances are impeded by cultural lag and sexual bias: technology is often pursued only if it serves normativity. This plays out in Embryo, where Paul’s secret and illegal research efforts are facilitated “between men” who reroute institutional resources from hospital to home lab without a second thought. On the other hand, Victoria’s research is fugitive, queer, and fatal; she must break into labs, steal data, even concerning her own body, and pay a sex worker to serve as her research subject.

120 

alanna thain

Firestone critically inspires Lewis’s recent rethinking of gestational labor power. In the provocative and demanding Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis makes three key claims. The first is that all reproduction is assisted; she attends to what goes unvalued when labor appears effortless, natural, free, or individual. The second is that gestational bodies work 24/7. This requires an expansive, intersectional perspective on gendered labor that goes beyond the “feminization” of labor. Consider the roots of gynecology in the torturous experimentation on awake and enslaved Black women—Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey—by Marion Sims, the so-called father of gynecology (Christmas). What would it take to recognize the work of experimental subjects, prefiguring today’s pervasive biopolitical extractions? Likewise, Federici locates the roots of “Wages for Housework” not in Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique but in the insights of welfare mothers that childcare only counted as work when they cared for other people’s children: one of the organizers, expressing what Federici called “the spirit of the welfare struggles,” stated that “if the government was smart it would start calling AFDC [Aid for Dependent Children] ‘Day and Night Care’” (Revolution 4). Finally, Lewis’s third claim is that even as gestation is a type of work where “[labor] does us,” we overvalue agency in our gestational imaginary instead of making radical demands for mutual aid. We might better attend to a “far wider range of social labors” if we are really to feel “the politics of uterine work to be comparable to other labors” (Full Surrogacy 129). Embryo does not offer a utopic alternative to the family under threat; indeed, Lewis’s subtitle “Feminism against Family” suggests that the family might be more risky than at risk. But the film does generate intense uncertainties around reproductive labor that re-potentiate what one values, notices, and fears. One’s unresolved horrors around the “mutant reproductions” of Embryo might ultimately require a mutation of reproductive labor: “a (gender, race and class) abolitionist reproutopian politics” (Lewis, Full Surrogacy 139). Horror, with its brutal exploration of entangled bodies and ecologies, provides an exploratory terrain for living through embodied risk without simple resolution. Reproductive technohorror’s unruly irresolutions are especially crucial for Embryo, where forced labor (Victoria as experimental subject) is inadequately addressed by appeals to liberal models of choice; Firestone’s insistence on children’s liberation gains new importance here.2 Lewis deromanticizes “natural” pregnancy by describing the embodied risk of human gestation, where the process of “hemochorial placentation” is not just a free-floating sac gently housed in an accommodating, expansive form but a placental invasion that breaches the walls of the uterus, digging into the gestator’s body and subjecting them to unusual risks from pregnancy

reproductive technics and time 

121

as compared to other species (Full Surrogacy 3). For the bioethicists Kingma and Finn, the risk is amplified in the popular imaginary by the “fetal container” model of pregnancy (358). They distinguish between ectogenesis, the creation of life outside of the human body (e.g., in vitro fertilization, when gametes are fertilized in a petri dish), and ectogestation, the ability to sustain human life outside of the human body throughout development. This difference concerns not only a more accurate name for science fact but underlines durational labor itself and concerns the capacities of an artificial environment to support the different physiological needs of a fetus versus those of a neonate (the former currently impossible outside of the human body). Embryo concerns only ectogestation, as Paul works exclusively with already-gestating fetuses, transferred before viability to an artificial environment and treated with experimental solutions to support and prompt development. Kingma and Finn argue that “artificial womb” is a dangerous misnomer that elides the integrated interface of the placenta in gestation. This has wider implications for the status of gestators and the cinematic representation of gestational labor. They write that “we tend to think of pregnancy as incubation; as providing a house—a womb—a container!—in which resides a free-floating baby (a pink one, without funny parts). . . . Given how much the fetal container model leads our thinking astray, we would do well to break the cycle” (361). They point out that “successful ectogestation almost certainly requires what is, effectively, a fetal transplant rather than a birth. And this requires invasive medical action on the maternal body” (362). In Embryo, the vessel model of ectogestation predominates, backgrounding this kind of invasive medical action but foregrounding other labors—housekeeping and domestic work, scientific research, education, and even sex—to trouble the ideal of successful ectogestation as a frictionless decanting of fetuses and to signal gestation’s invasive, entangled relations.

Embryo, aka “41⁄2 Weeks” Victoria’s body in this film condenses and makes horrifically palpable the elided labor of ectogestation in three ways: through the untimely and unruly impact of gestation’s 24/7 labor of bodies always on the clock, the pervasive labor of being an experimental subject, and the similarly relentless work of spectacle that displays Victoria as a beautiful woman and terrorizes her into “hiding” her true self. While assisted reproductive technologies famously decoupled reproduction from heterosexual sex, this modular approach

122 

alanna thain

to human activities fails to understand the complicated ways that sex and reproduction are and are not like work. In Embryo, “sex” and reproduction are insistently, fatally recoupled: as the film’s tagline puts it, “From embryo to woman in 41⁄2 weeks!” When Paul sleeps with Victoria, it seems to trigger her mutant aging and appears to cause her stomach-clutching pain. But the film’s ending rewrites this assessment: she has essentially gone straight from sex to conception to morning sickness in a matter of moments. The film’s horror affect takes hold when gestational labor, decoupled from the gestating body, has to go elsewhere. The unsustainability of the 24/7 labor pushes time out of joint, and Victoria can never settle into a normative human rhythm. She grows too fast, misses her childhood, is looped back into the labor of gestation too quickly, and ultimately fulfils one of the misogynist fears about assisted reproductive technologies when her aging, elderly body nonetheless gives birth, a moment so horrifying that the film keeps it off-screen. She also figures the undead: the miscarried offspring of Paul and his dead wife, Nicole, risen again. As embryo and gestator, Victoria embodies multiple positionalities vis-à-vis ectogestational experimentations. Elizabeth Romanis and Claire Horn identify a key limitation in conversations about ectogestation: “Most scholars do not engage with, and many do not even acknowledge, issues related to experimentation on women, fetuses, or embryos” (179). Lewis is similarly critical of “feminist” antisurrogacy advocates who fail to engage the people actually doing the work. Embryo’s horror also emerges from the slow dawning, the creep, of Victoria’s status as an experimental subject, which is obscured at various moments, as she seems to be joyfully alive and embodying a desirable young woman and Paul’s lover. This status means that Victoria is always held in suspense, between human material (the legacy of her previability “rescue”) and human subject. Without a birth, she first emerges like Eve, naked and with her long hair discretely covering her breasts, fully formed. She is thus never fully human to Paul. Ultimately, Victoria must care for herself; the only person who consistently shows Victoria kindness and care is Helen, who as gestational subject, is repaid with a violent attack and fetal theft. In assessing labor in the 1970s, Federici writes, As wives and mothers have “gone on strike,” many of their previously invisible services have become saleable commodities around which entire industries have been built. A typical example is the novel growth of the body industry—ranging from the health club to the massage parlor, with its multiple—sexual, therapeutic, emotional—services, and the industries that have been created around jogging (the popularity

reproductive technics and time 

123

of jogging is by itself an indication of the new general awareness that you have to “take care of yourself” because nobody else may be doing it). (Revolution 45) The only other caregiver Victoria has is the dog Number One, who hides her, protects her, and saves her from drowning, in a complicity born from their shared place lower on the animacy hierarchy as experimental subjects.3 Victoria constantly hides her pain and anxiety, her beauty an ironic contrast to the chaos within. Over and again, we are shown a monitor in the lab, which “reveals” the truth of her cells mutating out of control. Even at her end, as she stands dying, knife in hand, between Helen’s unconscious body and her harvested fetus, Victoria from the depths of her desperation still invites Paul to verify her claims against the magnified evidence of her cells on-screen: “See for yourself.” Her labor of being heard is the horrific knowledge that what she says isn’t enough. This is also true of the film’s clunky reliance on voice-over narration by Paul in many scenes, his solipsistic research memos an oppressive and oblivious drone. Victoria ultimately pours acid on Paul’s recordings and burns his notes as she attempts to rescript her own story and to evade capture as evidence, a case study for medical textbooks. To read Victoria as an experimental subject requires seeing and hearing her labor. In feminist interventions in gynecology, a key innovation was the professionalization of educators who use their own bodies to narrate and guide students doing pelvic exams, a practice that had long used anesthetized surgical patients, often without knowledge or consent (Underman 432). The replacement of silenced subjects with paid speaking subjects reveals this work as always having been labor. Where work can be done, it has been done: an oft-overlooked aspect of automation’s “novelty.” Embryo marks the ambiguous boundaries around household labor by pitting the housekeeper Martha against Victoria. Martha’s only value is her performance of housework, and she is usurped by Victoria, who is younger but also functions as a 24/7 lab rat. Victoria’s technobody also signals Martha’s obsolescence and a reprivatization of labor and value, in line with the then-contemporary discourse about the automation of domestic tasks and the arrival into the home of computers. When Martha is complimented on her dinner one night, Victoria obliviously notes that “in the cookbook, it is recommended to add a little more tarragon,” her perfect, computerlike retention promising a more perfect meal. It is secrecy and a sense of his own right to privacy that leads Paul to automate the work of care. At the beginning of the film, as he starts experimenting on the dog, Martha helpfully rushes to the lab with a tray of food, only to

124 

alanna thain

have Paul slam the door in her face. She only wants to help but is repeatedly framed as obsolete; her food goes untouched. Her exclusion from the lab becomes her exclusion from the home, where both Victoria and Number One (who constantly displays animosity toward Martha) can essentially fend for themselves. When Martha visits, she runs a finger disgustedly across a dusty banister, contemptuous of Victoria’s “lack” of care. Victoria may not be great at dusting, but she is shown constantly at work, both in her everyday learning and in her “off-hours” where she pores over Paul’s notes and transcriptions around her creation. Both the dog and Victoria are shown to be programmable subjects. One night, Paul remarks to Number One that he has forgotten to feed her; the extent of Paul’s care is to command Number One to do it herself. The dog opens the cupboard, takes out a bowlful of food, eats it, and then takes the dish to the sink. Martha and Victoria cannot see themselves as allies, as the scarcity of Paul’s attention keeps them at odds. Both Martha’s domestic labor and Victoria’s lab work are unpaid and unvalued forms of social reproduction. Federici reflects that the “Wages for Housework” struggle “established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it is not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised” (“Precarious Labor”). Such unpaid labor “is precisely this peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services that are involved in the role women must perform for capital that creates the specific character of that servant which is the housewife, that makes her work so burdensome and at the same time so invisible” (Federici, Revolution 13). When the home is also the lab, what changes? Even when she starts to kill, Victoria is profoundly sympathetic, while Martha is deliberately not; Victoria’s desperate desire to live evokes what Federici identified as a great cruelty of socially reproductive labor: “the impossibility to see where our work begins and ends, where our work ends and our desires begin” (Revolution 16). In Embryo, the alternative to the failure of privatized care is public spectacle: the freak show. Victoria’s intense fear of becoming a spectacle is rooted in historical fact. Ectogestation’s visual culture echoes how surveillance turns the labor of survival into work. Incubators were public entertainments in the early twentieth century at world’s fairs and as a longtime attraction (under the banner “Living Babies in Incubators!”) showcasing the work of Dr. Martin Couney at Coney Island, where the admissions funded the lifesaving devices (Raffel). The dual spectacle of vulnerable bodies and cutting-edge

reproductive technics and time 

125

technologies paid for care with the labor of being looked at. Embryo’s accelerated growth cycle is prefigured in the 1901 film The Over-Incubated Baby (W. R. Booth), also set at a public fair, where a woman deposits her child in “Professor Bakem’s Baby Incubator,” which promises twelve months’ growth in one hour. When a careless assistant accidentally kicks over the lamp heating the incubator, starting a fire that “cooks” the baby, what emerges is overdone: a little old man with an overgrown beard. The mother is horrified, the doctor intrigued. When Paul first thoughtlessly announces that Victoria might have to “go to the clinic,” she begs him to first take her to see the wider world. The success of this public showcase, where she attracts appreciative male gazes, shifts their relation to spectacle. Paul sees how this “display” can work for him, as when Victoria, despite having only “read books,” plays chess like a grand master or a computer at a cocktail party. When she is poised to beat the pants off an obnoxious guest (Roddy McDowall), Paul discretely signals her to let the man win. Smugly pleased with her performance and his puppetry, from then on he no longer threatens her with the clinic. But the damage is done. It’s thus no wonder that Victoria conducts her self-care work in secret, fugitively poring over Paul’s research. Her “treatment,” science and medicine when administered by Paul, is recoded as “addiction” when she treats herself. Dying, exposed to Paul in her self-medication, she cries out in wild despair that she has become “what I believe they call a junkie.” The dreadful solitude of her condition is amplified by her self-diagnosis that helplessly appeals to external validation: “what I believe they call.” Firestone called for “the political autonomy, based on economic independence, of both women and children” (194). Victoria’s confounding embodiment, where out of the box she’s a nubile young woman, prompts one to repeatedly forget and then recall, in a nonlinear way, that she is simultaneously a woman and a child, mere weeks old. Her biological childhood is spent in drugged suspense, and throughout her whole life Paul presumes a right to her body and freedom. After Victoria learns the tragic “cure” for her condition, she spends an afternoon at the beach. Hailed by a child who asks to be pushed on the swing, she instead plays with them like an overgrown peer, a beautiful version of Frankenstein’s monster; we see POV shots as she spins on a merry-go-round, and we share somatically her pleasure and kinetic joy. But she has an attack, manifesting her mutant untimeliness, while playing on the shore and almost drowns, saved by Number One. Water repeatedly marks Victoria’s liminal embodiments as the edge of risk, as if she never makes it out of the womb’s watery, entangled ecology.

126 

alanna thain

Lewis argues, “Too few of the speculative ectogenesis texts grappled at all with the relationship between social reproduction and reproduction of capital—the unequal distribution of technology, and the limits of the desirability of automation. . . . I’ll wager there is no technological ‘fix’ for the violent predicament human gestators are in. . . . The whole world deserves to reap the benefits of already available techniques currently monopolized by capitalism’s elites” (Full Surrogacy 28, 29). Indeed, it is the privatization of care and this unequal access that Embryo stages as a creeping horror of the technological “fix” for Victoria’s life. Her fugitive study is the counterimage of privatization and possession—after hours, alone rather than in collaboration, and outside of the networks of gendered and classed professionalism “between men.” Paul is profoundly comfortable with his own actions and takes everything, from a fetus to Victoria in his bed, as his due. When Paul needs a fetus, he can simply ask his buddy who runs the OB-GYN unit, who delivers the illicit goods in an ambulance straight to Paul’s door. This despite the fact that they both know the request is illegal; the law simply doesn’t apply between men. Tellingly during this scene, Paul leaves Number One in the car and orders her to stay. In a hilarious but otherwise unmotivated sequence, she instead lets herself out of the car and quickly murders a small dog, hiding the body in some bushes. Covering her traces reveals both her cunning and her vulnerability, hidden while Paul conducts his deathly business in the open, over lunch. When Victoria needs an embryo, she breaks into the same doctor’s office, shadowing Paul’s footsteps, stealing the file of a sex worker still carrying an unviable fetus. She shows up at the woman’s door and says, “I understand I can buy you,” in all naïveté and insightfulness, failing to fully understand the normative networks that govern the trade in reproductive goods. The visibly pregnant sex worker refuses, saying she’s not into “dyke stuff” but acquiescing when Victoria offers $200. Where Paul’s daylight ask is homosocial and heteronormative, rendered respectable by his motivation to “give a second chance to all the miscarried babies” lost to him and his dead wife, Victoria’s nighttime activities are queer, illegal, and spectacularized. Embryo is full of queered and nonhuman forms of kinship coded as perverse, dangerous, and antisocial but also deeply sympathetic. The excessive number of reaction shots of Number One’s face showcases the affective labor of companionability. We never see the gestational body of Victoria’s mother; all we know of her is that she died by suicide and “never gave the father’s name.” We might speculate about the reason for this refusal, but she literally doesn’t matter. Much as Victoria’s labor is concealed, so too are the human materials. In the

reproductive technics and time 

127

final act, Paul breaks in through the basement to rescue his daughter-in-law, Helen, and finds the sex worker’s body discarded on the stairs. As viewers, how do we read this lurid display against Paul’s easy channeling of male privilege in which he doesn’t get his hands dirty? Lewis writes, “The racial and class dynamics of U.S. society continue to trouble the commonplace certainty (mater semper certa est) that gestation produces the status of motherhood for the gestator” (Full Surrogacy 17). Lewis’s point is relevant for these films where motherhood is absented in favor of gestation: in a performance of surrogate humanity that, in obscuring gestational labor, works to make palpable the other absences that shade this category, notably race and class. Lewis concludes that if all reproduction is assisted, we need to radically expand “surrogacy solidarity” and the “communing .  .  . of reprotech” (29). Embryo plays off of the mobility of horror affects unleashed by the somatic redistributions of assisted reproductive technologies, automation, experimentation, and labor. It denaturalizes reproduction as a site of ongoing negotiation, left irresolute by the film’s ending. It suspends, through the untimeliness of gestational labor, that threshold of entry into human community—birth—with the possibility of the “do-over,” the pregnancy that reinterpellates Paul as a father who might have a second chance to do better at care. The creeping recognition of gestational labor’s isolation is at the heart of this film, as is a deep loneliness around reproductive work rooted in, not resolvable by, the dead end of the normative family. Embryo is a radically dystopian film, but the work of labor’s “creep” asks us to revisit what registers as horror, to make it actionable as a space for resistance and potential alliance.

Notes This research was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec–Société et Culture Research Team Support Program for CORÉRISC (Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk). 1. Embryo is deeply indebted to the urtext of feminist reproductive horror and the sympathetic monster, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and its cinematic mutant offspring, regendering the monster as both experimental and gestational subject. 2. Lewis cites SisterSong’s concept of reproductive justice to insist on the unavoidable entanglements of gestational labor (SisterSong). Reproductive justice addresses the incapacity of mainstream white feminism to take holistic action around reproduction. Beyond the liberal model of reproductive rights

128 

alanna thain

(e.g., the right to an abortion), reproductive justice is defined as safeguarding personal bodily autonomy to have children or to not have children and, crucially, to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. 3. The horror scholar Kris Woofter pointed out to me when reading a draft of this chapter that this echoes the complicity between Christiane and her father’s animal experimental subjects (dogs and doves) in George Franju’s 1960 film Eyes Without a Face.

Works Cited Christmas, Monica. “#SayHerName: Should Obstetrics and Gynecology Reckon with the Legacy of JM Sims?” Reproductive Sciences, 20 Apr. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s43032-021-00567-6. Embryo. Directed by Ralph Nelson, Sandy Howard Productions, 1976. Federici, Silvia. “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.” Libcom, 28 Oct. 2006, https://libcom.org/article/precarious-labor-feminist-viewpoint. ———. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press, 2012. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Morrow, 1970. Horn, Claire. “Gender, Gestation and Ectogenesis: Self-Determination for Pregnant People Ahead of Artificial Wombs.” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 46, no. 11, 2020, pp. 787–788, https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics​ -2020-106156. Kingma, Elselijn, and Suki Finn. “Neonatal Incubator or Artificial Womb? Distinguishing Ectogestation and Ectogenesis Using the Metaphysics of Pregnancy.” Bioethics, vol. 34, no. 4, 2020, pp. 354–363, https://doi.org​ /10.1111/bioe.12717. Lensing, Dennis M. “The Fecund Androgyne: Gender and the Utopian/ Dystopian Imagination of the 1970s.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 87–103, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300600950251. Lewis, Sophie. “Mothering.” Boston Review, 10 Aug. 2018, https://​ bostonreview.net/forum_response/sophie-lewis-lewis-emre/ ———. “Do Electric Sheep Dream of Water Babies?” Logic, no. 8, Aug. 2019, https://logicmag.io/bodies/do-electric-sheep-dream-of-water-babies. ———. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. Verso, 2019. Partridge, Emily, et al. “An Extra-uterine System to Physiologically Support the Extreme Premature Lamb.” Nature Communications, vol. 8, no. 15112, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112. Par-tu-ri-ent. http://www.parturient.artez.nl/about.html. Accessed 15 Aug. 2021. Raffel, Dawn. The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. Blue Rider Press, 2018. Romanis, Elizabeth Chloe, and Claire Horn. “Artificial Wombs and the Ectogenesis Conversation: A Misplaced Focus? Technology, Abortion,

reproductive technics and time 

129

and Reproductive Freedom.” IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 174–194, https://doi.org​ /10.3138/ijfab.13.2.18. SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. https://www​ .sistersong.net/mission. Accessed 15 Aug. 2021. Squier, Susan Merrill. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. Rutgers UP, 1994. Stabile, Carol A. Feminism and the Technological Fix. Manchester UP, 1994. Underman, Kelly. “‘It’s the Knowledge That Puts You in Control’: The Embodied Labor of Gynecological Educators.” Gender and Society, vol. 25, no. 4, 2011, pp. 431–450.

CHAPTER 7

“WE WANT TO TAKE OUR TIME” The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us Aviva Briefel

In a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure: “I want to see a black family on the beach, goddammit! . . . I want to see a black family buy a boat. That happens. And we’ve never seen it” (Sperling). Yet relaxation is a major source of horror in the film. From its initial representation of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk as a site of trauma, the film depicts American leisure as laden with anxiety and terror. It is during their vacation time that the Wilsons, a Black family of four, confront their uncanny doubles who rise to “untether” themselves from their human counterparts through radical acts of violence. As Red, doppelgänger to the mother, Adelaide Wilson, states, “We want to take our time.” Her haunting declaration is at once an expression of sadism and an acknowledgment that the Tethered’s violent acts are a warped version of bourgeois leisure. Taking one’s time involves the slow rhythms of vacation and other moments of play, marked through a radical separation from periods of work. Henri Lefebvre uses a terminology of mandatory rupture to describe the capitalist impulse to differentiate labor from leisure: “In capitalist, bourgeois society, which has its own way of manipulating the needs arising from a specific level of civilization—the most striking imperative as far as the needs of leisure among the masses are concerned is that it must produce a break.” This break, which should “offer liberation from worry and necessity,” maintains the fiction that individuals control their own free time apart from the necessities of work (55). Us exposes the violent aspects of this forced rupture, reconfiguring the capitalist “break” as a breakdown. The Santa Cruz Boardwalk is one example of a “funfair” whose chaotic stimuli, according to Lefebvre, “supply the required break” of capitalism (63). From their development at the end of the nineteenth century, American boardwalks such as Coney Island and Atlantic City trained their working-class 133

134 

av i va b r i e f e l

participants to forget about their weekly labors while providing somatic initiations into machine culture. Counterintuitively, the break from work could be experienced through a physical immersion into the amusement park’s material structures. John Kasson argues that Coney Island “represented a cultural accommodation to the developing urban-industrial society in a tighter integration of work and leisure than ever before. . . . Amusement thus became an extension of work; a mechanized, standardized character pervaded both experiences. To counteract weariness and boredom, Coney Island prescribed a homeopathic remedy of intense, frenetic physical activity without imaginative demands” (106, 108). These modes of “energized relaxation,” to borrow Lauren Rabinovitz’s term, conditioned bodies to feel the otherwise monotonous rhythms of industry in thrilling, but potentially dehumanizing, ways (2). Rides such as roller coasters and Ferris wheels converted the precarities of real labor into pleasurable and temporary fears.1 From the late nineteenth century, these synthetic fears were carefully, and often violently, guarded as white privileges. Victoria Wolcott traces this history in her book Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters, in which she contends that the “sense of safety amid chaos promoted by amusement parks and other recreational facilities was premised on segregation” (9). Well into the twentieth century, American amusement parks staged explicitly racist performances and carnival games, including “Coontown Plunges,” “African Dodgers,” and, at Coney Island, a “Hit the N—— Three Balls for Five” challenge, which incited predominantly white participants to commit acts of violence against Black bodies (Nasaw 93). Wolcott explains that while the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act legislated the desegregation of public spaces, violence and exclusions extended well beyond that date (196–197). She argues that nostalgic depictions of the heyday of amusement parks in America repress the “daily intimidation and violence experienced by African Americans seeking to enjoy urban leisure. . . . The popular myth of a golden age of urban recreation does not include the reality of white violence and black exclusion” (11, 12). In what follows, I argue that Us draws on the significance of the amusement park as a site of racial trauma to present the capitalist untethering of leisure from work as a form of horror. Rather than restaging scenes of racial conflict that have historically taken place in public spaces of amusement, Peele uses the figure of the Black woman to invoke the exclusionary nature of play in America. I base my analysis both on the film’s own troubled representations of leisure and on its unexpected connection to another film that situates trauma in an amusement park: Douglas Sirk’s 1959 maternal melodrama, Imitation of Life. Elsewhere, I have suggested that Peele adopts

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

135

“deep intertextuality” as a political strategy in Get Out (2017), compelling us to delve into his film’s “sunken spaces” to identify its connections to other cinematic narratives (Briefel). If we explore the hidden underground realms of Us, we find the shadow image of a melodrama that deploys its own visual vocabulary of harmful amusements, doubled identities, and motherhoods in distress.

“Find Yourself” Us never discloses what the Wilsons do for a living. What we do know is how they spend their vacation time and how this compares to the leisure activities of their white friends, Josh and Kitty Tyler. Gabe Wilson, the father, obsessively compares his leisure status to this couple’s, whose vacation home, boat, and general lifestyle exceed his own family’s. The Tylers’ occupations are also concealed from us; we know only that their income affords them luxuries, ranging from a midcentury beach house to Kitty’s subtle plastic surgery (“an itsy-bitsy little thing”), that mark them as better off than the Wilsons. The absence of information about the families’ work status accomplishes two things. First, it draws attention to race as a central factor in determining socioeconomic status, even though none of the characters addresses this difference explicitly. Secondly, it frames leisure as a sphere that at once results from labor but also actively conceals it. To return to Lefebvre’s formulation, the film takes the idea of the “break” seriously, offering a “liberation and pleasure” (55) that justifies, but does not acknowledge, the labor that made it possible. Gabe’s frantic commitment to leisure is a source of both humor and anxiety in the film. He immerses his wife and kids in his leisure overdrive, engulfing them in his fixation on his new boat, his fishing gear, their proximity to a great beach, and so on. He opposes their resistance to his fun-at-all-costs attitude with lines such as, “I’m not trying to force anyone,” and “I’m trying to have a vacation and my whole family lost their goddamn minds.” When the Tethered, consisting of doubles of each family member, invade their home, Gabe tries to appease them by using markers of his privilege as currency. After saying, “We don’t have anything here; this is our summer home,” he offers them his wallet, his car, and his boat (in response to which his daughter, Zora, says, “Nobody wants the boat, Dad”). Gabe’s increasingly frenetic attempts to cling to leisure as a provider of familial affection, social status, and even protection from violence present an extreme example of what Cindy S. Aron describes as American “vacation anxiety.” Beginning in the

136 

av i va b r i e f e l

nineteenth century, vacationing offered both promises of leisure and pleasure and apprehensions about what it meant to leave work behind: “Leisure and labor remained complicated and troubling categories—in some ways polar opposites, in other ways closely connected” (Aron 3). Gabe’s overinvestment in leisure turns vacationing into its own form of labor, a condition heightened by the fact that we do not know what he does for work. Gabe’s leisure drive draws him to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the site of Adelaide’s original trauma. While she anxiously insists that they can go to the local beach rather than the boardwalk, he responds, “That is not a beach. That is a bay. That is a shore. I’m talking about a real beach, with people, and sand, an amusement park.” Part of his reason for wanting to go to the boardwalk is to compare notes with the Tylers, who show up with bougie beach chairs and a cooler full of rosé. At the same time, Gabe’s pitch for the boardwalk echoes the escapist appeal of beach amusement parks since the late nineteenth century: boundless play, controlled encounters with strangers, the promise of a mini vacation without traveling too far afield. Indeed, his enthusiastic description echoes the call of Charles Canfield, president of the Santa Cruz Seaside Company since 1984, for visitors to enjoy the boardwalk’s pleasures: “The Boardwalk appeals to a very basic need: the need to recreate. It’s our instinct to go out and have fun. A lot of people struggle through the week at work, and if they can go out and just have a good time, it rejuvenates them” (Lilliefors 192). But these pleasures are closely monitored; the boardwalk has a private security force. The Seaside Company’s vice president explained in 2006, “One of the things we believe is that if the presence of authority makes people uncomfortable, then those are probably the people we want to be uncomfortable. Those are not the people we want on the Boardwalk” (Lilliefors 197). Although the film does not explicitly present Adelaide’s discomfort with the boardwalk as racial anxiety, it does draw attention to her deep-seated knowledge that for certain bodies, the carnival can be a site of horror rather than pleasure.2 Following a sequence of her as a child watching a Hands Across America commercial on television, the narrative transports us to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk at night, where little Adelaide wanders with her parents. Her father, perhaps as a result of drinking and marital tensions, or as a manifestation of his own racial anxiety in this place of amusement, seems a bit too enthused by what the fair has to offer. He runs from one attraction to another, beer in hand, trying to get his daughter to enjoy herself: “How about the Big Dipper? Addy, you wanna try it?” He anticipates Gabe’s own obsession with leisure, albeit focused here on carnival attractions rather than on bourgeois acquisitions like beach houses and boats. For her part, his wife

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

137

previews the adult Adelaide’s reluctance to enjoy herself at the fair, saying, “You know she’s not big enough to do that, and I sure as hell am not doing it.” The film sets up a gender dynamic between the father’s panicked drive for fun and the mother’s (and, in both cases, daughter’s) tendency to view the “fun” as at best a distraction and at worst a threat. Strikingly, Gabe will use the death of Adelaide’s mother, who was no fan of the boardwalk, to guilt his wife into going there despite her anxiety: “I know Jason [their son] really was looking forward to it. This is the first summer we’ve been back here since Grandma died. I know it’s been pretty hard on him.” It is young Adelaide’s refusal or inability to indulge in the manufactured pleasures of the carnival that draws her away from her parents, down the steps of the boardwalk, and onto the dark beach. After dropping her candy apple in the sand, as if in a final relinquishing of fun, she walks into a dark attraction called Vision Quest, framed by an image of a stereotypical Native American chief hovering over the at-once tempting and ominous tagline, “Find yourself.” Adelaide wanders, mesmerized, through this hall of mirrors, which offers the type of experience afforded by carnival attractions such as dark rides: immersion. Alison Griffiths describes “immersion” as the “sensation of entering a space that immediately identifies itself as somehow separate from the world and that eschews conventional modes of spectatorship in favor of a more bodily participation in the experience” (2). For Adelaide, this immersive experience is absolute: she finds an embodied double of herself in what appears to be a mirror, and she literally changes bodies. For most of the film we believe that the same Adelaide is suffering the trauma of whatever happened to her following this encounter, but at the very end we realize we are not dealing with the same body at all. The big reveal is that young Adelaide was abducted by her double, Red, who emerged from the tunnel and passed as the real Adelaide into adulthood. This is a dizzying revelation for the audience, who has been identifying with the “wrong” Adelaide all along.3 The switch in Adelaide’s identity, the punch line to “Find yourself,” draws out the Gothic aspects of the amusement park. The very elements that afford a possibility of escape and leisure reshape into something far more ominous: a radical transformation of self. Critics have long argued about the amusement park’s capacity to split visitors into doubles of themselves. Grahame Thompson, for instance, remarks that in the carnival, “the participant, both actor and audience, loses a sense of individuality by . . . splitting into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game. The player is rendered into a double” (133). Lefebvre describes this doubling as a generalized product of a culture seeking to untether amusement from work, thereby looking for

138 

av i va b r i e f e l

play in artificial environments rather than in the real: “We are now entering the vast domain of the illusory reverse image. What we find is a false world” (57). Adelaide’s transformative experience literalizes this split in identity, all the while drawing attention to her father’s (and Gabe’s) stances of radical leisure. To separate the work self from the play self, as capitalism has long asked us to do, is to extend the break into a breakdown.4 This full breakdown occurs when the Wilsons’ doubles arrive as the Tethered, a group that disrupts Gabe’s fantasies of unhindered leisure. Fittingly, the Tethered appear in identical red one-piece outfits that resemble working-class uniforms. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, Red’s pronouncement, “We want to take our time,” seems to mock Gabe’s (and other vacationers’) desperate need to lose himself in leisure. It thus seems appropriate that the Tethered choose to assault the Wilsons and the Tylers while they are on vacation. The film uses a number of strategic, and often humorous, ways to illustrate this assault on leisured pleasures, including the scene of a bloodied Kitty being pursued by her double as the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” plays from Amazon Alexa, and the scene of Gabe fighting his double to the death on his (ridiculously) beloved boat. The Tethered’s assault on American leisure may also explain why they make their mark on the surface world by replicating Hands Across America. The 1986 nationwide fundraiser to combat homelessness blurred the line between labor and play, encouraging participants to have fun for a good cause. This charity stunt brings to mind Sianne Ngai’s discussion of the gimmick’s fraught relationship to both work and leisure: “In our everyday encounter with the gimmick, we are . . . registering an uncertainty about labor—its deficiency or excess—that is also an uncertainty about value and time” (1). The Tethered are quite adept at locating the fault lines of capitalism. Indeed, the Tethered represent the shadow version of what must be repressed for capitalism to function properly; they suffer where their aboveground counterparts thrive. This idea lies at the heart of Red’s monologue about her divergent experiences from Adelaide: “Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her, warm and tasty, but when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody. On Christmas the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy, but the shadow’s toys were so sharp and cold they’d slice through her fingers when she tried to play with them.” Red’s monologue resonates with the contrasts that structure capitalism, which relies on the fact that poverty is wealth’s shadow double. As evidenced by Red’s contrast between her sharp and harmful toys and

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

139

Adelaide’s plush and lovable ones, Us directs its critique of capitalism to brutal discrepancies in play and leisure. Red’s monologue anticipates the underground confrontation that occurs between the women late in the film, accompanied by flashbacks of the moment of Adelaide’s trauma (at this point, we still do not know about their switch in identities). Through an elaborate crosscutting sequence that fuses the girls’ perspectives, we see that the fun that takes place aboveground—the eating of carnival food, exhilarating rides, winning of prizes, flirting—is replicated belowground in lurid and seemingly painful ways. The sequence begins with Adelaide’s father overenthusiastically playing a carnival game to win a prize for his daughter, which ends up being a Thriller T-shirt. The film cuts to the world underground, in which the Tethered mimic the movements of those above, absent any of the settings or props that make up a carnival; theirs is a sterile, institutional environment. Their mirror gestures seem forced and uncomfortable. When the shadow father turns around to give Red her prize, he bears a rictus that makes him seem like the victim of some external force or a monster himself. The scene continues with a prolonged contrast between Adelaide and Red walking through their respective environments, cautiously examining the amusements. Aboveground, individuals gleefully experience rides with flashing lights and blaring sounds, while underground, the Tethered simulate rides through spasmodic, coordinated motions. Their tortured choreography literalizes the idea that amusement parks can make their participants experience industrialization viscerally, as an “intense, frenetic physical activity without imaginative demands” (Kasson 108). Us uses the visual iconography of horror to reveal what compulsory fun might actually look like. In the sunken place of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk are the bodies and activities that must be repressed for their aboveground counterparts to enjoy their leisure.5 The disruptions caused by the Tethered both below- and aboveground are inseparable from the question of who has the right to play. Although the film does not specifically racialize the Tethered—like their human counterparts, they inhabit diverse racial identities—their emergence in the amusement park raises the American history of inequity and violence in public spaces intended for play. Instead of referring to this history in literal terms, the film centers on Black women who are made to bear the burden of this pressure to have fun in places of racial trauma: Adelaide, Red, and their respective mothers, as well as Zora, who shares Adelaide’s frustration with Gabe’s leisure drive.6 Us demonstrates that these women have to endure not only the haunted racist history of these public places but also the “emotion work” of dealing

140 

av i va b r i e f e l

with the pressures placed on the Black father to gain access to these spaces.7 Toward the beginning of the film, when Gabe brags about his boat, Zora asks, skeptically, “Will we all fit, though?” While he dismisses her question by saying, “Y’all are spoiled,” the question resonates throughout Us, which raises the traumatic predicaments of those who do not “fit” into spaces of leisure. As I argue in the next section, Us draws on Sirk’s maternal melodrama Imitation of Life to convey the deep history of Black women’s difficult relationship to leisure. Peele’s film includes snapshot moments of Sirk’s narrative, which hybridizes the concerns of the maternal melodrama with those of the social problem film. Critics have long debated the effectiveness of this hybridity in exposing the problem of American racial trauma. Marina Heung, for instance, argues that the powerful generic conventions of the maternal melodrama ultimately overwrite Imitation of Life’s critique of racial and social inequities: it “displace[s] the potential conflict between mistress/maid and black/white onto the framework of a mother/child conflict, the prototypical theme of the maternal melodrama” (309). Us incorporates intertextual snapshots from Imitation of Life into its horror narrative to bring out those moments of Sirk’s film that purposefully contrast the differences between Black and white female leisure. With these snapshots, moments of striking visual and thematic intersection between the films, Peele puts Sirk’s melodrama to work to underscore the trauma of leisure for Black women. He thereby demonstrates the interrelatedness of horror and melodrama for their status not only as body genres presenting the “spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion,” as Linda Williams has famously argued (269), but also as mutually illuminating narrative modes.

Mothers in Distress Imitation of Life launches its maternal melodrama from Coney Island. After a series of establishing shots of the crowded beach in the foreground, framed with rides and games in the background, we discover a distressed white woman, Lora, frantically looking for her daughter, Susie, in the crowd. A banner reveals that it is the summer of 1947, a landmark season in Coney Island history, as an air show on Independence Day drew a record 1.3 million visitors to the beach (Nasaw 243). As Lora scrambles back up the steps of the boardwalk to find the police, she passes a Black woman running down the stairs. The camera then switches to following this woman, Annie, who has found Susie and is keeping her safe under the boardwalk with her own

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

141

daughter, Sarah Jane. A few moments later, Lora arrives on the scene with a police officer, and the two women strike up what will become a decadeslong relationship. Annie offers her services to Lora as someone between a live-in servant and a friend, and Lora eventually becomes a world-renowned actress. Throughout its narrative, the film asks us to compare the women’s experiences as mothers and workers, and Susie’s and Sarah Jane’s increasingly different experiences as they grow into adulthood. Much of the melodrama of the film centers on Sarah Jane, whose desire to pass as white leads her to reject her mother from childhood onward. The end of the film stages her regret as she chases after Annie’s funeral procession, while onlookers deny her kinship to her mother. Although the film does not foreground the racial tensions that pervaded Coney Island at midcentury, it purposefully uses the amusement park as a launching pad for the racial trauma that will befall both Annie and Sarah Jane throughout the film. The beach encounter initiates a lifelong relationship between the mother and daughter pairs, but also a life of exhausting free labor for Annie and of racial resentment and violence for Sarah Jane. Laura Mulvey argues that the racialized dynamic between the two mothers is anticipated through their interactions on the boardwalk. She identifies a “pivot” from Lora to Annie as they cross each other on the stairs, which establishes both symmetry and hierarchy: “At the central point of the sequence, the shot on the steps, in themselves a transitional space, mediates between the two and creates a symmetrical pattern on which the structure of the sequence depends. . . . But the topography of the sequence, its organization of space, translates these oppositions into further, spatial, ones: ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘above’ and ‘beneath’” (151–152). Mulvey contends that the film uses these juxtapositions to spatialize the social and racial categories the women will come to occupy: “Lora is white and Annie is black. Lora’s space, the ‘above’ mapped out by the boardwalk, not only allows her to be seen as theatrical spectacle, but also, through the workings of antinomy, creates a space of ‘above’ in relation to Annie’s space as ‘below’. This spatial occupation carries with it further terms of high and low, so that connotations of class, race and social status merge with those of differing images of femininity” (153–154). Through this introduction, the film forecasts the tensions that will emerge from this difference: Lora’s self-centeredness, the erasure of Annie’s labor, Susie’s white privilege, and Sarah Jane’s rebellion and victimization by racist violence. That the leisure afforded by the beach will soon lead to racial conflict and inequity is signaled by the rapid transformation of the little girls’ playtime activities. A few scenes after their joyous Coney Island declaration, “We want to play!” their games adopt a troubling form that reflects Susie’s sense

142 

av i va b r i e f e l

of white superiority and Sarah Jane’s rejection of Blackness. The first manifestation of this hurtful play occurs when Susie offers her new friend a Black baby doll, which Sarah Jane promptly rejects in favor of a white one. The dynamic escalates when we learn that Sarah Jane cut Susie’s wrist to compare the racial composition of their blood, as a boy at school had allegedly said that “Negro blood was different.” Lora dismisses the girls’ disturbing interactions through a language of amusement, saying, “Oh well—you know how children are. They were only playing,” to which Annie, unable to ignore the dangerous side of play, responds, “I hope so, Miss Lora, I hope so.” When the girls are teenagers, their harmful play as children reemerges in a sequence that shows Sarah Jane dancing provocatively inside her room and kicking a stuffed animal of a lamb, while Susie innocently rides off on her new birthday pony. Sarah Jane’s retribution against a plaything mirrors her earlier rejection of the Black doll, which she dropped on the ground after telling Annie, “I don’t want to live in the back! Why do we have to live in the back?” In both cases, the violence performed on a toy signals Sarah Jane’s anger about her difference, and the fact, to quote Red, that some children are allowed soft toys, while others’ are “sharp and cold.” The Santa Cruz sequences from Us reconfigure the boardwalk dynamics of Imitation of Life into a visual vocabulary of horror. Young Adelaide’s descent down the stairs of the boardwalk to the beach and then, as we later find out, down more stairs and escalators to the world below, mirrors the “pivot” and doubling of identities described by Mulvey. In this case, Adelaide goes down the stairs of the boardwalk and Red comes up, marking both a shift in the social hierarchies between the girls as well as its own passing narrative. Adelaide’s “transformation” into Red is not an instance of racial passing per se, but it does take the form of what Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young describe as a “neo-passing narrative,” which “build[s] on the history of racial passing and the conventions of the passing narrative while subverting the traditional centering of racial discourse” (5). When Red passes as Adelaide, she thwarts the stability of familial, class-based, and gendered identities, all the while confirming that her Blackness intersects with these. Acts of passing in both narratives lead to climactic confrontations in schoolroom settings. In Sirk’s film, the public schoolroom is where Sarah Jane first rejects her mother, who, by bringing her boots to her classroom on a snowy day, unwittingly disrupts her daughter’s passing: “Why do you have to be my mother? Why?” Here, too, Lora tries to attenuate Annie’s valid concerns about her daughter’s racial conflict by using a language based on play: “Annie, don’t be upset. Children are always pretending.” In Us, the confrontation occurs in the showdown between Adelaide and Red, which

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

143

Figure 7.1. Coney Island prank in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

takes place in large part in an underground schoolroom resembling the one from Sirk’s film. Here, too, the institutional space of the school, far removed from the leisure of the amusement park, becomes a brutal site of instruction about difference and injustice. As Red, standing by the blackboard, tells Adelaide, “How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted. We’re human, too, you know. Eyes. Teeth. Hands. Blood. Exactly like you.” Furthermore, in both films the immediate aftermath of the boardwalk encounter exposes the amusement park as a site of segregated leisure. In Imitation of Life, Steve Archer brings Lora a photograph he took at Coney Island that shows Sarah Jane and Susie balancing a beer can on a sleeping man’s voluminous stomach. Blurring the line between work and play, Steve will later sell this image to a beer company and launch his career in advertising. The girls are thrilled to see this photograph, and Susie yells out, “Don’t you think it’s funny, Annie?” The film then cuts to a close-up of the image, framed by Annie’s hands. Unlike everyone else, she is not amused by what she sees, and she sternly says, “It’s lucky I didn’t catch Sarah Jane playing such pranks. It just ain’t seemly, Miss Lora.” Annie’s negative response anticipates her reaction to the girls’ racial blood experiment; it may be “only playing” to some, but not to her. As Jennifer Barker argues, the shot of Annie holding the picture makes us experience the seemingly happy image of the photograph through the Black woman’s perspective. Annie’s rejection of the image stems from intersecting “anxieties over race, class, gender, and motherhood as well as a complex array of perspectives—optical, emotional, and ethical/

144 

av i va b r i e f e l

political—among which this photograph is tenuously positioned” (Barker 196). One of the things that may perturb Annie, I would add, is her projection of what would have happened had Sarah Jane been identified as a Black girl committing a prank on a white man in a public space. Accordingly, the photograph incorporates three white spectators who look at the girls with responses that seem to range from amusement to something more serious, like concern. Annie’s reaction to the picture may signal her experience as a Black woman whose own relationship to leisure is fraught, especially in a household where her work is not always recognized or compensated. As Heung argues, Annie’s indeterminate position in Lora’s household leads her to be “invited, even appreciated, but intrinsically alien” (324). Heung’s description of Annie also applies to the adult Adelaide (who is, of course, actually Red). She inhabits her familial and social roles well enough to pass, but there is something off about her: her eating habits, her inability to partake in superficial chitchat with Kitty, her general anxiety around relaxation. There is one moment in particular that connects her to Annie’s out-of-place-ness. During the Wilsons’ visit to the boardwalk with the Tylers, Adelaide panics after Jason wanders away from the group. This sequence recalls Lora’s loss of Susie at the beginning of Imitation of Life; Steve later titles the photograph he took of that event “Mother in Distress.” Tellingly, Lora comments on the image’s aesthetic quality rather than on the temporary trauma it depicts: “Well, it’s good—very good!” Her enthused reaction to the photograph contrasts with Annie’s displeasure in seeing the seemingly innocuous photograph of the girls at the beach. While Adelaide is also a “mother in distress,” her reaction to a visual representation of her child’s disappearance at the beach is much closer to Annie’s than to Lora’s. Later that night, she looks at a drawing Jason made of his experience. The shot, which presents the picture framed by Adelaide’s hands, mirrors the one showing Annie’s anxious perusal of the beach photograph. In Jason’s drawing, the trauma of leisure is portrayed more directly than in the photograph from Sirk’s film: Jason includes a bright sun and rides but also an image of himself from the back, standing in front of a person (one of the Tethered) with a bleeding hand. The fact that we only see the back of Jason’s head, rather than his face, recalls Adelaide’s view of Red in the fun house: at first, she thinks she is looking at herself in the mirror, but then we see the back of a head that looks exactly like her own. Jason’s picture foregrounds the trauma of leisure spaces, a realization that, in both films, is carried literally and figuratively by the Black woman holding the image. Predictably, Adelaide’s horrified response is interrupted by Gabe’s return to leisure: “I was thinking about getting some fishing gear tomorrow.” His

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

145

Figure 7.2. Jason’s boardwalk drawing in Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

vacation fantasies are soon interrupted by the arrival of the family’s Tethered doubles in the driveway. Adelaide’s and Annie’s fraught relationship to leisure is expressed through mirrors, privileged symbols of reflection and doubling in both horror and melodrama. Lucy Fischer argues that throughout Sirk’s film, Lora and Annie are presented as complementary doubles: the white mother whose quest for work in the public sphere requires her to have a Black helper to take care of her home and child. For Fischer, this doubling becomes especially pronounced in mirror scenes that frame both women alongside each other; in these moments, Annie emerges as Lora’s “practical supplement—the duplicate underclass clone a ‘New York Career Woman’ needs to survive. From this vantage point, the film provides the white females a wish fulfillment fantasy of a double who appears at the door, offering, gratis, the custodial services they require” (17). In a shot following one of Lora’s sensational performances, both women appear in the mirror, Annie standing in a somber work dress while Lora sits in a sparkly outfit, getting ready for a night on the town. The striking visual difference between the mothers is heightened by their contrasting relationship to labor and leisure. Annie soothes her friend/employer, telling her that she needs to rest more, and instructs Lora’s theater director boyfriend, “You see she gets home at a decent hour!” Annie’s presence as a complementary double allows Lora to work and rest; through foot rubs and warm meals, the Black woman always labors, both physically and emotionally, to ensure the white woman’s leisure. Annie, on the other hand, is denied access to rest throughout the film, even in those moments when she picnics with the family or attends Susie’s graduation. As Lora’s “underclass clone,” Annie occupies a similar position to the Tethered in relation to their aboveground counterparts.

146 

av i va b r i e f e l

For Sarah Jane, the doubling of mirrors both causes and reflects her trauma. After sneaking out of her bedroom, she illicitly meets her white boyfriend, Frankie, who confronts her with Annie’s, and by extension her own, Blackness: “Tell me, is your mother a n——?” Despite Sarah Jane’s pleas, “I’m as white as you!” he assaults her. We initially witness this violence through the mirror reflection of a bar window, on which is also reflected a sign for a drive-in, thus reinforcing how readily spaces intended for leisure turn into ones of abuse and horror. The scene anticipates another moment in which Sarah Jane will announce her whiteness in front of a mirror: after Annie “catches” her performing burlesque and tries to get her to return home with her, Sarah Jane pleads in front of the mirror, “I’m white. White!” The fact that both she and Annie are reflected in the surface of the mirror undercuts her claim, as the presence of her mother immerses her in the “trauma of black shame” (Perez 126). The implications of Sarah Jane’s Blackness are reinforced in the scene immediately following her assault. In characteristically jarring fashion, Sirk cuts from a bloodied Sarah Jane lying in the gutter to Annie massaging Lora’s feet, as the white woman lies on her couch in a luxurious pink gown. The scene underscores the oft-hidden hierarchy between the two maternal figures, as well as the societal image of Blackness as servitude from which Sarah Jane tries to escape. In Us, the mirror at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk sets the stage for a horrific scene of involuntary doubling that initiates Adelaide’s life of passing. A moment intended for play—an encounter with fun-house mirrors—culminates in a lifelong experience of trauma. Part of this trauma comes from Adelaide’s inability to convey this experience to others, so that it remains solely her burden well into adulthood. The self-reflexivity of the mirror scene reflects the solipsistic containment of the experience. Responding to a therapist’s claim that Adelaide suffers from PTSD because of her experience at the boardwalk, her father says, “She wasn’t in ’Nam. She got lost for fifteen minutes.” When the adult Adelaide tries to tell Gabe what happened to her—fittingly, while she is standing in front of a dark window mirroring her reflection—the content of her story makes it impossible for him to understand. a d e l a i d e : I wandered off. . . . I ended up in that hall of mirrors. There was another girl in there. She looked like me. Exactly like me. gabe: But you were in the hall of mirrors— adelaide: She wasn’t a reflection. She was real. She was real. . . . She’s getting closer. gabe (skeptically): Who? The mirror girl?

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

147

adelaide: You don’t believe me. . . . gabe: You know I’m here, right? I’m pretty sure I could kick your ass, so if she looks like you, then . . . Adelaide’s attempts to communicate the reason for her trauma to Gabe are doubly impeded: first, by the common understanding of mirrors as reflective, rather than generative, spaces; and second, by the fact that these are fun-house mirrors in particular. Gabe’s incomprehension also seems linked to his deepseated commitment to leisure as escape: “You were in the hall of mirrors.” Like Adelaide’s father, he seems unable to comprehend that amusement and terror can coexist. When Adelaide responds with annoyance to his joke about “kick[ing] your ass,” Gabe says, “I’m just trying to lighten the mood.” His misplaced attempt to escape into humor is further thwarted by a blackout in their home that precedes the arrival of the Tethered.8 Adelaide and Sarah Jane are both incapable of clearly vocalizing their doubled identities. As Sarah Jane tells Annie while looking in the motel room mirror, “I’m somebody else.” These splits in identity culminate in moments of excess that befit the genres of both films. For Sarah Jane, it is the emotional collapse that occurs with the death of Annie, when, unrecognized by the Black community, she is pushed away from her mother’s coffin. For Adelaide, it is a violent showdown with the Tethered that puts her and her family at risk. Both films end with the women driving away in vehicles (the funeral procession car for Sarah Jane, the ambulance for Adelaide) and contemplating where they will go from there. In both cases, the indeterminacy of their position radiates from the personal to the public: in Sirk’s film, to the vast crowds gathering outside to spectate Annie’s funeral, and in Peele’s, to the seemingly endless Tethered Hands Across America chain making its way through the country. The women’s personal experiences are visibly linked to national and racial inequities and their manifestations in public space. At the same time, these final scenes also point to other, more liberating modes of public identity than the ones encompassed in the films’ visions of the amusement park. In Imitation of Life, the predominantly white Coney Island Boardwalk gives way to the primarily Black space of community and support at the funeral, which visually manifests the kinships that Annie enjoyed outside the confines of Lora’s house. When Lora had earlier expressed surprise about the “hundreds” of friends Annie claimed to have, Annie responded, “Miss Lora, you never asked.” In one of the only moments of tacit reproach for her condition, Annie alludes to the communal support denied her in the white private sphere. In Us, the Tethered appropriate Hands

148 

av i va b r i e f e l

Across America as an act of unification and resistance, a public declaration of freedom from their underground confinement. Following the initial line “Will somebody wear me to the fair?” from 4Hero’s cover of the song “Les Fleur,” the camera reveals an aerial shot of the Tethered holding hands over rolling hills. Their position mirrors roller coaster structures, but without such structures’ mechanical and regimented restrictions. As the music swells and the camera traces the line of Tethered to its disappearance on the horizon, the spectator shares in the thrills and uncertainties that come from breaking out of the boardwalk. These final intersections between the films position the melodrama of Sirk’s film with the horror of Peele’s as cinematic doubles that, taken together, work to illuminate the ongoing terror of American leisure.

Notes 1. Rabinovitz draws a persuasive parallel between amusement parks and movie theaters as sites of “energized relaxation,” describing both as “‘inventions’ of a process of accommodation to this new world marked by the dichotomy of commercialized labor and leisure” (12). 2. Of course, viewers of the horror genre already recognize the potential terrors of carnivalesque spaces: think of Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), and House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003), to name only a few. See “Best Horror Movies” for more examples. 3. For the purposes of this essay, I will continue to refer to Adelaide and Red as the characters we believe them to be until the final revelation. I am thus drawing on the experience that an initial, rather than a repeat, viewer of the film would have of each character until the very end. 4. I am grateful to Mikal Gaines for pointing me to the similarities between the twinning of Adelaide and Red and the exploitative exhibition of Millie and Christine McKoy, the so-called Carolina Twins, in the 1850s. Enslaved from birth, these conjoined twins were subject to the “racialized enfreakment” of nonwhite bodies, including Sarah Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”) and Chang and Eng Bunker, that took place in carnival culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Samuels 56). While my study here focuses on the immersive, participatory aspects of the carnival, such as rides and games, I am fascinated by Us’s tacit allusions to these human exhibits. 5. This structure illustrates Robin Wood’s landmark argument that the horror film depicts the monstrous return of what has been repressed by mainstream society. 6. While I am placing more emphasis on the female characters of the film, there is much to be said about Jason, who also bears the burden of the family’s trauma through leisure. His last look at his mother in the car suggests that he suspects her true identity. 7. I borrow the term “emotion work” from Hochschild, who uses it to

the hard work of leisure in jordan peele’s us 

149

define “unpaid” emotional labor (8). See chapter 5 in this volume for Jason Middleton’s discussion of “emotion work” in the film Midsommar. 8. Peele brilliantly represents the impossibility of explaining trauma in his horror films. The scene with Adelaide is reminiscent of the one in Get Out in which Rod Williams desperately tries to explain to a group of detectives that his friend has been enslaved by a “white girl,” which is absolutely true, but they laugh uproariously at him.

Works Cited Aron, Cindy S. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. Oxford UP, 1999. Barker, Jennifer M. “Be-Hold: Touch, Temporality, and the Cinematic Thumbnail Image.” Discourse, vol. 35, no. 2, 2013, pp. 194–211. “The Best Horror Movies about Carnivals and Amusement Parks.” Ranker Film, https://www.ranker.com/list/best-horror-movies-about-carnivals​ /ranker-film. Accessed 23 Feb. 2021. Briefel, Aviva. “Live Burial: The Deep Intertextuality of Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” Narrative, vol. 29, no. 3, 2021, pp. 297–320. Fischer, Lucy. “Three-Way Mirror: Imitation of Life.” Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, edited by Fischer, Rutgers UP, 1991, pp. 3–28. Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, Universal Pictures, 2017. Godfrey, Mollie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young. “Introduction: The NeoPassing Narrative.” Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow, edited by Godfrey and Young, U of Illinois P, 2018, pp. 1–28. Griffiths, Alison. Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. Columbia UP, 2008. Heung, Marina. “‘What’s the Matter with Sarah Jane?’: Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life.” Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, edited by Lucy Fischer, Rutgers UP, 1991, pp. 302–324. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. U of California P, 2003. Imitation of Life. Directed by Douglas Sirk, Universal Pictures, 1959. Kasson, John F. Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. Hill and Wang, 1978. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Translated by John Moore, Verso, 2014. Lilliefors, James. America’s Boardwalks: From Coney Island to California. Rutgers UP, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books, 2006. Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. Harvard UP, 1999. Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Harvard UP, 2020.

150 

av i va b r i e f e l

Perez, Hiram. “Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification.” Camera Obscura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008, pp. 113–143. Rabinovitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. Columbia UP, 2012. Samuels, Ellen. “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet.” Signs, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 53–81. Sperling, Nicole. “Jordan Peele Breaks Down His Get Out Follow-Up: ‘Maybe the Evil Is Us.’” Vanity Fair, 10 Mar. 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com​ /hollywood/2019/03/jordan-peele-us-movie-lupita-nyongo-winston-duke​ -interview-meaning. Thompson, Grahame. “Carnival and the Calculable: Consumption and Play at Blackpool.” Formations of Pleasure, edited by Tony Bennett et al., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, pp. 124–137. Us. Directed by Jordan Peele, Universal Pictures, 2019. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, New York UP, 1999, pp. 267–281. Wolcott, Victoria W. Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, U of Minnesota P, 2020, pp. 108–135.

CHAPTER 8

RACING WORK AND WORKING RACE IN BUPPIE HORROR Mikal J. Gaines

In his 1996 article “Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film,” Barry Keith Grant identifies a horror subgenre based on a cycle of films running from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Some primary examples include Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Pacific Heights (John Schlesinger, 1990), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Poison Ivy (Katt Shea, 1992), Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992), Unlawful Entry (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992), and The Temp (Tom Holland, 1993). These films feature young urban professionals (typically couples or nuclear families) who find their bourgeois lifestyles and eventually their very lives under assault from a dangerous Other. Drawing upon Robin Wood’s well-known repression theory of horror, Grant reads these films as evidencing the “anxieties of an affluent culture in an era of prolonged recession” (Grant 4). Although Grant does acknowledge that the term “yuppie” could apply to someone of any race or gender who placed a premium on conspicuous consumption, prestige, and other trappings of modern metropolitan identity, his discussion does not address how the almost uniform whiteness of these films’ protagonists functions as what Isabel Cristina Pinedo and more recently Russell Meeuf describe as a structuring absence, signifying the primary sociocultural currency that they are always in danger of losing and that they fight to the death to preserve. This unacknowledged yet fundamental aspect of yuppie horror matters in large part because it helps to illuminate some of the dynamics at work in a recent cycle of similar Black horror-thrillers, or what I term “buppie horror.” The twenty-first-century cycle focuses on upwardly mobile Black couples, interracial couples (that may include a Black partner), or a single Black woman (sometimes with children), who, like their earlier white counterparts, find themselves besieged by an Other figure who threatens to destroy the 151

152 

mikal j. gaines

picture-perfect lives they have worked hard to create. The formula appears across films from the late aughts to the present, with Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute, 2008) and Obsessed (Steve Shill, 2009) serving as archetypes for this racially revised model. Several others have followed, including Addicted (Bille Woodruff, 2014), No Good Deed (Sam Miller, 2014), The Perfect Guy (David M. Rosenthal, 2015), When the Bough Breaks (Jon Cassar, 2016), ’Til Death Do Us Part (Chris Stokes, 2017), Unforgettable (Denise Di Novi, 2017), Traffik (Deon Taylor, 2018), Breaking In (James McTeigue, 2018), The Intruder (Deon Taylor, 2019), Fatal Affair (Peter Sullivan, 2020), and Fatale (Deon Taylor, 2020). This cycle seems to have operated contemporaneously alongside that of similar white home invasion films released during Barack Obama’s presidency, a trend that Meeuf interprets as representing a larger preoccupation with whiteness under siege. Yet, because Meeuf limits his study to films explicitly categorized as horror, his discussion misses many of the above films, thereby presenting a somewhat less complex portrait of how these themes were handled during the Obama years and beyond. Both the previous cycle of yuppie horror and this more recent one frame their primary conflicts as contests over the safety of the home, or what Ofelia Cuevas describes as “ontological security” (609). Cuevas argues that the home represents “the site of the family and domestic relations, of the possibility of a future, both in terms of biological reproduction and of the projection of the self through time” (609). At a pragmatic level, ontological security in these films comes down to acquiring and preserving specific markers of material success: white-collar professional achievement, high-end property ownership, and the cultivation of a nuclear family. But whereas much of the tension of yuppie horror stems from the potential loss of privilege—from the idea that this kind of attack upon personhood should not be happening to white people—the long history of systematically denying ontological security to Black folks recontextualizes the conflicts that occur in buppie horror. Put differently, buppie horror stages contests in which the promise of projecting oneself through time runs headlong into the realities of an anti-Black world where ontological security for Black folks has been undermined or outrightly obliterated. In the following discussion, I examine the recent cycle of buppie horror, with a particular focus on those with common authorial strains. More specifically, I am interested in stories penned by the screenwriter David Loughery and the Black writer-director Deon Taylor because their films demonstrate some of the subgenre’s major thematic concerns and display an emphatic preoccupation with work/labor as a central axis around which horror revolves. I argue that through a series of complex representational ironies and reversals,

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

153

buppie horror stages heavily racialized, gendered, psychosexual, and classed conflicts that signal a broader anxiety about Black upward mobility. Over and over again, these films suggest that Black pursuit of ontological security through “respectable” corporate or other white-collar labor must be challenged, often in life-or-death terms. Furthermore, even when these films end in successful defenses of self, family, and property, the persistent restaging of the contest for the classically conceived bourgeois American dream unveils the tenuousness of that dream for Black folks. Buppie horror seems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.

Domesticity Interrupted Although Lakeview Terrace and Obsessed do not lend themselves to the more commonly accepted claim to auteur analysis by sharing the same director, both films credit David Loughery as screenwriter. In this sense, Loughery serves, somewhat problematically, as a chief architect of a subgenre that hails Black audiences in deliberate ways. Loughery’s buppie horror films seem to oscillate along a spectrum between openly acknowledging race as a crucial aspect of the contest for ontological security and, in other cases, addressing race only through more subtle formal and narratological codes. As an archetype, Lakeview Terrace sits in the former register, but it does so through a peculiar series of representational reversals that try to subvert audience expectations about racial power relations. The film opens with wide establishing shots of a California suburb. Over these shots, we overhear a radio broadcast that mentions the encroaching threat of wildfires, a continual figurative and visual motif that points toward the inherent unsustainability of the utopian drive behind the American suburb: the wish for a segregated space and place wherein one gets to control who lives next door. More precisely, the wildfires seem to represent a violent rejection of suburban sprawl by the natural world, an ecological corrective to the selfish desire for spatial exclusivity. The subdivision of Lakeview Terrace might not be presented as a gated community, but it is nevertheless prefigured as a place of exclusive access and respite away from the dangers of the city, particularly for the film’s antagonist, Black police officer Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson). Following the establishing shots, the film cuts to Abel, who lies restlessly in bed listening to the aforementioned radio report. He rises to place a turned-facedown picture of him and his late wife right side up again before kneeling to pray. No further reference is ever made to his faith, so this moment feels more

154 

mikal j. gaines

like something he does out of habit or perhaps in deference to his wife’s memory. The choice to open the film this way foreshadows its manipulative play with the audience’s sympathies, a persistent narrative feature that runs throughout the larger cycle. By presenting Abel as a respectable, grieving, God-fearing Black homeowner with a preexisting claim to the neighborhood, the film introduces the interracial couple Chris (white; Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Black; Kerry Washington) as interlopers violating the peace of Abel’s suburban sanctuary. It does not take long, however, for the film to complicate this initial impression. The subsequent breakfast scene characterizes Abel, a recent widower with two children, as a firm-handed patriarch and conservative champion of Black respectability politics. He reprimands his son, Marcus (Jaishon Fisher), for wearing a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey, asserting that “we’re not advertising that guy.” This moment feels like a reference to Bryant’s temporary fall from public grace following sexual assault allegations in 2003 (Draper). Abel also insists that his teenage daughter, Celia (Regine Nehy), not use her iPod at the table, first as a matter of respect but also to limit her exposure to the corruptive forces of Black popular culture. Abel’s persistent hostility toward what he perceives as disreputable Blackness, particularly as manifested in hip-hop and R&B music, evinces itself throughout the film, figuring as a symptom of the same pathological crime he polices in the city. He later slaps Celia for talking back to him after he catches her dancing to Destiny’s Child with Lisa. And after his first confrontation with Chris, who likes to listen to rap while smoking in his car, Abel ominously affirms, “You can listen to that noise all night long, but when you wake up in the morning, you’ll still be white.” The disdain Abel shows toward Black pop culture, at least that which he interprets as lacking morality or as being easily appropriable by white guys like Chris, frames him in much the way we might expect of an older white male cop who has a Black man and a white woman interracial couple move in next door. Abel’s conservatism stems not just from his identity as police but as someone who attributes his security to an unrelenting work ethic. He later reveals in a conversation with his partner, Javier (Jay Hernandez), that after growing up facing the dangers of South Central LA, he refused to allow his children to go through the same struggles, subsequently “pulling every extra shift” and “shit detail nobody else wanted” to maintain their home in the suburbs. Abel understands himself as someone who has, above all else, worked hard to create a stable life for his family, a life that remains under constant threat from outside forces.

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

155

Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo situate Lakeview Terrace alongside other post-9/11 films that reflect the national tragedy’s consequent altered worldview, in which terroristic monsters can take the form of an “external/outside nearby threat” or “[reside] within—within our borders, communities, and selves” (51). The irony of Lakeview Terrace lies in its turning Abel into the monster of the story, a figure who should epitomize protection and authority but who instead exemplifies bigotry, insecurity, and abuse of power. When Chris and Lisa arrive to move in next door, the camera picks up Abel’s gaze as he spies on them from between the blinds of his house, an act of surveillance that supports a post-9/11 reading. He seems mildly surprised at what first appears to be a relationship between Lisa and a much older Black man, Harold (Ron Glass), but Harold turns out to be her father. Once Abel realizes that Lisa is with Chris, the white man whom he mistook for one of the movers, Abel shows disgust. Again, his obvious prejudice feels like a deliberate reversal, with him assuming, as a white man would about a Black man, that Chris could only be the help rather than Lisa’s love interest. In keeping with Loughery’s preference for slowly revealed character secrets, Abel later discloses to Chris that much of his hostility toward their relationship stems from his suspicion that his own late wife might have been having an affair with her white boss. The insult of her potential deception is doubled: by betraying him with her white boss while Abel was off working to support his family, his wife undermined his conservative belief that a strong work ethic should guarantee security, as well as any sense of Black solidarity between them. For Abel, Chris’s relationship with Lisa personifies white male privilege, and he admits to “hating” that “white boys” like Chris think they can “take whatever [they] want.” Loughery therefore presents two reversals: first by turning the cop and family man into a bigoted monster and then by having racial intolerance come from a Black man who should ostensibly be opposed to such stereotyping.1 In addition to its racial concerns, Lakeview Terrace also establishes some of the other core tropes of the contemporary Black domestic horror-thriller, many of which have been borrowed from adjacent subgenres: namely, rape-revenge, home invasion, urbanoia, and the rural Gothic. In her classic study Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol J. Clover identifies what she describes as one of horror’s most common double-axis plots, “the revenge of the woman on her rapist, and the revenge of the city on the country” (115). While the threat of rape does sometimes feature in buppie horror, it is the city-versus-country conflict to which this recent cycle owes the larger debt. Clover suggests that an economic story lies at the heart of this antagonism,

156 

mikal j. gaines

which itself veils a deeper contest between the civilized versus the primitive, with the country configured as a place where city folks no longer have recourse to the “system of supports that silently keep their privilege intact” (131). Lakeview Terrace incorporates this dynamic by marking Chris and Lisa as entitled city yuppies while ironically having Abel, a representative of the state, behave as the unevolved, resentful “redneck.” Because Abel effectively is the law corrupted, Chris and Lisa cannot engage with him on “civilized” terms any more than the protagonists in Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) or The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) can reason their way out of a violent showdown with the killers who invade their homes. Abel indicates as much when Lisa tries to berate him for striking Celia and insists he get off her property. He tauntingly replies, “Or what? You want to call the cops? Go ahead, I’ll tell you who’s on duty.” This scene works in conjunction with a later one where Chris tries to stop a loud bachelor party at Abel’s house, only to have Abel and his other cop friends emasculate and humiliate him. For most of the film, Chris and Lisa are made to feel powerless in the face of Abel’s provocations. Even before these more blatant clashes occur, though, the film does do its part to establish Chris and Lisa as entitled yuppie trespassers in Abel’s suburban oasis. As with Straw Dogs, as well as some of the other subsequent films in this recent cycle, Lakeview Terrace frames the couple’s other violations of Abel’s space (beyond their interracial relationship) in terms of politics, gender, sexuality, and class. Chris, for example, drives a Toyota Prius, perhaps the quintessential twenty-first-century liberal yuppie vehicle, which stands in stark contrast to Abel’s black pickup truck. Chris also works for a supermarket chain called Good, which he claims has “a pretty strong environmental agenda.” In one of the most consistent tropes that appear across the cycle, we also see Chris running for exercise, something presented as the exclusive purview of the yuppie protagonists. Running signals a clear class distinction: only those with jobs as part of the corporate-creative class, whose daily labor does not demand physical body work, need to run for exercise. For male yuppies and buppies in particular, running gets positioned as a feminized alternative to more manly hobbies or more demanding domestic labor that requires working with one’s hands. When Chris returns home from a run, for instance, he notices Abel working on a vintage muscle car in his driveway, a contrast that immediately calls Chris’s masculinity into question. When he tries to confront Abel about the bright security lights that stream directly into his and Lisa’s bedroom at night, Abel politely dismisses him, claiming that he has not gotten to them yet, and Chris easily backs down. The mise-en-scène situates them both in medium shot, with Abel, wearing

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

157

standard dad jeans and a dark-gray T-shirt, standing above a cowering Chris, whose white, shirtless body appears fit but soft and even delicate in comparison. As for Lisa, we never learn very much about her job beyond that she “works” from home on a computer but asserts that she “hates it” and that she is “not even getting paid.” That a Black woman occupies a position of relative privilege where her labor is not required to financially maintain the household further contrasts the couple’s comfort and mobility with Abel’s professional precarity, especially when he later gets suspended and pushed toward retirement following a lawsuit for police brutality. The most significant affront to Abel comes when he arrives home from one of his nightly neighborhood patrols to find his children watching Chris and Lisa having sex in their pool. When Abel voices his disapproval to Chris, the dialogue seems intent on having him echo the sentiments one might expect from an older white man. LaBute films the scene through a series of increasingly tight close-ups. abel: I got nothing against you, or her. LAPD, I work with all kinds. I’d lay my life down for those guys. chris: All kinds? abel: But that’s where I work. This is where I live. I’m trying to raise these kids by myself, teach them to respect themselves and the people they come from, so I don’t need you or your lady putting your bedroom scenes out here for them to see. I don’t think they’re ever going to forget that little synchronized swimming exhibition . . . me either. chris: Look Abel, I’m sorry . . . abel: Maybe there’s places where that’s okay, and maybe that’s where you ought to live. While Abel’s apparent bigotry remains reprehensible, he is nonetheless situated as the injured party, as he seems earnestly invested in raising healthy Black children in a virulently anti-Black world. Abel’s peculiar conflation of antimiscegenation and parental concern implies that Chris’s investment in Black culture ultimately remains superficial, perhaps even including the appropriation of his Black wife’s body for the purposes of fulfilling a fetishized sexual fantasy. Their exchange positions Chris, who has already demonstrated his reticence to start a family with Lisa, as a white man oblivious to his own privilege and uninterested in taking on the burdens of any true engagement with Blackness, particularly the raising of strong Black (or biracial) children. Meanwhile, Abel, his prejudices notwithstanding, appears fiercely aware and committed to taking on those burdens.

158 

mikal j. gaines

Much of the ambivalence the film creates around who should be viewed as aggrieved gets undone as the narrative moves toward a more conventional trajectory that escalates into violent conflict. Lisa gets pregnant, albeit quite problematically, by not taking her birth control despite previously agreeing with Chris to wait; Chris initially objects, but the film never addresses this as a violation of his consent. Still, once Abel puts Lisa’s and the child’s lives in danger, he represents an existential threat not just to their claim to settle peacefully in the neighborhood but to the reproductive futurity promised by their move to the suburbs. Abel solidifies his monstrousness by having one of his informants break into Chris and Lisa’s house while they all attend another neighbor’s barbecue. Even here, though, Loughery has Abel act in ways that complicate his status as a villain. When Lisa leaves the party early to return home and interrupts the burglar, both Chris and Abel rush to her aid. Abel prevents Chris from entering first and instead goes in with his gun drawn. It is another moment where Chris seems like the less manly of the two. To cover his tracks, Abel shoots his informant before he can be caught or questioned. Interestingly, Abel appears to have legitimate concerns that he has let his petty jealousies and insecurities make him cross one of his own moral redlines, and he also seems relieved that Lisa was not more seriously hurt. Yet the undergirding logic of the subgenre demands that the conflict end with its monster being punished. Lakeview Terrace enacts Abel’s punishment in the final act through a series of ironic turns. With Lisa having been minorly injured during the break-in, she and Chris return home from the hospital to discover that they need to evacuate from the approaching wildfires. One of the film’s most arresting images features Abel in long shot, spraying the roof of his house with water as clouds of black smoke from the fires overwhelm the background of the frame; it’s the clearest symbol that his hope to preserve his suburban paradise is futile. Although Chris has come to thank Abel for saving Lisa, he discovers the burglar’s cell phone still in the house, with Abel as the last caller. The film ends with Chris appearing to find his manhood and take on the role of patriarchal protector, obtaining a gun and instigating a standoff between him, Abel, and the police. Most significantly, Chris manages to best Abel not with brute force but rather through measured psychological manipulation. He questions whether Abel ever truly listened to his late wife, implying that he was so concerned with working to achieve their own respectable Black bourgeois status that he ignored her needs and is subsequently responsible for both her affair and her death. This pointed accusation enrages Abel, prompting him to draw his gun, thereby triggering a hail of bullets from the police. Not only does the narrative punish Abel, but it does so in the most

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

159

ironic way possible, with a conservative Black cop killed by other police in his own failed suburban utopia. Ultimately, Lakeview Terrace uses its elaborate series of representational reversals to lay bare the underlying racial, gender, class, and psychosexual concerns that animate the buppie horror subgenre. Loughery’s narrative and dialogue work in conjunction with formal horror syntax to subvert audience expectations by having not just a Black man but a Black cop give voice to conservative social views, open hostility toward interracial relationships, and other segregationist ideologies. On the one hand, this strategy feels like an absurd and dangerous distortion of reality in a country where the development of the suburbs rested on the white desire for segregation and flight from predominantly Black inner cities. Read in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing fights to end unjust, racist policing—policing that often functions in direct service of protecting predominantly white suburbs from the perceived danger of Black invasion—Lakeview Terrace feels that much more bizarre. At the same time, these almost satirical reversals suggest that the classical binary oppositions proposed by scholars such as Wood and Clover (normality versus monstrosity, city versus country, yuppie versus redneck, settler versus native, victim versus oppressor) operate less as fixed ideological or political positions in this subgenre than as adaptable representational codes. Buppie horror deliberately plays with those codes, revealing not that the oppositions are simply relative, or that the violence that accompanies their articulation does not have real consequences, but that the terms themselves only gain legibility and power through their narrativization.

Making the White Woman Monster Released just a year after Lakeview Terrace, Obsessed represents the other end of Loughery’s buppie horror spectrum in that it simultaneously avoids any explicit mention of race while relying directly on racialized casting to articulate its politics. More specifically, Obsessed rearticulates buppie horror’s main conflict as one between the bourgeois Black family unit and a sinister white temptress who threatens to destroy it. Thus, not only does the Other quite literally take the form of “the other woman,” but she becomes symbolic of a uniquely horrific and dangerous brand of white female monstrosity: one that contradicts historical constructions of sanctified white womanhood. Moreover, the film evidences the subgenre’s tendency toward ironic turnabout in that its silence around race actually amplifies its role as

160 

mikal j. gaines

a structuring narrative apparatus. Obsessed therefore serves as an important twin archetype in the buppie horror subgenre because it demonstrates that whether explicitly addressed or encoded more subtly, questions about Black mobility, agency, and futurity remain paramount. It would be virtually impossible to discuss Obsessed without recognizing its obvious link to films in the earlier cycle. In his review for the New York Times, Stephen Holden called it “a clanking, low-rent imitation of ‘Fatal Attraction.’” One could argue that the earlier film does partly indict its male protagonist, Dan (Michael Douglas), for participating in an actual affair with another woman, Alex (Glenn Close). In Obsessed, on the other hand, the “crazy” other woman comes off as merely unstable and lacking any substantive characterization that would account for her obsessive behavior. The story features a buppie couple, Derek (Idris Elba) and Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter), along with their infant son, Kyle, who find themselves beset by the irrational and increasingly invasive advances of a white temp secretary, Lisa (Ali Larter), working at Derek’s corporate office. Beyond Derek’s being perhaps a bit too polite toward her, little in the narrative justifies Lisa’s obsession with him or her escalating attempts to disrupt their family, including throwing herself at Derek while he is in the men’s room during a company Christmas party, sneaking into his car while adorned in a trench coat and lingerie, attempting suicide in Derek’s hotel room during a business conference, and briefly kidnapping Kyle. At the film’s climax, Lisa breaks into their house while she believes the couple will be away on a trip, so that she can try on one of Derek’s old football jerseys and roll around in the marital bed while imagining herself as his wife. When Sharon unexpectedly returns to find her in the house, she can only remark that Lisa is “completely delusional.” As with Lakeview Terrace, though, the final scenes pit the yuppies against the threatening Other, and in this case, the matriarch Sharon and her wannabe usurper Lisa engage in a life-or-death struggle for the future of the Black nuclear family. The one-on-one nature of their final fight feels significant for several reasons. First, Derek, who has served as the main source of Lisa’s fixation, is effectively removed from the narrative. Unlike Lakeview Terrace, with all its concern about turning the effeminate white male yuppie Chris into a real man who can defend his wife and unborn child, Obsessed presents the ultimate contest over the family’s future as a battle between a Black matriarch and her would-be usurper. It is a move that feels strange in part because so much of the narrative up to this point has hinged on Derek avoiding Lisa’s seduction attempts and atoning for not having been completely honest

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

161

with Sharon about her advances sooner. In the end, protection of the home becomes a form of “woman’s work” that only Sharon can perform. The individual nature of the showdown also seems significant in that it reifies the protagonists’ persistent lack of extended family in most films in the cycle. For example, although we are introduced to Lisa’s father in Lakeview Terrace, he remains largely absent during important moments in the story and is nowhere to be found during the last act once things really escalate. In Obsessed, we never even meet Derek’s or Sharon’s parents, other extended family, or friends. The broader implication would seem to be that buppie identity demands a separation from larger Black kinship networks, that the cost of achieving the American dream gets paid through a commitment to post-9/11 individualism that dictates that, as Bloodsworth-Lugo and LugoLugo argue, “white Americans are on their own” (55). Thus, if Sharon and Derek hope to secure a life normally only possible through white privilege, they must accept a similar logic of self-sufficient isolationism. Moreover, they must ironically shed the veneer of civilized, assimilationist pacifism, really the performance of double consciousness, that engenders limited forms of Black advancement in white institutional structures in favor of a more virulent “us versus them” mentality, at least until the threat has been vanquished. This is to say that even as Sharon slips into a Black vernacular during the fight with Lisa, claiming that she’s going to “beat [her] skinny ass,” the violence she performs functions in much the same way it would if she were Patty Palmer (Melanie Griffith), the white woman protagonist of Pacific Heights, who similarly takes the lead as the active agent after her husband gets disabled. Both narratives grant their women protagonists the agency and permission to turn “primitive” so long as it happens in service of protecting their homes and families. Sharon does manage to fend off Lisa’s efforts to undermine her and Derek’s family harmony, at first through sheer physical dominance but then, like Chris in Lakeview Terrace, through her ingenuity. She tricks Lisa into falling through a hole in the attic floor. Lisa not only plummets several feet through a glass table but has a giant chandelier crash on top of her to finish the job. With Sharon’s labor complete, the film ends in a successful defense of the domestic space and with the buppie family intact. Holden asserts that “unlike the mousy, demure spouse played by Anne Archer in [Fatal Attraction], Sharon is a pro-active woman warrior, to put it mildly.” I would argue that what Holden characterizes as Sharon’s “warrior” status is really code for how Obsessed manages to amplify the film’s racial politics through their occlusion. In fact, as I indicated, the film features no explicit mention of race

162 

mikal j. gaines

at all. Such a seemingly deliberate avoidance of the reality that Derek has risen to the top of his company as a Black man despite whatever obstacles he might have encountered, particularly systemic racism in the corporate world, feels much like an overwrought gesture to make race appear incidental to the characters’ upper-class lifestyle. But this silence isn’t to be trusted. The casting of the Black heartthrob Elba, who was already well known from his role as Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire (2002–2008) and would later be crowned People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2018, as well as Knowles-Carter, who had recently married the rapper-mogul Jay-Z and was already one of the biggest pop stars in the world in her own right, functions as an obvious hail to Black spectators and perhaps to Black women spectators specifically. To then have even the fantasized version of a Black super-couple come under siege by a conventionally attractive, thin, blond, white starlet like Larter, perhaps most famous for donning a whipped-cream bikini in the cult favorite Varsity Blues (Brian Robbins, 1999), signifies an unspoken but readily discernible anxiety that animates the whole film: the fear that successful Black family men are always in danger of being stolen away from their rightful place beside strong, Black “warrior” women by sexually adventurous white women. One need only consider how the logic of Obsessed recalls and possibly reframes a film like Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) as a buppie horror film. Lisa therefore need not receive any deeper characterization that would account for her obsessive behavior, because her role is almost entirely symbolic, standing in as a cipher for concern about the reproductive futurity of the Black family. One should therefore read the combination of interracial casting and strategic silence about the characters’ racial identity as operating together to create a horror film about the fear of a buppie family under threat of infiltration by a white woman. Holden draws attention to this unspoken force at work within the story at the end of his review, suggesting that “the movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends ‘Obsessed’ a distasteful taint of exploitation.” Holden’s invocation of Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder and O. J. Simpson’s subsequent trial, what Linda Williams discusses in Playing the Race Card as one of the great public racial melodramas of the last century, feels strange because beyond representing another interracial coupling, neither Elba nor Larter, nor their relationship in the film, bears any real resemblance to O. J. Simpson and the white wife he was accused of murdering. Instead, Holden seems to raise it as a clumsy shorthand for how the film is “playing the race card,” exploiting

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

163

a set of cultural taboos about interracial relationships between Black men and white women that he recognizes but cannot accurately name. As with Grant’s formulation of yuppie horror, however, Holden’s critique obscures how this subgenre, even when it introduces Black and other protagonists of color, still relies upon the construction of the white, heteronormative, nuclear family ideal as a baseline for demarcating the boundaries between normality and monstrosity. If Obsessed does indeed exhibit the “distasteful taint” of something, it seems related less to exploiting the fear surrounding Black male violations of sanctified white womanhood (as embodied by the Simpson case) than to an uncomfortable laying bare of central presumptions about how Americans conceptualize the right to ontological security: that the rights holders will typically be white and that they are therefore justified in acting violently to secure their own safety. I would contend, then, that Obsessed is no more exploitative than any other film in either cycle, and it perhaps only feels that way because of its coterminous omission of and dependence on racial politics inherent to the subgenre more broadly.

New Horror, Old Work As its title suggests, Deon Taylor’s Traffik concerns modern-day human trafficking, and although it might not initially appear to fit within the buppie horror categorization, it exhibits several of the formulaic elements. The film also serves as an important touchstone in the subgenre’s broader development, given the ways that Taylor seems to have adapted elements of Loughery’s style and syntax. Although the pair would go on to collaborate on other films in the cycle, including The Intruder and Fatale, Traffik stands out both because of how Taylor expands its scope to consider larger societal ills and because of the direct connections his film makes between race, class, gender, and labor. Like the films already discussed, both the narrative and the mise-en-scène of Traffik situate the protagonists, Brea (Paula Patton) and John (Omar Epps), as Black urban professionals with successful careers in Sacramento, California. Brea works as a reporter for a major newspaper and John as a mechanic. Brea is introduced in a tracking shot as she completes her morning run, and we hear John wish her a happy birthday in a phone message voiceover. Things quickly turn when she then learns that her story about systemic corruption has been scooped by a white male reporter. Her boss intimates that her inability to focus on a simply told story may be putting her career in jeopardy. Thus, a film that will go on to critique the horrific nature of human

164 

mikal j. gaines

trafficking and, by implication, the horrific labor that trafficking victims will be forced into, begins with the horror of potential job loss. John’s job as a mechanic should in theory make him less professionally secure, but as the couple prepares to leave for a weekend getaway (during which John plans to propose), he gifts Brea her “dream car,” a restored ’69 Chevy Chevelle that he “rebuilt from the frame up.” The extravagance of the gift he has built implies that he is no ordinary mechanic but rather one with extraordinary skills who likely services higher-end clients. Their buppie social status gets both questioned and reinforced by a dinner scene at a fine-dining restaurant with their friends Darren (Laz Alonso) and Malia (Roselyn Sanchez), the former of whom works as a high-powered sports agent. After interrupting their conversation with a phone call from one of his clients, Darren remarks to Brea, “Life would be so much simpler if we just had simple jobs. Like you, John. Mechanic. How much more simple can that get? You got one piece. You got another piece. You put ’em together, you put some oil and shit on ’em, and you’re good to go. Nah mean? Simple.” Brea quickly jumps to John’s defense, claiming that she “couldn’t imagine doing” something as complicated as building cars, calling his work “impressive.” In a negative review for Variety, Andrew Barker dismisses most of this dinner table debate as irrelevant, claiming that “roughly a quarter of this information will have any bearing at all on what comes next.” I would disagree in that this scene is one of several that express anxiety surrounding different forms of work along an ethical spectrum, with human trafficking, the work of trading enslaved people, occupying the extreme negative against which all other forms of labor are judged. Darren’s condescension infers that laboring in a working-class trade, rather than in white-collar professions from which Black folks have often been excluded and where they face unique systemic challenges, should necessarily make John’s life easier to navigate both practically and ethically. Meanwhile, Brea’s stern defense of the unappreciated complexity, talent, and discipline required to do trade work well signals an attempt to validate the hidden genius in Black skilled labor. And yet only Brea’s shrewdness as a journalist, along with her willingness to become as violent as her would-be captors, proves successful in restoring justice in the end. John dies nobly defending her, while Darren, who seems modeled after the infamously ineffective negotiator Ellis (Hart Bochner) from Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), gets executed trying to talk his way out of their confrontation with the traffickers. Barker’s review reflects a critical consensus about Traffik’s attempts to deal with such a serious subject by using horror tropes: “Noble intentions

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

165

are derailed by deeply confused execution . . . which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.” I am interested precisely in Taylor’s “confused execution,” not just in terms of how the film makes obvious (and admittedly inelegant) connections between modern-day human trafficking and the transatlantic slave trade, but in how its attempts to do so operate in tandem and in tension with the tropes of the domestic horror-thriller as well as other subgenres, namely backwoods horror and the captivity narrative. Critics like Barker seem to misunderstand the ideological work of buppie horror, with all its allegedly exploitative tendencies, as operating at cross-purposes with the more meaningful social commentary offered by a more “serious” drama. But as Clover points out, the most exploitative horror subgenres offer some of the best distilled articulations of the same politics at work in more mainstream film (20). Brea and John’s weekend getaway to an isolated luxury vacation home (owned by Darren’s agency) marks a symbolic move in accordance with Clover’s city-versus-country axis. And if Clover is right that the city always goes to the country guilty, their journey marks the trespass of city “haves” into the realm of country “have-nots” (Clover 128–129). A confrontation with a group of surly white bikers at a gas station, who we later discover work as slave traders for a trafficking ring and who threaten Brea and John’s domestic future, plays very much like a variation on the first contact with the “hillbilly” monsters so common in backwoods horror. As in Lakeview Terrace, the confrontation between one of the bikers, Scoot (Scott Anthony Leet), and John hinges on a dual racial reversal, situating John as both a city boy who thinks he is better than the low-class country folk but also as an “uppity Negro” who dares to condescend to white men offended by his apparent success: scoot: Now that is a hot rod. Sweet ride, smoking piece of ass in the store—you a ball player? john: Nah. scoot: Come on, who you play for? john: Nobody, I’m just a regular dude. scoot: What is she, a ’68? john: ’69. scoot: What’d you pay for her? john: Nothing. I built her myself. scoot: Where’d you learn that? The prison auto shop? That’s awesome.

166 

mikal j. gaines

john: Yo, look, man, I’m just trying to enjoy the day. Not looking for any trouble. scoot: Trouble? I’m a problem for you, is that it? Big bad biker, long hair and tats, can’t hold polite fucking conversation, is that about the size of it? I’ll tell you what, as a token of my appreciation for your racial profiling and snooty fucking attitude, here’s a little something to remember me by. Scoot then proceeds to spit on the Chevelle, and John punches him. Before the fight can escalate, a white woman sheriff, Sally Marnes (Missi Pyle), arrives warning the bikers not to disrupt the peace of her “small town.” Her intervention here proves ironic as she, too, is later revealed as an accomplice in the trafficking ring. It would not be a stretch to assume that Taylor intended to portray white women as equally complicit in perpetuating unjust systems. I am most struck, though, by the way Taylor’s dialogue between John and Scoot mimics the racial reversal of Abel and Chris’s conversation in Lakeview Terrace in that we hear a sense of aggrieved entitlement and an appropriation of the language of racial injury articulated from the opposite of where we might expect it. Here it makes more sense, though, particularly if we consider the long history of white resentment directed toward Black folks, who despite the obstacles of white supremacy, have still managed to secure a modicum of financial stability. Traffik’s narrative logic therefore depends on a juxtaposition of buppie achievement and upward class mobility against human trafficking, which the film presents as the exclusive purview of low-class, country white men working in coordination with white law enforcement. Much of the rest of the film plays like a combination of a home-invasion story and a backwoods-horror captivity narrative, with more than a few callbacks to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). The contest leaves Brea and Malia as the only survivors, with the former taking on the role of “Final Girl.”2 Ultimately, Brea manages not only to kill some of her captors but to outwit the white woman sheriff by calling in the state police. During their final showdown, in which the sheriff both insults Brea for being a “big-city journalist” who “thinks she’s so fucking smart” and tries to justify her own complicity by claiming that she is “just a part of a system that already exists,” Brea challenges her semantical displacement, asserting that she should just call the practice what it is: slavery. Brea’s calling the sheriff a “traitor” to other women also then plays as a double entendre, marking the sheriff just as much of a slave “trader” as her male coworkers. This scene resonates with an earlier montage where Brea is temporarily taken

racing work and working race in buppie horror 

167

captive and during which Taylor deploys Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” as nondiegetic score music. His inclusion of the song metonymically links Black bodily disposability, as crystalized in the history of American lynching, to stand in for all forms of dehumanization that turn the body into a commodity, especially modern-day human trafficking. Trading in bodies, the film suggests, is the most horrific labor one can do.

Looking Forward through Buppie Horror and Beyond The persistence of buppie horror shows little sign of slowing, and it has already proven more durable than the earlier yuppie horror cycle by a considerable margin. What I hope this analysis has demonstrated is how buppie horror borrows much of its vocabulary from various other established horror subgenres while also appropriating classic horror tropes and conventions to offer its own unique social and cultural commentary. At least two potentially compelling lines of future inquiry present themselves. Down one road lies a more comprehensive investigation of other films in this recent cycle, several of which offer just as interesting opportunities for thinking through the anxieties surrounding the Black pursuit of ontological security. Down the other (and probably more labyrinthine) path awaits a more fundamental rethinking of what we know about the rhetoric of horror itself. For if the oppositional poles that have long been understood as governing the structure of the genre (e.g., normality versus monstrosity) are not essential positions but instead unstable and situational identities that find coherence through the act of storytelling itself, then studying these stories helps us to understand the work of race and the racing of work in other discursive fields, from law and politics to history and popular culture.

Notes 1. The second reversal that situates a corrupt policeman as the villain is not a wholly new one in this subgenre, with Unlawful Entry (Jonathan Kaplan, 1992) and Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990) serving as important precursors. 2. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak recognize Brea as well as Shaun (Gabrielle Union) from Breaking In (James McTeigue, 2018) as Black Final Girls in their recent edited collection. But it is worth noting that they mistakenly list a white woman, Christine (Priscilla Quintana), as the protag-

168 

mikal j. gaines

onist of Traffik even though this character only appears in the opening of the film as a cautionary tale about how easily women can be taken into captivity. This error bespeaks the ways in which buppie horror has not been given its just due as complicating racial representation in horror. See the introduction of Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, p. 7.

Works Cited Barker, Andrew. “Film Review: Traffik.” Variety, 20 Apr. 2018, https://variety​ .com/2018/film/reviews/film-review-traffik-1202768334/. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Mary K., and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Projecting 9/11: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Recent Hollywood Films. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1993. Cuevas, Ofelia O. “Welcome to My Cell: Housing and Race in the Mirror of American Democracy.” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 2012, pp. 605–624. Draper, Kevin. “Kobe Bryant and the Sexual Assault Case That Was Dropped but Not Forgotten.” New York Times, 27 Jan. 2020, https://www.nytimes​ .com/2020/01/27/ sports/basketball/kobe-bryant-rape-case.html. Grant, Barry Keith. “Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 4–16. Holden, Stephen. “Happily Married, but Still a Stalker’s Perfect Target.” New York Times, 24 Apr. 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies​ /25obse.html. Lakeview Terrace. Directed by Neil LaBute, Sony Pictures, 2008. Meeuf, Russell. White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump. Indiana UP, 2022. Obsessed. Directed by Steve Shill, Sony Pictures, 2009. Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, and Stacy Rusnak, editors. Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State U of New York P, 1997. Traffik. Directed by Deon Taylor, Lionsgate, 2018. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton UP, 2001. Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s.” Horror, the Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 25–32.

CHAPTER 9

THE HORROR OF STAGNATION; OR, THE PERSPECTIVAL DREAD OF IT FOLLOWS Joel Burges

1 There are not many good jobs left in It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014). Among the jobs characters do on-screen, we see an organist at an old movie theater, a college literature instructor, high school administrative staff, yogurt and ice cream parlor servers, police officers, sex workers, and nurses, doctors, and medical technicians in the greater Detroit metropolitan area, where the film primarily takes place. Similar jobs occur in the off-screen spaces of the film, especially food service work. All of these jobs constitute the content of what is, according to Adam Lowenstein, the most important spatial form of It Follows: a “landscape where human presence is subtracted” in “a depressed and depopulated Detroit” (358, 365). Lowenstein’s view is more existential than economic in accounting for what he calls “the spatiality of horror” (367). But the on- and off-screen jobs listed stress how economic this spatiality is. They reveal that this landscape is a landscape of labor, one that has undergone an epochal shift from the more secure market of mid-twentieth-century Detroit to unstable ground, especially for, as the film tends to figure it, the white working and middle classes that once found prosperity, security, and mobility through their jobs. In making this landscape of labor the setting of It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, the film’s writer and director, tunes in to the economic present by turning to the cinematic past to tell a contemporary story that reworks the stalker cycles of the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g., the Friday the 13th franchise) and the late 1990s and early 2000s (e.g., the Scream franchise). It Follows centers on a young woman who is, in keeping with the slasher film’s habit of giving “boyish” names to female characters (Clover 40), 169

170 

joel burges

androgynously named Jay. After a sexual encounter with a young man, Jay finds herself infected by “It,” which tracks her across the Detroit area that functions as the “Terrible Place” that Carol Clover describes as “a venerable element” of the slasher film (30). Just as Michael Myers stalks Laurie Strode in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), an obvious influence on It Follows, the entity follows Jay with the singular purpose of killing her solely because It has been transmitted to her sexually—sexual transgression also being a convention of the slasher film, especially the first cycle, in which having sex almost inevitably leads to getting killed (Clover 32–35). While It is singularly motivated to kill Jay for much of the film, It possesses multiple bodies in the course of following her and has killed many victims prior to her. This departs from the tendency of slasher films to have one killer, sometimes two, but rarely the seemingly infinite number that arise in It Follows. Where once there was one killer and many victims, now there are many killers and many victims.1 This departure is significant because when viewed more systematically, there is a finite quality to It, even as It multiplies across generations and genders, abandoning the masculine position of the one killer in earlier films to become a racially marked class formation. The many bodies It possesses belong to those white working and middle classes now in a landscape of labor, from Pittsburgh to Rochester to Detroit, that is no longer normatively characterized by well-paid work. What workers encounter in this landscape of labor, and what stalks Jay in her encounters with It, is the horror of stagnation that defines nothing less than the entire capitalist world at present. In what follows, the horror of stagnation is both economic and cultural. Economically, it refers to a material reality in which contemporary laborers find themselves stalked by class morbidity because of a totality of interrelated conditions, such as wage stagnation and suppression, chronic underemployment, informal employment, on-the-job disciplining through the double threats of termination and technological surveillance, and demographic dispossession for a worldwide proletariat increasingly dogged by wageless life. These interrelated conditions develop out of what scholars often call “secular stagnation,” where “secular” refers to a long-term tendency rather than a cyclical process.2 A determinant force in It Follows, this long-term tendency involves the deceleration of economic growth that has occurred on a global scale for decades, especially because of both industrial overcapacity within identical lines of production and the absence of any new lines to reinvigorate the world economy. At the same time, as Jason  E. Smith has explored, manufacturing industries have shed workers employed in productive labor, pushing more and more people into unproductive forms

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

171

of employment of the kind represented in It Follows. These exert a drag on the overall profitability of the global economy; capital abhors this drag even as it embraces unproductive labor (Smith 92–113). This situation results in prosperity, security, and mobility losing ground to precarity, insecurity, and morbidity. This situation results, in short, in the horror of stagnation. Culturally, the horror of stagnation has become a genre in its own right in the early twenty-first century, examples of which include Stranger Things (Matt and Ross Duffer, 2016–) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013). Both register the horror of stagnation in its economic sense by drawing on the cultural history of the horror genre. It Follows joins the Duffer Brothers series and the Jarmusch film when it reworks the cultural past it takes up, especially the perspectival systems of earlier stalker films. This reworking occurs around a white working and middle class morbidly divided against itself as it faces It, such that dread overwhelms the film’s perspectival system, mediating the horror of stagnation in its economic sense. A collective and conflicted experience of race and class thus structures It Follows more than in earlier stalker cycles. This emphasis locates the film in what Sarah Brouillette, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan have described as the “cultures of secular stagnation” at the center of contemporary economic life (325). In those cultures, It Follows provides a prescient account of the horror of stagnation far from more nostalgic responses to it.

2 Dread is slow. Its pace is near stagnant. Its menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents. While that menace feels like an anxious possibility of the future, ahead of you, its slow pace signals that this future is omnipresent too, all around you right now, perhaps following you from behind. By the time you experience this feeling, the object of your dread appears to have caught up to you. Dread is an imminence that has already arrived in the moment you perceive that the cause of this feeling is both profoundly and obscurely on its way. But despite its arrival, that imminence nonetheless often remains beyond the threshold of your immediate perception. So you wait for that threshold to be crossed and the menace to become clear. When it does—if it does—a faster-moving fear and the suddenness of terror overtake you. But dread is not that fear or terror. It is the panicked waiting and vigilant watching that precede the terror that has seized you. Scenes of dread, not surprisingly, often shape the horror genre. Picking

172 

joel burges

up on an unfinished thought in Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, Cynthia Freedman describes “art-dread” as an imaginative mode of cognitive abstraction in horror, an “a-rational” mood “looser and less focused” than fear, but the obscure cause of which is vaster, more profound, if inaccessible, than objects that stir anxiety (191, 192, 195). Slow and steady in its rhythms, vague and vast in its horizons, dread is not generally understood, however, to be the dominant affect of the earlier stalker cycles to which It Follows is indebted. Freedman’s central examples are The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), and Signs (M. Night Shyamalan, 2002), all narratively and tonally distant from a Halloween or a Scream. This is because the latter pivot instead around shock and fear, around our disgust at the punishing violence of the killers and our alarm at the abject terror of their victims (Clover 41–42). The baleful quality of dread does materialize in the buildup to the shock and fear that erupt in the inevitable series of murders and mutilations that organize the films’ plots. But dread pervades It Follows with such force that it constitutes a transformation of that affect in the slasher film. It assumes this force for two reasons: it is more cinematically formed and more collectively figured. Mitchell’s film develops a perspectival system in which dread is never sutured to this or that individual’s point of view such that some subjectivity is conferred upon our experience of dread. Dread is instead both affectively inhuman and collectively diffused by way of two non–points of view that never resolve into one another. Form and figure in turn, the non–points of view articulate the perspectival dread of It Follows in a way that mediates the horror of stagnation. The first of these non–points of view arises out of the technique for which It Follows is best known: a 360-degree camera rotation, the repeated use of which is central to making dread the dominant affect of the film through a form that disturbingly liberates this feeling from anyone in particular. Consider the opening sequence, which positions us in the conventional world of the slasher film by starting with a half-dressed young white woman on a suburban street fleeing an unseen entity. Far less conventional, however, is the way the camera rotates in a relatively slow-moving long take. The take begins with a shot of the suburban street, the camera panning about 90 degrees when the young woman runs out of her house. The camera then advances another 90 degrees in a clockwise motion, pausing for a moment with the young woman when she stands still in the middle of the street before moving again once she runs full circle back into her house. When she does, the camera begins to double its rotation by passing its starting point. But the camera turns steadily back, moving counterclockwise as she rushes

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

173

out of her house a second time to get into a car. The film cuts to the car’s interior after another 90-degree movement. But the cut does not attribute the 360-degree camera movement to her perspective: it follows her, but it does not feel subjectively motivated by her. This lack of subjectivity is emphasized by the allusion to the opening of Halloween (1978). John Carpenter’s film begins similarly with an unconventional perspectival form: what was at the time the not-yet-cliché use of first-person camera that would later become normative in slasher films (Clover 185–186; Dika 33–44). But where that “I-camera,” as Clover calls it, is ultimately motivated by the character of six-year-old Michael Myers stabbing his naked sister to death after she has sex at the beginning of Halloween, no one causes the 360-degree rotation in It Follows. That this technique is autonomous of any character’s point of view is elaborated in a later scene that repeats the 360-degree camera movement. Jay and her neighbor Greg visit a suburban high school to gather information on the young man—who used the alias Hugh while dating Jay but whose real name is Jeff—who infected Jay with It earlier. The visit is filmed similarly to the opening sequence. But this time, the encircling of the mise-en-scène occurs in an elongated take of 720 degrees that has almost nothing to do with the characters’ actions as it rotates 360 degrees twice. In another scene, the inhuman autonomy of this non–point of view is reinforced by the interruption of its encircling presence by far more traditional point-of-view shots, especially shot/reverse shots grounded in Jay’s terrified perspective. In this scene, Jay encounters It for the first time on her own after Hugh/Jeff infects her. During a college literature class, the camera pans counterclockwise until it is interrupted after about 180 degrees by a more conventional shot of Jay gazing out of the classroom windows. Echoing the moment in Halloween when Laurie sees Michael outside her high school during class, this interruption yields a shot/reverse shot sequence in which Jay sees an elderly woman in a white nightgown approaching her from across campus. The shift into shot/reverse shot intensifies with a further interruption in which Greg, also in the literature class, stares at Jay as her panic visibly grows, her chest moving rapidly up and down, before the film cuts back to a fourth and final shot/reverse shot between Jay and It. The increased rhythm of Jay’s breathing is like the increased editorial rhythm that the technique of shot/reverse shot introduces into this scene over and against the steadier, slower rotational movement of the camera with which it began. Terrified as she realizes that the elderly woman is It, if in a different body than the one she saw after her initial infection, Jay runs out of the classroom. The camera resumes its 360-degree rotation in response but is interrupted again when

174 

joel burges

she bursts through the classroom door into the hallway. Once she is in the hall, the colliding rhythms—the durational cadence of the encircling camera, the swifter pace of the shot/reverse shot—converge. A clockwise 360-degree rotation begins again as Jay flees through the hallway, moving around its corners as she looks for the elderly female It until the entity appears behind her. Looking over her shoulder in a subjectively marked point-of-view shot that It never gets, the camera shifts into Jay’s perspective and triggers another set of shot/reverse shots between her and It. These soon culminate in an over-the-shoulder shot of Jay transfixed by the elderly woman just before Jay exits the building at a pace faster than It ever goes. Throughout this scene, the camera moves independently of a character’s point of view, clarifying the nonsubjective autonomy of its protracted rotation by interrupting its movement with the shot/reverse shots. It is in this sense that the 360-degree camera movement in It Follows is a non–point of view: a form that disorients our experience of cinematic space and time by refusing us the orienting perspective of a character and embracing the inhuman negation of human perspective. This is a form that refuses, in other words, to suture us to a subject—a way of describing It Follows that resumes the older theoretical framework of suture theory. Given the significance of that framework to accounts of horror cinema, especially slasher films such as Halloween and their famous progenitor Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), returning to it here allows me to grapple with the more cinematically formed status of dread in It Follows, with how this first non–point of view places dread at the nonsubjective center of the film. “Suture,” writes Kaja Silverman, “is the name given to the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity on their viewers” (195). This conferral of subjectivity happens through two processes: identification, or when viewers identify with a fictional character in a film, and enunciation, or the techniques by which that identification is articulated such that viewing subjects feel as if they are within the fictional world of a film (199). In theories of suture, shot/reverse shot sequences of the kind in the classroom sequence I discussed are paradigmatic of this dual process of engendering subjectivity for spectators. They offer a form of editing that both locates and dislocates viewing subjects as shots alternate between the points of view of two characters interacting. Suture is thus structured by a “castrating coherence” founded in the viewing subjects’ “willingness to become absent to [themselves] by permitting a fictional character to ‘stand in’ for [them], or by allowing a particular point of view to define what” they see (205). In this model of cinematic signification, spectators permit their own point of view to be displaced in order to cope with what, as Silverman notes, Jean-Pierre

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

175

Oudart calls the “Absent One.” The Absent One refers to “a controlling gaze outside the fiction” that is, ultimately, the cinematic apparatus. As the Absent One, the apparatus possesses “all the attributes of the mythically potent symbolic father: potency, transcendental vision, self-sufficiency, and discursive power,” producing the fantasy that we are actively seeing, when we are actually being coerced to witness a world passively (Silverman 204). The 360-degree rotations in It Follows are so striking because they are defined not by the conferral of subjectivity but by the counteracting of it. As the camera inhumanly turns and turns, we wait and watch for a subjectivity to be conferred upon its motion, but it never is. This form—fundamentally subtractive, to follow Lowenstein—is reinforced in the classroom scene because even though shot/reverse shot sequences tempt us with the subjectivities of Greg and Jay, neither makes up for the Absent One. Neither compensates for an apparatus without a subject. The plenitude of the camera turning and turning instead gives way to the finitude of (not) being, as in the shot with which the opening sequence of the film culminates: an image of the half-dressed young woman lying dead on a beach, her limbs broken and contorted like a sculpture, the violent making of which has been withheld from us. No other image could better punctuate how the 360-degree rotation that leads to it is stripped of subjectivity, our experience of the film organized by a non–point of view in which the Absent One is overwhelmingly, paradoxically present. The refusal to conceal the Absent One is arguably a powerful instance of the castration anxiety that the viewing subject, often conceived as prototypically masculine in suture theory, is said to experience in the face of a female body that displays its phallic lack in the way the half-dressed young woman in It Follows does before she is murdered and the sister of Michael Myers does just before she is stabbed to death in Halloween. These bodies are the wellspring of what Vera Dika once called, echoing Silverman’s extended reading of Psycho, an “unconscious male conflict” (43), engendered by a perspectival system that is, in Clover’s related argument, magnetized by the “assaultive gaze” of the masculine killer and the “reactive gaze” of the feminine victim (181–205). As figure 9.1 shows, these two gazes involve us in a drama of gendered affects in the slasher film, moving us between shock at the punishing violence of the assaultive gaze and the fear embodied by the reactive gaze. This movement from shock to fear ultimately reveals, as Clover famously claims, the masochistic pleasures of being feminized for the male moviegoer commonly assumed to be addressed by this subgenre (209–233). But the overwhelming and paradoxical presence of the Absent One in the non–point of view of It Follows never feels castrating nor, as Lowenstein notes, “motivated by the killer[’s] or the victim’s perceptual vantage point, as

176 

joel burges

is common practice in slasher films” (363). It instead feels as if It Follows is drawing dread out of the background of the slasher film. If It Follows is borrowing any vantage point from slasher films in the camera’s rotations, then it is that of the more objective shots, often mobile and durative, that follow characters in less eventful moments in a film such as Halloween. The most memorable of these types of moments occur when the teenFigure 9.1. Gendered affects in the slasher film age protagonists of Halloween walk to and from high school through their suburban neighborhood in Haddonfield, Illinois; such shots recur when Jay and her friends walk around the Detroit of It Follows. According to Dika, these portentous shots often mark the killer’s presence in an “undefined,” “ubiquitous,” and “imminent” way that generates suspense (22, 54), creating dread that the killer is both on the way and already here. It is this dread that Mitchell’s film brings into the formal foreground of its perspectival system. Never sutured to a character with whom we can identify, set free of both the assaultive and reactive gazes of masculine killer and feminine victim, the 360-degree rotations give perspectival form to dread not simply as an apparatus without a subject but as an apparatus of affect without a subject, unfolding in cinematic space and time rather than perceptually focused within them. Dread thus assumes its own perspective in It Follows, taking on a more cinematically formed place in the foreground of the film through the 360-degree rotations. It not only does so because the rotations refuse us the satisfactions of suture, embracing subtraction and abstraction. It also does so because the encircling enunciates the horror of stagnation in its economic sense. Opening up a vast and vague space to a slow and steady rhythm, this non–point of view is a perspectival form in which the horror of stagnation, to channel Fredric Jameson, sediments spatially and temporally. I have already noted that the camera can encompass up to 720 degrees of space in It Follows. More significant is the time this encompassing takes: the opening rotation is almost two minutes long; the rotation crosscut with shot/reverse shots in the college

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

177

classroom and hallway is roughly three minutes long; and the rotation at Hugh/Jeff’s high school is about one and a half uninterrupted minutes. During these sometimes-torpid long takes, omnipresence and imminence temporally coincide so as to make this torpidity feel enveloping, the horror of stagnation dreadfully sedimenting at the level of form. On the one hand, the encircling inspires an experience of temporal enclosure in a stagnant present, time running in slow circles such that the characters seem trapped in an omnipresent moment from which there is no escape. On the other hand, the turning stirs an experience of temporal anticipation from within this inescapably omnipresent moment. Despite the fact that it does not feel like that moment has a future to it, the stagnant encircling nonetheless provokes a looming sense of imminence that is given its fullest form—or, rather, figuration—in whatever body the entity has possessed to follow Its victim.

3 “Whether working as home health aides in Minnesota, adjunct university lecturers in Italy, fruit vendors in Tunisia, or construction workers in India,” Aaron Benanav writes, “more and more people feel that they are stuck in place” (Automation, 63). This feeling of being stuck in place, of working multiple jobs but still feeling immobilized by class morbidity, emerges out of an increasingly universal reality for labor “in the shadow of stagnation,” as Benanav phrases it (29). That reality is the massive expansion of service work for which the pay is bad, the benefits and protections are few, and the demand is low (45–74). In the United States, race and class intersect such that this trend is worse for workers of color and workers without a college education (49). Detroit is no exception. Although one thinks of midcentury Detroit as a booming place for the working and middle classes, such that the former was economically mobile enough to access some of the prosperity and security of the latter, this was largely true for white male workers with good jobs and powerful unions whose heteropatriarchal families also benefitted from this situation. Black workers and their families were often excluded from such benefits and segregated from the expanding suburbs to which their white counterparts were moving. Such race- and class-based inequalities are entrenched in the US labor market to this day, exacerbated by the spread of bad jobs and the demobilization of unions.3 Benanav argues, however, that “what makes the United States unusual, from an international perspective, is precisely that experiences of economic precariousness diffuse throughout the workforce” (49). When dread assumes its own perspective in the 360-degree

178 

joel burges

rotations, it is the diffusion of precarity that is being registered as dreadful affect and perceptual effect of a landscape of labor disrupted by the horror of stagnation. But a second non–point of view, that of It, does more than register this horrific diffusion formally. Instead, it concretely figures the horror of stagnation as collectively diffused across a white working- and middle-class formation, the outlook of which has done an about-face historically. Attending more closely to the setting of It Follows and how characters reflect on it better reveals how the film is historically tuned in to this transformed outlook. It Follows describes a Detroit that has undergone an epochal shift. This is evident in the depictions of two spaces at the beginning and the end of the film: respectively, a defunct factory and a hospital. The factory appears early as the setting where Jay is infected with It when she has sex with Hugh/Jeff in a 1975 Plymouth Gran Fury, which was made by Chrysler, a twentieth-century giant of US manufacturing employment. Hospitals appear twice in It Follows. The second time, toward the end of the film, the hospital is filmed in a way that rhymes with the wide shots of the defunct factory earlier. But where the factory is empty, its workers all long ago discharged from their jobs, the hospital is full of doctors, nurses, and medical technicians at work in the present. This contrast historicizes the setting economically. On the one hand, the abandoned factory is a sign of the economic past that Sianne Ngai calls “a meta-image: the representation of post-Fordist, post–Golden Age, Rust Belt decline” (150). On the other hand, the hospital is a sign of the economic present. It is a new metaimage: the representation of how health care has replaced hard industry as a still-growing market of “mass low-wage private-sector employment” that “will make the healthcare sector the largest in the U.S. by 2024” (Winant 3; Smith 116). The hospitals in It Follows index an expanding care economy of service workers that, as Gabriel Winant has argued, not only attends to the well-insured but hard-hit bodies of earlier generations that worked in manufacturing but also soaks up laborers who can no longer get the jobs characterized by higher wages and stronger benefits of those earlier generations (17). Although this shift involves the creation of jobs, those jobs often embody the horror of stagnation, especially the laborious sense of being at an economic standstill. Strikingly in this respect, Jay is immobilized in both of these scenes: literally, in the wheelchair into which Hugh/Jeff straps her at the factory, and effectively, after a car accident lands her in the second hospital with a broken arm. Of course, Jay herself is not a worker, at least not yet. The central characters of the film are young adults whose relationship to labor is liminal. Much like the babysitters and camp counselors of earlier stalker cycles, they

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

179

work in part-time positions, if they work at all. Thus, Jay’s friend Paul and her sister, Kelly, work at a yogurt and ice cream parlor. This job is kin to the meta-image of the abandoned factory. It looks like the iconic labor of midcentury American youth, especially the soda jerk, who might later find better employment at a unionized workplace or as a professional of some sort. But the nostalgia for a more innocent economic past that this job evokes in, for instance, the third season of Stranger Things is ironized in It Follows not only by the setting but also by the canny awareness the teenage characters exhibit about the horror of stagnation. These teens know this job for what it is: a future of feeling stuck in place. Jay expresses this feeling in the quasi-nostalgic monologue she gives after sex with Hugh/Jeff. Recounting a childhood fantasy of going for a drive and listening to the radio with “a cute guy,” activities that evoke the automobile and music industries for which Detroit is romanticized, Jay knows that this prosperous, secure, and mobile lifestyle no longer has any material base from which to freely develop. As she wonders, just before she is rendered unconscious and immobilized in the wheelchair, “Now that we are old enough, where the hell do we go?” Kelly answers this question tacitly in a scene soon after. Asked by Paul if her mom is already asleep, Kelly tells him she is because of her work schedule. “She wakes up at five fifteen,” Kelly observes. “That would kill me.” Where they go, to answer Jay’s question more explicitly, is into jobs that seem to be both dead-end and demanding. From the historicized setting of the film to Jay’s and Kelly’s canny remarks about the constraints that setting imposes on them, It Follows locates us in a landscape of labor in which the horror of stagnation is dreadfully diffuse. There it envelops even teenagers who grasp that a city once celebrated for the economic mobility it unequally offered is now a site where they are morbidly stuck in place. The two sisters know that whatever prospects used to be accessible to young adults are as defunct as the factory where Jay is infected and immobilized. It is this situation that It figures as a non–point of view. The clearest evidence that It figures a non–point of view in the more formal terms used in the prior section is that It generates virtually no point-of-view shots despite the multiple and many bodies It possesses. The multiplied lack of point-of-view shots stands in stark contrast to the “I-camera,” to return to Clover’s phrasing, that is a major formal feature of many stalker films when it comes to articulating the killer’s masculine point of view in largely individual terms within their perspectival systems. Even in a case like Scream, where there turn out to be two killers, only one of the killers has a motive. But much like the first Halloween, It Follows is not interested in individual motives for killers. The lack of point-of-view shots is thus a formal function

180 

joel burges

of the collectively distributed status of It across a seemingly infinite number of figures that pursue Its victims for no apparent reason. The distributed figuration of It also makes for another contrast with the earlier stalker cycles. As the pronoun indexes, It has no gender. Indeed, It also has no generation, possessing any and all ages. Between Halloween and It Follows, one goes from a masculine “I” to a neither feminine nor masculine “we” or “they” that the film calls “It.” Along with the missing motivation of any individual figure, this ungendered and ageless state of transfiguration releases It from any particular point of view and abstracts It from any concrete perceptual position. The “I-camera” has become the “It-camera.” The transformation of the “I-camera” of earlier stalker cycles into the “It-camera” of It Follows suggests an identity between the figure of It and the form of the 360-degree rotations. But the film insists on their distance. Beyond their often distinctive geometries (line, circle), the film marks figure and form as nonidentical in the singular exception to the plural rule of the non–point of view of It. The third act ends with Jay and her friends going to a closed indoor pool in Detroit proper with the aim of luring It to Its death in a final confrontation. Before the entity appears as Jay’s father, It seems to generate what is arguably the one and only true point-of-view shot that It gets. We seem to be back in the “I-camera,” as It—Its current figuration as Jay’s father still concealed from us—advances through the basement below the pool. But the amount of time it takes for this point of view, if it is that, to become grounded in the figure of the father once It arrives at the pool lags enough that this fleeting moment of first-person camera for the killer still remains abstracted from any individual position. The one instance of “I-camera” for It ironically reinforces how collectively diffused the “It-camera” is as no one’s point of view. And yet this is not quite right. While It figures the point of view of no one in particular, It also figures the non–point of view of the many bodies It possesses. And despite Its transcendence of gender and generation, Its forms belong to the complexly interrelated white working and middle classes that twentieth-century Detroit did in some measure produce as a race and class formation. The whiteness of It is constant. None of the figures possessed is anything but white, and the white clothing they wear only underscores this. The film further racially marks It as white in sequences in which Jay and her friends go into Detroit proper. For example, when searching for Hugh/ Jeff, they discover that he had been living in an abandoned house in a Black neighborhood to protect himself from Its hunt. In expropriating this house and neighborhood to hide out, Hugh/Jeff suggests how becoming Its prey feels like being Black to him—and dreadfully so. Jennifer C. James writes

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

181

that “Black dread is an existential state of waiting: the anticipation of racial ‘situations,’ sometimes quotidian, often catastrophic, that Black Americans experience under racial capitalism in the necropolitical state,” including experiences of being followed (691–692). But while Hugh/Jeff may feel as if he is now suffering under this necropolitical regime, the film does not equate the threat its white characters experience in being followed by It to the Black dread that James describes. Instead, the film figures their dread as coming from within their own ranks. The sequence when they go into Detroit proper is again instructive. Throughout much of it, Black people are blurs through windows of cars and houses. They are visually and visibly segregated from the white teenagers by glass boundaries in a manner that prefigures the character Yara’s almost unbearably didactic monologue later in the film about the borders that racially segregate suburban and urban Detroit. There is one moment in which a Black man begins to come into focus, looking to Jay as if he will turn out to be It when she catches sight of him through a window in Hugh/Jeff’s hideout. But this moment is a red herring. Thus, where Hugh/Jeff racially misreads his dread, Jay racially misreads the source of the threat to her in a way that the film disallows, perhaps too subtly undercutting the racist trope of Black men preying on white women that films such as Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) variously explore and explode. In It Follows, it is as if what George Lipsitz once called “the possessive investment in whiteness” (372) is in the figure of It undergoing a possessed disinvestment racially incomprehensible to the white characters of the film. The entity, in other words, is always a version of the victims themselves, a shared figuration that extends to class as much as race. But where It is definitively white, It is less conclusively of one socioeconomic class or another. Some of the figures It assumes seem to signify a solidly middle-class lifestyle and others a more working-class one. But Its victims provide a clearer socioeconomic picture of class in the film. Jeff and Greg are depicted as belonging to white middle- to upper-middle-class families, but Jay is not. As David Church has observed, this socioeconomic difference is evident in the stuff (appliances, furniture, clothing, security systems, and fixtures) that can be found in the characters’ homes. Greg’s home is filled with newer versions of this stuff, but Jay’s overflows with the obsolete and the outmoded. As Church rightly puts it, “the past persists out of economic necessity” in It Follows (20). Despite these socioeconomic differences, the film locates the characters in the same space, the teens working together across class boundaries in a late bourgeois unity of the kind Stranger Things celebrates (Burges). Here, however, that unity is less stable than in the Duffer Brothers series, which

182 

joel burges

nostalgically embraces what Mitchell’s movie cleaves apart. The formation of white working- and middle-class characters in It Follows is morbidly divided against itself in a downward motion that stands in contrast to the upward mobility that was on offer for some of the twentieth century. In this respect, the most significant of the figures that materialize as It are Greg’s mother and Jay’s father, both of whom reveal that the non–point of view figured by It is that of this divided formation. That division is on orgiastic display when the entity manifests as Greg’s mother in a scene that ends with Greg’s death at Its hands—the only scene in which we see It kill on-screen. After Greg and Jay have sex to relieve her of Its pursuit, It eventually comes for Greg—even though he does not believe It is real—appearing as a lithe young man dressed in white pajamas whom Jay sees approaching and then breaking into Greg’s house. The young man resembles Greg, such that Jay doesn’t initially recognize It, but once inside Greg’s house, It assumes the figure of Greg’s mother in a white silken robe left open to reveal Its naked body underneath. Knocking relentlessly on Greg’s bedroom door, in an inversion of the opening of Halloween, It springs violently at Greg once he opens the door thinking It is his mother, as Jay, who has rushed in from her house across the street, watches in horror. The entity’s touch results in Greg’s immediate death, but It nonetheless keeps riding him in an undeniably libidinal way. As in many early slasher films, sex equals death. In those films, that equation indicates an unconscious male conflict around female sexual transgression that is especially punitive to women. But the calculus here is different. Sex does not so much equal death in It Follows as it configures a race and class formation divided by the horror of stagnation. While sexual activity is the medium that transmits death to Greg, what the image of his upper-middle-class mother riding him sexually and fatally as It figures is the bourgeois project of intergenerational well-being cleaving in two as the horror of stagnation dreadfully overtakes it. Such morbid and mortal figurations extend to the relations between white working-class parents and children in the film. During the scene at the indoor pool, the It that materializes as Jay’s father hurtles consumer goods at Jay as she swims: lamps, a television, a typewriter, a radio, an iron. These electronic goods are in a state of disrepair akin to the disheveled appearance of It in various states of undress. Brought by Jay and her friends to the pool in the hopes of electrocuting the entity, the accumulated junk of what perhaps used to be an upwardly mobile existence instead becomes a weapon of parent against child. Once the material signs of economic mobility, here they are signs of class morbidity, which their often dated and defunct appearance reinforces. As in Greg’s incestuous death, they are even signs of class mortality.

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

183

The entity uses them to try to kill Jay, inverting the project of increasing material well-being from one generation to the next, which was possible for the white working and middle classes following World War II in ways that are cruelly optimistic today (Berlant). As these two examples suggest, then, the non–point of view that It figures is that of a race and class formation in a state of deformation. No longer coherent, which they were only ever idealized to be, the white working and middle classes of twentieth-century modernity are fundamentally divided in It Follows. With a unified perspective no longer imaginable to these classes, the prospect of getting ahead has been displaced by the non–point of view of being followed.

4 It Follows is not alone in mediating the horror of stagnation. It is part of a wider culture of secular stagnation that registers global economic deceleration for capital and labor alike. That culture, according to Brouillette, Clover, and McClanahan, is characterized by “an ambient affect tending toward narratives and images of decline, de-development, stasis, stagnation, ill health, and morbidity” alongside “a generational fascination with images of ennui, directionlessness, and failure, paired with a real rise in depression, drug dependency, extended adolescence, and childlessness” (325–326). On this basis, the dread that pervades It Follows makes historical sense as the predominant affect of a film set in a landscape of labor like the one it depicts. Other affects are possible in the culture of secular stagnation. These include the melancholy with which Only Lovers Left Alive inhabits its Detroit from the vantage point of two vampires and the nostalgia with which Stranger Things reconstructs middle-class modernity over and against the slow-motion crisis with which secular stagnation infects the good life. In the latter case, the reconstruction involves telling the story of a late-bourgeois unity in which characters from across income brackets and ages join forces to defeat the monsters in their midst (Burges). Both that unity and the narrative victory that realizes it are gone from It Follows. Despite critics who see either a “not entirely convincing nostalgia” (Ngai 168) or an ambivalent mix of “ruination” and “melancholy beauty” (Church 17) in the image of Jay and Paul walking hand in hand that concludes It Follows, there is no real longing to be found in this Final Couple going nowhere. Rather than nostalgically attempting to resurrect a late-bourgeois unity like the one that Stranger Things pursues, It Follows brings that unity to its dreadful end. Nothing objectifies that terminus more than the two non–points of view

184 

joel burges

that engender the perspectival dread of It Follows. But the non–points of view generated by the 360-degree rotations and by the series of Its never resolve into each other. Put differently, the non–points of view through which we perceive It Follows mediate the Absent Cause of a collective “mise-n’en-scène” of History to which cinematic experience cannot easily give form or figuration.4 On the one hand, the rotations disarticulate point of view such that dread assumes Figure 9.2 Perspectival dread as a function of its own inhuman perspective the non–points of view in It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) as an apparatus of affect that allows us to feel the horror of stagnation at the level of form. On the other hand, It negates perspective in a more conflicted and collective sense, figuring the horror of stagnation as a race and class formation that has become so internally divided that no unified point of view is available to it in our economic present, despite the fact that it is romanticized to have been available in our economic past. While these non–points of view coexist, they never fully converge. It is as if cinematic perspective itself has become formally and figurally precarious, insecure, and morbid in ways akin to the outlook of the white working and middle classes at the center of the film. In It Follows, “the [once] centered subject of the age of reification” (Jameson 160) has finally found itself without any point of view to ground what the film names “It.”

Notes Thanks to Aviva Briefel, Rachel Haidu, Rio Hartwell, and Jason Middleton for their crucial and patient comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. This sentence alludes to Clover: “Where once there was one victim, Marion Crane, there are now many: five in Texas Chain Saw I, four in Halloween, fourteen in Friday the Thirteenth III, and so on” (33).

t h e p e r s p e c t i va l d r e a d o f i t f o l l o w s  

185

2. For important contemporary work on labor, see Aksikas; Benanav (especially “Demography”); Denning; La Berge; and McClanahan. For work on secular stagnation relevant to the labor question, see Backhouse and Boianovsky; Benanav (especially Automation); Cooper; Gordon; and Smith. 3. For more on the complex US history of race and class in deindustrialized cities, see Apel; Church; Lipsitz; Sugrue; and Winant. 4. Brinkema offers “mise-n’en-scène” as a phrase for “what is not put into the scene; what is put into the non-scene; and what is not enough put into the scene” (46). Among the “whats” that may not be in the scene enough or constitute a kind of non-scene is, I would argue, History as an Absent Cause as elaborated by Jameson in The Political Unconscious (23–58, 100–102).

Works Cited Aksikas, Jaafar. “Prisoners of Globalization: Marginality, Community and the New Informal Economy in Morocco.” Mediterranean Politics, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 249–262. Apel, Dora. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline. Rutgers UP, 2015. Backhouse, Roger E., and Mauro Boianovsky. “Secular Stagnation: The History of a Macroeconomic Heresy.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 23, no. 6, 2016, pp. 946–970. Benanav, Aaron. Automation and the Future of Work. Verso, 2020. ———. “Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950–2000.” Social Science History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2019, pp. 679–703. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Duke UP, 2014. Brouillette, Sarah, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan. “Introduction: Late, Autumnal, Immiserating, Terminal.” Theory and Event, vol. 22, no. 2, 2019, pp. 325–336. Burges, Joel. “The Violence of Nostalgia, or, the Crisis of Middle-Class Modernity.” Post45: Contemporaries, July 2019, https://post45.org/2019​ /07/the-violence-of-nostalgia-or-the-crisis-of-middle-class-modernity/. Church, David. “Queer Ethics, Urban Spaces, and the Horrors of Monogamy in It Follows.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no. 3, 2018, pp. 3–28. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992. Cooper, Melinda. “Secular Stagnation: Fear of a Non-reproductive Future.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 27, no. 1, 2016, pp. 337–359. Denning, Michael. “Wageless Life.” New Left Review, vol. 66, 2010, https://​ newleftreview.org/issues/ii66/articles/michael-denning-wageless-life. Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th,” and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Dickinson UP, 1990. Freedman, Cynthia. “Horror and Art-Dread.” The Horror Film, edited by

186 

joel burges

Stephen Prince, Rutgers UP, 2005, pp. 189–206. Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton UP, 2016. It Follows. Directed by David Robert Mitchell, Animal Kingdom, 2014. James, Jennifer C. “Dread.” American Literature, vol. 92, no. 4, 2020, pp. 689–696. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981. La Berge, Leigh Claire. Wages against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art. Duke UP, 2019. Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1995, pp. 369–387. Lowenstein, Adam. “A Detroit Landscape with Figures: The Subtractive Horror of It Follows.” Discourse, vol. 40, no. 3, 2018, pp. 358–369. McClanahan, Annie. “TV and Tipworkification.” Post45: Issue 1; Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, 2019, https://post45​ .org/2019/01/tv-and-tipworkification/. Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Harvard UP, 2020. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford UP, 1983. Smith, Jason E. Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. Reaktion Books, 2020. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton UP, 2014. Winant, Gabriel. The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Harvard UP, 2021.

CHAPTER 10

FIELDWORK Anthropology and Intellectual Labor in Ari Aster’s Midsommar Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Blowing Your Mind in the Anthropocene In Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken, a cookbook based on the restaurant of the same name that Nilsson ran in Jämtland, central Sweden, from 2008 to 2019, the philosopher-chef poses a question that is equally appropriate for horror film: “How do you blow someone’s mind today then, how do you create that sense of discovery that is so wonderful in a time when there is so little effort needed to discover something?” (229). The answer, for Nilsson, is a hyperlocal auratic cuisine featuring dishes with names such as “A little lump of very fresh cheese, one lavender petal from last summer” and “Things that have been cooked with leaves decomposing under the snow for one winter” (52, 252). In the second of these recipes, Nilsson narrates the development of the dish as one of deeply nostalgic discovery, a voyage in or under, with shades of exploration and an appreciation for the landscape that can sound a lot like latter-day fantasies of terra nullius: In a grove of birch trees, walking around one spring morning, after the snow was gone but before the grass had started to grow, I smelled something that I smell every year at this moment. It was the smell of decayed organic matter becoming new life again in the great carbon cycle. Leaves fallen off trees half a year earlier, their skeletons eaten almost bare by bacteria, fungi and tiny critters under a protective covering of snow that was no longer there. I picked up a handful of leaf mould and pressed it to my face. The humid leaves, cool against my skin, smelled so good, fragrant and clean of earth and life. We went out that day and collected hundreds of litres of this top layer of birch 187

188 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

leaf mould to be dried in our drying room and stored to use. For what, we didn’t know yet. (252) It’s tempting to drop a Knausgård punch line here, something about the insistent habit of certain men to imagine that their banal existence is not just great art but also deserves an outsized share of our time, our attention, and the market we are compelled to make of ourselves through the “therapeutic language” of what Sarah Brouillette has called “management discourse” (83). Most of all, I see in this description a confident orientation toward the “to come” grounded in the certitude of a life and a place where one can smell things “every year at this time,” where it is not dangerous to wander alone in a woods presumed to be one’s own, over a land that has belonged to and been stewarded by one’s people for generations. This very disposition is posited as a form of rugged labor, a tender postagrarianism where the accoutrements of the outdoors telegraph self-reliance, the constancy of doing and maintaining, exposure to the elements, and so forth. Where pressing future loam to one’s face—pausing decomposition and “the great carbon cycle” to imagine and consume—and gathering it for some unknown future use is both pleasure and work. In Sweden, the right to roam and forage is protected by law. Allemansträtten, everyone’s right, raises questions connected to the still-operative dream—especially for US Americans living in the near-total evacuation of public goods and social welfare—of generous and functional Nordic socialism, which, until relatively recently, has relied on a largely homogeneous and relatively small population and GDPs buoyed by oil (Morgan). A connected aesthetic of right, freedom, space, and environmental stewardship pervades the tourism boom of the New Nordic culinary movement, in which restaurants such as Nilsson’s and the Danish chef René Redzepi’s Noma are valuable commodities scaffolding a newly booming tourism industry. Part of the experience these restaurants promote is the possibility of leaving ideology behind and submitting to an unapologetic you-don’t-know-whatyou-want, you-can’t-get-it-anywhere-else logic. The alacrity in Nilsson’s style bears this ethos out. The writing in Fäviken is compelling, part memoir of a young family, part meditations and photographs of unpeopled landscapes (some taken by Nilsson himself), and the food is both delicate and savage. At the restaurant Fäviken, for example, Nilsson served colostrum (the laxative, bioactive, immune-boosting postbirth milk of mammals) in a “shell” of milk powder with a gel of meadowsweet flowers or wild blueberries. Describing the challenges of serving this rare and exquisite dish, infused with the varying shades of what one understands to be “labor,” from birth to work, Nilsson

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

189

Figure 10.1. Erik Olsson, photograph from Fäviken, by Magnus Nilsson (Phaidon, 2020)

writes, “When you say colostrum, it’s as if people stop listening to the rest of what you say, however clear or important it is, and start asking questions instead, when all they should do in that moment is eat, and perhaps ask the questions after” (150). The Nilsson that comes across in Fäviken, in Netflix’s hit Chef’s Table TV series, and in the pages of Nilsson’s The Nordic Cookbook is stridently boyish. He talks in interviews about having imagined a totally different life for himself, far away from Sweden, in some cosmopolitan center of culture and food, with busy restaurants, rigorous technique, and exotic ingredients. New Nordic cuisine, one learns quickly from the many multigovernment-sponsored publicity materials, emphasizes Nordic and Arctic terroir, foraging, preservation, simplicity, the cleanliness of the environment, and above all purity, the first and oft-repeated tenet of the 2004 “Nordic Kitchen Manifesto” for the cuisine (Nordic Co-operation). After some time immersed in these publicity materials—which never mention Arctic drilling, or the cultural and culinary influence of the seventeenth-century Dutch trade in Asian spices, or Scandinavia’s many immigrant populations who do much of the actual labor of keeping the region thrumming as a global example of health and beauty—the eye seems to drop the i and scans instead for “terror.”1 An emphasis on terroir, authenticity, and the singularity of site-specific

190 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

experience motors the Instagram-filtered shock aesthetic of Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar, which pointedly borrows the visual vocabulary of New Nordic culture. More interestingly, a similarly touristic desire for discovery, for the real or the authentically distant, the true Otherness of the Other, drives the travails and journeys of the film’s central group of protagonists, who are anthropology graduate students in search of their projects and their purpose. They want to have their minds blown, and they want to blow minds with their gorgeous research. In an ostensible attempt to help his friend, who is researching European midsummer traditions, one of the cohort, Pelle (“stone” in Swedish, “skin” in Italian), suggests they travel to rural Sweden for a once-in-a-lifetime May queen celebration on the commune where he grew up in Hälsingland. As the group drives into the region on long, flat roads, a banner stretched across the roadway reads, “Stop Mass Immigration to Hälsingland . . . Vote for a Free North This Fall.”2 The group is mostly boys, mostly white. Their collective conscience is outsourced to a girlfriend, Dani (Florence Pugh), who is studying psychology and who has just experienced a traumatic family murder-suicide. The death of her parents and sister is, to my eye, coded as a horror buff’s fake-out rather than a mind-blowing scene: it’s too obvious and too early in the film to be Aster shooting his shot. Overwritten by late twentieth-century horror tropes that emphasize the jarring contrast between domestic space, femininity, and gruesome violence (think, for example, of the Slumber Party Massacre movies of the 1980s, written and directed by women), Dani’s loss is coded by its placement at the start of the action as an everyday suburban American horror that will shape and give context for the more evidently “primitive” violence to come. The group’s collective intellect is outsourced to the Black friend, Josh (William Jackson Harper), who suggests in a dive-bar chat that perhaps Dani’s boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), is fussing about his relationship in order to avoid writing his thesis prospectus. Josh is accompanied at the bar, as ever, by a book: in that moment, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality (1922). Later, in Sweden, as the gang winds away from the airport and out of the city, Bobby Krlic’s grinding, ghostly score keys the viewer in to what none of the characters, except maybe Josh, seemingly the only reader in the group, is aware of: according to Lévy-Bruhl, the primitive mind cannot fathom the accident or secondary causes in the consideration of death or misfortune. He writes, In all uncivilized races everywhere, death requires to be explained by other than natural causes. It has frequently been remarked that when they see a man die, it would seem as if it might be the very first time

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

191

such a thing had happened, and that they could never before have been witnesses of such an occurrence. “Is it possible,” says the European to himself, “that these people do not know that everybody must die sooner or later?” But the primitive has never considered things in this light. In his eyes, the causes which inevitably bring about the death of a man in a certain (fairly definite) number of years—causes such as the failure of the bodily organs, senile decay, diminution of functioning power—are not necessarily connected with death. Does he not see decrepit old men still alive? If, therefore, at a given moment death supervenes, it must be because a mystic force has come into play. (37–38) To connect the dots between Primitive Mentality and Midsommar can yield a surprisingly complex diagram of concerns. Dani already arrives on her anthropological adventure with the news still washing over her that her sister has gassed herself and their parents in a cul-de-sac death chamber. If their deaths are not exactly meant to be read as a curse, they are certainly not, in the logic of the film, an accident, and the aftermath sinks Dani further toward tragedy. Aster has described Dani’s emotional landscape as the determining aesthetic of the film, which he characterizes as a melodrama and, “in every way, a breakup movie, at heart”—a film that takes the fictional world and makes it “as big as the feelings that the characters are feeling” (Fennessey and Ryan). One of the most shocking scenes conjured by this personal-psychology-turned-world-picture depicts two elders at Pelle’s ancestral commune jumping to gory deaths from an Ättestupa, one of the mythic cliffs where it was believed for a time that ritual senicide was performed in Scandinavia. The series of killings and live-torture sacrifices that takes place on the commune follows both the village’s own logic of mysticism and belief and the traditional horror film’s protocols: everything is overdetermined, and nothing is an accident, not even the embroidery hanging on the line, drying in the sun, not even the book in Josh’s hand at the bar. Lévy-Bruhl writes about a geographically and historically wide combination of peoples and places in Primitive Mentality, from Indigenous Americans to Australian “aboriginals,” to South Africans, to indeterminate “natives,” largely from the perspective of missionaries’ diaries and reports rather than his own field observations. Lévy-Bruhl was trained as a philosopher; his labors are mostly synthetic and summative in this book, and there’s little of the kind of immersive participant-observer anthropological writing that would characterize the work of his intellectual descendants, such as Michel Leiris, who read and often cited Lévy-Bruhl, even as a negative example (Price and Jamin 158). I don’t think Aster, who wrote and directed the film,

192 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

was necessarily in this deep with Lévy-Bruhl and interwar French anthropology, but certainly the film relishes the racial and chromatic twist (Aster repeatedly cites Midsommar as the first horror film that takes place almost totally in daylight) that turns the group journey to the Hårga’s commune into a reverse Heart of Darkness narrative. I will return to Lévy-Bruhl and Leiris, and the horrors of their anthropological labor. But first it’s important to register how Aster’s oblique callback to Conrad also occasions, or perhaps more accurately reveals, the film’s obvious homage to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out, from which it borrows its racial reversal and its dynamics of barbarism and intellectual and artistic theft, although the latter is not as on the surface as the former. The primitive in both films, of course, is the white European and his descendants: in Midsommar, not just the remote villagers in Hälsingland but also and especially the Americans—seemingly hapless, well-meaning neo-imperialists from a country that forgets it’s been at war for twenty years, for a hundred years, for four hundred years. The white liberals who are one’s therapists, colleagues, students, neighbors—the incompletely woke art-collector guy with a black turtleneck and a Black friend—come under especially sharp scrutiny in this era of US horror. Get Out—with its critique of whiteness’s infinite and covert capacity to exploit the intellectual and aesthetic labor of Black people, their vision, their very sight—has been likened by a not insignificant number of Black, Indigenous, and other academics and artists of color, especially those working at remote educational institutions in small, isolated towns, to their own professional experiences: the veneer of white kindness, acceptance, and interest that morphs over time into resentment, obstruction, endless labor extraction, and finally outright unmediated racism leading quickly to diminishing mental and physical health (Hughes). Compounding this narrative arc is a common feeling of being trapped or imprisoned, paralyzed and placed in a basement, so to speak, so that the fruits of one’s thinking can be touted by the institution as the work they are enabling and supporting—the institution’s own achievement. Gayatri Spivak has called such a position that of the “native informant,” an imposed, rather than ontic, condition. To survive it, one becomes well versed in what she elsewhere calls “strategic essentialism.” The “job” one is paid for in such settings is precisely to “disrupt” or “challenge” the aesthetic, political, and spiritual cultures of the institution, but to do so feels often, to those who do this work, derangingly isolating, an invitation to abuse. Both Get Out and Midsommar—and, behind them, Us (Jordan Peele, 2017), Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), Dear White People (Justin Simien, 2014;

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

193

2017–2021); and, ahead of them, Lovecraft Country (Misha Green, 2020) and aspects of the Small Axe anthology series (Steve McQueen, 2020)—also wrestle with a question that is at the center of Heart of Darkness and the literary culture of modernism it helped to usher in: namely, What stories are there left to tell in Europe, in Anglo-America? Where can whiteness find new material? How does one turn the endless labors of natural-resource extraction into an aesthetic and conceptual transfusion for the waning energies of whiteness? How can we blow minds, to return to Nilsson’s question, in the Anthropocene?

Fieldwork Midsommar’s answer to these questions is gendered as well as raced. Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, confesses prior to their departure for Sweden that he doesn’t know what his thesis is. The other graduate students have picked up on his intellectual waywardness; thus their repeated admonishments to settle on a thesis topic, to get on with the work. It’s difficult to understand what motivates this character’s academic pursuits in the early scenes; one imagines that a couple of half-attentive teachers told him he had a good idea or two based on texts given to him and ideas generated by smarter classmates, and, building on a life of privilege, he imagined he would make extraordinary work, perhaps without even trying too hard. In the group he has fallen in with, attempts at mind opening are undertaken as a matter of routine, a sort of light fieldwork. There are scenes of collective psychotropic exploration: a mushroom tea upon arrival in Sweden, for example, that leads to a typical trip, lens-flared by the midnight sun. “Can you feel that?” Pelle asks. “The energy? Coming up from the earth?” Dani looks down and sees grass growing from the wildflower field through her own hand. “Nature just knows instinctually how to stay in harmony,” Pelle observes, “everything just mechanically doing its part.” This sense of harmony, of the proper functioning of the natural and social worlds, is beautiful, but it is emphatically not mind-blowing. The group approaches both trips, the travel and the psychoactive, as extensions of their expectations of what they will find at the commune, namely a simple and largely predictable string of events bathed in the soft light of confirmation bias and its fulfilments. The filters of their experience, fully installed before their arrival, are pervasive and seemingly unshakeable: the myth of Northern European welfare and purity, the beautiful land in harmony with its people, the quaint but largely inoffensive habits of a small,

194 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

homogeneous, self-sustaining society. It is precisely the site-specific artisanal consumer experience the New Nordic tourism industry has been selling for two decades. For anyone who has done their research, these expectations should produce skepticism if not outright terror, especially once the fieldwork begins. The Hårga’s implicit commitment to autochthony, the obvious and blinding whiteness of the village’s inhabitants and their garments of purity, the genocidal history that connects the volk to the territory, the heightening of the healthy reproductive body as a temple and an allegory, the deliberate production and social exploitation of the disabled body as prophet or communal scribe: Josh is the only one aware of, and, indeed, in search of, the primitivism Lévy-Bruhl erroneously ascribed to nonwhite people. Dani has experienced an intimation of her closed world being rent asunder—the “shock” of “violent” encounter Lévy-Bruhl associates with natives’ realization that the walls of one’s world “might be scaled” (353).3 Following the gruesome senicidal ritual at the Ättestupa, Christian has what he believes to be an epiphany: he has seen a crash of the inconceivable, real, and authentic. A mind-blowing moment. It is available to Christian in this way not because of the poignancy of Dani’s existing labors of grief—the way she is processing and “working” through, as one says, the loss of her parents at the hands of her sister, heightened to the point of graphic melodrama in the Ättestupa scene—nor because of Josh’s research into European midsummer traditions, which has prepared him for the brutality of what they will witness. When Pelle suggests the group had better get their beauty rest because of the Ättestupa ceremony the next day, Josh, notebook in hand, looks aghast: “Seriously?” Christian scrolls through his phone, sitting on the edge of a bed in between them, and asks, “Is it scary?” Josh, who knows what they are about to witness, begins to look smug, affronting Christian doubly: “That is so fuckin’ annoying.” At the ceremonial meal the next day, where the elder man and woman about to meet their death are celebrated in a tense, brooding choreography of tight-lipped anticipation, this dynamic deepens. Christian, oblivious, trying to do some anthropology, asks Pelle, “How long do they typically stand?” Pelle’s response is pointed but soft, interpellating Christian in what is about to happen before Christian is aware of his complicity: “We’re gonna stand until it’s right to sit.” In the scene that follows, the elders jump from the cliff to great and bloody destruction, but they don’t entirely die: their skulls must be smashed to bits by the community with huge wooden mallets as the onlookers wail in communal pain. Not a few theatergoers walked out in disgust afterward. The moment is mind-blowing to the film’s naïve boy, Christian, precisely because he is utterly ignorant of both Dani’s and Josh’s labors, their laying

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

195

Figure 10.2. The banquet table in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

of intellectual and emotional groundwork, even as he is surrounded by it on all sides. The other outsiders are horrified and disgusted. Simon and Connie, the other two people of color at the commune, also visitors for the midsummer festival, are visibly shaken and angry. “This is fucked!” Simon screams, presumably with a Black Briton’s lifelong experience of calling out abuse when he sees it, as the Hårga matriarch, Siv, tries to talk them down. “What you just saw is a long-, long-, long-observed custom.” “Custom! It’s fucked!” Simon wails. “You need to understand it as a great joy for them,” comes the reply. “A joy??!” Connie bleats, her ethnically ambiguous appearance pointing to a familiarity with centuries of colonial gaslighting (the actress, Ellora Torchia, is of South Asian descent). Siv’s explanations appeal to their millennial values: It’s a form of recycling! A gift? It’s no use to rage against the dying of the light. The explanations fall on mostly deaf ears, but Christian is manic, seemingly having the first idea of his life, a major discovery. His mind can be blown in this way, and he acts according to this studied and self-serving ignorance. He leaves a crying Dani on the way back from the cliff and takes off running after Josh, who is jogging to grab his laptop and record what he saw. In a painfully labored conversation in the group’s double-height sleeping quarters (a building modeled after the highly decorated farmhouses of northern Sweden [Knibbs]), Christian, wearing his mediocrity like a wound, confronts Josh: “Hey, listen, I’ve been thinking about something that I wanted to ask you, or tell you actually, um.” The camera tracks Christian’s broad back from behind, his looming form out of focus, while Josh sits on the edge of his bed, typing in a dusty sunbeam, lit like a Vermeer. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my thesis,” Christian continues, crossing his arms nervously over his chest, “and, um, I’ve decided I’m gonna do it here. On Hårga. And I

196 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

wanted to tell you first, just so it didn’t seem like I wasn’t telling you.” The expression that draws like a curtain over Josh’s face is one that is familiar to many, observing, once again, the indefatigable audacity of whiteness. “I feel like . . . I feel like I can’t tell if you’re joking,” Josh says carefully, blinking, beginning to turn toward Christian, who is now standing closer. “I mean, you know I’m doing my thesis on midsummer, that’s . . . that’s the reason we’re here.” Christian counters, shrugging, interrupting, “Yeah, but not on this community. I mean, you’re going to England and Germany next.” “Well, I mean, you knew I was gonna want to do this!” Josh protests, as Christian stands impassive, shaking his head in feigned surprise. “Nope.” After some back-and-forth, Josh stands, exasperated. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing? It’s kind of actually outrageously unsubtle. The fact that you’re being this bald about it. I’m honestly kind of impressed. . . . What the fuck, this is what I’ve been working toward and you know it. That’s why you look so guilty right now, because you know! You know.” Josh is now standing face-to-face with Christian, who has pivoted backward, conceding. “You know what you’re doing is unethical, and lazy, and leechy, and frankly,” Josh says, marshaling the full range of professorial hand gestures, “it’s kind of sad.” “Fuck you,” Christian intones tentatively. “No, not fuck me, fuck you! Find your own subject! Or your own passion! Because look,” Josh turns away, pulling his hands to his face in frustration, “I am . . . I am actually invested in this. This is not some glorified hobby that I’m casually dipping my feet into.” Christian’s response to this reading is both bodily and verbal. The light in the bunkhouse hangs in cool shafts, as in a boxing gym. He looks away and clenches his left hand into a fist, looks to the floor, and then raises his right hand in an accusing point, first to the sky. With the spirit of a millennium of conquering white men at his back, he points the finger at Josh and finds his footing in a tone of condescension and certitude: “I’m gonna do my thesis here. If you’re gonna do it here too, I’m open to collaborating.” Josh shakes his head in gutted recognition: the feeling oozing out of his every pore is, again, one of being utterly prepared for this moment. Another white boy, white-boying all the others to shame. The rest of the film makes some minor nods, but not many, to Josh and Christian’s ongoing negotiation over intellectual property, the ethics of research, the meaning of originality and ideas in a world where nothing really blows minds—certainly not an average grad student making someone else’s stuff his property and then deigning to offer a “collaboration.” The subplot about race mostly falls out, barring the early disappearance of Simon and Connie (a simple but not exactly self-reflexive reproduction of the old horror movie trope where the Black characters

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

197

are killed first) and the implicit cresting of the village’s white-reproduction narrative, with its double culmination in Christian’s seed spilling and Dani’s crowning as the Hårga’s May queen. It returns only as a muted allegory in the film’s much-lauded and much-memed conclusion. Nevertheless, I want to draw out this scene of academic exploitation and this story thread as being Midsommar’s most significant contribution to a strain in early-millennium horror that looks directly and indirectly at the ongoing white exploitation of nonwhite people’s labor, both intellectual and otherwise. The work of the field and the architecture of the plantation hang over the racial dynamics of the Hårga commune, further determining Christian’s relationship to Josh, which prior to their arrival in Sweden could be routed through the university and the discipline, into the presumably higher calling of anthropological “fieldwork.” Christian assumes, inheriting both frameworks, an unimpeded right to Josh’s work. The film gestures in this direction by way of its numerous scenes of domestic and microagricultural labor, which, performed by white people in the bright light of the midnight sun, appears to be quaint and intentional, integrated and wholesome, instead of bloody and necropolitical. After Josh is bludgeoned to death by an unseen village elder—a punishment for taking photos of the sacred book of the Hårga in the middle of the night—no one really registers his empty bed. “I’m not too worried,” Pelle says at breakfast. It is only later, following Christian’s semiwitting ritual impregnation of a Hårga girl, that we find visual confirmation of Josh’s incomplete interring, his body returned to the earth, which in turn absorbs its blood, its cells, its work, its matter. Josh’s foot, marked with a rune written in blood, sticks out of a charming herb garden next to a cozy cottage, fertilizing, as it were, the ground of whiteness, the property of Christian’s future offspring. As Katherine McKittrick reminds us in her work on Black geographies, “Being materially situated in place is an inconclusive process” (2). For Josh, it is partly inconclusive because the regime of ownership into which he has necessarily entered in performing his fieldwork and “owning” his study—not as a hobby, as he desperately reminds Christian, but as a vocation—is predicated to an extent on the ownership of all kinds of property, including enslaved people. Of this double bind, McKittrick writes, Bodily violence spatializes other locations of dehumanization and restraint, rendering bodily self-possession and other forms of spatial ownership virtually unavailable to the violated subject. One of the many ways violence operates across gender, sexuality, and race is through multiscalar discourses of ownership: having “things,” owning

198 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

Figure 10.3. Josh’s interment in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

lands, invading territories, possessing someone. . . . This reward system repetitively returns us to the body, black subjecthood, and the where of blackness, not just as it is owned, but as black subjects participate in ownership. Black diasporic struggles can also be read, then, as geographic contests over discourses of ownership. (3) This rich passage moves severally along theoretical paths of ontology, trauma, the legal frameworks of personhood and possession (or self-possession), and genocidal cartographies as they influence the possibility of conceptualizing Black geography or even just accounting for Black people in space. I want to draw out two elements from McKittrick’s provocation in relation to the Black anthropologist in Midsommar. First, note how Josh’s material situatedness-in-place (as a student in a white discipline and later as a garden ornament in the village he has gone to study) functions properly in the project of diasporic recuperation and institutional critique and is also undercut by the “inconclusiveness” of “inclusion and diversity” in the academy that Josh is trying to enter. One can imagine, for example, the absolute coup, in the film’s fictional universe, of a Black student in the anthropology department defending his prospectus not on what his advisors perceive to be his “own” culture but—twist—on the primitive mentality of the European. Second, when McKittrick writes of the ways bodily self-possession and spatial ownership are “virtually unavailable to the violated subject,” she is anticipating later developments in her argument that point to how entering discourses of ownership is a losing proposition for us all—a zero-sum metric we’re conscripted into but cannot

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

199

Figure 10.4. Detail, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On) (1840), oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (353⁄4 x 481⁄4 in.), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 99.22, art object © [1840] Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

win or abide. The legibility of Josh’s body after his death confirms not just a literal dispossession but a figurative one as well: even his remains seem to be signed over to the iconography of the Middle Passage and its scandals of ownership. The soil in which Josh is planted, head down, transforms, in the received light of J. M. W. Turner’s tumultuous waves, back into the ocean, his foot and ankle a visual citation of the shackled leg in the foreground of the 1840 painting that was originally called Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On.

200 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

The Best a Man Can Get (Little Fires Everywhere) Significantly, Josh, unlike Dani, has no context in the film. We know nothing of his family, his geographic origins, his romantic relationships, or what drives him to study midsummer customs. Midsommar is no more about the exploitation of Black intellectual labor than it is about New Nordic cuisine and tourism, which is to say it’s a little bit about both, but mostly as a kind of clever garnish. Writing about the Turner painting in In the Wake, Christina Sharpe describes it as a memorial in golden hues, and also a devastating warning: “In the roiling, living orpiment of Turner’s painting, the dead are yoked to the dying” (36). In Midsommar this is quite literally true. The death of Josh presages the death of Christian, who has now inherited both Josh’s project and the Hårga’s wrath, in addition to Dani’s. In his final moments of paralysis, a drugged death-within-life, Christian is also in a wheelchair, blanketed and enveloped in the carcass of a bear, a brown body whose first appearance in a tiny traveling-zoo cage points both to the carceral space of the slave ship and to the ascendant cultural capital of Nordic coziness, or “hygge,” which since the 2010s has obliterated all other aesthetics in aspirational visual culture. The fur coat hanging on the rustic wood-beamed wall at Fäviken (Is it art, or is someone headed out for a forage?) is metonymic here. The other lost bodies are dragged out of storage: Simon’s from a kind of chicken coop, where he has been rendered a blood eagle but has been breathing for some days; Connie’s and Mark’s from another unknown place; Josh’s from the earth, his mouth now stuffed with pages from the Rubi Radr. They are placed tenderly on bales of hay in the A-frame structure that has grounded the Euclidian feel of many of the film’s middle-distance shots, composed to capture the simple lines and geometric purity of the Hårga’s vision of a properly functioning society—“everything just mechanically doing its part,” in Pelle’s foreboding words. The film leads to a conclusion centered not on Josh’s demise (his research being the reason we’re “all” here) or the liquidation of all ethnographic projects but on an emotional conflagration we are invited to read as an expression of Dani’s pain. Recall Aster’s assertion that it’s more a “breakup movie” than a horror film. But Dani’s ascendancy on the commune, after she beats out all the other girls in a spiraling test of endurance around a Maypole, is fraught. Certainly the result of Pelle’s engineering, her seat at the head of the festival table is a veritable horror: the flowers on her gown dilate like pupils, the putrid food on the table writhes with rot or leftover life—the effect of psychedelics as much as the ominous circumstances. She is force-fed a whole herring, which she immediately spits out. It is no wish fulfillment;

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

201

Figure 10.5. Christian burns in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

the vectors of power are too incoherent. What if we were to insist, then, on Midsommar’s final reverse sati not as an expression of Dani’s most spectacular (if also grief-filled) revenge fantasies but rather as a deflating return to the perspective of the storied “mediocre white man,” who will always take us all down with him, if for no other reason than because he has run out of material (Todd).4 What if, in other words, the film’s final spectacle is one of self-immolation, far more consonant with Christian’s desire than with Dani’s or Josh’s. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said describes the adventures of empire as standing in stark contrast to “the lusterless world of the European bourgeoisie, whose ambiance as every novelist of importance renders it reconfirms the debasement of contemporary life, the extinction of all dreams of passion, success and exotic adventure” (158–159). In the great texts of colonial letters, Said argues, readers are given a glimpse of such exotic adventures and learn to take pleasure in them as a conduit to taking pleasure in empire more broadly. We see this perspective updated slightly in Michel Leiris’s Phantom Africa, a massive and surreal text that runs headlong into the immersive experience of ethnographic fieldwork as, among other things, a direct line to becoming a more interesting person and gathering new material. Phantom Africa was published in 1934, prior to the groundswell of anticolonial movements that gained force in the years during and after the Second World War. In the preface to the 1951 edition of the book, Leiris writes, “I intended to break away from my previous intellectual habits, and, through contact with men from another culture and another race, to knock down the partitions that were suffocating me and to broaden my horizon to a truly human scale” (63). But the occasion of the 1951 edition is also what Leiris

202 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

calls a “renunciation” (65). He says, fifteen years on, that what emerges in Phantom Africa, ultimately, is not “a fallacious attempt to other myself by taking a plunge—entirely symbolic, moreover—into a ‘primitive mentality’ for which I was nostalgic, but instead a broadening and forgetting of the self in the community of action, where purely formal communion (being allowed some access to some secret, for example, or taking part in some ritual) is replaced by real solidarity with men who have a clear awareness of what is unacceptable about their situation” (64). Adjudicating whether this is true or not, whether he has really moved past “the Romantic role of the White Man” in the huge number of pages that follow, is a question that is still hotly debated by critics, to the point that some have disavowed the existence of this translation into English (Leiris 64). More interesting to me, here, is how this renunciation or disavowal resonates with other authenticating prefaces to lengthy exercises in what might be understood as hegemonic mistake making, or white-man fuckups—a particular kind of narrative I want to zero in on in moving toward a conclusion. Having already attempted to assuage his boredom and fill his empty mind by inhabiting Josh’s life’s work, by co-opting his insight and perspective, Christian, with neither ideas nor feelings of his own, winds up as both Leiris’s “Romantic White Man” and a reproductively moot man version of a widow sacrifice, donning the mantle of Dani’s loss-of-family as his own and preparing to really have his mind blown, or boiled, if one is being precise. This final scene in which the visitors (most already dead) are ritually set ablaze in the barn reads to me as an instantiation of auteurist self-cancellation (a parodic and poorly learned lesson of so-called cancel culture) not dissimilar to Knausgård’s painstaking six-volume attempt to whittle his being down—at vast length and across many pages that circulate in many languages throughout many countries—to unremarkable minimifidia under the sign of Hitler’s (also massive) autobiography. Let’s call it a maximalist, an operatic, remix of the compulsory performance of heroic subjectivity. Something like the elaborate announcements people make when they are “taking a break from Facebook,” or the legendary “self-expelling” houseguest narrated in Thomas Chatterton Williams’s July 2020 Twitter confession. The trouble is that such stories, in the end, are always in part an homage to the man who does his best, who manages to self-expel or to submit to ignition, having lit fires all over the place, in a blaze of abnegation, not just of the self but of the whole world made in his image. Another important and more successful example of this genre is Scott McClanahan’s 2017 novel The Sarah Book, which leads with the confession that “portions of this book have been plagiarized” (front matter). It is never

anthropology and intellectual labor in aster’s midsommar 

203

revealed which parts, but the book is much more about Sarah, and her stories from being a nurse, a mother, and a wife, than anything else. It ends with the ne’er-do-well dad figure (also named Scott McClanahan) in a tense but civil reunion with his now ex-wife, whom he has tortured with his self-destruction for years. Having failed to self-destruct, he tries, movingly, to slip into her existence, her way of being in and as the world. Their kids are present: “We watched Sam jump and jump some more. I saw Sam and I saw Iris and I saw Sarah, and all I could see was Sarah now. Sam was a Sarah and Iris was a Scott and the rivers were a Sarah and the sky was a Sarah and the mountains were a Sarah and Sarah was a Scott. Then I smiled and saw my face in the window, but my face wasn’t my face anymore. I was a Sarah too” (233). These texts seem to suggest that, beginning with not having had their own ideas and ending with erasure, the best a cisgender, white, heterosexual man can do is to take up women’s labor (cooking, serving, child-rearing), to get smaller, to stay put, to strive toward simplicity and champion the rustic, to move toward self-abolishing, or to go up in waves of undulating smoke. As above, these stories, like Midsommar, are still their stories. The film, like the genre it properly sits in, manages to make material of the wrongs of racial and gendered violence, the labors of difference performed under duress, in service of its narrative. If we pause to contemplate what will become of Dani, following her victory at the May queen dance, the rules of the horror film and of the Hårga commune do not bode well for her, given (among other terrors) that all her friends and family are now dead. In spite of Dani having decided to kill off Christian—and there were other options—one can imagine the May queen, seated once again at the head of a beautifully laid table of authentic midsummer vacation Instagram dreams, being told to swallow a whole herring, or maybe some colostrum, to “eat now, and ask questions later.”

Notes 1. On the spice trade, there are countless works of indelible scholarship. I am particularly fond of the efficiency of Julie Berger Hochstrasser’s “The Conquest of Spice and the Dutch Colonial Imaginary.” 2. Thanks to Gloria Fisk for checking my translation. 3. In Primitive Mentality, this encounter is the primal (and irrecuperable) scene of anthropological contact: the arrival of the white man, which, according to Lévy-Bruhl, induced only very rarely “any testimony of the impression made upon them by their first experience of white men” (352–353). It is, therefore, a white imaginary of shock conditioned by naïveté. 4. The phrase “mediocre white man” has been attributed to a since-deleted tweet by the Canadian writer Sarah Hagi.

204 

a n j u l i f at i m a r a z a k o l b

Works Cited Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford UP, 2014. Fennessey, Sean, and Chris Ryan. “Making ‘Midsommar,’ a Deep Dive into the Movie Freak-Out of the Year.” Interview with Ari Aster, The Big Picture podcast, 3 July 2019. Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. “The Conquest of Spice and the Dutch Colonial Imaginary: Seen and Unseen in the Visual Culture of Trade.” Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, U of Pennsylvania P, 2005, pp. 169–186. Hughes, Brooke Dianne-Mae. Our Sunken Place: “Post-Racial” America in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” 2018. MA thesis, SUNY Buffalo, https://ubir​ .buffalo.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10477/78070/Hughes_buffalo_0656M​ _15801.pdf?sequence=3. Knibbs, Kate. “How ‘Midsommar’ Turned Tradition and Folklore into Nightmare Fuel.” The Ringer, 10 July 2019, https://www.theringer.com​ /movies/2019/7/10/20688163/midsommar-nordic-traditions-folklore-ari​ -aster. Leiris, Michel. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards, Seagull Books, 2017. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. Primitive Mentality. Translated by Lilian A. Clare, Macmillan, 1923. McClanahan, Scott. The Sarah Book. Tyrant Books, 2017. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster, A24, 2019. Morgan, Richard. “Foraging Is Part of Swedish Identity.” NPR, 26 Sept. 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/09/26/761253799​ /foraging-is-part-of-swedish-identity-now-its-countryside-is-the-wildest​ -restaurant. Nilsson, Magnus. Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End. Phaidon, 2020. Nordic Co-operation. “The New Nordic Food Manifesto.” 2004, https://www .norden.org/en/information/new-nordic-food-manifesto. Price, Sally, and Jean Jamin. “A Conversation with Michel Leiris.” Current Anthropology, vol. 29, no. 1, Feb. 1988, pp. 157–174. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016. Todd, Sarah. “How to Overcome Perfectionism in a Judgmental World.” Quartz, 2 Apr. 2019, https://qz.com/work/1565187/how-to-overcome​ -perfectionism-in-a-judgmental-world/. Williams, Thomas Chatterton [@thomaschattwill]. “I’m in the middle of nowhere in France and I literally ended up expelling from my house an American friend of a friend. . . .” Twitter, 13 July 13 2020, http://archive.is​ /XKGRM#selection-4319.0–4319.186. ———. “Why don’t you self-expel from the convo?” Twitter, 14 July 2020, https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1283053350104240131.

AFTERWORD

THE WORK OF HORROR AFTER GET OUT Catherine Zimmer

“Work has been a nightmare.” I have uttered this phrase probably more than I can count over the last couple of years, despite the fact that, globally speaking, I could not ask to have it better in terms of labor. Notwithstanding my own hyperbole, work is a very real site of terror for a vast percentage of the world’s population and is one of the more salient ways that horror genre conventions have overlapped with horrific realities. Indeed, as long as analyses of modern labor have existed, they have been coupled with exposés of the often hidden horrors of the “working conditions” behind the scenes of mass production. Slavery, exploitation, imprisonment, poisonous environments, industrial accidents, gaslighting, and innumerable variations of abuse have characterized work life in ways that the modern media has both exposed and capitalized on. Horror as a genre, however, has a long-standing commitment to metaphor, and the most horrific of human experiences, war in particular, have been remarkably absent from the genre dedicated to fear, violence, and traumatic survival. Work life is in some ways an exception to this, as this volume shows: work of various kinds has been an element of horror narrative in forms ranging from the vestiges of slavery and colonialism that appear as ghosts and zombies haunting postcolonial environs, to the butchery, impurities, and transgressive consumption of food production (particularly meat) that appear again and again in tales of torture and cannibalism. Given that horror often avoids the horrific in its most literal and real-world ways, how does the work of horror itself change when it touches more closely on the horrific? The coinciding of this volume with what is frequently referred to as a “renaissance” of Black horror—horror produced by Black creators and focusing on the horrors that have marked the Black experience—makes this question particularly pertinent. For a long time, scholarship on horror film 205

206 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

was premised on the most basic of questions: “Why horror?” It was the title of no fewer than two of the seminal essays on the genre, posing the broad questions of why we make and watch genre films and why we watch horror in particular.1 There have been several horror watersheds, depending on whom you are asking: those films or clusters of films that intervened in the genre so significantly that after them things would never be the same, as well as films that created a new subgenre that would become so dominant that it might as well have reinvented horror; Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) have all been cited as such films, establishing, respectively, the psychosexual slashers, the flesh-eating zombies, and the low-budget extremity that still, in various forms, reign over horror. Given the sheer amount of discourse about the film in multiple registers, not to mention its box office success, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) is clearly such a film. While in Horror Noire Robin R. Means Coleman has amplified the specificity and importance of “Black horror” (as well as “Blacks in horror”) as a substantial element of cinematic history in the United States, Get Out reframes and reworks horror genre tropes to think about horror and race, specifically Blackness, so expertly that its story has become a new vernacular in speaking both about Black experience and about horror. Get Out and the surge in Black horror productions that has followed (a number of which are either written or produced by Peele or otherwise directly influenced by him) have become so thoroughly focused on the monstrosity of White supremacy and the violence inflicted on Black people’s bodies—the production of the body as Black through the very process of this violence— that it is worth re-asking, “Why horror?” What is it that horror, specifically, has to offer to representations of Blackness, especially in the context of the current movements to defend Black lives that have gained broad coalitional support? Or, more to the point in the current context, what work is the horror genre doing culturally, politically, and economically now that the genre is frequently being reframed by the lived experience of Black people and the biopolitical inscriptions of Blackness onto both individual bodies and entire populations? In foundational analyses of the work of horror, answers were to be found within psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, and/or within postmodernity and cultural studies.2 At a certain point, it seemed like those questions no longer needed to be asked, both because horror had become a legitimate object of study and because the broader answers had accumulated to the degree that the uncanny, the abject, the repressed, or simply “ideology” seemed to cover all the bases, generally speaking. What was left to be decided

afterword 

207

was the significance of individual works, how they formed and re-formed the genre, what trends were redefining horror for specific eras, what zeitgeist was making its rounds (“torture porn,” the “found-footage” film, “J-horror,” satire and self-referentiality, etc.). Get Out has caused both critical and creative revisitation of the genre, not just because it reflects on both the future and the past of horror; it also asks us to explore the work of horror in contemporary cultural production, as well as the working conditions of Black artists within a culture of fetishization and enduring violence.3 In the wake of Get Out, and in the midst of a long, long overdue reckoning with anti-Blackness in the United States, catalyzed in no small part by the dissemination of videos showing the brutal and unapologetic murders of Black people at the hands of police, a range of contemporary horror films and streaming series have both focused on the monstrosity of White supremacy and produced a visceral sense of living a life of precarity within the White-supremacist United States: these include, among others, the films Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021), Bad Hair (Justin Simien, 2020), Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020), and Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022); and the series Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020), Them (Amazon, 2021–), and Horror Noire (Shudder, 2021–). The accumulation of narratives and graphic images of brutality toward Black bodies in the horror genre has made the figurative, mythic elements of horror so violently literal that while these films can and have been read through the uncanny, through the abject, through the repressed, numerous critics in the context of the contemporary social and political work to defend Black lives are investigating the specific cultural labor that the horror genre performs.4 In the years prior to Get Out, films focused on the American enslavement of Africans and African Americans, perhaps most notably 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), winner of multiple Academy Awards, presented horrifying and traumatizing stories, images, sounds, and languages of anti-Blackness and demonstrated that a broad range of critics and audiences were willing to recognize the artistic and social importance of representing and viewing the terrors of Black life in the context of historical drama. In contrast, films such as Get Out, Candyman, Bad Hair, and others are using the troubled and troubling temporalities of the horror genre, with varying results, to refuse the distancing offered by periodization. Recent Black horror films use haunting and possession, the tangles of embodiment, inheritance, and intertextuality, to create a narrative space that shows time, history, violence, and art to be layered and circular.5 With these types of interventions, it is eminently clear what Black creators

208 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

and the thematization of Black lives, bodies, and experiences have to offer to the horror genre; what is less clear is what it is that horror as genre, as artwork, as mediation, as storytelling, has to offer to representations of Blackness, to the realm of Black visual culture, and to the contemporary cultural and social movements that surround the media market of Black horror. Certain viewers have asked if the graphic brutality of some of this horror is retraumatizing, a reiteration of violence rather than a resistance (Giorgis). How much does the critical framework of these films matter? How much does the authorship matter, when the images look the same? Especially when we think of these images as iconic—literal, yes, but also representative of a vastness of brutality that cannot be fully represented—what are the ethics of reproducing images of tortured and slain Black people? Such questions certainly exceed the discussion of horror genre work and address the circulation and reinscription of imagery throughout the social-cultural world: the corpse of Emmett Till; the citizen videos capturing the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd at the hands of White police.6 But these questions also perhaps make it more insistent that, again, we ask, “What is the work of horror now?” There are indeed some important textual cues that point to Black horror both as doing work and as a product of work. Night of the Living Dead revolutionized horror with its low-budget/high-revenue production and its redefinition of zombies as a mass phenomenon of flesh eaters. The 1968 film has also served as a cultural landmark by casting Duane Jones, a Black man, in the lead role of Ben in an otherwise all-White cast, without mention of race in the dialogue. But it is, significantly, the credits sequence of the film that brings the reality of racist violence and the aesthetics of anti-Blackness to the surface explicitly. The film’s abrupt conclusion shows Ben the next morning, having miraculously survived the “night of the living dead,” being summarily shot in the head by a posse of White men armed with rifles. The film both ends and doesn’t: as Coleman aptly puts it, “Those that walked out of the theater before the credits rolled missed the handling of Ben’s body” (107; emphasis mine). The credits appear as part of an abrupt shift to a sequence of still, grainy photographs, an aesthetic most comparable to news media or amateur photography; Coleman notes that the shots indeed “look like they could be the weathered photographs of Emmett Till” (107). Ben’s body is collected with meat hooks, placed on a pile of other bodies, and burned in a bonfire, the actions presented as a jarring series of photographic moments: flashes of fire, hooks, bodies.7

afterword 

209

It is crucial that the liminal space of the credits sequence, particularly in an era before it was common to have the narrative extend into the credits, is the place where racial violence becomes simultaneously more literal and more figural. Where the story ends, history begins: the highly pixelated photographic images that show the treatment of Ben as “only” a body echo the reality of lynching photography as both souvenir and documentation. The placement of these images behind the credits, where the work of the actors and crew is recognized, suggests, among other things, that the story being told exceeds the space of the narrative. Despite Romero’s dubious assertion that Night of the Living Dead was not about race, the film is addressing itself as both “a work” and as “the work,” the historical labor of film and other photographic technologies in perpetrating, documenting, or exposing the murders of Black people at the hands of White mobs and White institutions. Similarly, the shadow puppet animation that is arguably the most powerful element of Nia DaCosta’s 2021 sequel/revival of Candyman is only shown in its entirety during that film’s credit sequence. The animated short is also an entire story or history of its own, independent of the film’s narrative space but also contextualizing everything we have seen with a linear (though circular) story line that connects all of the significant elements of the Candyman tale (Weiss). This animated shadow puppetry, even in its figural aesthetic of abbreviated and exaggerated silhouettes, shows the historical realities of torture, mob murders, lynching, and police violence that in the film are the origin of the Candyman monster and the mythology surrounding him.8 In Bad Hair, Sorry to Bother You, and Master, it is the narratives themselves that centralize work: in Bad Hair and Sorry to Bother You the protagonists both descend into horrific entanglements (at times literally) in their efforts to secure jobs and advance their careers. The legacy of Black slave labor and White property owners frames both films’ stories. In Bad Hair the film is in fact bookended by showing the “means of production” of hair weaves, in which we see the horrific reality (partly imagined by the film, partly quite real) behind the “making” of human hair as a commodity, a commodity that is then used in the film to allow Black women to gain the cultural cachet of straight hair in a media industry that values Blackness only insofar as it can be easily incorporated (again, at times literally) into White standards of beauty. In Sorry to Bother You, it is the assumption of a White telephone voice that allows the protagonist to succeed in a telemarketing job. In fact, this whole film, which straddles horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and satire, thematizes multiple layers of slavery, debt, and indentured servitude that reference numerous forms of labor formations in the United States, from slavery to eugenics to the contemporary digital consumer economy. In both

210 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

films, the (only barely) hidden truth is that White men who represent the top end of corporate and cultural power are actively harnessing Black bodies, and creating new forms of Blackness, to generate a Black labor force in the service of White supremacy at cultural and economic levels. Most recently, Master’s story of an elite college haunted by an ongoing history of anti-Black violence and the constant microaggressions of the liberal White faculty presents an only barely exaggerated rendering of academic work life for Black women (both faculty and students). The film’s story, hopelessly unresolved, ends when the protagonist, Dr. Gail Bishop (Regina King), chooses to leave her tenured but clearly precarious position as “Master” at the college. Rather than supplying her faculty ID to justify her presence to the campus cop who approaches her, she instead says, “No, I don’t work here. I was just on my way out.” In a different vein, in both Get Out and Candyman (2021), the protagonists are artists, producers of their own work: significantly, Get Out’s Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is a photographer whose work appears to be observational, documentary, and focused on urban Black life; Candyman’s Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a painter and an installation artist whose work focuses on vivid representations of the victims of police brutality and murder. In both versions of Candyman, Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) (the ur-Candyman whose brutal murder is the origin of the Candyman mythology of the films) was a portraitist whose artwork was the path to his degradation and murder after he and a White woman, one of his subjects, fell in love. Robitaille, we are told, was then subjected to the same kind of mob violence that Ben’s body endures at the end of Night of the Living Dead, mutilated and burnt. Even the image of the hook at the end of Romero’s film is echoed in Candyman in the form of an appendage replacing the hand cut off of Robitaille, a hook that signifies Candyman as both victim and monster. In the 2021 Candyman, Black artwork that references anti-Blackness is made both central and explicit. Such layers are echoed in the film’s use of the mirror and the repetition of the name “Candyman” to evoke his spirit. The film’s artist-protagonist Anthony re-creates the mythology within the film by positioning the mirror as an art object within a gallery space and also hails some of the activist discourse of contemporary Black Lives Matter movements in titling his installation “Say My Name.” The film—like Get Out, in the figure of the gallerist who covets and then purchases Chris’s body for his artistic “eye”—incorporates the critical art world through the White art critic who refers to Anthony’s representations of anti-Black violence as “cliché” and the jealous White gallerist who explicitly instructs Anthony on how to commodify himself and his work as Black art. The film’s referentiality

afterword 

211

and connections to the cultural milieu surrounding Black artwork exceed the narrative, as Candyman’s director, DaCosta, in one article’s unfortunate phrasing, “hand-picked” Black artists (Cameron Spratley and Sherwin Ovid) to create Anthony’s artworks used in the film (Tangcay). These movies thus not only intervene in the generic development of horror but also use horror as a highly marketable genre of Black popular art that references and supports other Black artists who may be working in less lucrative conditions and media, while also critiquing the commodification of Black suffering by the White institutions of the art world. This referentiality extends into the meta-textual animated short of shadow puppetry of the trailer and credits, which cannot be seen separately from its similarity to the work of one of the best known contemporary Black artists, Kara Walker. Walker’s work in turn references a form of popular art that is similar to genre in its operational deployment of stereotypes: nineteenth-century silhouette painting. Walker’s use of the silhouette is something that has been amply discussed as a radical revisiting of a popular art form to represent, through stereotype and exaggeration, the obscenity and extremity of antiBlack violence in both American artistic tradition and American history. The questions that the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw was inspired to ask after first encountering Walker’s silhouettes might well be the same ones asked of Candyman’s puppet show, or of director DaCosta and new Black horror more generally: “What was the nature of the antique silhouette format that gave it such an uncanny ability to express current American cultural and racial ideologies? What motivated a young African American woman artist to create a fantastically horrific narrative out of racial stereotypes, nostalgic themes, and historical mythology?” (5). For various reasons, horror had long been thought of as an overwhelmingly White genre, as well as a space historically unkind to racial Others (to put it mildly). Between the Gothic tradition of coding ethnic and racial difference as transgressive and monstrous, the use of Indigenous peoples and traditions in American horror to provide an undercurrent of witchcraft and haunting, and the cliché of 1970s and 1980s horror that any Black character in the film would be among the first to die, it is tremendously difficult for a non-White character to survive a White horror film unscathed. On the other hand, horror is a genre that has allowed spectators and cultural commentators to undermine Whiteness by making fun of horror. From Eddie Murphy’s famous “get out” bit in his 1983 stand-up special Delirious (which Jordan Peele acknowledged as one of the points of reference for his own Get Out)—in which he asks, apropos of two canonical White horror films of the period, Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) and The Amityville

212 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1975), “Why don’t White people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house?”—to the Wayans brothers’ Scary Movie film series (2000–2013), horror puts on display the ridiculousness of White behavior and has made it ripe for satire (Ward). Or, as Ryan Poll notes in his essay on Get Out, also citing Eddie Murphy’s joke, mainstream White horror was “only possible because of White ignorance” (69). But as Poll also highlights, Get Out is not even remotely a comedy, as suggested by its famous mischaracterization in its nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. Peele’s now famous response to this nomination on Twitter, “Get Out is a documentary,” puts questions of genre at the forefront. Peele’s response is both a “fuck you” to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and a remark that demonstrates that genre is far more complex than White critical or marketing frameworks allow for, and that a Black horror film about Blackness can and should disrupt one of Hollywood’s most foundational mythologies: the existence of fiction as separate from lived realities. Through the critical framework of Afro-pessimism, Poll’s analysis of Get Out reinserts the primacy of horror in the film, contending that “for African Americans, horror is not a genre, but a structuring paradigm” (70). But it is not of minor importance that at the same time that Get Out is terrifying in both content and experience, it is also funny, and Peele’s background in sketch comedy is not inconsequential. No, the film is not a comedy nor merely a satire of Whiteness, but it does cast a piercing eye toward the horror genre in a way that hails the Whiteness behind the tropes not just as monster but as clown. Humor is also one of the most discomfiting elements of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, from the works’ titles to the impropriety of the content. Recalling Shaw’s characterization of Walker’s art as carnivalesque, horror, too, is “an idea, a way of looking at the world that subverts the dominant oppressive vision into one that can be laughed at and ridiculed. These silhouette caricatures insert laughter where it is most forbidden, and therefore most meaningful” (Shaw 14). In either Walker’s silhouettes or the horror film, laughter is not separate from the criticality that is used to construct generic work that depicts, at both literal and metaphorical levels, the horrors of Black life in the United States from slavery, abduction, and murder to daily, constant aggressions. The humor does not detract from the horror: it makes it work. As Isabel Pinedo notes in her essay on the film, “the perspective Get Out generates is akin to what bell hooks calls an oppositional gaze” (97). In this case, the film uses horror genre conventions to produce so many opposing terms, affects, scales, and forms that it can provide its own dialectics and praxis.

afterword 

213

For White viewers, horror is no longer a psychoanalytic safe space. If White people are going to continue to watch horror, they cannot do so with the impunity granted in the past. The current cycle of Black horror reflects back on the White spectator not their repressed fantasy but their repressed history: the horrors that created Whiteness, the complicity and violence disavowed by the comforts of White lives. With the deployment of humor in Black horror, the White liberal viewer is denied the relatively easy labor of finding the appropriate affective response that might be offered by the clarity of other genre formations: if we laugh, we are laughing in the context of a film about Black suffering; if we are not laughing, we don’t get it, we are unwilling to laugh at Whiteness or at the idiocy of racism, or we dislike that we are not in on the joke. To be clear: these films are not for or about White people, but if there is work to be done on the part of the White viewer, the White critic, it is to sit in the discomfort of being unable to find a subject position that offers the security of being “right”—to be unable to find a way to write about these films that is not itself subject to critique. Indeed, what more horrifying position for the White ally than the existential dread of being exposed as either a racist or a self-parody? Horror is a genre that evokes both laughs and screams, often at the same time; it is a genre that has long allowed terror and humor to coexist, in fact encourages the use of humor to explore terror. Playing with the conventions of the horror genre creates a space in which the horrors of White supremacy and anti-Blackness are exposed and avenged, while community is fostered through shared spectatorship and humor; this type of genre play also insists that the work of social justice need not come at the expense of fun, of joy. Ironically, one might say that the real work of horror is its potential for laughter. Perhaps the “work” of Black horror, both as product and as labor, is that it acknowledges itself as such and also refuses to be only work. It both exceeds and refuses the legacies of Black labor. It doesn’t need to do anything, and in not needing to, it does.

Notes I am tremendously grateful for the time and insights of Lauren McCleod Cramer. The initial thoughts behind this essay are the product of our collaboration on a seminar we led at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, “Spectacles of Anti-Black Violence: Teaching Horror ‘With Everything Going on Right Now,’” and her feedback on this piece was invaluable. I also want to thank the students in my fall 2021 “Body Horror” class at Pace University, who in the face of pandemic exhaustion and confrontations

214 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

with anti-Blackness and other forms of White supremacy in their daily lives, explored these topics with me in depth and with honesty, sensitivity, and their own excellent senses of humor. 1. Carroll and Tudor both explicitly pursued the question of “Why Horror?” in the 1980s, just as cinema studies was being firmly established as an academic discipline, and those essays were as much concerned with legitimizing horror as a topic of discussion for film critics as anything else. Clover’s more widely influential work on the “Final Girl” similarly sought to take seriously the possibility of a feminist analysis of films most often dismissed as simple and violent misogyny. 2. For Wood, the “American nightmare” was the return of the repressed: “collective nightmares” that created monsters out of anything that was cast as Other in White, capitalist patriarchy. Carroll’s ruminations on “art-horror” emphasized a kind of universal psychology, which he found to be a more useful, if “not as jazzy,” approach than psychoanalytic theory, in which curiosity and fascination were both the cause and the result of the disclosures at the heart of horror narrative (195). He also spoke of the impurities that were the crux of Julia Kristeva’s (via Creed) concept of abjection that became a de facto rule of horror, especially as it became more focused on the formation and deformation of the body. Tudor, genre theorist extraordinaire, in reviewing any general approach to the questions raised by horror, decided that cultural specificity and historical context were the only reasonable way to address any whys and wherefores; for Jameson, the work of really any genre is, in a word, “ideology.” 3. Harrison posited the idea of a “New Black Gothic” in 2018, but this designation quite purposefully exceeds the realm of the horror genre to account for a consistency of topic and tone that connects Get Out to Donald Glover’s series Atlanta (2016–) as well as Glover’s music and video work as Childish Gambino. Certainly, it is clear that although the horror genre does not and cannot contain the incongruities and terrors that have been explored in numerous media and in numerous ways by Black artists and artwork, the emergence of horror as a priority location for forms of popular media critically focused on anti-Blackness bears discussion. 4. Coleman’s work on Black horror demonstrates that it is a discussion that significantly preceded today’s much broader academic and cultural conversations. Kee’s essay is also a significant, pre–Get Out intervention in discussions of Blackness and horror, in which she uses Kristeva’s theories of abjection within historical context to argue that “cinematic representations of Black male abjection” must be considered in relation to “the real images of racial violence that have circulated for centuries within U.S. visual culture” (49). 5. Arguably, the corollary trend in contemporary horror is to focus on Whiteness. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), in different ways and to different ends, centralize Whiteness as both horrific and bizarre, in narrative spaces that use temporal abstraction as a narrative and aesthetic device to structure the space as White. If the invocation

afterword 

215

of history in Black horror is used to haunt, possess, and avenge, in some of the “quality” new White horror, time is isolated—alienated and alienating, even nonsensical. Even in Aster’s Hereditary (2018), which focuses explicitly on family lineage and traumatic history, it is a completely self-enclosed, claustrophobic history, a tree house of White time. 6. In a short review essay for Harper’s, Zadie Smith insists that the imagery of Black suffering in popular Black horror film is inseparable from other repetitions and iterations in American visual culture, comparing Get Out to the controversial inclusion of the White artist Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till’s body in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. 7. The film returns, again abruptly, to cinematic motion at the end of the credits sequence, a final shot of the bonfire. 8. This mini-film was also used as a teaser trailer for the film, another narrative-adjacent space of representation that has its own work to do: marketing the film as product.

Works Cited Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990. Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, fall 1987, pp. 187–228. Coleman, Robin R. Means. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to the Present. Routledge, 2011. Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 1986, pp. 44–71. Giorgis, Hannah. “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?” Atlantic, 17 Apr. 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/black-horror-racism​ -them/618632/. Harrison, Sheri-Marie. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 June 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-black-gothic/. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. Kee, Jessica Baker. “Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror: Race, Gender, and Abjection.” Visual Culture and Gender, vol. 10, 2015, pp. 47–56. Pinedo, Isabel. “Get Out: Moral Monsters at the Intersection of Racism and the Horror Film.” Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, edited by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak, Palgrave McMillan, 2020, pp. 95–114. Poll, Ryan. “Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, fall 2018, pp. 69–102. Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Duke UP, 2004.

216 

c at h e r i n e z i m m e r

Smith, Zadie. “Getting In and Out: Who Owns Black Pain?” Harper’s, July 2017, https://www.harpers.org/archive/2017/07/getting-in-and-out. Tangcay, Jazz. “Meet the Artists Who Contributed to the Art of ‘Candyman.’” Variety, 27 Aug. 2021, https://variety.com/2021/artisans/news/artists-of​ -candyman-nia-da-costa-1235050543/. Tudor, Andrew. “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre.” Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 1997, pp. 443–463. Ward, Priscilla. “Jordan Peele Credits ‘Get Out’ Inspiration to Eddie Murphy’s Earlier Reference.” Essence, 26 Oct. 2020, https://www.essence.com​ /entertainment/jordan-peele-credits-eddie-murphy-get-out-inspiration/. Weiss, Josh. “Here’s How Nia DaCosta’s ‘Candyman’ Pulled Off That Powerful Shadow Puppetry.” SYFY, 31 Aug. 2021, https://www.syfy.com​ /syfy-wire/candyman-shadow-puppets-interview. Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, by Wood, Columbia UP, 1986, pp. 70–80.

CONTRIBUTORS

Aviva Briefel is the Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell UP, 2006) and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2015) and a coeditor of the anthology Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (U of Texas P, 2011). She has published extensively on horror cinema in journals, including Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Film and History, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Post45. Joel Burges is an associate professor of English and the director of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where he is also on the faculty in the Departments of Film and Media Studies and Digital Media Studies. He is the author of Out of Sync and Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture and a coeditor, with Amy J. Elias, of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. He is at work on two books: the first, “Television and the Work of Writing,” will focus on the figure of the television writer, from Carl Reiner and Rod Serling to Issa Rae and Michaela Coel; the second is “Late Bourgeois Unities: Class Morbidity and Class Fantasy in the Twenty-First-Century World.” His writing has also appeared, among other places, in New German Critique, Post45, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Cinema Journal. David Church is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh UP, 2015), Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh UP, 2021), and Mortal Kombat: Games of Death (U of Michigan P, 2022). Lisa Coulthard is a professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on violence, theory, and sound studies. She has published extensively 217

218 

list of contributors

on violence, American and European cinemas, crime television, and film sound and music. She currently holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant studying the fight scene in cinema as well as an SSHRC Insight Development Grant on Digital Dark Tourism. She is currently completing a monograph on sound and violence. Mikal J. Gaines is an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. He is the author of “Staying Woke in Sunken Places, or The Wages of Double Consciousness,” in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”: Political Horror (Ohio State UP, 2020); “They Are Still Here: Possession and Dispossession in the 21st Century Haunted House Film,” in The Spaces and Places of Horror (Vernon Press, 2020); and “Strange Enjoyments: The Marketing and Reception of Horror in the Civil Rights Era Black Press,” in Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). He has also been a contributor to Black One Shot for ASAP/Journal. His research areas include African American literature, film, and popular culture; horror and Gothic studies; and critical theory. Adam Lowenstein is a professor of English and film and media studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the Horror Studies Working Group and serves as the faculty fellow for the University Honors College’s scholar community in horror studies. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia UP, 2022), Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (Columbia UP, 2015), and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia UP, 2005). His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Critical Quarterly, Film Quarterly, boundary 2, Representations, and Discourse, as well as in numerous anthologies. He facilitated the acquisition of the George A. Romero Collection and the founding of the Horror Studies Archive at the University of Pittsburgh and serves on the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation. With support from the University of Pittsburgh’s Global Studies Center, he is director of the Global Horror Studies Archival and Research Network. Jason Middleton is an associate professor in the English Department and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, as well as the director of the Film and Media Studies Program, at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship (Routledge, 2014) and a coeditor of Medium Cool: Music

list of contributors 

219

Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (Duke UP, 2007). He is a coeditor of the forthcoming special issue of Discourse, “Horror Grows Up.” His essays have been published in Cinema Journal, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Visual Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Post45, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. His current book in progress is titled “The Intimate Work of Horror.” Marc Olivier is a professor of French studies at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on European cinema, literature, and critical theory. He is the author of Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (Indiana UP, 2020) and a series editor for the new Icons of Horror series with Indiana University Press. Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, with particular research interests in the history of science and intellectual history, poetry and poetics, gender and sexuality studies, political theory and independence movements, the Gothic and horror, and comparative literary studies. Her book Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (U of Chicago P, 2020) lays out the literary and discursive history behind the ubiquitous figure of the “terrorism epidemic.” Raza Kolb was the inaugural Edward W. Said Fellow at Columbia University in 2017, and her poems, translations, essays, and other writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Discourse, Fence, Critical Quarterly, Boston Review, Peach Magazine, Reality Beach, Public Books, Victorian Studies, Triple Canopy, Guernica, and more. Alanna Thain is an associate professor of world cinemas and cultural studies in the Department of English at McGill University. She directs the Moving Image Research Laboratory (mirl.lab.mcgill.ca), devoted to the study of bodies in moving image media. She also heads the Fonds de Recherche du Québec research team Collective for Research on Ontologies and Epistemologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC). She is the author of Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (U of Minnesota P, 2017). Since 2012 Thain has been running Cinema Out of the Box, a bike-powered itinerant cinema in the streets and soft spaces of Montreal. She is currently completing a book, “Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and Post-Digital Cinema.” Other current projects include “The Sociability of Sleep,” on sleep media and performance, and feminist approaches to reproductive horror.

220 

list of contributors

Catherine Zimmer is a professor and chair of the Film and Screen Studies Department at Pace University. She has published essays in Camera Obscura, Discourse, and Surveillance and Society, among others, and has contributed to several anthologies on horror. Her book Surveillance Cinema (New York UP, 2015) focuses on how a range of surveillance technologies and practices work as a structural element of narrative cinema and genre formation. More recently Zimmer has published several essays of cultural criticism in forums such as Public Books, Avidly: Los Angeles Review of Books, and Real Life.

INDEX

Aaron, Michele, 51, 52 Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, The (1971), 49–50 affect and affect theory: in The Babadook, 87; creep, 17, 114–115, 122, 127; Deleuze on, 110–111n2; dread and, 172, 177–178, 184; in Embryo, 122, 126–127; gendered affect, 175, 176; gestational body and, 114, 116, 117–118, 122; in Get Out, 212–213; in gothic film, 84, 87; hopelessness and, 84; in horror film scholarship, 1; in It Follows, 183–184; labor of companionability, 126; in Midsommar, 97–98, 99–110, 111n7; precarity and, 79, 177–178; stagnation and, 183; transmission of affect, 111n7 Africa addio (1966), 51 “American dream,” 1, 2, 9, 10, 153, 161 American Psycho (2000), 21–22 Amityville Horror, The (1975), 211–212 amusement parks. See leisure Anderson, Coll, 88 Antebellum (2020), 207 Anthropocene, 58, 193 anti-Blackness, 2, 152, 157, 207– 213, 214n3 Antichrist (2009), 77, 83 Arendt, Hannah, 2–3, 4, 10–11n4 Aron, Cindy S., 135–136 art and artists: art-dread, 172; arthorror, 214n2; in Black horror, 207, 210–212; caring professions and, 81, 83; circularity of, 207; folk art, 97; in Hereditary,

81, 83; “high art,” 19, 50; in Midsommar, 192; pragmatism and, 114; in slasher films, 19 Aster, Ari, 5, 96, 110n1, 189–190, 191–192, 200, 215n5. See also Hereditary; Midsommar automation, 4, 114–117, 119, 123–127 autopsies. See death-care industry Autopsy (1994–2008), 44 Autopsy: Voices of Death (2000), 44 Autopsy 2: Voices from the Dead (1995), 46 Autopsy 7: Dead Men Talking (2001), 46 Autopsy of Jane Doe, The (2016), 39–54: Black Magic and, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49; gendered tensions in, 39–44; mortuary setting, 40–44; premise and opening scene, 39–40; White Science and, 42, 44, 46, 49 Baartman, Sarah (“Hottentot Venus”), 148n4 Babadook, The (2014), 5, 77, 78; absent father in, 80; domestic exhaustion in, 84–89; haptic aurality and, 78–79; home space in, 81; sonic Gothic and, 78, 82–86, 90 Bad Hair (2020), 207, 209 Bak, Meredith, 85 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51 Balthaser, Benjamin, 5–6 Barker, Andrew, 164–165 Barker, Jennifer, 143–144 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), 23 Benanav, Aaron, 177 221

222 

index

Berlant, Lauren, 79, 81 Big Country, The (1958), 59–61, 68 Black Christmas (1974), 17 Black horror, 9–10, 205–213, 214n4 Black Lives Matter movement, 51, 159, 210 Blood Rage (1987), 25 Bloodsworth-Lugo, Mary K., 155, 161 boardwalks. See leisure bodies: in amusement parks and carnivals, 134, 136, 137, 139, 148n4; Black bodies, 134, 167, 206–210; death-care industry and, 37–42, 47–54; of domestic workers, 79, 84; gestational bodies, 114, 116, 117–118, 122; reproductive bodies, 5, 116–117, 120–121, 123–125; trafficking in, 167; of zombies, 68 Body Bags (1993), 38 Brakhage, Stan, 49–50 Breaking In (2018), 152, 167–168n2 Brennan, Teresa, 111n7 Briefel, Aviva, 85 Brinkema, Eugenie, 185n4 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 43 Brood, The (1979), 5 Brottman, Mikita, 50–51 Brouillette, Sarah, 171, 183, 188 Bunker, Chang and Eng, 148n4 buppie horror, 151–168; definition of, 151; examples of, 152; future of, 167; Lakeview Terrace as, 153–159; misunderstandings of, 165, 167–168n2; Obsessed as, 159–163; ontological security and, 152–153, 163, 167; post-9/11 film and, 155, 161; Traffik as, 163–167 Candyman (1992), 181 Candyman (2021), 207, 209–211 capitalism and capitalist theory: Berlant on, 79; Lefebvre on, 133; leisure untethered from labor in, 8–9, 133–134, 138–139;

precarity and, 79; racism and, 181; reproductive labor and, 5, 114–115; stagnation and, 170; technology and, 114–115; unpaid labor and, 116, 124; in Us, 134, 138–139; zombies and, 5, 57 caretaking labor, 78, 80, 91. See also reproductive labor carnivalesque, the, 38, 51, 148n2, 212 carnivals. See leisure Carroll, Noël, 171–172, 214nn1–2 Cemetery Man (1994), 38 chain-saw effect, 7, 15, 17, 27, 193 Chef’s Table (2015–), 189 Child’s Play (1988), 18 Chion, Michel, 82 class: economic stagnation and, 170–172, 176–179, 182–184; middle class, 4, 5–6, 9, 18–19, 52, 171, 178, 181–183; morbidity, 170, 181, 182; social class in slasher films, 17–20, 22, 31; working class, 1, 5, 18–19, 22, 52, 133–134, 138, 181–182 Clover, Carol J., 10, 15–17, 24, 25, 42, 45, 48, 49, 155–156, 159, 165, 169–170, 173, 175, 179, 214n1 Clover, Joshua, 171, 183 Cohen, Anne, 111n8 Coleman, Robin R. Means, 206, 208, 214n4 confirmation bias, 7, 15, 17, 27, 193 Conrad, Joseph, 192 Creed, Barbara, 5, 43, 214n2 creep, horror affect concept of, 17, 114–115, 122, 127 Cronenberg, David, 5 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015), 39 Cuevas, Ofelia, 152 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 26 Cusk, Rachel, 96 DaCosta, Nia, 209, 211. See also Candyman (2021) Dawn of the Dead (1979), 57, 62, 65

index 

Day of the Dead (1985), 57, 62, 65 Dead and Buried (1981), 38 Dear White People (2014), 192 Dear White People (2017–2021), 192 death-care industry, 37, 39–44; filmed autopsies, 50–51, 54n3, 54n7. See also Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Deleuze, Gilles, 83–84, 98, 110– 111n2 Des morts (1979), 51 Destroyer (1988), 25 Diary of the Dead (2008), 57, 58–59, 62, 65 Dika, Vera, 175, 176 disability and disability studies: in horror film scholarship, 1; in Midsommar, 194; Romero’s films and, 57 Doane, Mary Ann, 106–107 domestic labor, 5, 124, 156; exhaustion of, 84–90; gendered domestic labor, 77–91; madness and, 79–84; soundscape of, 90–91 Doughty, Caitlin, 41 Driller Killer, The (1979), 19–20 ectogestation: animal experimentations and, 116; bioethicists on, 114; definition of, 113; in Embryo, 115, 117–119, 121–122, 124; in Par-tu-ri-ent, 113–114 Elba, Idris, 162 Embryo (1976), 8, 115–127; affect in, 122, 126–127; ectogestation in, 115, 117–119, 121–122, 124; queerness in, 119, 126 emotion work: in Midsommar, 95–110, 111n4; in Us, 139–140; use of the phrase, 148–149n7 empathy, 41, 52, 58, 62–72, 77–80, 87, 101 empire: Said on, 201; neoimperialism, 192 Exorcism of Emily Rose, The (2005), 45

223

Exorcist, The (1973), 45, 48 Faces of Death (1978–1990), 51 Fäviken (Nilsson), 187–189, 193 Federici, Silvia, 116, 120, 122–123, 124 femininity, 42, 49, 120, 141, 175, 176, 190 feminism and feminist theory, 1; emotion work and, 7–8, 95, 110; Final Girl trope and, 214n1; postfeminism, 77, 86; reproductive justice and, 127– 128n2; reproductive labor and, 5, 114–123, 127n1; second-wave feminism, 48 Fennessey, Sean, 191 Final Boy trope, 16, 27–28 Final Exam (1981), 25 Final Girl trope, 7, 15–17, 26–28, 107, 166, 214n1; Black Final Girls, 167–168n2 Finn, Suki, 114, 116, 117, 121 Firestone, Shulamith, 116, 119–120, 125 Fischer, Lucy, 145 Floyd, George, 208 folk horror, 8, 95–97, 103–104 Ford, John, 59 Freedman, Cynthia, 172 Freudian theory, 1, 48 Friday the 13th franchise, 25, 26, 169; Friday the 13th (1980), 26; Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), 26 Friedan, Betty, 120 Funeral Home (1980), 38 Fusco, Katherine, 81 Garner, Eric, 208 Gaslight (1944), 82 gaslighting: colonialism and, 195; in Midsommar, 8, 97–100, 102, 104, 107; no-drama ideology as, 97–100, 104, 105, 107, 110; of work, 205 gaze: assaultive gaze, 175–176; female gaze, 106–107, 175; male

224 

index

gaze, 43–44, 107, 125, 175; oppositional gaze, 212; reactive gaze, 175–176; of spectators outside fiction, 174–175 Get Out (2017), 181, 192–193; artist as protagonist in, 210; Black suffering and trauma in, 149n8, 206, 215n6; genre of, 206–212, 214n3; impact of, 206–213; influences on, 211; intertextuality as political strategy in, 134–135 globalism, 1, 171 Godfrey, Mollie, 142 Gorfinkel, Elena, 84 Gothic genre: madness and, 80–84; motherhood and, 77–83, 85, 91; noise and, 82; sonic Gothic, 78–79, 82–89, 90–91 Graduate, The (1967), 105 Graeber, David, 2 Grant, Barry Keith, 151, 163 Greer, Amanda, 84 grief: gendered domestic labor and, 77, 84; in Lakeview Terrace, 154; in Midsommar, 98–104, 108, 201; mortuaries and, 38 Griffiths, Alison, 137 Halloween (franchise), 24, 25, 172; Halloween (1978), 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 170, 173–176, 179, 180, 182; Halloween (2018), 18–19, 24; Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), 24, 33n6; Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), 24 Halperin, Victor, 5 Haneke, Michael, 87–88 Harpin, Anna, 80, 89 Harrison, Sheri-Marie, 214n3 Haunting, The (1963), 82 Haunting of Hill House, The (2018), 41 Haunting of Hill House, The (Jackson), 81–83 Hawkins, Joan, 50 Hearse, The (1980), 38

Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 192, 193 Hereditary (2018), 5, 77, 78, 80–81, 83, 215n5 Hester, Helen, 79 Heung, Marina, 140, 144 Hills Have Eyes, The (1977), 23, 25 Hills Run Red, The (2009), 25 Hitchcock, Alfred, 3. See also Psycho Hochschild, Arlie, 95, 111n4, 148–149n7 Hochstrasser, Julie Berger, 203n1 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 71 Holden, Stephen, 160, 161–163 Hollywood: Black horror film and, 212; serial killers in films, 38; Wyler films, 60 hooks, bell, 212 Horn, Claire, 116–117, 122 Horror Noire (2021–), 207 hyperacousia, 82–83, 84 I-camera, 173, 179, 180 Imitation of Life (1959), 9, 134, 140–148 inequality, economic, 1, 61, 177 Innocents, The (1961), 82 Isaacson, Johanna, 5 It Follows (2014), 6, 181–184, 214–215n5; dread in, 171–184; landscape of labor as setting of, 169–171, 177–179, 183; non–points of view in, 172–184; shot/reverse shots in, 173–177; stagnation in, 170–172, 176–179, 182–184 Jackson, Shirley, 81–83 James, Jennifer C., 180–181 Jameson, Fredric, 176, 184, 185n4, 214n2 Jancovich, Mark, 38–39 Jones, Duane, 208 Jungle Fever (1991), 162 Kapsalis, Dean, 8, 87. See also Swerve, The

index 

Kasson, John, 134, 139 Kee, Jessica Baker, 214n4 Keetley, Dawn, 91, 97, 104 Kent, Jennifer, 5, 8, 86–87. See also Babadook, The Killing of America, The (1984), 51 Kingma, Elselijn, 114, 116, 117, 121 Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé, 162 Korven, Mark, 88, 90 Kraus, Daniel, 58, 73n4. See also Living Dead, The Kristeva, Julia, 214n2, 214n4 labor: feminism and reproductive labor, l5, 114–123, 127n1; gendered domestic labor, 77–91; intellectual labor, 191–197, 200; landscape of labor as setting, 169–171, 177–179, 183; leisure and, 133; postmortem labor, 37. See also work Lakeview Terrace (2008), 152, 153–159, 160–161, 165, 166 Land of the Dead (2005), 57, 62, 65 Langenkamp, Heather, 37–38 Larsen, Lars Bang, 5 Last House on the Left, The (1972), 156 Lauro, Sarah, 4 Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), 15 Lee, Spike, 162 Lefebvre, Henri, 133–134, 135, 137–138 Leiris, Michel, 191–192, 201–202 leisure: amusement parks, 134, 136–143, 147, 148n1, 148n3; boardwalks, 133–134, 136–137, 139–144, 146–148; capitalism and, 133–134, 138–139; carnivals and carnival culture, 134, 136–137, 139, 148n2; Coney Island, 124, 133–134, 140–143, 147; doubling and shadow figures of, 137–139, 142, 145–147, 148n4; as escape, 137, 147; labor compared with, 133; Peele on

225

Black leisure, 133; Santa Cruz Boardwalk, 133, 136, 139, 142, 146; segregated leisure, 134, 142–143; trauma of, 134–137, 139–141, 144–147, 148n6; in Us, 134–148 Lensing, Dennis, 117 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 190–192, 194, 203n3 Lewis, Sophie, 114–115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 126, 127–128n2 Lilliefors, James, 136 liminal space, 2, 125, 178–179, 209 Lipsitz, George, 181 Living Dead, The (Romero and Kraus), 58, 66–67, 73, 73n4, 73n5 Lodge, The (2018), 77, 83 Loughery, David, 152–153, 155, 158, 159, 163. See also Lakeview Terrace; Obsessed Lovecraft Country (2020), 193, 207 Lowenstein, Adam, 169, 175–176 Lugo-Lugo, Carmen, 155, 161 madness, 4, 19, 78, 79–84, 89 mad science and mad scientists, 2–3, 4 mad studies, 79–80 Maniac Cop (1988), 25 Markovitz, Jonathan, 106–107 Martin (1978), 60 Marxism and Marxist theory, 1, 2–3 masculinity, 8, 41–42, 80, 110, 118, 156, 175–176, 179–180 Master (2022), 207, 209, 210 McClanahan, Annie, 171, 183 McClanahan, Scott, 202–203 McKittrick, Katherine, 197–199 McKoy, Millie and Christine (“Carolina Twins”), 148n4 Meeuf, Russell, 151, 152 melodrama: maternal melodrama, 140–148; Sirkian melodrama, 96, 103; as ur-genre, 52 #MeToo movement, 2 Middleton, Jason, 85

226 

index

Midsommar (2019): anthropological fieldwork in, 190–199; close-ups in, 110–111n2; emotion work in, 95–110, 111n4; female gaze in, 106–107; final image in, 109–110; folk-horror tradition in, 8, 95–97, 103–104; gaslighting in, 8, 97–100, 102, 104, 107; grief in, 98–104, 108, 201; intellectual labor in, 191–197, 200; May queen and Maypole dance in, 98, 103–104, 107–110, 111n8, 190, 197, 200–201, 203; New Nordic culture and, 188–190, 193–194, 200; no-drama ideology in, 97–100, 104, 105, 107, 110; Otherness in, 190; primitivism in, 190–192, 194, 198, 202, 203n3; racial reversal in, 192, 200–201; score of, 190; senicide in, 100, 102, 191, 194; Sirkian melodrama of, 96, 103; site-specific experience in, 189–190, 194, 198 Modleski, Tania, 80 Mondo cane oggi (1985), 51 mondo film, 50–51 Mortuary (1983), 38 motherhood: Gothic genre and, 77– 83, 85, 91; “intensive mothering,” 77, 86; “new momism,” 77, 86 Mulvey, Laura, 141, 142 Murphy, Eddie, 211–212 Nasaw, David, 134, 140 Nekromantik (1987), 38 neoliberalism, 1, 5 New Nordic culinary movement, 188–190, 194 200 Ngai, Sianne, 5, 138, 178, 183 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984), 107 Night of the Demons (1988), 38 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 1, 57, 60, 62, 65–66; casting of Duane Jones in, 208; impact of, 206, 208–209; race and, 208–209, 210

Nightwatch (1997), 38 Nilsson, Magnus, 187–189, 193 Nordic Cookbook, The (Nilsson), 189 Nowell, Richard, 16 Obama, Barack, 152 Obsessed (2009), 152, 153, 159–163 Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), 171, 183 Osterweil, Ara, 49–50 Others and Otherness, 1, 4, 151–152, 159–160, 190, 211, 214n2 Øvredal, André. See Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Pacific Heights (1990), 151, 161 Par-tu-ri-ent (speculative design project), 113–117 Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna, 167–168n2 pathos, 52 Peele, Jordan, 5, 149n8; on Get Out’s Golden Globe nomination category, 212; influence of, 206; on influence of Eddie Murphy, 211; on objectives in Us, 133; sketch comedy background of, 212; use of intertextuality by, 134–135; use of Sirkian melodrama, 140, 148. See also Get Out; Us Perez, Hiram, 146 Petridis, Sotiris, 16 Phantasm (1979), 38 Phases of Death, Phase One: Through the Coroner’s Eyes (1996), 51 Pinedo, Isabel Cristina, 151, 212 police procedurals, 38, 40 police violence, 2, 51, 157–159, 207, 208, 209 Poll, Ryan, 212 Poltergeist (1982), 4, 211 Possession of Hannah Grace, The (2018), 45–46, 48 Possession of Michael King, The (2014), 46

index 

postmortem labor, 37 Powell, Michael, 71 Pressburger, Emeric, 71 primitivism: in Lakeview Terrace, 155–156, 161; in Midsommar, 190–192, 194, 198, 202, 203n3 privilege: of affect, 27; loss of, 43, 152; male privilege, 107, 127, 155, 157; relative privilege, 157; white privilege, 105, 107, 134, 135, 141, 155, 157, 161 Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1991), 25 Prowler, The (1981), 17–18 Psycho (1960), 3, 10, 174, 175, 206; impact of, 206 psychoanalysis, 1, 206 psychoanalytic theory, 1, 206, 214n2 queerness and queer theory: in Embryo, 119, 126; in horror film scholarship, 1; Romero’s films and, 57; slasher villains and, 33n5 Quiet Man, The (1952), 59 Quigley, Paula, 85 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 134, 148n1 racialization: in buppie horror, 152– 153; of female dynamics, 139– 141; freak shows and, 148n4; of labor, 9; racialized casting, 159; racialized subjects as Other, 4; of safety, 10, 212–213 racism: anti-Blackness, 2, 152, 157, 207–213, 214n3; in corporate world, 152; leisure and, 134, 139–140, 141; policing and, 159; tropes of, 181 Re-animator (1985), 38 reproductive labor, 5, 114–123, 127n1 Repulsion (1965), 81–82 Return of the Living Dead, The (1985), 38 reversals, racial, 165–166, 192, 200–201 Reyes, Xavier Aldana, 80

227

Rhodes, John David, 2–3 Romanis, Elizabeth, 122 Romero, George A., 7, 57–58; The Living Dead, 58, 66–67, 73, 73n4, 73n5; Night of the Living Dead, 1, 57, 60, 62, 65–66, 206, 208–210; Survival of the Dead, 57–67, 69–72 Rosemary’s Baby (1968), 1, 4, 5 Rusnak, Stacy, 167–168n2 Ryan, Chris, 191 Said, Edward, 201 Salem witch trials, 47–48, 52–53, 54n6 Scary Movie series (2000–2013), 212 Schwartz, Hillel, 82 Scream (franchise), 25, 169, 172; Scream (1996), 23, 179; Scream 2 (1997), 23, 26; Scream 3 (2000), 23, 26 Se7en (1995), 38 See No Evil (2006), 25 See No Evil 2 (2014), 38 Seventh Continent, The (1989), 87–88 sex trafficking, 45, 165 shadow puppetry, 209, 211 Sharpe, Christina, 200 Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, 211 Shelley, Mary, 127 Shining, The (1980) Shirley (2020), 78, 83 shockumentaries, 44, 50–51 Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971), 54n5 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991), 38 Silent Night (2012), 25 Silverman, Kaja, 9, 10, 174–175 Simone, Nina, 167 Sirk, Douglas, 9, 134, 140–148 Sirkian melodrama, 96, 103 SisterSong, 127–128n2 slasher films: chain-saw effect and, 15, 17, 27; clothing worn in, 17–22, 29; code-switching in, 18–19, 20; final battles and final

228 

index

weapons used in, 26–28; Final Boy trope and, 16, 27–28; Final Girl trope and, 15–17, 26–28; gender imbalances in, 22–23; guns used in, 24–25; household tools used as weapons in, 22–23, 29, 30; scholarship, 15–17, 27–28; sexuality orientation in, 18, 27, 33n5; social class of aggressors and attacked in, 17–20, 22, 31; tool categories used for kill, by gender, in, 30; tool categories used in fights, by gender, in, 29 slavery, 54n6, 59, 61, 120; zombies and slave labor, 4–6 Slumber Party Massacre franchise, 190; The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), 23, 26 Smith, Jason E., 170–171 Smith, Zadie, 215n6 social reproduction, 79, 90, 113, 115–116, 124, 126 Soetarman, April, 96 Sorry to Bother You (2018), 192, 207, 209–210 Sperling, Nicole, 133 Spivak, Gayatri, 192 stagnation: horror of, 170–172, 176– 179, 182–184; secular stagnation, 170–171, 183, 185n2 Stranger Things (2016–), 171, 179, 181, 183 Straw Dogs (1971), 156 Survival of the Dead (2009), 57–67, 69–72 Swerve, The (2018), 77, 78, 81, 84, 87–90; emotional labor in, 78; motherhood in, 78; score of, 88, 90 Taking of Deborah Logan, The (2014), 46 Tales of Hoffmann, The (1951), 71 Taxi Driver (1976), 99 Taylor, Deon, 152, 163, 165, 166–167. See also Traffik terroir, 189–190 Terror Train (1980), 26 Texas Chainsaw (2013), 15

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974), 4, 5, 10–11n4, 15, 17, 20–21, 166, 206 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (2003), 15 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994), 15 Texas Tower Sniper, 25 Them (2021–), 207 Thompson, Grahame, 137 Till, Emmett, 208, 215n6 Todorov, Tzvetan, 50 Toolbox Murders, The (1978), 20–21, 23 tools of violence. See under slasher films Toop, David, 83 Traces of Death (1993), 51 Traffik (2018), 152, 163–167 trauma: cumulative trauma in Romero’s films, 66, 68–69, 72; in Gothic film, 80, 84; of leisure, 134–137, 139–141, 144–147, 148n6; in Midsommar, 99–104, 110; PTSD, 146–147; True Gore (1987), 51 Tudor, Andrew, 214nn1–2 Turner, J. M. W., 199–200 12 Years a Slave (2013), 207 Undertaker, The (1988), 38 Undertaker and His Pals, The (1966), 38 Us (2019): amusement parks and boardwalks in, 134–148; doubling in, 137–139, 142, 145–147, 148n4; final scenes of, 147–148; Imitation of Life and, 134, 140–148; maternal melodrama in, 140–148; trauma of leisure in, 134–137, 139–141, 144–147, 148n6 Valentine, Carla, 44 Vodou, Haitian, 46 Vogel, Amos, 50 Voices from the Dead (1995), 46

index 

weapons. See under slasher films Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), 37–38 whiteness: Anthropocene and, 193; Black horror and, 146, 192, 211–213, 214–215n5; buppie horror and, 151–152; contemporary horror and, 214– 215n5; in It Follows, 180, 181; in Midsommar, 194, 196, 197 white privilege, 105, 107, 134, 135, 141, 157, 161 white supremacy and superiority, 141–142, 166, 206, 207, 210, 213 White Zombie (1932), 5 Whitman, Charles, 25 Wicker Man, The (1973), 97 Williams, Linda, 10, 52, 109, 140, 162 Williams, Thomas Chatterton, 202 Winant, Gabriel, 178 Wolcott, Victoria, 134 Wood, Robin, 2, 5, 48, 148n5, 151, 159

229

Woodhouse, Guy, 4 Woofter, Kris, 128n3 work: Arendt on, 2–3, 4, 10–11n4; invisibilized work, 7, 37, 116; labor as distinct from, 2; service work, 2, 169, 177; visibility of, 2–3. See also labor working class, 1, 5, 18–19, 22, 52, 133–134, 138, 181–182 Wyler, William, 59–61 Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 142 yuppie horror, 151–152, 163, 167 zombies: in The Autopsy of Jane Doe, 39, 46–47, 49, 50; Black horror and, 205–206, 208; in The Living Dead, 66–73; in The Night of the Living Dead, 57, 60, 62, 65–66; race and, 4–5, 205–206, 208; in Survival of the Dead, 59–66 zombification, 5 Zwissler, Laurel, 48