Confronting Eternity

Confronting Eternity Strange (Im)mortalities, and States of Undying in Popular Fiction January 27, 2014 Edwin Bruce Bacon 46250931 [email protected] Department of English University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Supervisors: Dr. Anna Smith and Dr. Mary Wiles To Glen and Benjamin, The inspirations for immortality. ii Table of Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS .....................................................................................................................III THESIS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... V AN INTRODUCTION TO IMMORTALITY.......................................................................................... VI GLOSSARY OF NEOLOGISMS AND UNIQUE PHRASES .................................................................... IX CHAPTER ONE: THE MIRIFIC MORTALITIES OF DOCTOR WHO ......................................................... 1 PHOENICAL MEN, AND “THE MASTER RACE” ............................................................................................. 1 Phoenical Bodies, Tardevism, and “The Long View” ................................................................... 3 Moriartesque Supervillainies: The Master as a Moriarty .......................................................... 13 The Master as a Cambion, as a Merl(i/y)n, and as a Misanthrope ........................................... 16 The Master as Misanthrope, and as Many................................................................................ 20 “Breaking News”: Vote Saxon! (Conclusion) ............................................................................. 28 GALLIFREYAN GALLIMAUFRIES: UNDYING, AND THE PHYSICIAN OF THE UNIVERSE ............................................ 31 The Doctor, Holmes, and Immortal Insouciance ....................................................................... 34 The Corsair, Orlando, Woolf, and Dickinson .............................................................................. 38 THE IMMORTALS OF THE WHONIVERSE ................................................................................................... 42 Undying, and Pansexuality: Captain Jack Harkness .................................................................. 42 “Hello Sweetie”: Congenital and Quantum Immortalities, and River Song ............................... 43 CHAPTER TWO: PARALLEL UNDYINGS IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ........................................ 47 GALDERDASH! REJUVENESCENCE IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER ................................................................. 47 Malefic Magic(k), and Galderdash ............................................................................................ 48 “Your Suffering Has To End”: The Dwimmer Doll, “Mistressing” Reality, and Magic(k) as the Language of the Teenage Nihilist .............................................................................................. 55 Vampwill: Darkness as a Bride, and Parallel Undyings ............................................................. 64 “THIS ISN’T EVEN MY FINAL FORM”: DEAD FACES IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER .......................................... 67 The First, and Dead-Faced Portrayal ......................................................................................... 67 The Proteus of Death, and Mirimortality .................................................................................. 69 CHAPTER THREE: THE VIZARD AND ETERNAL LIFE IN THE MASK, BATMAN, AND SCREAM ............ 71 DEATHLESS TOONTOWN: MIRIFIC MASKS, AND PERSONAL AGGREGORIANISM IN THE MASK ............................. 71 Head, Hyde, and the Corporeal Protean.................................................................................... 71 ‘Toon Thespians, and Spurning Science ..................................................................................... 75 Serfs in Reality, Kings in Toonworld .......................................................................................... 77 IMMORTAL THROUGH INACTION: GOTHAM’S GYWNPLAINE IN BATMAN ........................................................ 80 iii Slaughter is Salutary: The Joker, His Scars, and The Modern Fool ............................................ 80 A Kinship of Abnormalcy: Batman and The Joker ...................................................................... 83 Anarchy Athanatised: The Joker as an Immortal, and as an Emulable ..................................... 89 MURDER IN THE MOVIES: GHOSTFACE, CABIN IN THE WOODS, AND THE MASK AS A MIRROR ........................... 94 Emulation and The Ghostfaced Killer ........................................................................................ 94 The Villainous Affable, and The Re-casting of The Teenage Role .............................................. 95 CHAPTER FOUR: THE IMMORTAL MORIBUNDS OF SAW AND BREAKING BAD ............................ 101 THE ANGEL WHO TAUGHT US GORE: DYSCHRONIA, AND MEMORIAL VIVEFACTION IN THE SAW SEPTILOGY ....... 101 The Jigsaw Legacy, and Memorial Vivefaction ........................................................................ 101 Lungwitz, Metempsychosis, and Dyschronia ........................................................................... 106 THE DEATHLESS MORIBUND: WALTER WHITE AND THE ALCHEMY OF BREAKING BAD .................................... 110 Walter White, The Portrait Persona, and The “Grammar of Evil” ........................................... 110 Satanic Sagacities, and Cacomimesis ...................................................................................... 114 CHAPTER FIVE: FROM SCIENCE TO STRULDBRUGGS: HEROES AND GULLIVER'S TRAVELS ............ 119 TOO SPECIAL TO SUCCUMB: SYLAR AND HEROES ..................................................................................... 119 The Gossamer God .................................................................................................................. 119 i-Mortality: Editing the Corporal, and Embellishing One’s Genome ........................................ 122 NIGHTMARE PERPETUITY: THE GULLIBLE TRAVELLER, AND STRULDBRUGGISM IN GULLIVER’S TRAVELS .............. 126 Lambasting Laputa: Swift vs. The Royal Society ...................................................................... 126 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 132 A CHAOS OF FORTITUDES: RECAPITULATION, AND A LOOK TO THE FUTURE OF UNDYING ................................. 132 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................. 139 iv Thesis Abstract “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee, /And for my soul, what can it do to that, /Being a thing as immortal as itself?” -Hamlet, (1.4.65), Hamlet, speaking to Horatio. When the meritless scrabble for the bauble of deity, they ironically set their human lives at the “pin’s fee” to which Shakespeare’s Hamlet refers. This thesis focuses on these undeserving individuals in premillennial and postmillennial fiction, who seek immortality at the expense of both their humanities, and their natural mortalities. I will analyse an array of popular modern characters, paying particular attention to the precursors of immortal personages. I will inaugurate these analyses with an examination of fan favourite series Doctor Who. I will first examine the characters of the Time Lords named The Doctor and The Master, and adduce them as parallels of Sherlock Holmes, and his nemesis Professor Moriarty. I will use these figures of the deathless to introduce the concepts upon which my research is founded. I will elucidate firstly the strange mortality which I refer to as mirimortality, and secondly, the corporeal protean, the mutability of the human form. I will concretise these terms and compare somatic and mnemonic immortalities through an observation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg/Dark Willow and the primordial entity known as The First. I will analyse magic and science thereafter, and their influences on both dying and undying in fiction as I move through subsequent chapters on modern immortals from Big Head/The Mask, to The Joker, to “moribunds” such as John Kramer and Walter White. Those who pursue the illusion of immortality live less than those who seize life’s brief candle, and burn it at both ends. So would you pay a pin to be a phoenix? Those seeking eternity pay this and more, and find their strange mortalities in both good and evil. v An Introduction to Immortality There is but a thin membrance between us humans and death, however loath we may be to concede it so. Any deprivation of food, or water, or oxygen; drowning, asphyxiation, bludgeoning by a blunt object, transfixion by a blade, poisoning, strokes and cardiac arrest, being crushed, trampled, burned, or frozen, decapitation, and many other methods too numerous to list. The ways in which we can and might die are fearsomely enumerable. This thesis acts as a comprehensive dissection of the modes of mortality in primarily postmillennial fiction, and the individuals who wish to put a million year bulwark between themselves and dying. I will argue that the immortal is reality’s homunculus, who must at first live the mortal’s life. The immortal then dies the only death possible to an immortal, the death of disremembrance, as he or she grows more nihilistic. I will continue that the existences of the deathless cannot but lapse into

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