Media and Identity in Post-War American and Global Fictions of the Undead

"Born in Death": Media and Identity in Post-War American and Global Fictions of the Undead Jonathan Mark Wilkinson MA by Research University of York English January 2015 2 Abstract Existing scholarship has largely overlooked that the undead are, famously, ‘us’. They are beings born from our deaths. Accordingly, their existence complicates the limits and value of our own. In this dissertation, I therefore argue that fictions of the undead reflect on questions of identity, meditating on the ways in which identities are created, distorted or otherwise reformed by the media to which their most important texts draw insistent attention. Analysing landmark texts from Post-War American contexts, this dissertation expands its hypothesis through three case studies, reading the texts in each as their own exercise in ontological thought. In each case study, I show that fictions of the undead reflect on the interactions between media and identity. However, there is no repeating model through which the themes of media, identity and undeath are repeatedly engaged. Each text’s formulation of these interacting themes is distinct to the other’s, suggesting that the significance of the undead and their respective tradition is not in the resounding ontological ‘answers’ that they and their texts inspire, but the questions that their problematic existential state asks. 3 List of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................2 Author’s Declaration .................................................................................................4 Chapter 1: Introduction ..............................................................................................5 Chapter 2: Media Made Vampires: Identity as the Performance of Media Scripts in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend................................20 Chapter 3: Being in Place and Placeless Beings: Place, Identity and Television in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead..................................35 Chapter 4: Media-Zombies and Zombie-Media: Media Identity and Mediated Identity in the Found-Footage Zombie Movie .......................52 Chapter 5: Conclusion..............................................................................................66 Bibliography .............................................................................................................74 4 Author’s Declaration I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. All sources are acknowledged as References. 5 Chapter 1 Introduction ‘A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.’ (Matheson, Legend 161) In their century-long existence, the undead have carved out a significant place in Western popular culture. Holding stakes in most popular artistic traditions, they have so successfully infiltrated the collective imagination that few could claim not to know of them and their kind. However, for all their popularity, the undead have yet to be studied in any great detail: for whilst they have attracted critical attention, it has generally been for their contribution to the traditions of the vampire and the zombie.1 Although these traditions overlap with the undead at numerous junctures and share between them a host of key texts, the undead are not an amalgam of the two. They have a genealogy in and of themselves, a history independent of the vampire and the zombie with which they are often equated. Born in death, as Richard Matheson has put it, the undead are at once us and yet not us; and here, at the hinterlands of ourselves, their existence, if we can use that term, questions the limits of our own. Fictions of the undead are always therefore explorations of identity. They call into question who or what a subject ‘is’, and this ontological reflexivity is paired with the attention they pay to the media within which they circulate. Characteristically populated by a range of media technologies, fictions of the undead remind us that media are always remediations,2 one medium oscillating into another through a process that is itself a form of undeath, and this undeathly quality is doubly enacted as and in these fictions. At an extratextual level, this remediative logic explains the undead’s cultural identity as a life lived between the vampire, the zombie and the infected. Whilst within these 1 For an overview of the well documented and diverse history of the vampire, see Beresford From Demons to Dracula, Auerbach Our Vampires, Ourselves, Frayling Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula and Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage. For overviews of the history of the Zombie in fiction, see Christie and Lauro, Better off Dead, and McIntosh and Leverette, Zombie Culture; and see Zora Neale Hurston Tell My Horse for an overview of the Haitian and Jamaican origins of the zombie myth. 2 See Bolter and Grusin. 6 fictions, media’s undeathliness is figured in the representation of lives mediated by media: identities inflected, reconstructed, or deformed by the media technologies that circulate their fictional worlds. It is my contention that this connection between media and identity has been a latent feature of fictions of the undead since their beginnings in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, it is a relationship that only fully unfurls in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the undead are released from their historical partnership with the vampire and begin new partnerships with post-war American and global media technologies. In an analysis of the zombie, Boon details the evolving etymology of the term ‘monster’ as follows: Its Old and middle French (mostre and monstre, respectively), and Anglo-Norman derivations articulate disfiguration of the human form, and the term’s evolution from classical Latin (mōnstrum) through Italian (mostro), Spanish (mostro), and Portuguese (monstro) imply a warning (from base monēre – to warn) embodied in the monstrous form. Thus, the etymological roots of the monstrous imply a boundary space between human and non-human (originally, human and animal) – the imaginary region that lies between being and non-being, presence and absence. (33) From an etymological perspective the monster is a warning carved into flesh. Continuing, Boon argues that ‘[t]hat which is defined as “monstrous”’ is that which ‘was not supposed to happen’(34). It is a deviation or aberration on the human whose difference opens up a dialectic of self and other that defines that which the human is and should be by antithesis of that which it should not. This allegorical understanding of the monster is common to both Gothic studies and, more specifically, analyses of the undead. It is most popularly championed by Judith Halberstam, who argues that ‘Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known’(2) – a deviance she marks is represented in the monster’s deformed skin. Turning her attention to Stoker’s Dracula, she argues that its monster ‘is a composite of otherness that manifests as the horror essential to dark, foreign, and perverse bodies’(90). She notes that ‘Dracula … resembles the Jew of [contemporary] anti-Semitic discourse’, and that his ‘his physiognomy … is a particularly clear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity’(92): a monstrous aspect which, she adds, was ‘also seen to express … criminality and degeneration’(93). Contemporary anxieties surrounding degeneration and 7 Judaism are thus conjoined in Dracula, a social parasite who drains the health and wealth of his host-country and its citizens by the power of his two protruding teeth, markers of his deformity. Mighall has contested this ‘anxiety model’ approach and its tendency to read a text’s ‘anxious’ content in terms of the ‘anxieties’ of its context. In doing so, he has also turned his attention toward the undead, focusing again on Stoker’s Dracula and again on the tendency to equate its monsters with contemporary anxieties surrounding degeneration. Halberstam’s analysis is one such example; however, I will use Kane’s “Insiders/Outsiders” as a more developed and typical example of this thought.3 Kane argues that Dracula is an attempt to ‘overcome a whole complex of phenomenon’(21) related to ‘Darwinist-inspired fears regarding physical, mental, sexual, and racial degeneration’(4) by ‘project[ing] these fears onto one, clearly distinct, scapegoat’(21) in the shape of the Count; his invasion and expulsion played out to first situate that which was perceived to ail the nation as foreign and then to prescribe a ‘cure [for] the nation[‘s] … diseases’(17). In contrast, Mighall contends that: ‘[t]hat scientists, pathologists, or sexologists had recourse to these devices, and that later Gothicists may have reciprocated by giving their own use of them distinct physiological or somatic inflection, does not necessarily suggest that they feared the same thing or anything at all’. Rather, he continues, ‘[w]hat it suggests is that both scientists and novelists belonged to a linguistic as well as a ‘class’ community’(181). Reading Dracula in terms of a more nuanced history of the changing scientific and social industry that surrounded its production, Mighall argues that the thematic of degeneration as it appears in Dracula is not necessarily linked to a fear of the

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