ALL I’VE FOUND IS PAIN AND TERROR: AESTHETICS AND MORAL STATUS IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR NARRATIVES A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Ross Chiasson 2018 English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program September 2018 ABSTRACT All I’ve Found is Pain and Terror: Aesthetics and Moral Status in Contemporary Popular Narratives Ross Chiasson This thesis is concerned with how specific aesthetic elements function in various contemporary texts to distort, obscure, or illuminate the immoral actions and behaviours being represented. This thesis applies the moral status philosophy of Mary Anne Warren, along with the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Zygmunt Bauman. Close reading and critical analysis are supported by Michele Aaron’s theory of spectatorship. The sublime is explored in Dexter (2006) and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the uncanny in Battlestar Galactica (2003) and Westworld (2016), and the abject in The Walking Dead (2003) and World War Z (2006). The intentions of this project are to conduct a formal examination of the relationship between audience and text as it is filtered through aesthetic representation and moral frameworks. This thesis argues that aesthetic effects must be understood in connection to morality for active consumers to engage with these texts as sites for ethical consideration. Keywords: Popular fiction, moral status philosophy, aesthetic theory, spectatorship, Dexter, The Dark Knight Returns, Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, The Walking Dead, World War Z ii Acknowledgements The biggest thanks for this project go to my supervisor, Dr. Kelly McGuire, who not only embraced a project with so many texts under consideration but helped navigate me through the process of writing and theorizing it. Dr. Kathryn Norlock also deserves special thanks for her invaluable insight into the philosophy angles of my thesis. Thanks to Dr. Brian Johnson for acting as my external. Much love and thanks to my parents, Lorraine and Marc, who have always been my first readers. Thank you for the unrivaled support, even from so far away. Thank you to my office mates and friends, Cait and Callie. This research was supported in no small part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction: We Never Asked Ourselves Why We Deserve to Survive 1 Chapter One: They Will Look Up and Shout ‘Save Us’ and I’ll Look Down and Whisper ‘No’ 15 Chapter Two: Are You Alive? Prove It 65 Chapter Three: We’re Not A Civilization Anymore, We’re a Gang 108 Conclusion: To Escape This Place You Will Have to Suffer More 145 Works Cited 149 iv Introduction: We Never Asked Ourselves Why We Deserve to Survive Popular fiction has long combined powerful storytelling with mass audience consumption, often garnering cultural value simply through the measurable number of people consuming the content at any given time. On this basis alone, if not the traditional pedagogical or semiotic basis, a knowledge of what is being communicated in our popular fiction offers us the opportunity to explore the ramifications of our engagement and involvement with these texts. As Oscar Wilde famously said in his essay “The Decay of Lying: An Observation,” “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (“Oscar Wilde”). I quote the Irish poet and playwright here to suggest that popular fiction may reflect the ideas and values of our culture, but it is worth considering how popular fiction may be more notably determining the ideas and values of our culture. If this is true then it is more important than ever that we as consumers of content become and maintain our status as active readers, viewers, and participants. The most effective way to ensure this level of active participation is to unpack and understand the philosophical, ideological, and cultural ideas being explored in our popular fiction texts. In her book Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, Michele Aaron discusses the role of the spectator in the consumption of texts, with a specific focus on film. She suggests that “The discussion of spectatorship has always been bound up with [the] question [. .] of the spectator's activity or passivity, manipulation or resistance, distance or implication” (Aaron 1). Aaron discusses the relationship between spectator and film as a masochistic relationship, claiming “Masochism in its strange position between activity and passivity, between pain and pleasure, between submission and control, inscribes a world in which the spectator as witness is similarly strangely positioned but always, as will become increasingly significant, complicit” (62). Aaron’s book positions the spectator as complicit in their passive adherence to film; the audience ultimately chooses to engage with the text as the submissive recipient of the text’s content, be it painful or pleasurable or both. Where Aaron avoids the content of film to discuss the spectator’s complicity, I intend to explore more closely the content of my selected texts, benefiting from the work Aaron has already done. I also intend to apply Aaron’s theory, both directly and indirectly, to a range of popular fiction media not confined specifically to film. My selection of texts includes graphic novels, literature, and television shows. Popular fiction is now consumed in many forms and to limit this exploration to a single medium would do an injustice to the spirit of this endeavour; how popular fiction communicates ideas of morality and ethics through different media has an inevitable effect on how those ideas are internalized. But, regardless of form, Aaron says, “The crucial point here is not to get hung up on the 'is it real?' and 'dismiss it if it isn't' issue - as if only real things are meaningful - but to interrogate the real or fiction status of images of suffering for their impact upon questions of personal and social response and responsibility” (122). As much as how the idea is communicated matters, my concern is with what the ideas are, how those ideas are presented in narrative form, and what the consequences of that presentation or representation are. Increasing consideration of the self vs. other in popular culture coincides with an ethical turn in the humanities that has occurred over the last twenty years. In his introduction to Poetics Today entitled “The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?”, Michael Eskin provides an exhaustive list of theorists whose combined efforts have “signaled what has come to be perceived and referred to as a ‘turn to ethics’ in literary studies and, conversely, a ‘turn to literature’ in (moral) philosophy” (Eskin 557). Eskin identifies this as an Aristotelian shift towards viewing human experience as best understood “through works of literature” (558).1 It should come as no surprise that many theorists cite 9/11 as the inceptive event for this shift towards ethical consideration in 1 Aristotle believed that tragedy should cause the audience to experience fear and pity, specifically using the term phobos to mean a less subjective sense of fear. This is discussed by both Di Leo and Mehan, and Eskin in their respective introductions. 2 both popular culture and academia. In the introduction to Theory Ground Zero: Terror, Theory, and Humanities after 9/11, Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan argue that “of course, the attacks were no movie, but the emotions they brought out (fear and pity), especially for those who were not experiencing these events firsthand, bore an uncanny and uncomfortable relationship with the arts and the emotions associated with them” (Di Leo and Mehan). Di Leo and Mehan argue that 9/11 ought to be considered a historical event that has (and still is), “defining a generation and occupying the center of our theoretical energies” (Di Leo and Mehan). Furthermore, in his essay “Praxis of the Ethical Turn through Literature,” Meenu Gupta Aggarwal extrapolates on Eskin’s theorization of this “double turn” and claims “the perfect blend of the particular and the universal that informs literature makes of it a potent vehicle for ethics for putting theory into praxis” (Aggarwal 105). In other words, literature (though I will extrapolate Aggarwal’s argument to include a wider range of narrative texts) has become recognized as an eminently effective device for working through questions of moral and ethical concern. It is in keeping with this increasingly dominant theoretical consideration of the position of texts in our cultural discussions of ethics and moral philosophy that I have chosen to approach a range of narratives that grapple with the rights of the “other” in a post 9/11 world. Mary Anne Warren’s moral status philosophy is central to my consideration of the ethics of popular narrative. In Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things, Warren’s concern is to construct a “multi-criterial” (176) approach to determining when and how human beings have moral obligations. Warren’s work provides a baseline understanding of what moral status is and means; put simply, moral status is “to be morally considerable, or to have moral standing. It is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations” (Warren 3) and means “we must not murder other persons, assault them, cheat them, torture them, imprison them unjustly, or fail to help them when help is needed and we have the means 3 of providing it” (Warren 13). In applying moral status philosophy to my selected texts, I am primarily concerned with demonstrating that the subjects of violence in the various texts are possessors of moral status by Warren’s definition. Hence, I will argue that both the targets of vigilante justice (as criminals) and synthetically created beings remain bearers of moral status, although the question becomes more complicated when we consider other beings with dubious status such as zombies, which fit less easily into Warren’s criteria.