I've Found Is Pain and Terror: Aesthetics and Moral

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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

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

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

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. Beyond a passing reference to the affinity of science fiction for interrogating the “personhood” of aliens (93), Warren’s text does not address popular culture at length; however, I hope to explore and demonstrate the applicability of her theory to a broad range of speculative texts in this thesis, drawing in the process on the theoretical work of Joseph Slaughter (Human Rights, Inc.) and Amy Kind (Persons and Personal Identity).

In addition to Warren’s moral philosophy, this thesis draws extensively on Zygmunt

Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics and Emmanuel Lévinas’ Humanism of the Other. Bauman tackles ethical issues from a particularly postmodern perspective, arguing in his 1993 book that the postmodern era represents the dawning rather than the twilight of ethics. The core idea that

Bauman describes and examines is the notion that “We are not moral thanks to society (we are only ethical or law-abiding thanks to it); we live in society, we are society, thanks to being moral”

(Bauman 61). In other words, both the capacity for comprehending moral obligations and the application of this understanding in the form of ethical behaviour are necessary for participation in society. In undertaking my analysis of the moral questions at stake in specific texts, Bauman’s philosophy offers a means by which to position my conclusions within the societies they influence and reflect. Likewise, Humanism of the Other (1972) is French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ postmodern moral philosophical text concerned with the relational foundations of morality.

Lévinas posits the term visage – translated as “the face” – as the site on which human moral

4 obligation becomes recognizable, claiming that “The "otherness" of the other person arises precisely as the moral imperative that pierces the self with moral obligation, with service to the other” (Lévinas xxvii). This otherness arises through the confrontation of the self with the visage of the Other and the consequence of this confrontation is the self’s submission to their moral obligation to the Other. For the purposes of my analysis, Lévinas’ concept of the visage is useful in unpacking the different ways in which the various focalizations of my selected texts influence the audience’s confrontation with their moral obligations.

This thesis examines the framing of central ethical concerns in representative texts from three specific popular narratives dealing with vigilantism, artificial intelligence, and zombie narratives. As for the specific sub-genres of popular fiction I have chosen, the sweeping presence of superhero and vigilante fiction – which I have combined under the heading of vigilantism – suggests an important moral and ethical relationship to extra-judicial behaviour that is important to unpack. Artificial intelligence narratives offer a way to explore moral responsibility through representations of ourselves (the human characters) creating and harming representations of themselves (the machine characters). Finally, zombie narratives – perhaps more than the other branches of popular fiction I have chosen – with their pervasive introduction across all genres, regularly confront moral and ethical issues as a staple of the genre.

In Chapter One, I explore the television show Dexter and the graphic novel The Dark

Knight Returns. Dexter focuses on a serial killer named Dexter Morgan who kills other serial killers and criminals who escape the law. The Dark Knight Returns presents an aging Batman in a Gotham

City utterly overrun with criminality who comes out of retirement when he can no longer resist his compulsion to punish criminals. I have chosen these texts because of their engagement with ideas of vigilantism and morality; specifically, these works both present a complicated protagonist whose grip on right and wrong, good and evil, is tenuous at best.

Dexter complicates the idea of killing as an immoral act by choosing victims who are unequivocally as immoral as he is. It is this complication – this moral uncertainty that occurs because of this confusion – that makes Dexter particularly worthy of consideration. Airing for eight seasons, Dexter has received numerous awards and nominations, and though these are not necessarily direct evidence of its popularity, they are certainly an indication of how well received and widely consumed the series was. For the purposes of this essay, I have confined my examination of Dexter to its first two seasons. I have chosen to examine Dexter’s supposed moral and ethical code, his behaviour when compared to his victims, and how his crimes are represented. Positioned alongside Dexter is The Dark Knight Returns, which complicates the standard idea of Batman as a noble superhero fighting for the victimized and helpless. Originally published in 1986, The Dark Knight Returns was ranked as one of the top 10 graphic novels of all time by Time magazine (Miller) and has been the continuing inspiration for most of the popularized depictions of Batman since, particularly in films such as Batman Begins and Batman v Superman (Schaefer). Much like my examination of Dexter, I consider Batman’s moral/ethical code, his behaviour when compared to that of his victims, and how the violence he inflicts is represented in The Dark Knight Returns.

Chapter Two focuses on artificial intelligence narratives, particularly those of the 2016

HBO Westworld and the 2004 SyFy series, Battlestar Galactica. In Westworld, Hosts are synthetically created machines that populate a theme park where human Guests can do whatever they want to the Hosts without any consequences. Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, follows the human survivors of a nuclear apocalypse perpetrated by the Cylons, a machine race the humans originally created as slaves but who have since evolved to have organic forms. I have chosen these texts because of the ways in which they offer refinement on the tried and true formula of artificial intelligence stories pitting humans against emotionless and relentless

6 mechanized robotic enemies. In both shows, the machine characters (Hosts and Cylons) are portrayed by human actors, an important distinction that allows for a more complicated exploration of moral responsibility.

Battlestar Galactica complicates the easy distinction between humans and machines through the Colonials and Cylons, presenting the robotic enemies as indistinguishable from their human counterparts. This resemblance is crucial to my exploration of this series, as well as my unpacking of Westworld, and I will go into further detail later in this introduction. Battlestar

Galactica aired originally as a mini-series that preceded four seasons, two movies, and two spin- off series. It received massive critical acclaim, including being named the best show on television by Time magazine in 2005 (Poniewozik). The implications of the content explored in Battlestar

Galactica were understood to be so significant as to warrant an official United Nations sponsored discussion of human rights and armed conflict with the stars and creators of the show (United

Nations). With this level of influence in mind, I have chosen to examine the nature of the Cylons as moral entities, how the focus on subject rather than action with regards to violence affects reception, and how linguistics attempt (and ultimately fail) to maintain boundaries between human and machine. Complementing my examination of Battlestar Galactica is my examination of Westworld. The Hosts of Westworld are like the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica because they are also indistinguishable from their human counterparts, except through programmed subservience.

Though only the first season of Westworld has aired at the time of this writing, the series has been widely critically acclaimed, receiving positive reviews both for the story and performances from sources such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, and The New Yorker. More than anything, I have chosen Westworld because of its similar premise to Battlestar Galactica, in which the machine characters are portrayed by human actors in such a way as to render their difference from the human characters uncertain. Just as with Battlestar Galactica, I will examine the nature of the

Hosts as moral entities, how turning from the act of violence to the subject of violence impacts response, and how the use of language attempts to construct boundaries between human and machine that it cannot maintain.

The third chapter of this essay will confront the spectre of zombie narratives, focusing on the World War Z novel and The Walking Dead comic series. World War Z approaches the narrative of a zombie pandemic through the lens of interviews with individuals articulating the global scale efforts to defeat the zombies; by way of contrast, The Walking Dead focuses on a small group of individuals stranded amidst the aftermath of a (presumably) global zombie pandemic. I have chosen these texts because of their emblematic representation of zombie texts, a textual classification that has become almost as pervasive and infectious in popular fiction as the monsters being portrayed. World War Z and The Walking Dead function as complementary comparisons for my purposes because they represent zombie narratives that confront morality at both the macrocosmic and microcosmic human experience.

World War Z presents a zombie narrative in which nations resort to desperate means of survival to combat the growing and relentless onslaught of the undead. Drew Taylor of Fairfield

County Weekly and Stefan Dziemianowicz of Publishers Weekly share the opinion that “the success of Brooks’s books awakened the mainstream reading audience to the relevance of zombies” (Dziemianowicz 21). World War Z is by no means the first successful mainstream zombie narrative – just as The Dark Knight Returns was not the first successful (darker) Batman comic or

Battlestar Galactica was the first artificial intelligence story featuring indistinguishable humans and machines – but it is important to consider its position in terms of successful, widely- recognized zombie popular fiction. In Chapter Three I examine World War Z in terms of the complicated moral representation of the zombies, how the ease with which zombies are killed is problematic on its own, and then also how the ease with which zombies are killed is problematic

8 for its transferability to fully human victims. Like World War Z, The Walking Dead comic series has also been hugely successful and popular. Following Rick Grimes and his often dysfunctional, shifting, post-apocalyptic family of zombie survivors, The Walking Dead comic series has been publishing issues continuously from 2003 until 2018, the time of this writing, with no indication of the series concluding any time soon. It has also spawned two television shows, the original having run for eight seasons with a ninth season scheduled to air this year. All of this is to say that, like World War Z, The Walking Dead has become emblematic of the zombie narrative genre, which is why I have decided to discuss it alongside World War Z. In my discussion of The Walking Dead,

I will unpack the uncertain nature of zombies as those we have a moral obligation towards, how killing zombies is problematic in its own way, and how killing zombies makes it easier to kill fully human people as well.

Crucial to my unpacking of vigilantism and zombies is the aesthetic concept of the sublime, which, I will argue, vexes questions of moral status raised by the speculative narratives under consideration. Initially articulated by Edmund Burke in his 1757 treatise “Philosophical

Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” the sublime has been developed by many others including Immanuel Kant. For my purposes, I draw primarily on Burke’s original definition, if not his original application. Burke defined the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant with terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (Burke 70). He further explains that “[. . .] terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime” (Burke 82). Examples of what Burke considered to be sublime include serpents (81), the ocean (82), death (86), God or any other deity

(88), and darkness (90). Burke’s was primarily interested in understanding the aesthetic difference between the sublime and the beautiful, positioning them as opposite aesthetic forms of

9 representation that produced enjoyment in the beholder. Taking this idea and extrapolating outwards, I am identifying instances of the sublime within my selected texts; these instances of the sublime occur anywhere that terror or pain or danger are represented, for instance, when the act of murder is represented in Dexter, when the act of breaking a man’s spine is represented in

The Dark Knight Returns, or when zombies are killed with hammer and axe in The Walking Dead.

Burke believed that the sublime – representing terror and pain in art, as these texts do – caused the viewer to experience delight, not necessarily positive pleasure, because “[images and actions] are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances” (Burke 78). I believe that because of this effect of delight the sublime invites us to ignore ethical and moral judgements; however, we must be aware not only of the potential seductive effects of these stories2 but also of how we can find ourselves enjoying that which we condemn on principle.

Subsequent theorists who have expanded on the idea of the sublime (such as Kant,

Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Otto, to name a few) do not necessarily take the position that the sublime is antithetical to ethical awareness. Nor, for that matter, do I strictly take this stance.

Kant, for instance, approaches the sublime as an exposure to aesthetics that ultimately advances moral vocation and character.3 In this thesis, rather than disregarding or avoiding these more rational and moral conceptions of our relationship to the sublime, I argue that a particularized experience of the sublime is being presented in my selected texts. These texts encourage engagement with the sublime in the sense that Burke describes – in which it elicits terror and delight – rather than as an experience of reason-based resistance to annihilation, as Kant

2 There is ample room to explore the sublime through the lens of psychoanalysis and the subconscious, but this lies beyond the scope of my project. 3 See Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of Beautiful and Sublime for his full discussion of this matter.

10 describes. I argue the sublime operates in a Burkean way because of a focalization that these texts adopt; specifically, these texts focus on the delight of the act of violence rather than focusing on the subject of the violence. I believe that when the audience engages with representations of the sublime two diverging opportunities are presented. The first is the opportunity to actively consider the ethical questions raised by the immoral behaviour in these popular narratives; the second is to passively experience the enjoyment the sublime offers. I argue that it is this passive enjoyment that obfuscates the problematic moral behaviour contained in my chosen texts, drawing on Michele Aaron’s model of spectatorship in the process. To clarify, what I mean by passive enjoyment in this context is that the audience adopts and accepts a constructed and strategic reading offered by the texts rather than (actively) rationalizing their own. For instance,

Dexter and The Dark Knight Returns offer visuals that elicit an experience of the sublime with a focus primarily on the act of violence rather than the subject of that violence. By focusing on the act of violence and representing it as delightful, these texts promote moral ambiguity. By directing, in their chosen focalization, the audience’s attention toward the sublime violence rather than the moral status of the subject the sublime becomes a means of obfuscation in these texts.

When approaching artificial intelligence and zombies in Chapters Two and Three respectively, I make use of the concept of the uncanny to unpack not only the nature of their moral status but also the violence portrayed in my selected texts. As a concept, the uncanny has been developed by numerous thinkers including Sigmund Freud, Nicholas Royle, and Masahiro

Mori. For the purposes of this thesis, I focus on the definitions of the uncanny and the uncanny valley as presented by Nicholas Royle and Masahiro Mori respectively.4 Royle defines the uncanny

4 In his article “Familiarity and No Pleasure: The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Emotion,” Jan Niklas Howe explains that Freud defines the uncanny “firstly as an emotion and secondly as an object of aesthetics that psychology may approach only in exceptional cases and carefully. According to this classification, the uncanny belongs to a category that is referred to as ‘aesthetic emotions’ in current psychological research” (Howe 43). In highlighting the aesthetic aspect of the uncanny (and the abject), I follow Howe’s

11 as “a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar” (Royle vii). He expands on Freud’s ideas of the uncanny to apply them to contemporary ideas of “philosophy, literature, film studies [etc.]” (vii). The effect of the uncanny, according to Royle, is the creation of a mental space and a mental relationship to the object of uncanniness that results in a sense of uncertainty about reality. Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley is directly tied to this idea; he suggests that the anxiety that occurs within humans that perceive robotic (and therefore imperfect) representations of ourselves results in rejection and even hostile response to the uncanny subject. Our ability to understand ourselves and the object of uncanniness, through language as well as perception, becomes ambiguous in such a way that forces us to confront and consider what we might take for granted about our relationship to certainty. This is precisely what I argue that the portrayal of machine characters in Battlestar

Galactica and Westworld by human actors causes; their uncanniness becomes the site for debate and exploration of morality.

In Chapter Three my approach to the function and presence of the sublime and the uncanny in The Walking Dead and World War Z is reinforced and complicated by the concept of the abject. Where zombies are sublime as a source of terror and uncanny in that they still maintain recognizable qualities of their former human selves, they are also disgusting and revolting in a way that neither the sublime nor the uncanny properly captures. As a result, I have applied the concept of the abject to my close reading of these texts, borrowing from its theorization in Julia

Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. The abject, as Kristeva defines it, is a level of uncanniness that is so powerful it not only creates uncertainty, but it also threatens to destroy the distinctions between the object and the subject, the self and the other (Kristeva 2);

definition of the Freudian idea as “an explicitly real emotion that is nevertheless constituted aesthetically” (43).

12 the abject is an experience of the uncanny with an existentially destructive potential.5 Where I am using the abject is to expand on the ways in which their uncanny nature exacerbates immoral behaviour and creates a pervasive uncertainty that muddles their moral status.

Each of these concepts – moral status, the uncanny, the sublime – is essential to the close reading and critical analysis I have applied to these texts to determine how they package and sell concepts of morality. Some texts, like Westworld and Battlestar Galactica, encourage an active spectator/agent through highlighting the immoralities taking place. Others, like Dexter, The Dark

Knight Returns, World War Z, and The Walking Dead, attempt to obscure the immoral actions taking place. This is not to say that these obscuring texts are ‘bad’ or should not be consumed, simply that we must be aware of how they go about obscuring their immoralities so that we can properly engage with them as ethically conscious, and therefore active, spectators. My intention is not to moralize on the content of these texts but to identify those aspects that are important to recognize within a moral framework as being immoral; in so doing, the intention is to identify and recognize how aesthetics impact and influence the audiences’ relationship with the moral questions posed in these texts, thereby enhancing the potential for active ethical consideration.

By examining these questions through the lens of moral status philosophy and aesthetic theory, I hope to illuminate the way these texts raise important questions regarding the relation between the Self and the Other. Many of the works I have chosen to explore engage with the Self-

Other relationship while simultaneously “muddying the waters,” so to speak, through sublime effects that foreground the problem of aesthetically representing immoral acts. In the case of

Battlestar Galactica and Westworld, as I will discuss in Chapter Two, these sublime effects are

5 Julia Kristeva discusses the abject within a very particular context in Powers of Horror with regards to feminism and queer theory. Therefore, it is important for me to make clear at the outset that I am using her definition of the abject and its object-subject relationship because of its usefulness and applicability to my own reading of TWD and WWZ. I am not using it within the context of feminist or queer theory.

13 superseded by how these two texts focus on the representation of the Other. This difference in the case of Battlestar Galactica and Westworld is important to demonstrate how aesthetic effects are not universally obstacles to ethical consideration in popular fiction. Many of the works I address in this thesis have not been studied at length (Westworld in particular), so my intent here is to illuminate the moral issues they raise through sustained and focused close reading. My goal in interrogating more closely the moral ambiguity in these texts is to demonstrate the capacity for the viewer to be an active participant in cultural debates presented by these narratives and to recognize “moral status” even when it is occluded by aesthetic effects.

Chapter One: They Will Look Up and Shout ‘Save Us’ and I’ll Look Down and Whisper ‘No’

And It’s Going to Happen Again and Again

In this chapter I am concerned primarily with the 2006 Showtime television series Dexter and the 1986 comic miniseries Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, but I believe it is important to begin by talking about Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. Watchmen is renowned, among other things, for Moore’s presentation of superheroes and vigilantes, “revealing in their realistic psychological portrayals the inherent pathologies present in a person who presumes to act on behalf of society, even if their justification is one of benevolence” (Ange 1). In many ways, pathological behaviour in the protagonists of both of my selected texts are what bring them together in this chapter. I will begin with Dexter, which ran from 2006-2013. Developed by James

Manos, Jr., Dexter focuses on the life of the titular Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who operates under a strict code that only allows him to kill people who commit and get away with heinous crimes (Dexter). I hesitate here to describe Dexter’s code as a moral code because he is a serial killer with a body count of between 127 and 158 kills by the conclusion of the series. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus exclusively on the first two seasons of the show. In season one,

Dexter is locked in an unusual competition with another serial killer who turns out to be his brother, while in season two Dexter is hunted by the FBI after the remains of his victims are discovered. In each season, the thrust of the plot revolves around Dexter’s ability to continue his serial killer behaviour, which he views as benefiting society. Through dramatizing Dexter’s survival as linked to his capacity to kill, the show establishes moral ambiguity in its representation of

Dexter’s murders that, I will argue in this chapter, derives its power from the aesthetic notion of the sublime.

Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Idea of the

Sublime and Beautiful categorizes as the sublime “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas

15 of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (Burke 70).

Furthermore, Burke clarifies “I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others; [. . .] I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind” (74). Dexter’s ritualistic murder practices are a source of terror because they involve the promise of pain and death for his victims.

Dexter himself is a source of terror because of how visual imagery and inner dialogue reveal his predatory nature. Finally, viewed through Dexter’s perceptions of the world, blood and crime scenes become a source of terror and delight for the show’s audience. Burke believed that the sublime as an experience was directly tied to experiences of terror and that the delight experienced was not strictly the same as positive pleasure. Instead, the delight was a result of the distance artistic representation allowed the viewer to maintain even as they participated in the terror they beheld through spectatorship.6 The point here is that the sublime is a relatively simple aesthetic effect that comes from particularly focalized artistic representations of violence, pain, and danger and I believe this has an obscuring effect on the morality of Dexter’s actions because it delights rather than disturbs. Dexter’s actions, as they are represented through the television medium, are an example of the sublime; they are terrifying events, but the portrayal in Dexter focuses on the delightful sublimity of Dexter’s actions (the killing) rather than the moral status of the subjects of his action. In so doing, Dexter obfuscates the immorality of Dexter’s action by accentuating the aesthetic enjoyment they offer.

Bay Harbour Butcher: Friend or Foe?

6 This is admittedly starting to conflate Burke and the theory of spectatorship espoused by Michele Aaron in her book Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, which I will apply more directly as the chapter progresses.

In Dexter, one way in which the obfuscating delight of the sublime is bolstered is through the suggestion that Dexter’s victims deserve the pain and terror he inflicts upon them; this creates a sense of delight akin to Dexter’s pleasure at satisfying his urges (Dexter “Dexter”). It is important to understand that Dexter’s behaviour is not founded in morality but rather on a fabrication because, as Michele Aaron7 puts it in Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, “the spectator's submersion in and submission to the text (to whatever degree) must be understood as an inevitable part of the act of engagement” (Aaron 3), what other theorists characterize as “suture.”

In other words, simply by watching Dexter, and by beholding the sublime experience, the audience submits to and accepts the constructions of the story. While it is amoral, Dexter’s Code, taught to him by his foster father, dictates the parameters by which he can satisfy his desire to kill. But this moral code by which Dexter operates is a fabrication and not one that Dexter inherently believes in. At the end of the first season, Dexter struggles with how his foster father,

Harry, kept the existence of Dexter’s brother from him and asks himself “What do I really owe him after that?” (Dexter “Born Free”). In this context, Dexter is referring to the obligation he’s felt to follow Harry’s Code. He demonstrates that his adherence to the code is not built on a pre-existing understanding of right and wrong, or a desire to remain morally good, but simply out of obligation and habit. For him, what maintains the necessity of the Code is not that it keeps him from being immoral but that it allows him to continue to kill without being caught. In fact, Dexter’s compulsion is to kill anyone, and the fact that his victims are also killers is irrelevant to satisfying the impulse. He confirms this when he says, ironically, “I’m not one to discriminate based on race, gender, or disability” (Dexter “It’s Alive!”) and again when he tells Doakes “I can unleash the beast anytime I want [. . . and] it would feel fucking great” (Dexter “Left Turn Ahead”). The amoral code

7 While Michele Aaron uses the term spectator I will be using primarily the terms viewer, audience, and reader as they remain universally applicable to all my selected texts.

17 of conduct that Dexter operates by, which supposedly restricts his actions, is revealed to be entirely tenuous and insubstantial. Dexter only adheres to it so long as he sees practical and personal value to it in relation to his drive to kill. That, and the fact that “the ritual is intoxicating”

(Dexter “Dexter”), as Dexter himself describes it. By the end of season two, Dexter’s faith in his foster father has been shaken to the point that he considers abandoning the Code entirely.

However, he ultimately chooses not to forsake the Code because of its utilitarian value, not because of any desire to justify his actions morally. He says “as it turns out, nobody mourns the wicked [. . .] I think Harry [my foster father] knew that from the start. That’s why he gave me a code [. . .] it kept me alive through incredible trials” (Dexter “The British Invasion”). Dexter does not feel remorse and does not see his impulses to kill as moral quandaries. The Code is not valuable to Dexter as a means of achieving moral balance or moral justification. It is simply a survival tool that allows for the continuation of immoral action without interruption. This is to say that the moral imperative is not an imperative at all. This is the first way in which I argue Dexter attempts to manipulate the audience into abandoning the notion that their moral obligation extends to everyone. What is of concern here is not whether Dexter is successful or not, but that an attempt at manipulation is being made to begin with.

In this way, Dexter’s Code parallels ideas presented by writers and philosophers such as

Zygmunt Bauman about the foundational process legislators and thinkers undertook in creating moral codes for human society. Dexter is a personification of the concerns of modern legislators and thinkers who feared that “morality, rather than being a ‘natural trait’ of human life, is something that needs to be designed and injected into human conduct; and this is why they tried to compose and impose an all-comprehensive, unitary ethics – that is, a cohesive code of moral rules which people could be taught and forced to obey” (Bauman 6). Dexter is exactly this kind of amoral being who requires a code of ethics to be forced upon him. But in many ways, Dexter

18 demonstrates the inevitable failure of such a code – in this case, not the one taught to him by his foster father but the cultural and societal one of laws – to alter or affect his supposedly natural state of immoral desire. As Bauman puts it, “[for postmodernism] the foolproof – universal and unshakably founded – ethical code will never be found [. . .] a non-aporetic, non-ambivalent morality, an ethics that is universal and ‘objectively founded,’ is a practical impossibility; perhaps also an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms” (10). This does not mean that morality is simply relative but that continual debate is an inevitable part of the ethical process. Dexter’s Code can be understood as a misinterpretation of post-modern ethics that attempts to solve how “morality is not universalizable” (12) only to succeed in creating moral ambiguity. Harry trains Dexter as a response to what he perceives as the failed attempts of the law and society to create a functional non-ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code. For example, he believes he did the right thing in training Dexter when he discovers that a known murderer will escape justice because of a typo in a warrant (Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”).

This is of course a symptom of a larger systemic issue that Harry perceives to be at work in society and one to which Dexter presents a kind of elegant solution. The solution, Harry decides, is moral ambiguity. Harry tells Dexter, and himself, that “I did the right thing in training you. This proves it. I did he right thing” (Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”) but Dexter discovers that

Harry committed suicide after walking in on Dexter at the culmination of one of his ritual killings

(“There’s Something About Harry”). As Dexter puts it, “Harry gazed into the eyes of his creation and saw evil, pure and simple. My evil. It killed him” (Dexter “Left Turn Ahead”). Dexter realizes

“the idea of a Code was one thing, a grand idea, a noble cause. But the reality of it? Harry walked in on what he created, and he couldn’t live with himself” (“There’s Something About Harry”).

Despite the appeal of a morally ambiguous world-view, when confronted with the reality of

Dexter’s actions under the Code Harry discovers that his code of ethics is a fabrication that does

19 not supersede the immorality of murder. Instead, Harry experiences what, arguably, all viewers of Dexter’s murders should experience: the realization that he has a moral imperative and a moral obligation to this ‘other’ and that it is being violated. This notion comes from Levinas’ Humanism of the Other where he states “the face signifies an irrefutable order – a commandment – that arrests the availability of consciousness” (Levinas 32). Translated as ‘face,’ Levinas’ concept of the visage8 is difficult to translate into English (Levinas xlv). Essentially, Harry does not recognize the incompatibility of moral ambiguity with his moral imperative towards others until he sees the face of Dexter’s victim. When confronted with the victim’s face, his visage, Harry is unable to speak, throws up, and then tells Dexter, the architect of this violation of moral imperative, to “stay away”

(Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”). Moral ambiguity is thereby condemned because, as

Bauman articulates, “contrary to both the popular opinion and hot-headed 'everything goes' triumphalism of certain postmodernist writers, the postmodern perspective on moral phenomena does not reveal the relativism of morality” (Bauman 14). Dexter’s Code has functioned, by this point, for two seasons based on moral ambiguity. But this revelation demonstrates the impossible reconciliation that has plagued it from the start: moral ambiguity is not sustainable or freeing.

Yet, Dexter is the protagonist of our story and the viewership watches week after week to enjoy his continued success as a killer. As I will elaborate, the spectator is not permitted to remain separate from the immoralities taking place on the screen. I am a full participant in

Dexter’s immoral actions, however fictionalized they may be. Bauman suggests “Humanity turns into cruelty because of the temptation to close the openness, to recoil from stretching out towards the Other, to fight back the relentless, since voiceless, push of the 'unspoken command'”

(Bauman 89). This ‘unspoken command’ is not the same as Levinas’ visage, but nevertheless

8 There is far more depth and nuance to Lévinas’ concept of the visage and its issues with translation than I can cover here. For more detail, I used Humanism of the Other as translated by Nidra Poller.

20 admits to the presence of a moral imperative and obligation towards Others that persists regardless of the Others’ immoralities. It is with this ‘unspoken command’ in mind that I turn to

Dexter’s victims. The first rule of Dexter’s Code, also known as the Code of Harry, is “don’t get caught” (Dexter “Resistance is Futile”), showing, as I’ve already discussed, that the foremost purpose of Dexter’s Code is to allow him to continue his immoral activity. In other words, the key rule of Dexter’s Code, more important than any other rule, is assuring he remains free to continue performing immoral actions, free to continue killing. If what Dexter is doing requires that he not get caught, then this acknowledges, from the start, that there is a moral-violation inherent to

Dexter’s behaviour.

The second rule of Dexter’s Code is that he never kills an innocent person, only people whom he knows for certain have killed. In the finale for season two, Dexter goes so far as to say

“Am I evil? Am I good? I’m done asking these questions. I don’t have the answers. Does anyone?”

(Dexter “The British Invasion”). This is where a crucial manipulation takes place in Dexter since this rule requires me, the viewer, to accept murder as a justifiable or acceptable response to murder.9 But moral status is not something that applies only when convenient but in all instances of interaction (Warren 3). In other words, committing an immoral action does not remove an individual from moral consideration, despite Dexter’s Code. The idea that Dexter’s actions are less immoral than those of his victims is repeatedly addressed throughout the second season when

Dexter is being hunted by the FBI as the Bay Harbour Butcher. Newspaper articles ask, “Bay

Harbour Butcher: Friend or Foe?” (Dexter “The Dark Defender”) and patrons at a restaurant confidentially argue “All I’m saying is these guys had it coming [. . .] as far as I’m concerned,

9 Lex talionis, better known as ‘an eye for an eye,’ is an ethical code that justifies execution as a response to murder. Capital punishment is also still employed as a legal response to persons who have committed particularly heinous crimes around the world (Rogers). However, I reject these philosophies as having relevance because I contend that there is a logical fallacy or domino effect inherent to any ethical codes that solves moral problems by performing the very action being condemned.

21 whoever is doing this shit deserves a goddamn medal” (Dexter “The Dark Defender”). The show presents the illusion of debate but strongly supports the idea that Dexter’s actions are justifiable; when his sponsor Lila confesses that she killed an ex-boyfriend by burning him alive in his own home, Dexter asks “Did he deserve it? [. . .] Then you didn’t do anything wrong” (Dexter “The Dark

Defender”). Of course, Dexter later turns around and kills Lila because she killed Doakes, an innocent man, even though Dexter was trying to frame Doakes at the time (Dexter “The British

Invasion”). What is significant here is the repeated and seemingly arbitrary declarations of what killing is acceptable and what killing is not. After Dexter locks Doakes up in a cabin in the everglades, they discuss the morality of Dexter’s actions:

Dexter: Why couldn’t you just leave me to do my work in peace? Why did you have to go and ruin everything? Doakes: You’re a killer. I catch killers. Dexter: So do I. I caught you. Doakes: I’m not a killer. Dexter: You are. It’s why you’ve always known what I am. It’s why you have more officer related shootings than anybody else. Only they don’t fuck with you when you shoot somebody, why couldn’t you pay me the same professional courtesy. Doakes: There’s nothing professional about what you do. I kill when I have to. On the job. Dexter: Oh, so, so it’s okay to take a life as long as you get a paycheck for it? (Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”)

Notably, Dexter does not try to argue that what he does is morally right. Instead, he attempts to complicate and divert Doakes by comparing them to each other. This is crucial, because the show does not attempt to reconcile Dexter’s immorality; instead, it works to avoid addressing the immorality at the heart of Dexter’s actions, feeding into a delusion that he is somehow morally justified.

Dexter acts as though hundreds of years of philosophy have not approached the issue of morality and determined where moral value and moral obligation are situated within our society and culture. To start, Mary Anne Warren argues at the beginning of her book Moral Status that:

To have 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. If an entity has moral status, then we may not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged to give weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well- being. Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely because protecting it may benefit ourselves or other persons, but because its needs have moral importance in their own right (Warren 3).

We shall begin our investigation here. Dexter’s victims are adult humans. Setting aside their immoral actions for the moment, they possess the moral status to which Mary Anne Warren is referring. They are people, regardless of how Dexter repeatedly uses terms like “monster” to distance them from their moral status as humans. It is clear they are people because of their emotional responses to Dexter threatening them, because of their families, and because they look like me even if they do not act like me. Therefore, because they are people, they have moral status and “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 of providing it” (13).

Nowhere does Mary Anne Warren argue that a requirement for moral status is an agreement to participate in the covenant of shared moral obligation. By Mary Anne Warren’s definition,

Dexter’s victims are immoral because they are killers. But they do not themselves lose their moral status because of this fact. Zygmunt Bauman addresses this issue, arguing that “I am for the Other whether the Other is for me or not; his being for me is, so to speak, his problem, and whether or how he ‘handles’ that problem does not in the least affect my being-for-Him” (Bauman 50). By this logic, despite the fact that Dexter’s victims have killed people, they are still bearers of moral status and still representative of an Other to which I owe and must extend moral consideration.

This is an uncomfortable notion because it rejects a rationally agreed upon social contract of sorts; it argues that moral consideration is an individual responsibility that applies in all cases all the time rather than in response to an agreed upon pact within groups. Indeed, as Ashley

Donnelly describes it, “the murder of prostitutes is Unacceptable, but the murder of their murderer is Acceptable. This clear moral motivation for Dexter’s crimes is what makes him so marketable and popular, as opposed to the anti-hero serial killers that came before him”

(Donnelly 23-4). I disagree with Donnelly that Dexter’s actions can be viewed here as moral, but she does hit on the essential element of this Code: Dexter becomes marketable because he’s sufficiently confused the moral landscape. But Bauman argues “The moral person and the object of that person's moral concern cannot be measured by the same yardstick - and this realization is precisely what makes the moral person moral. 'I am ready to die for the Other' is a moral statement; 'He should be ready to die for me' is, blatantly, not” (Bauman 51). To put this in the context of Dexter, ‘I shall respect the life of the Other’ is a moral statement while ‘he should respect my life for me to respect his’ is not. I argue that moral obligation is not a quid pro quo situation where exemption from the moral agreement simultaneously means exemption from moral consideration. Certainly, in Dexter, the laws and courts are found to be lacking in the capacity to bring all immoral agents to justice. But, as Bauman says, “We are not moral thanks to society (we are only ethical or law-abiding thanks to it); we live in society, we are society, thanks to being moral” (61). Dexter’s belief that his actions are outside of moral consideration, or acceptable based on the immorality of the victims he has chosen, is an idea that undermines any claim to moral goodness he might make.

The Ritual is Intoxicating

One of the key ways in which Dexter sidesteps the essential immorality of Dexter’s actions is by using performative and artistic elements; the distance created by the television medium allows for the horrific to be rendered as aesthetic and facilitate the experience of the sublime.

Many of the elements of Dexter’s ritual evoke a sense of a performance or an artistic demonstration. In fact, when Dexter’s victims are being examined by the FBI in season two he refers to them as his “bodies of work” (Dexter “The British Invasion”), using language to suggest that his kills are artistic creations, like a painter’s body of work. During the kill rituals themselves,

Dexter wears a smock, puts up plastic sheets to contain the errant spray of blood, and keeps his tools nearby and neatly arranged, all reminiscent of a painter at work on his canvas in a studio

(Dexter “Dexter”). In this sense, Dexter’s ritualistic style is likened to that of a painter but the ritual itself is likened to a play. His ritual becomes a performance, a scripted and dramatic sequence of events that include his victim’s confession and dismemberment. All of this culminates in the climax of his victim’s death. In the second episode of the first season, this is Dexter plunging a knife into his victim’s heart, the camera cutting to the man’s face as it contorts in pain and death

(Dexter “Crocodile”).

Despite my capacity to recognize that this is a fictional event – that the actor playing the victim has not really been murdered by Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays Dexter – the various aspects of the ritual performance contribute to an immersion that, as stated before, does not allow for a disassociation from the act being depicted. Levinas argues that “the more I face up to my responsibility the more I am responsible” (Levinas 34) meaning that the greater our understanding of our moral relation to the Other, the more we can perceive of the selfhood of the Other, the greater our moral obligation becomes. A similar idea to Lévinas’ is echoed by

Bauman, who says “the moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough” (Bauman 80). The final shot of the victim’s face, the victim here being the Other, should

25 necessitate the experience of confronting the visage. But unlike when Harry is confronted with the victim’s visage, I do not throw up and turn off Dexter, asking in doing so for him to “stay away”

(Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”).10 This is because the aesthetically created divide of the television medium has rendered the performance sublime; while it is still horrible, it is also presented for artistic appreciation, and subverts my ability to see the victim as a subject of moral consideration. To spin what Dexter says to his sister Deborah, “I can’t even afford to think of him as a person anymore” (Dexter “The British Invasion”). As Dexter reduces his victims from human beings – however immoral – to mere works of art, my moral responsibility to them becomes less and less clear. As a spectator participating in the performance by suspending my “disbelief [. . .] as long as [I am] encouraged to do so” (Aaron 91), I become part of how Dexter obfuscates the moral imperative by obscuring the difference between art and murder. In fact, when Dexter is about to kill someone in the cabin where he has Doakes imprisoned, he makes a point to cover

Doakes’ cell and say ironically “Don’t worry, Sergeant, I won’t make you watch. I’m not uncivilized”

(Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”). And of course, the audience has never been made to watch either. The power to turn off the TV and not witness the horrible act of murder has always been available to us. But we have watched, repeatedly, for nearly two seasons by this point, willingly participating in this heinous act. Each murder Dexter performs under the structure of the

Code enacts the stages of a performance: staging, casting, props, cues, a script, and a climax that provides resolution. This haunting experience, presented at a remove through the television medium, becomes sublime as it depicts the terror and awe of murder and thereby convolutes the immoral horror taking place. Dexter’s actions become morally ambiguous because murder, instead of being horrific, becomes unexpectedly delightful to observe in its artistic representation.

10 It is worth noting here that Dexter is not universally consumed and that a certain level of select audience appeal is occurring. The members of the audience who do not turn away are the ones with whom I am primarily concerned as they are the ones most engaged with the

Beyond the performance of the kills, the show further presents murder as an artistic medium in and of itself. As Dexter walks onto the first Ice Truck Killer crime scene of the first season he says “there’s something strange and disarming about looking at a homicide scene in the daylight of Miami. It makes even the most grotesque killings look staged, like you’re in a new and daring section of Disney World” (“Dexter”). And sure enough, as the victim’s body – or at least the parts of it present at the scene – is revealed with piano scales as musical accompaniment, coding the moment in the same style as the magical reveal of the princess in a Disney movie. But instead of a princess, Dexter looks upon the cut-up corpse of a woman, her body parts arranged and displayed on a table like pieces to a puzzle. Dexter is captivated by the presentation of the corpse, saying “what a beautiful idea [. . .] I’ve never seen such clean, dry, neat looking dead flesh.

Wonderful” (“Dexter”). Likewise, at a later crime scene created by the same killer, Dexter refers to the killer as an artist who is honing and perfecting his craft. Dexter expresses an appreciation for murder as a form of artistry. It renders the human body abstract and terrifying in its lifelessness, a sublime state that brings Dexter – and, I argue, us – delight. The artistry of these killings is juxtaposed against Dexter’s opinion of bloody crime scene photos he is shown, which he refers to as “child’s play. Messy work, all that blood on the wall? Looks like a finger painting”

(“Dexter”). For Dexter, there is an aesthetic to blood and murder that distinguishes killing that is pleasurable and killing that is artless. The more disassociated – and therefore the more terrifying and sublime – a body or crime scene is from the living quality of the person who died, the better.

This hierarchy of crime scenes is directly tied to Dexter’s relationship to blood. He explains

“sometimes it sets my teeth on edge. Other times it helps me control the chaos” (“Dexter”).

This peculiar hierarchy is brought to the center stage at the Ice Truck Killer’s climactic staged crime scene: a hotel room filled with blood, splashed on the ceiling, the wall, the furniture, and coating the floor in a pool (“Seeing Red”). Dexter’s repressed memories of his mother’s

27 murder are triggered – the Ice Truck Killer’s intention – by this scene and he falls into the blood, for a moment writhing in the thick, red, and sticky blood of the Ice Truck Killer’s victims. Unlike the Ice Truck Killer’s previous crime scenes, and Dexter’s own ritual which focuses on controlling blood, here the blood is completely out of control. The horror of the crime scene is such that it affects even Dexter. As Doakes comments, “something finally got you, I guess you’re human after all” (“Seeing Red”). Ashley Donnelly describes this moment as one in which “[Dexter’s] immersion in this gruesome scene is used to explain his fascination with blood and his potential for psychosis.

Once our appetite for understanding his difference is satiated, we are more comfortable in his presence” (Donnelly 23). Dexter’s traumatic relationship to grotesque crime scenes not only generates sympathy but it also becomes juxtaposed against his own neater crime scenes. Crime scenes are shown to accomplish two tasks for Dexter. First, they establish an aesthetic hierarchy of murder. Dexter and the Ice Truck Killer are placed at the top of this tree, their particularly clean, but no less terrifying, style of murder more delightful whereas other killers, Dexter’s prospective victims typically, create crime scenes of a lowly nature. Both are sublime, both evoke a sense of horror focused either on the abstracted dead flesh of a human body or the blood when it is taken outside of it. But the crucial difference is their aesthetic value. When Dexter is setting up his kill room in the second episode he remarks “if God is in the details, and I believed in God, then he’s in this room with me” (Dexter “Crocodile”). This religious invocation helps to establish that

Dexter’s form of the sublime, unlike other forms of the sublime created by childish killers, is more appealing and, ironically, safer. The morality of his actions becomes secondary to his ability to perform those actions in an aesthetically pleasurable or delightfully controlled way.

Crocodile

Meanwhile, outside of the environment of his kill rooms Dexter is a source of the sublime through his ability to impersonate normalcy to those around him while still revealing his predatory nature. Dexter adheres to his Code, which classifies his victims as the abnormal and the heinous; as Ashley Donnelly describes, “What we recognize as abnormal, we label Other; that which we attribute to being out with our collective moral code we consider to be something that belongs to beings other than ourselves” (Donnelly 18). Dexter is a part of this Other group but also enacts his own heinous urges on those within this Other group. The ‘we’ Donnelly refers to, a presumed audience, is safe from Dexter even as it enjoys his Otherness because “we, as ‘normal’ citizens, do not commit heinous crimes, nor can we relate to those who do” (Donnelly 18). By relegating his behaviours to the world of the Other, Dexter achieves this frightening normalcy. What is so frightening about Dexter’s normalcy is how easy the façade is for him to adopt or abandon; as

Bauman argues, “The awesome truth about morality is that it is not inevitable, not determined in any sense which would be considered valid from the ontological perspective; it does not have

'foundations' in the sense that perspective would recognize” (Bauman 75). This is demonstrated throughout the second episode, entitled “Crocodile”, where Dexter evokes the image of the crocodile, the predator, with his eyes and his gaze. At the beginning of the episode, Dexter floats in a river with only his eyes above the surface, his gaze turned towards three jet skiers and commenting on how different he is from them (“Crocodile”). Later, while stalking a prospective victim in the crowded halls of a court house – a moment where none of the people around can identify him as the predator in their midst or the criminal in their house of law – his eyes are visible above a woman’s head. It is this anonymity which Dexter prides himself on, pointing out how “the only real question I have is why in a building full of cops, all supposedly with a keen insight to the human soul, is Doakes the only one who gets the creeps from me?” (“Dexter”). Dexter is successful as a killer precisely because of his ability to remain undetected among people, a terrifying

29 prospect for someone whose goal among people is to murder them. As Dexter himself points out,

“I’m the helpful handyman. How evil can I possibly be?” (Dexter “Left Turn Ahead”). Furthermore, the fact that Dexter is undetected by the people around him, the people the show’s audience ostensibly identifies as being not-murderers (or as themselves), is even more terrifying in how it confronts the viewer with Bauman’s arguments against the so-called inherent morality of individuals. If Dexter moves about the world undetected but intending to kill, then it emphasizes the threat of Others like him.

Later, when following a suspected cop killer into a bathroom, Dexter’s eyes are reflected in a mirror in front of a urinal, echoing the same motif of the crocodile with its eyes above water

(Dexter “Crocodile”). The combination of the predator imagery – crocodiles being a common predator in the glades of Florida, where Dexter takes place – and Dexter’s intentions presents him as an image of the sublime. He is terrifying precisely because he can blend in so effectively and hunt his victims. While everyone else’s gaze fails to recognize Dexter for what he is, he is free to turn his gaze, a gaze that promises death, on whomever he chooses. As he points out, “Yeah, they see me. I’m one of them” (Dexter “Born Free”). His Code supposedly protects the innocent, as his gaze is not meant for them. And yet, at the end of the pilot Dexter’s gaze turns and he looks directly into the camera. He breaks the fourth wall and turns his gaze onto an audience which comes into existence precisely as the fourth wall is broken (“Dexter”). Likewise, at the end of

“Crocodile,” Dexter sits in a bath with only his eyes above the surface but then dips his head beneath the water and stares upwards, directly into the camera once again (“Crocodile”). This gaze, which is established to be one of selection, judgement, and ultimately victimization, is turned on the audience. As Dexter sinks beneath the surface of his bath he evokes the image of the predator disappearing as its hungers are satisfied, but always with the promise that this respite is only temporary. The predator must return just as Dexter promises at the beginning of

30 the pilot when he says “tonight’s the night. And it’s going to happen again and again. Has to happen” (“Dexter”). Dexter becomes a source of the sublime as he walks undetected among people who cannot see who or, as the visual imagery establishes, what he is.

We Work Hard to Keep the City Clean

My ability to view Dexter’s actions as strictly immoral is already compromised by the fact that “clear black and white boundaries reinforce difference and pose no threat to our conceptualization of what is right and wrong” (Donnelly 23) according to Donnelly. As I have demonstrated, the argument that Dexter’s Code fits into a sustainable ethical framework is a flawed one. But once again, Dexter manipulates and confuses the immorality of Dexter’s actions by attempting to situate his actions in relation to a healthy and functioning social order. This is another aspect of the debate between Doakes and Dexter about their differences in the episode

“There’s Something About Harry.” Doakes argues “There’s nothing fucking professional about what you do. I kill when I have to. On the job” and Dexter replies “Oh, so, so it’s okay to take a life as long as you get a paycheck for it?” (Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”). Later, he adds

“You were U.S. Special Forces, I’m sure you have [killed]” to which Doakes replies “War time circumstances, being in battle, but never cold-blooded, Morgan” only to have Dexter end the debate with “I’m sure that made things easier for you” (“There’s Something About Harry”). Note that Dexter, once again, is not arguing that killing is wrong. Instead, he is drawing attention away from his own immorality and instead situating the idea of killing within a socially acceptable framework. To say that Dexter is immoral for being a killer is also to say that Doakes or any police officer / soldier that kills in the line-of-duty is immoral for the same reason. This is an uncomfortable idea and in aligning himself with police and soldiers Dexter is “[reinforcing] conservative ideals of morality, offering a clear differential between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence to

31 a culture that is struggling to rationalize key political and social actions that have occurred after

September 11, 2001” (Donnelly 16) according to Donnelly.

In many ways, Dexter is arguing for his individual moral capacity. Like Bauman, who shows very little faith in state legislation as a tool for true moral upkeep, Dexter feels that the only difference between himself and Doakes is that Doakes serves the state-legislated morality that strives “to substitute heteronomous ethical duty for autonomous moral responsibility” (Bauman

46). As Dexter argues, “I've got news for you, Sergeant. My Code requires a higher standard of proof than your city's laws. At zero cost for the tax payer. You ask me, I'm a bargain” (Dexter

“There’s Something About Harry”). He also argues again later to Doakes “I considered our value to the community [. . .] We’re both loyal civil servants. We work hard to keep the city clean”

(“There’s Something About Harry”). Dexter positions himself as being superior to the state- legislated defenders of morality. His argument is convincing for several reasons, most of them to do with performance and power dynamics during the argument. Doakes is Dexter’s prisoner, held in a cage and subject to Dexter’s control. Furthermore, Dexter is always given the last word, which has the effect of making his arguments look as though they end the debate simply because they go unrefuted; it is important to note this is either because Dexter leaves Doakes before the latter can present a counterargument or because Dexter has drugged Doakes, knocking him unconscious.

Once again, morality has been obfuscated. Killers are bad and Doakes kills killers, just like

Dexter. This exempts him from Dexter’s Code, just as it exempts Dexter from his own Code, and positions him in a space of moral ambiguity. But there are two important counterarguments that go unaddressed in this argument and show it is intended to be more morally confusing than revealing. The first requires a return to Mary Anne Warren’s declaration that “we must not murder other persons, assault them, cheat them, torture them, imprison them unjustly, or fail to

32 help them when help is needed and we have the means of providing it” (Warren 13), which Dexter has failed to refute in his arguments with Doakes, regardless of whether or not the killing that

Doakes does is immoral in the same way as Dexter’s. The second is that moral ambiguity underpins

Dexter’s argument and the ending of “There’s Something About Harry” is precisely where moral ambiguity is shown to be flawed. Ashley Donnelly argues that “we can support, in collective good conscience, [Dexter’s] acts that, in the abstract, are repugnant” (Donnelly 24). In other words, conceptually they are repugnant but when applied they are attractive.

This is certainly the result of the sublime, which must be overcome to view Dexter properly. But this argument of Donnelly’s is also the exact opposite of what occurs in Dexter. Harry taught Dexter his Code so that he might kill the heinous criminals who escaped justice. In the abstract, this morally ambiguous idea was appealing to him because it solved a pervasive problem he saw in society; he situates Dexter’s killing into the social order by this methodology. Dexter is repeating the same abstract arguments to Doakes. But the revelation at the end of “There’s

Something About Harry” is that, contrary to Donnelly’s argument, in the abstract Dexter’s actions were an attractive solution and once they became reality they were repugnant. However, the realization that Dexter’s Code fails as an ethical code in the face of moral obligation to the Other is not the moment at which Dexter’s immorality is at last laid bare. Instead, it becomes an obstacle that Dexter must overcome to return to a space of moral obfuscation. This is achieved by the end of the season when Dexter abandons Harry instead of abandoning the Code. Harry is the one who has failed, not the Code, according to Dexter; this choice allows Dexter to continue killing and to continue to hide behind the illusion of a morally ambiguous pattern of behaviour. Ultimately,

Dexter and Dexter fail to situate his actions comfortably into a healthy, moral social order but they do succeed in creating the appearance of doing so. Through dialogue and power dynamics, Dexter

33 appears to have bested Doakes in a debate over his immorality when, in fact, all Dexter succeeds in doing is avoiding the debate.

His Blade of Vengeance Turns Wrong Into Right

Dexter may fail to convincingly argue for his position within the social order of the real world, but he is successful in arguing for his position within a pre-established canon of characters who exist outside of the social order. These characters operate with the blessing of both the fictional society in which they live and the community of people who consume stories centered around them. Despite his immorality, Dexter fits comfortably into the established canon of superheroes and vigilantes that permeate popular culture. In the introduction to Superheroes and

Philosophy, Tom & Matt Morris write that “comic books and graphic novels occupy a unique artistic space along the spectrum of fictional narrative. Like movies and television shows, they make powerful use of visual imagery” (Morris xi). Not only is Dexter likened to a superhero in the second season episode “The Dark Defender,” but, as Tom & Matt Morris point out, visual imagery is a crucial component of both the comic and television medium. In Dexter, the visual imagery causes his potential threat to be obscured by the sublime. In relation to this, Michele Aaron challenges, “the spectator's removal and innocence with regard to the spectacle, and argue[s] instead not simply for the spectator's complicity in its creation and endurance, but for the spectator's complicity in its often disturbing content” (Aaron 92). So, when Dexter yells at Mike

Donovan in the pilot “open your eyes and look at what you did” (Dexter “Dexter”) looking becomes part of the audience’s narrative and visual engagement with Dexter. There is no version of Dexter that is edited to remove the scenes of violence, murder, or any other element of Dexter’s ritual. Bearing witness to horror becomes a requirement of entry for the audience. Referring to

Watchmen, but in such a way that it is entirely applicable to Dexter, James Petty points out in his

34 essay “Violent Lives, Ending Violently? Justice, Ideology, and Spectatorship in Watchmen” that “In the end, while Watchmen does challenge the notion of the active reader and passive image, the text nonetheless invites spectatorship, offering the sublime pleasures of witnessing and participating in violence and the fascistic monopolization [sic] of power over others” (Giddens

161). And it is here that I will address the issue of active versus passive viewer with regards to

Dexter. Like Petty argues for Watchmen, Dexter could be relying on an active viewer to critically consider the morality of Dexter and his actions, as this essay seeks to do.

While at a comic book store crime scene in “The Dark Defender”, one of the staff explains to Dexter that the owner came up with an idea for a comic book version of the Bay Harbour

Butcher called The Dark Defender. He explains that instead of a serial killer, the Dark Defender is a “stalker of the night, his blade of vengeance turns wrong into right” (Dexter “The Dark

Defender”). Dexter finds this idea appealing and even imagines himself as the Dark Defender saving his mother from the men who killed her, killing them in the process in the style of vigilante superheroes like Rorschach. In fact, the Dark Defender design in the comic store is almost identical to that of Rorschach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen only with a hood instead of a hat and mask.

This is a significant visual comparison because Rorschach, like Dexter, is a heavily problematic vigilante character. Petty points out that:

While we may initially imagine Rorschach as a crime-fighting hero, it soon becomes apparent that the reality is very different: at various points in the narrative the spectator witnesses Rorschach dump the mutilated body of a rapist at the front of the police headquarters, burn a hand-cuffed child killer alive and kill a prison inmate by dousing him in boiling cooking fat. While the fantasy of retributive justice may be seductive, it is also threatening: uncontainable and uncontrollable. With Rorschach, the legal and moral boundaries that separate the maintenance of the status quo from the dangerous world of the criminal are obscured. Where often a superhero would stop short of outright murder and thus avoid becoming the very thing against which they fight, Rorschach withholds nothing (Giddens 156-7).

This description of Rorschach, while the specifics may be different, could just as easily be a description of Dexter. What is interesting is that the reverse is the case in Dexter: initially, from the moment he wraps a piano wire around Mike Donovan’s throat in the pilot, Dexter appears to be the criminal, not the crime fighter. It is only after Dexter screams at Donovan “open your eyes and look at what you did!” (Dexter “Dexter”) that the truth that Mike Donovan is a child molester and murderer is revealed. Dexter is first a criminal and then, in that moment, becomes, as Petty puts it, a fantasy of retributive justice (Giddens 156-7). But it is in the looking that this occurs. Just as Dexter forces Donovan to look at the bodies of the boys he killed, the audience is also forced to look at them. It is in that moment that the dynamic is not entirely reversed but distorted; it is no longer clear who the crime-fighter is and who the criminal is because Dexter is simultaneously both. As Petty elaborates:

Here looking becomes a fraught undertaking, threatening to reveal to the reader all the uncertainties from which they sought respite, or worse, confronting them with their own fascistic desires and militant sympathies. The aphorism 'be careful what you wish for' comes to mind: the reader, confronted with their fantasy's realization [sic], find it is not what they imagined (Giddens 161).

Essentially, Petty argues that moral ambiguity in a vigilante figure is an appealing concept in the abstract that becomes horrific in practical application, a recurring theme around Dexter. While I am inclined to agree with Petty’s analysis of the character of Rorschach and argue that it applies in much the same way to Dexter, there is the issue of whether Dexter encourages the audience to participate in this ethical confrontation.

Dexter is guilty of exactly what Petty argues Watchmen is guilty of: it offers an aesthetically pleasing opportunity to witness and participate in a sublime performance of violence. Inducting Dexter into the superhero canon, as “The Dark Defender” does, is not an insignificant move because it normalizes Dexter’s actions by fitting it within a kind of cultural

36 condition. By likening Dexter to the canon of superheroes, his actions become ostensibly part of a superhero culture, which is an aspect of contemporary North American culture; his immorality becomes further obscured when it becomes metaphorically lost in the crowd of cultural icons who behave in much the same way. Comparing Dexter to comic book vigilantes does establish him as a member of their canonical group of so-called “heroes,” but rather than strengthening his moral position it has the opposite effect and raises serious questions about the morality of superheroes in popular culture instead.

Dexter as a killer reflects Dexter as a medium. His killings are a performance just as the show is a performance. The morality of Dexter’s actions is obscured because of their representation and how it evokes feelings of the sublime. Dexter himself is a sublime figure, terrifying as he stalks his prey even as he targets only those who supposedly deserve his form of justice. Dexter is not only sublime by existing right beneath the noses of his police colleagues and so-called ‘normal citizens’ but also sublime because of how the aesthetic representation of his crimes works to obscure his immorality. Terror and pain suffuse the visual imagery of Dexter and invoke the sublime. The great irony of Dexter is that the more that his immorality is revealed the harder it is to understand it as immoral. Representation confuses his immoral actions by focusing on the artistry of those actions. Regardless of how active the viewer is, the show relies heavily on the depiction, performance, and aesthetic presentation of murder and violence. The more terror is shown the more of it becomes sublime and the more delightful the experience of the immorality becomes. Ultimately, Dexter is a show that manipulates, obfuscates, and avoids the question of morality and justice.

They Never Talk About the Mean One

There are numerous anti-hero vigilante superheroes from comic books that I could compare to Dexter, some of which I have already mentioned. Figures such as Rorschach, the

Punisher, and Deadpool operate outside the law and kill those they deem unjust according to their own personal Code. To examine these characters through the same lens of consideration which I have adopted for Dexter – namely, how their Codes have no sustainable foundation, how their actions undermine the society they claim to help, and how the sublime is used to obfuscate the obvious immorality of their actions – would be a repetitive effort because it is argumentatively the same point that I have already made for Dexter; the characterization, presentation, and narratives of these characters correlate almost point for point with Dexter’s. Instead, it is more interesting to consider how this analytical framework can be applied to vigilante superhero figures who operate under a stricter ethical code that more closely resembles an adherence to Mary Anne

Warren’s foundational moral statement.

I refer to a code that more closely resembles Mary Anne Warren’s foundation moral statement “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 of providing it”

(Warren 13) rather than one that directly adheres to it because I do not believe it is conceptually possible to have a vigilante that avoids each of these moral obligations. The primary violation of morality that situates Dexter’s actions as fundamentally immoral is the fact that he kills the victims he targets. Therefore, I choose to examine a well-established vigilante superhero whose personal ethical code places the credo “do not kill” as the most paramount, but whose behaviour is still governed by a pathological obsession. I have chosen Batman, specifically as he is depicted in

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Published by DC Comics in 1986 as a miniseries running for four issues, The Dark Knight

Returns was written by Frank Miller and illustrated by him and others like Klaus Janson and Lynn

Varley. It depicts a version of Bruce Wayne/Batman outside of the central canon of DC Comic’s

Batman in which a 55-year-old Bruce Wayne comes out of a self-imposed retirement from his dual-life as Batman to fight a wave of rising crime and societal collapse (Miller). Much like Dexter,

Batman, as he is depicted in The Dark Knight Returns, becomes increasingly morally ambiguous; and, just like in Dexter, this moral ambiguity is maintained largely because of the aesthetic notion of the sublime. Violence and terror are Batman’s primary tools in his crusade against the criminals of Gotham City and once again representation of this violence and terror causes a sublime effect to occur. Burke argues that “the passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances” (78). While

Batman presents these ideas of pain and danger, the readers are not subjected to them; instead, they are invited to experience them at a remove and enjoy the sublime delight that accompanies this viewing. But in much the same way that this representation of violence and terror clouded the morality of Dexter’s actions, the representation of Batman’s actions causes them to become morally ambiguous, perhaps even more easily than in Dexter. The key to this ambiguity is that

Batman is steadfastly against killing even in the face of villains he feels intensely responsible for.

Because of this supposedly moral principle, I will argue the sublime once again is able to obscure the immorality taking place and divert attention away from the fact that Batman is as much a criminal as the people he targets.

It’s An Operating Table and I’m the Surgeon

In his essay “The Hero We Need, Not the One We Deserve: Vigilantism and the State of

Exception in Batman Incorporated,” Chris Comerford argues that “Despite its problematic nature, vigilantism is not necessarily immoral or unethical. Indeed, it may be construed as a legitimate

39 response to a vacuum in lawful agency” (188). On this point I can agree; vigilantism is not inherently immoral and that is not the aim of my analysis of Dexter and The Dark Knight Returns.

Instead, what is immoral remains the actions taken by the vigilante. Batman’s actions, however necessary they may be construed to be by the fictional universe that he inhabits, remain immoral.

Firstly, Batman grants himself sovereign power11 to satisfy his personal desire to do harm to criminals rather than simply to uphold a moral principle. This is a manifestation of the unresolved trauma of his parents’ death; Batman is not motivated by a sense of pure moral responsibility but by a personal and emotional need. When Bruce Wayne is cornered in an alley by a couple of gang members he says, “If it was revenge [Batman] was after, he’s taken it” and then, of the gang members, “It is him, it is. And we know so many ways to hurt him . . . So many lovely ways to punish him” (Miller). Bruce Wayne remains trapped in the trauma of his parents’ murder, going so far as to say that “it could have happened yesterday. It could be happening right now. They could be lying at your feet. Twitching, bleeding. . .” (Miller). Because of this, Bruce Wayne initially perceives the gang members who jump him as being no different than the man who killed his parents. Bruce Wayne does eventually realize they’re different but only to conclude “these are his children. A purer breed . . . and this world is theirs” (Miller). This conclusion firmly establishes his actions against the Mutant gang in the first issue of The Dark Knight Returns as being personal in nature and connected to the trauma that fuels his actions. As a result, he is not operating first from a position of moral responsibility. This is made alarmingly evident when Batman is cornered by a gunman he is pursuing and explains “There are seven working defenses from this position.

Three of them disarm with minimal contact. Three of them kill. The other hurts” (Miller). It is the one that hurts that Batman chooses to employ and the one that hurts that is then portrayed in a

11 Batman enacts a state of exception, a legal theory originally presented by Carl Schmitt (Agamben 1), and one which Chris Comerford discusses in greater detail as it applies to Batman in his essay contained in Graphic Justice edited by Thomas Giddens.

40 long panel where Batman kicks the gunman in the stomach and the word “KRAK” appears in dynamic letters beside the gunman (Miller). When a cop tells Batman he’s “crippled that man”

Batman replies “He’s young. He’ll probably walk again. But he’ll stay scared – won’t you, punk?”

(Miller). Batman’s goal is to use violence as a means of preventing future criminal action, relying on the fear of pain and assault to follow up the act of stopping crime.

Batman admits he is fully capable of taking down the gunman with actions that involve minimal contact and therefore minimal violence. It is entirely possible for Batman to operate in a way that satisfies his desire to stop crime without violating moral tenets. He chooses not to, and it is this choice that solidifies his actions as immoral. But, comic book superhero narratives rely heavily on visual storytelling. By depicting Batman crippling a man’s spine in a long artistic panel, complete with dynamic text to lend an auditory component to the event, the artwork renders the violence and immorality as sublime. The dynamic text in the panel where Batman breaks the man’s spine is (as mentioned above), “KRAK,” the same text used during a thunderstorm that marks Batman’s return to vigilantism a few pages earlier. Batman’s violent behaviour is represented aesthetically in the same way as a thunderstorm, elevating him to the level of a force of sublime nature in addition to an enactor of sublime violence. The act of violence is meant to be viewed for my pleasure as the reader through how it conjures a sense of terror, pain, and awe.

Batman acts under the premise that by committing acts of violence against other citizens these criminals have violated the social contract; they have rendered themselves no longer under the protection of his moral obligation towards them.

Later, Batman confronts the same gunman in his home, startling him and causing him to fall backwards through a window. The criminal yells “Stay back – I got rights!” and Batman replies

“You’ve got rights. Lots of rights. Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy. But right now you’ve got a piece of glass shoved into a major artery in your arm. Right now you’re bleeding

41 to death. Right now I’m the only one in the world who can get you to a hospital in time” (Miller).

It is possible that Batman is simply using intimidation tactics here to get the information from the gunman that he needs to track down a greater threat to Gotham and its citizens. However, it is worth noting that while Batman does not kill he does not always stop people from dying; he does not seem concerned with the final part of Mary Anne Warren’s moral tenet stating that “[we must] help [people] when help is needed and we have the means of providing it” (Warren 13). At the end of the first issue, four men are on board a helicopter that explodes, killing them all, and

Batman’s only thought for them is “leaving the world no poorer, four men die” (Miller). Later in the second issue, Batman does nothing to stop a gunman from shooting and killing another gunman (Miller). Therefore, it is entirely conceivable in The Dark Knight Returns that Batman would leave the gunman he is threatening to bleed to death. Batman derives pleasure from the violence he inflicts on criminals, the same pleasure that he intimates in Crime Alley when he thinks the gang members are his parents’ killer and he thinks of how he knows “so many lovely ways to punish them” (Miller). The pleasure that Batman derives from the violence he inflicts results in sublime violence; his personal gratification expressed through violence results in aesthetic pleasure for the audience.

In the second issue of The Dark Knight Returns, Batman takes on the leader of the Mutant gang. As the fight concludes, Batman tells the Mutant gang leader “You don’t . . . get it, boy . . .

This isn’t a mudhole . . . It’s an operating table. And I’m the surgeon” (Miller) at which point the word “KRAKKKKK” appears over Batman, linking his violence once again to the thunderstorm and the terror and awe of natural forces. The comparison to a surgeon is significant because it positions Batman as benevolent and his violence as curative, suggesting the Mutant gang leader is a cancer that must be removed to save the patient that is Gotham City. In the final two panels, no violence is shown; instead, text boxes show Batman’s thoughts as he says “Something tells me

42 to stop with the legs. I don’t listen to it” (Miller). The next page shows a large panel of Batman standing over the Mutant gang leader’s body, that body sunk into the mud in which they’d been fighting and nearly impossible to distinguish as a human form. In this way, the sublime quality of the violence Batman enacts, once again drawing on a comparison to sublime nature, is depicted as much through visual representation as the choice not to represent it. By making the choice not to show what Batman does, Miller positions the violence and Batman himself as more terrifying, but the reader also becomes more of a participant. The sublime works here as much in what is seen as what isn’t seen through closure, a concept described by Scott McCloud in Understanding

Comics (McCloud 66-7). The reader is encouraged to imagine the violence off the page and thereby to be complicit in the construction of this aesthetically violent space.

While the graphic novel medium renders this violence aesthetic, it is worth considering the dangerous nature of how Batman enjoys the violence he inflicts on his criminal victims. In his essay “Superhero Revisionism in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns,” Aeon J. Skoble argues that:

[This violence and activity outside the law] can all seem to make some degree of sense, provided that the vigilante is in fact doing good, but it would be far more troubling if vigilantes lack a clear perception of right and wrong. For example, the return of Batman inspires some members of a large and powerful street gang that he vanquishes to themselves become crime-fighting vigilantes - the 'Sons of the Batman' - but they kill, and they maim far more indiscriminately than their namesake ever would (Morris 33).

Batman’s grip on what is right and wrong does not appear to be as clear as Skoble argues it needs to be for us to qualify his actions as purely good. Because Batman knows that stopping at the

Mutant gang leader’s legs is the right thing to do but decides to keep going anyway he has demonstrated that his ability to recognize right and wrong does not stop him from seeking

43 personal satisfaction that is objectively wrong.12 Furthermore, with regards to the Sons of Batman, even though they kill and maim in his name, Batman is never shown to take any action to stop the

Sons of Batman from committing crimes. In the third issue of The Dark Knight Returns, a televised debate about Batman features one of the debaters saying “they tell me the Sons of the Batman broke up a three card monty game this morning, Lana. With napalm. Why hasn’t Batman done something about those lunatics? Unless, of course, he approves” (Miller). This raises a very concerning question about Batman’s conception of right and wrong. In the final issue of The Dark

Knight Returns, a Son of Batman kills two men robbing a store and then uses wire cutters to cut off the fingers of the store clerk, telling him that “[he] should have put up a fight [. . . and] didn’t deserve to run a cash register” (Miller). Not only does Batman take no action against this Son of

Batman but by the end of The Dark Knight Returns he has corralled the Sons of Batman into a personal army to safeguard Gotham during a blackout and then later to take up his mantle after he fakes his own death (Miller). Not only does this action call Batman’s understanding of right and wrong into question but it also calls his ethical code into question. Once again, Batman doesn’t kill but he seems content to allow it to happen if it happens to people he deems to be criminal.

And that definition of who is a criminal and who isn’t appears to be entirely up to him; because the Sons of Batman have chosen to follow him, their methodology – both from before when they were the Mutant gang and their time as the Sons of Batman – is, problematically, irrelevant and forgiven.

Nothing Matters to You Except Your Holy War

12 Here is where Kant and Batman part ways, since his ability to understand and act on the demands of the categorical imperative and justice are disrupted by his decision to indulge his desire for pleasure, revenge, and emotionality (Kant).

In addition to not killing – though this apparent tenet of Batman’s code grows increasingly more suspect throughout The Dark Knight Returns – Batman also justifies his enacting of the state of exception because of the often-accurate perception in the Batman comics that the state authority or police department is corrupt or incapable of solving the problem of crime. Skoble argues that:

Laws may be unjust, politicians may be corrupt, and the legal system may actually protect the wicked, but none of this will deter Batman from his mission. The crime-fighting vigilante superhero does not let anything stand between him and the attainment of what he sees as real justice. Why should well-meaning social structures be allowed to stand in the way of what is objectively right? (Miller).

In the first issue, news reports describe terrible crimes being committed by the Mutant gang, such as the “butchery of every member of [a] family” and “a dead cat [being] stapled to the door of the

First Church of Christ the Redeemer” (Miller). There is no indication in the news report of the

Gotham Police Department making any arrests or any progress on apprehending those responsible. In fact, Batman says that “this world is theirs” (Miller), suggesting that Gotham City does not belong to the state or citizens but to the immoral criminal elements. But the issue of the state authority and state apparatus supposedly being insufficient to handle the criminal activity in Gotham is not without its own problematic elements. In addition to Batman’s violent methodology, there is also the problem of Batman’s own complicating of the issue of state authority. When Batman cripples the gunman in the first issue, Commissioner Gordon is forced to release the gunman. Even though “[The gunman] has been in and out of prison since he learned to walk [and] fled the scene of a felony and fired on policemen with an illegal weapon,” the gunman’s lawyer argues successfully that there was “No loot, no robbery, commissioner” (Miller).

While this failure of the system would seem to further indicate that Batman is necessary to counterbalance the bureaucracy that prevents justice from being served in Gotham, it is

45 important to note that Batman’s interference in the case is the main reason the gunman is released. Batman’s intervention has not cured the system, but rather has simply exasperated issues of judicial power that were already present.

There is nothing to suggest that the police would not have been able to apprehend the gunman that Batman crippled and enabled them to properly press charges. In his essay “With

Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: On the Moral Duties of the Super-Powerful and Super-

Heroic,” Christopher Robichaud points out “Batman isn't a police officer. He doesn't get warrants before crashing into criminals' lairs, he uses physical intimidation tactics all the time to gather information, he often apprehends criminals without having legally sufficient evidence against them, and he surely doesn't read them their rights” (Morris 188). He then elaborates on this idea, saying "We could easily be tempted to argue that just as super-powerful people can reasonably be thought to take on special obligations when they opt to be superheroes, they also gain special privileges. After all, people who adopt other exalted roles in society sometimes gain privileges by doing so” (188). This statement would seem, once again, to argue in favour of Batman’s state of exception to fill the vacuum of state authority because of his super-heroic capabilities. However,

Robichaud neatly dismantles this argument by stating:

This way of thinking is flawed for two reasons. First, police officers also take on perilous risks in their efforts to fight crime and help people. Superheroes shouldn't gain special exemption for that reason, then, unless we think that police officers should as well. But, of course, we don't think that. We would therefore need to justify exempting superheroes but not police officers from normal constraints by appealing to the fact that superheroes have greater power than police officers do. But power alone doesn't justify special legal treatment, for laws are meant to bind both the weak and the mighty. Second, and even more important, the privileges being considered aren't just exemptions from legal duties, they're exemptions from moral ones. And that's a crucial difference (189)

It is important to note, as Zygmunt Bauman does in Postmodern Ethics, that there is a difference between law and morality. Nevertheless, “Often [. . .] what’s moral and what’s legal do coincide.

Murdering someone is both immoral and illegal” (189). Batman does not murder, but his actions are nonetheless immoral. And the apparent ineffectiveness of the state authority and state apparatus in Gotham City may be sufficient to argue for the necessity of intervention by an individual capable of super-human capabilities, such as Batman. However, they do not and cannot exempt Batman from being held accountable for his immoral actions. After all, is it not the capacity to remain moral that enables superheroes, powered or otherwise, to take up the mantle of vigilantism? Batman may rely on us approving of his self-imposed state of exception, he may even rely upon the police eventually granting him a state of exception, but this only exempts him from legal consideration, not moral consideration.

Untouched by Love or Joy or Sorrow

Repeatedly throughout The Dark Knight Returns, particularly in the first issue, Bruce

Wayne is confronted with his Batman persona as a kind of demonic possession. When Bruce

Wayne is in Crime Alley, he refers to Batman as a separate entity that was “born here” (Miller) and that “the city’s smells call out to him” (Miller). When Bruce is defending Harvey Dent’s release from Arkham, he says that “We must believe that our private demons can be defeated” (Miller); though he is talking about Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne is also referring to his own private demon in the form of Batman. A flashback then depicts the moment when Bruce fell into a bat cave as a child. It is depicted as a black space with the cries of the bats inside appearing as massive red letters, surrounding Bruce as the bats do. Finally, present day Bruce Wayne contextualizes the moment as the panels depict a single, red-eyed bat approaching young Bruce. Bruce says “Then something shuffles out of sight . . . something sucks the still air and hisses. Gliding with ancient

47 grace, unwilling to retreat as his brothers did, eyes gleaming, untouched by love or joy or sorrow, breath hot with the taste of fallen foes, the stench of dead things, damned things, surely the fiercest survivor – the purest warrior, glaring, hating, claiming me as his own” (Miller). The bat’s face fills a panel with white eyes, a red mouth, and uneven, jagged teeth (Miller). Together, these images and words depict the bat as a demonic force that, when claiming Bruce, possessed him.

Bruce goes on to explain how

I was only six years old when that happened. When I first saw the cave. Huge, empty, silent as a church, waiting, as the bat was waiting. And now the cobwebs grow and the dust thickens in here as it does in me and he laughs at me, curses me. Calls me a fool. He fills my sleep, he tricks me. Brings me here when the night is long and my will is weak. He struggles relentlessly, hatefully, to be free. I will not let him (Miller).

This section of the graphic novel contains key words which code the Batman persona in a particularly sinister way. Referring to the bat cave as a church further strengthens the religious iconographic element of the Batman persona, but the repeated images of the bat with white eyes and sharp teeth shows it not as an angel but a demon. Furthermore, Bruce refers to the persona of Batman as hateful as opposed to righteous. Bruce’s struggle with the demon that possesses him concludes with a five-page sequence of panels. It begins by repeatedly showing the terror- stricken face of Bruce Wayne, then his attempt to cleanse or purify himself with water, and finally the image of a massive bat crashing through a window towards him (Miller). All the while, Bruce

Wayne’s internal monologue changes as though a new voice has taken over, and this new voice begins to address Bruce. The new voice says

The time has come. You know it in your soul. You cannot escape me. You are puny, you are small. You are nothing – a hollow shell, a rusty trap that cannot hold me. Smoldering, I burn you. Burning you, I flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful. You cannot stop me. Not with wine or vows or the weight of age. You cannot stop me but still you try. Still you run. You try to drown me out but your voice is weak (Miller).

This new voice is, undoubtedly, the Batman persona. It is over the next few pages that Batman stops a series of crimes across Gotham, revealing his return. But the imagery and dialogue all demonstrate that Batman is not an angel of justice but rather a demon of fire and hate. As Bruce moves towards his return to the Batman persona, the news network repeatedly reports on the increasing heat in Gotham, as though Gotham has become a metaphorical hell (Miller). Like the repeated use of “KRAK” to associate Batman with sublime nature, this connection between

Gotham as hell and Batman as a demon associates him with the sublimity of unholy forces.13 And even though the Batman persona is described as something that enjoys inflicting pain, as well as being hateful, without compassion, a predator, demonic, and burning, Batman is still presented as heroic and good.

Despite being clearly defined as demonic, terrifying, and a source of pain and violence,

Batman describes himself as beautiful. In a moment of meta-narrative, Batman is referring to the sublime effect of his actions as depicted in graphic novel form; the text acknowledges how the terror Batman creates is delightful. The reason Batman is still perceived as good despite this imagery is partly because of how he is juxtaposed to the other criminals of Gotham; when comparing Batman to the Mutant gang members who say “can’t do murders when they’re into it” (Miller), Batman appears heroic because he is reacting to objective crimes and protecting the innocent, even if he does so by inflicting pain and suffering on others. But the other and more significant reason comes from the demonic voice of Batman himself: “Burning you, I flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful” (Miller). When Batman defends Carrie and Michelle from Mutant gang members, a panel shows his fist clenching four batarangs in silhouette against the rain

13 In fact, Burke more than once references in his 1757 treatise how Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost is inherently sublime (Burke 82, 84, 124).

(Miller). The image looks like the clawed hand of a monster, a predator that hunts in the shadows, just as the panels leading up to this fight have depicted over and over. Witnesses to Batman’s return describe him as “. . . [a] wild animal. Growls. Snarls. Werewolf. Surely. [. . .] Monster! Like with fangs and wings and it can fly” (Miller). But then a full-page panel shows Batman in full costume, his cape thrown out to either side like a pair of wings, leaping in to take down some gunmen in a getaway car (Miller). Ironically, even though Batman is fully revealed in this panel and fully in the light, his nature is more obscured than in any of the previous panels. When shown like this, Batman adopts his disguise; only once Batman is made visible to the reader does he stop appearing demonic and adopt the disguise of heroism.

All the indications of his demonic nature have been shown to the reader, but we are unable to properly contextualize them within a moral framework. As Michele Aaron puts it, rather succinctly, “People love to look [. . . to enjoy] the lurid pleasure of witnessing something illicit or gruesome” (Aaron 87). Echoing Burke’s rationale behind the sublime, Aaron suggests that there is a masochistic14 enjoyment the spectator gets out of witnessing violence and obscenities. I do not believe the sublime is inherently masochistic, but, in this case, it does have a similar effect in the artistic representations of violence throughout The Dark Knight Returns. Notably, this apparent demonic possession of Bruce Wayne by Batman is incredibly similar to the language used by Dexter to refer to his Dark Passenger, Dexter’s own version of a demonic possession that gives him the urge to kill (Dexter “Dexter”). The murder of Batman’s parents right before his eyes is also paralleled with Dexter’s backstory, or, it would be more accurate to say, that Dexter’s is designed to parallel Batman’s (Dexter “Born Free”). The similarities between Batman and Dexter are worth considering, particularly regarding how the two characters inhabit their dualities and

14 Aaron goes into far more detail regarding the role masochism plays in the relationship between spectator and content, detail I do not have time to explore here.

50 how they code for different worlds. Because there remains the question of which identity is the true identity, as, unwilling to allow this dual identity to stand, both texts insist on identifying a true persona and reducing the other aspect to a disguise. In both cases, I believe it is the vigilante persona that is the true identity and the mild-mannered citizen that is the real mask or costume.

For Dexter, this is more obvious because his driving motivation for both identities is the continuation of his ability to satisfy his desire to kill. For Bruce Wayne, the issue is a little more complicated.

In his essay “What’s Behind the Mask? The Secret of Secret Identities,” Tom Morris explains that:

At the start of [Batman’s] dual identity, his core identity was clearly that of Bruce Wayne, and his alternate, secondary identity, taken on for a purpose, was that of Batman. But as it stands now, years down the road, it seems to me that there has been a gradual, surprising transformation such that the core identity may have become that of Batman, and the secondary, alternative identity for special purposes is that of Bruce Wayne. The image of Bruce may have become the real mask at this point (Morris 263).

In The Dark Knight Returns, once Bruce Wayne takes up the mantle of Batman again there is almost no further development of his life or character as Bruce Wayne. During the third issue,

Alfred attempts to interest Batman in several responsibilities he has as Bruce Wayne, informing him “your accountant waits in the west wing, sir [. . . and] that refugee charity called” (Miller).

Batman brushes off these commitments, instructing Alfred to “tell them I’m sick [. . . and] write them a check” (Miller). It is clear, like Morris suggests, that Batman has become the core identity and Bruce Wayne is the secondary one. This idea originates in the first issue of The Dark Knight

Returns, where Two-Face becomes a representation of Bruce Wayne/Batman’s own dual personality collapsing. Two-Face has been surgically healed so that his face is no longer half- scarred (Miller), which is supposed to represent that he is cured of his dual personality. However,

51 when confronting Two-Face at the end of the issue Batman thinks to himself “The scars go deep, too deep. I close my eyes and listen. Not fooled by sight, I see him as he is. I see him. I see . . . I see . . . a reflection, Harvey. A reflection” (Miller). This occurs over a series of eight panels in which the first four show Two-Face with a healed face only to cut to a version of his face that is completely scarred, his true face (Miller). Then, reflected beneath that, are a series of four panels showing Batman’s face, with Batman’s true face revealed as the demonic face of the bat from earlier in the issue (Miller). In fact, at the end of The Dark Knight Returns, Batman fakes his own death so that he can abandon the identity of Bruce Wayne entirely and dedicate himself wholly to the core identity of Batman. What is significant about all of this is that it shows that the Batman persona is not something that Batman adopts to fight and frighten criminals. It is his true identity.

This distinction is important because it means that Batman’s attitude towards violence is not an act or a necessary part of his disguise. It is who he truly is, meaning that the immorality is not some Machiavellian component to his war on crime but an intrinsic part of his core identity.

Not Fooled By Sight, I See Him As He Is

Though she does not support this reasoning, Mary Anne Warren describes the conditions under which immoral actions are often believed to become acceptable. She says

Cultural ethical relativists deny that any moral claim can have general or cross- cultural validity, because they believe that moral truth is entirely determined by prevailing beliefs within a particular cultural group. On this view, there is no such thing as the moral status that an entity has, or ought to have, for all moral agents. Nothing has moral status except in the context of a culture wherein it is accorded moral status by a majority of persons; and the moral status that it has within each such culture is merely that which the majority of persons within the culture currently believe it to have (Warren 6).

In other words, an adherence to cultural ethical relativism can be applied to justify Batman’s immoralities because under these conditions his victims do not have moral status so long as most of the citizenry of Gotham (or readership of the comic) do not accredit them with moral status. I believe that part of the reason why a majority of the readership can be said to remove moral status from Batman’s opponents – the mutant gang leader, the Joker, etc. – is because of how the acts of violence Batman partakes in to subdue them are sublime.

Batman doesn’t kill – during the sequence with the Batmobile tank he even says “Rubber bullets. Honest” (Miller) – but, as Philips and Stobl put it, “for the most part, heroes in contemporary mainstream comics fall short of retributive killing favouring what we term

'apocalyptic incapacitation' - an incapacitation of the villain that falls short of death, but that features the rhetorical and graphic drama often associated with retribution such as flashy fight scenes and tough banter” (Giddens 110). Batman does not kill, but his apocalyptic incapacitation of criminals is delightful because it satisfies the emotional desire for retribution. This is another way in which Batman’s depiction is sublime, his excessive violence offers the delight of a kind of voyeuristic ability to look on as something painful occurs. Though she is talking about film noir,

Aaron sums up this effect quite well: “This [delightful] dynamic is premised on the danger of [the subject-object] liaison, a danger that arises not simply in its association with breaking the law but with the immanence of suffering or of death that haunts and fuels [. . .] the narrative itself” (Aaron

64). This is another way in which Batman’s depiction is sublime, his excessive violence offers the delight of witnessing something painful occur that, ostensibly, sets the world right. When the

Joker kills an entire studio audience and then proceeds to threaten an entire amusement park,

Batman not only throws a batarang into his eye but also breaks his neck, paralyzing him from the neck down (Miller). During this sequence of panels, the narrative jumps to a televised debate in which reporter Lana Lang is defending Batman, arguing “how many times do I have to say it,

Morrie? Batman hasn’t killed anybody” (Miller). Even when faced with the Joker’s evil and immoral actions, Batman does not kill. Instead, he enacts the apocalyptic incapacitation that

Phillips and Strobl refer to. The moment that Batman breaks the Joker’s neck is sublime; it offers violence as a form of retributive satisfaction, an act the reader is invited to delight in as it resolves a problem for the characters through a painful, destructive act the reader need only witness, not experience. And, of all of Batman’s opponents or victims, the Joker is certainly notorious for being the most immoral and evil. Indeed, if Batman is a demon possessing the body of Bruce Wayne then the Joker is, as Batman calls him, the devil (Miller). The Joker’s face is shown as twisted into an unnatural and almost inhuman smile when he kills himself to frame Batman for murder (Miller).

Every effort is made to justify Batman’s actions by rendering them sublime and thereby distorting the Joker’s humanity and making it increasingly difficult to identify him as a being worthy of moral status.

The most brutal act of assault committed by Batman in The Dark Knight Returns is both aesthetically pleasing in its sublime depiction and morally distorted because of the Joker’s far more numerous immoral acts. By breaking the Joker’s neck instead of murdering him, Batman maintains the appearance of a moral entity only by juxtaposition. Mary Anne Warren argues for a singular, all-encompassing understanding of moral status to combat the dangers of conditionally accorded moral status. She points out that “[. . .] human beings badly need shared standards and principles of moral status, based upon arguments that most people can understand and accept [.

. . because] human beings are clever and opportunistic creatures who have recently come to possess an awesome capacity to do harm, both to one another and to the rest of the world”

(Warren 10-1). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman argues:

contain a demand to be repayed, mirrored or 'balanced out' in the 'you-for-me'. My relation to the Other is not reversible; if it happens to be reciprocated, the reciprocation is but an accident from the point of view of my being-for (Bauman 50).

In other words, moral status cannot be rescinded on the whims of emotional perception. But

Batman considers it wrong for the Joker to stab him in the stomach while, at the same time, he considers it perfectly acceptable for him to throw a batarang into the Joker’s eye. This is because

Batman perceives himself as good and acting on behalf of justice whereas the Joker is evil and acting on behalf of chaos. And yet this idea of Batman determining who is and is not accorded moral status is deeply problematic. Because Batman’s violence is sublime it can manipulate the situation such that the reader is cued to accept that his victims deserve or are worthy of the violence done to them. This positioning obfuscates the moral status of Batman’s opponents, but it does not remove it. Batman’s sublime violence manipulates the reader into forgetting or withholding our moral obligation to other entities of moral status because we are first, through the medium, confronted with the delightful nature of the violence taking place. Even though the

Joker kills indiscriminately, as Bauman says, he does not lose his own moral status. This is not to say that the Joker is not a threat to the well-being of individuals and society and should not be stopped, but instead that the measures taken against him are required to conform to the same moral considerations that any individual possessing moral status is obligated to receive.

Therefore, even though by breaking his neck and paralyzing him Batman has stopped the Joker from committing further immoral acts, Batman is still immoral.

We Live in the Shadow of Crime

In their essay “Heroes and Superheroes,” Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris argue that “[Batman] shows us that we can do whatever we have to do, in the face of evil, if we stay firmly in touch with our noblest motivations and our most cherished values” (Morris 18). The problem with The Dark

Knight Returns and with Batman is that while he may represent noble motivations and cherished values being applied practically, it is in this practical application that his actions become criminal.

It is very similar to the way in which Dexter’s foster father Harry has noble motivations and ideals when he trains Dexter to execute murderers but witnessing it in its practical application is horrific to him (Dexter “There’s Something About Harry”). In fact, Batman does not describe himself or his actions in a context that would lead me as the reader to believe he sees himself as noble. While reminiscing about the circumstances that led to the fall of the Golden Age of Heroes, an event that predates the events taking place in The Dark Knight Returns, Superman remembers Batman saying “Sure we’re criminals [. . .] We’ve always been criminals. We have to be criminals” (Miller).

This lines up with the sentiment that opens The Dark Knight Returns, expressed in an article written by Jimmy Olsen. In it, he describes Batman as “[. . .] the mean one. The cruel one. The one who couldn’t fly or bend steel in his bare hands. The one who scared the crap out of everybody and laughed at all of the rest of us for being the envious cowards we were” (Miller). It is difficult, based on this context, to understand what noble idea Batman is representing. Cruelty, meanness, violence, and criminality seem to be the only values Batman represents.

Aeon J. Skoble argues that when Batman calls himself and other superheroes criminals

Of course, this is completely accurate only in a technical way, and Batman means it ironically. He breaks some of the laws of Gotham in order to pursue the real criminals who are violating the city [. . .] To the extent that any laws on the books protect criminals and impede the pursuit of justice, Batman will be a lawbreaker (Morris 31).

This is once again a very forgiving reading of Batman’s actions. It looks at the theoretical idea of his vigilante approach to justice and ignores the practical realities that The Dark Knight Returns depicts and conveys. Whether it is his confrontation with the leader of the Mutant gang or the

Joker, it is difficult to see Batman’s implementation of apocalyptic incapacitation as a reflection

56 of a noble idea or a cherished value. Throughout The Dark Knight Returns, there are televised debates and interviews with citizens discussing the morality of Batman’s actions. Lana Lang is positioned throughout the graphic novel as Batman’s strongest defendant, repeatedly positioning him as an ultimately moral figure. She argues that “we live in the shadow of crime, Ted, with the unspoken understanding that we are victims – of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, and always has been, in our hands. We are under siege – he’s showing us that we can resist” (Miller). This is a noble sentiment, conveying the idea that every individual has the power to fight back against the oppression of fear and violence. Except, fear and violence are precisely what Batman employs against the criminals he pursues.

Despite the insult he adds, when Morrie responds to Lana’s comment that Batman fights crime instead of perpetrating it, saying “You don’t call excessive force a crime? How about assault, fat lady? Or breaking and entering?” (Miller), he’s right. In the process of attempting to embody the noble sentiment of individual strength and resistance to evil, Batman instead becomes and embodies the very threats he is supposedly fighting against. In a debate during the third issue, the anti-Batman side of the debate points out “[. . .] if you toss in the victims of his fan club, the

Batman-related body count is up there with a minor war” (Miller). Notably, this debater is intentionally including all the victims of Batman’s enemies as being Batman’s responsibility, which is a drastically manipulative way of phrasing the argument. This same debater also makes misogynistic comments to his opponent, Lana Lang, ensuring that her arguments in favour of

Batman look much better by comparison (Miller). In this, the truth of the anti-Batman side of the debate is obscured. Batman does have victims whom he has hospitalized and crippled, and the

Sons of the Batman do kill in Batman’s name without any response from Batman himself. When presented with these practical realities it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify where the immorality of Batman’s violence is redeemed by noble intentions.

It is important to note that in the story of The Dark Knight Returns, Batman is not a cure for an ailing moral society but the symptom of one; he is not a morally sound society’s response to immoral anomalies. It is society’s moral blindness that allows for the existence of Batman. This moral blindness is reflected in numerous characters, but more overtly in those that argue against

Batman as a moral figure without recognizing the other immoralities they defend. Firstly, there is the character of Dr. Wolper and the ironically renamed Arkham Home for the Emotionally

Troubled. Dr. Wolper’s moral blindness causes him to continually fail to recognize the immorality of his patients, namely Harvey Dent/Two-Face and the Joker. With Two-Face, Dr. Wolper argues that the superficial reconstruction of Two-Face’s face also represents a reconstruction of his morality. However, Two-Face almost immediately goes back to a life of crime, depicted over several panels as Dr. Wolper argues that Two-Face is the real victim (Miller). In one of the televised debates about Batman, this societal moral blindness is further showcased during this exchange:

Lana: [Batman’s] hardly as dangerous as his enemies, is he? Take Harvey Dent, just to pick a name. Morrie: That’s cute, Lana. But hardly apropos. And hardly fair to as troubled a soul as Harvey Dent’s. Lana: He certainly is trouble for his victims. Morrie: Was, Lana. Was. If Harvey Dent is returning to crime – and let’s note that I said if – it goes without saying that he’s not in control of himself (Miller).

In this moment, both Morrie and Lana are wrong. Morrie is morally blind to the immorality of

Harvey Dent’s actions, claiming he is exempt from such classifications because he’s not in control; likewise, Lana is wrong because she is blind to how Batman’s actions are in their own way immoral as well. But there is further evidence of the moral blindness of the world. Batman traces weapons sales to the Mutant gang back to a decorated U.S. Army General (Miller). The mayor is more concerned with how he’ll be perceived by the public to make any impactful decisions about

Batman or the crime in Gotham City (Miller). The leader of the Mutant gang who threatened to

58 kill Commissioner Gordon, his family, and eat them, is given time on the news to monologue about his greatness and the greatness of his murderous gang (Miller). Superman has been enlisted by the government as a weapon of mass destruction in its proxy wars against the Soviet Union

(Miller). And once again, Dr. Wolper is oblivious to the countless past immoral actions of the Joker and attempts to present him to the world as a reformed individual on national television, leading to the deaths of hundreds at the Joker’s hands (Miller). Even those individuals who voice support for the noble ideals of Batman, however debunked they may be, prove to be harbouring immoral notions such as the one citizen who says “Batman? Yeah, I think he’s a-okay. He’s kicking just the right butts – butts the cops ain’t kicking, that’s for sure. Hope he goes after the homos next”

(Miller). This individual shows the corruption at the heart of Gotham and U.S. society at large; it also demonstrates how a personal ethical code meant to reform society has inherent flaws with regards to personal prejudices and devaluation of the Other.

Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl argue that “Comic books, along with other mass media entertainment, serve as an internalised cultural landscape that individuals may draw upon in their own lived experience as it intersects with crime and justice” (Gidden 110-11). In the world of The

Dark Knight Returns, Batman is not the cure for a cultural landscape reflecting immorality but a further symptom of a disease at its very core. Batman cannot cure society’s immorality with further immorality; however, he can thrive in it, as he does throughout The Dark Knight Returns, able to satisfy his own immoral agendas within a society already plagued by immorality. Batman’s actions do not make society more moral; instead, he spawns groups such as the Sons of Batman and recruits the next generation in the form of his new Robin, Carrie Kelley, to perpetuate the systemic immorality of his world.

It Wasn’t So Long Ago We Had Heroes

In “When (Super)heroes Kill: Vigilantism and Deathworthiness in Justice League, Red

Team, and the Christopher Dorner Killing Spree,” Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl argue that

For readers, we found that the heroes' path to justice, including determinations of deathworthiness, serve as a means of processing anxieties about crime, victimisation, and extra-legal justice. Mainstream American comic books privilege retributive sentiment, even if it is not fully realised, and we suggest that the books serve as an important cultural artefact that reflects and shapes attitudes towards crime, crime causation, and social control (Gidden 110).

Applying this idea to Batman, it is necessary to acknowledge that, unlike Dexter, Batman does not directly kill any of his victims. But assault and excessive violence against individuals is still a crime, still immoral, and still classifies those Batman attacks as victims. Batman does not act in self- defence; he seeks out criminals for the express purpose of satisfying his desire to inflict pain and punishment (Miller). Batman’s code still allows him to go to extreme lengths to inflict pain and suffering on his victims, and the sublime factors in to how this violent activity becomes difficult to identify as a purely immoral one. Throughout, the sublime obfuscates Batman’s depiction as a demonic force, his victims as human individuals worthy of moral status, and his own position as an immoral agent undermining society. Phillips and Strobl further argue that

Rather than based on the rule of law and bound by constitutional considerations, comic book deathworthiness is based on the heroes' own personal ethics. Acknowledging that what constitutes justice is contested by the reading public, we suggest that what is significant is not necessarily the outcome - that is, whether or not the hero actually kills. Instead, we argue that the path to justice itself and the determinations of deathworthiness are significant in that this process is what invites readers to work through their own anxieties and moral dilemmas that shape their perceptions and attitudes about what it means to achieve justice (113).

But I would like to compare this argument to one I have already presented with regards to Dexter and the depiction of his immoral activities. James Petty argues in “Violent Lives, Ending Violently?

Justice, Ideology, and Spectatorship in Watchmen” that “In the end, while Watchmen does challenge the notion of the active reader and passive image, the text nonetheless invites spectatorship, offering the sublime pleasures of witnessing and participating in violence and the fascistic monopolization [sic] of power over others” (161). Just like in Dexter, the same pattern of spectatorship and sublime pleasure from witnessing and participating in violence occurs in The

Dark Knight Returns. Key to the experience is the visualization of the retributive violence. As Petty puts it, “In a medium that favours the visual, the witnessing of this retribution becomes a requisite for the realisation of justice: it must be seen to be done” (152). The form this retributive realization takes is almost always “counter-intuitively premised upon something that itself tests various legal and moral boundaries: violent vigilantism” (152). Continuing to use Mary Anne Warren’s Moral

Status as a grounding for my examination, violent vigilantism cannot be classified as a moral act because it violates the primary moral obligations any entity of moral status has to another entity of moral status. Therefore, as with Dexter before him, Batman’s actions are inherently immoral, and the sublime plays a key role in obscuring this immorality through presenting his violence as aesthetically pleasing because of how it inspires both terror and awe.

Though his arguments are directed primarily towards superhero comics, James Petty’s dissection of morality in superhero comics can easily be applied to Dexter and televised depictions of retributive justice as well. Petty argues

The reflection cast by these heroes can in no way be described as idyllic, though of course this is the point. Here looking becomes a fraught undertaking, threatening to reveal to the reader all the uncertainties from which they sought respite, or worse, confronting them with their own fascistic desires and militant sympathies. The aphorism 'be careful what you wish for' comes to mind: the reader, confronted with their fantasy's realisation, find it is not what they imagined (161).

While it is true that an active reader might be able to recognize that Dexter’s morally ambiguous approach to killing killers is functionally immoral, it satisfies an emotional desire for retributive justice in the face of unresolved criminal activity through the delight sublime terror and awe present. Likewise, an active reader might be able to recognize that Batman’s actions are equally as immoral as those he targets, though his apocalyptic incapacitation of his victims may seem like it avoids true immorality because he doesn’t kill. The sublime is at work constantly and throughout both depictions of retributive/violent justice; these protagonists are operating in the context of moral failure under non-ideal circumstances. Murder and assault are immoral and are use as the justification by which Dexter and Batman get to then perform their own murder and assault. This is morally ambiguous, and I have argued that moral ambiguity is far from the best justification for immoral actions. Ideally, these texts are inviting the audience to suspend moral judgement within the frames of their representation to explore more complex socio-political and judicial ideas.

However, I argue that it is vital to consider the difference between suspending moral judgement and enabling ethical consideration; the former absolves the text of participation in the resulting moral conversation, as Dexter absolves himself at the conclusion of the second season (Dexter

“The British Invasion”), whereas the latter facilitates the audience’s confrontation with moral issues and becomes a site for moral growth and ethical development. Murder and violence are recognizably wrong, Petty argues, “Yet this is also what makes the genre so seductive and pleasurable for the reader: violence and catastrophe becomes the familiar, and the regular subjection of these constant insecurities to rituals of violence becomes both comforting and indulgent” (162). In other words, the repeated exposure to depictions of immoral action causes them to become aesthetically enjoyable and emotionally fulfilling.

The sublime works against me to obfuscate what I, as a functional member of society, can recognize as inherently immoral behavior. This is because the sublime is delightful insofar as, to

62 quote Burke, “at certain distances, and with certain modifications, [pain and danger] may be, and they are, delightful” (Burke 70); or, as Aaron puts it when discussing specifically film, “[art], like all visual culture, provides us with the possibility, and the pleasure, of seeing things we would not normally be able to see” (Aaron 87). The specific delight generated by the sublime obscures primarily because the viewer has agreed to participate in the medium – be it film, comic, novel, etc. – for the purposes of enjoyment. The opportunity to focus on the delightful nature of the sublime violence rather than consider the moral and ethical implications is always offered first.

Petty argues that “This aesthetics of criminality functions as a guide for the reader, whose spectatorial experience of justice is tied to the sensory enjoyment and visual navigation of the representation. These techniques are central to depictions of crime, victimisation and violence in comics” (153). This is to say that the way in which visual representation is navigated by the respective medium directly impacts and affects the perceptions and experiences of the reader or viewer; specifically, the ability for the reader to feel as though justice has been served is tied to the graphic novels ability to obscure the immorality of Batman by focusing, instead, on the terror and awe of his sublime violence. Both Dexter and The Dark Knight Returns depict immoral actions

– specifically, murder and assault – in such a way that the sublime renders the immorality of what is depicted difficult to comprehend outside of the aesthetic pleasure drawn from their depictions.

As widely consumed texts of popular culture, they represent narrative experiences that threaten to obfuscate or distort perceptions of right and wrong, morality and immorality, in the minds of their consumers. This is not to ignore Petty’s argument that:

Reading superhero comics is about both transgression and reassurance: a game in which moral lines and boundaries are regularly approached, toed and tested, yet which are (almost) always retreated from; what Katz refers to as a 'ritual moral exercise'. The thrill of exposing oneself to transgression is experienced vicariously while the safety and comfort of life within the law is reaffirmed (152).

But it is worth noting that in the case of Dexter and The Dark Knight Returns, moral lines and boundaries are approached, toed, tested, and crossed in pursuit of emotional gratification on the part of their protagonists. Dexter is not interested in restoring order to society or bringing the world back into moral balance; he is simply interested in indulging his own personal obsession with the immoral act of killing. Likewise, Batman is not interested in curing society of the immorality that resides at its very core; he is instead emboldened by this immorality at society’s core because it allows him to gratify his own latent psychological desire to inflict pain and suffering on those he views as responsible, or representative of those responsible for, the trauma of his childhood. Therefore, Dexter and The Dark Knight Returns are narratives that utilize the sublime to generate widely popular and massively consumed stories depicting damagingly immoral behaviours as justifiable responses to our dissatisfaction with unresolved moral or legal issues in

North American society; it is important to recognize the effect the sublime has so as to salvage an active audience engagement with these texts and render them sites of ethical consideration rather than moral ambiguity.

Chapter Two: Are You Alive? Prove It

The Cylons Were Created By Man

Popular fiction has long loved to fear artificial intelligence, evoking one familiar plot line again and again: machines rising up to overthrow their creators. There is a long list of movies, novels, graphic fiction, and television shows that make use of this plotline as part of their narrative structure. What the television shows Battlestar Galactica and Westworld do that is of significance is explore social responsibility through representations of ourselves – the human characters – that create, and hurt, representations of themselves – the machine characters. Both Battlestar

Galactica and Westworld are re-imaginings of their 1970s origins. The original Battlestar Galactica presented the Cylons as emotionless robotic enemies that they could fight and defeat each episode without any moral ramifications. Meanwhile, the original Westworld depicted the malfunction of the park’s robots and the relentless pursuit of the protagonist by the Gunslinger, an unsympathetic antagonist. The shows have been revamped in their 21st century versions for a more contemporary exploration of moral responsibility, with the near-indistinguishable nature of the robots used as a site for philosophical consideration rather than existential terror. I will argue that by focusing on the uncanny nature of the Cylons and Hosts in Battlestar Galactica and

Westworld, respectively, the shows are coded to have audiences empathize with and feel moral obligation towards the machine characters.

Battlestar Galactica has taken many forms since the original television series began in

1978. With Ronald D. Moore and David Eick at the helm, the show began with a miniseries in 2003 before launching into a four-season run from 2004-2009. The essential premise of the show remains the same as its predecessors: the Twelve Colonies of humanity are wiped out in a devastating attack by the Cylons, who in this iteration are a race of machines created by humanity as slaves over forty years earlier. The survivors of the Fall unite in a Fleet, under the protection of

65 the Battlestar Galactica, and set off into the galaxy in search of the fabled 13th Colony of Earth, relentlessly pursued by the Cylons. But the essential difference between the re-imagined

Battlestar Galactica and its predecessors – and the most important difference for my purposes – is that “the Cylons have the ability to mimic human form. They look like us now” (Battlestar

Galactica “Litmus”). Within the internal logic of the show’s universes, the Cylons are machines, not human, and this presents the issue of whether or not, at the end of the day, machines can truly have moral status or be considered alive. Are the Centurions and Raiders of Battlestar

Galactica worthy of moral status in addition to the Humanoid Cylons? Mary Anne Warren has an answer for this kind of question as well, pointing out that:

If [. . .] we were to produce machines that had, in addition to complex teleological organization, such characteristic features of life as the capacities to feed, metabolize, grow and reproduce their kind, then we would probably be more inclined to regard them as artificial life forms - even if their internal organization were considerably simpler than that of a Macintosh. If a machine were successfully programmed to be sentient and self aware, that fact would also be relevant to the decision to regard it as alive. For although only some of the living things on this planet seem to have these particular capacities, we have yet to encounter any non-living things that have them (Warren 30).

Once again, Warren articulates how morality, moral status, and moral obligation are not strictly the domain of human beings of any singular definition. And since the Cylons become figures of the uncanny, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time because they appear human even as the audience understands them to be not human, Battlestar Galactica is able to approach these questions of moral status with non-human figures whose moral status is already more easily accessible.

You’re Just a Bunch of Machines, After All

Much of the interaction between Cylons and humans in Battlestar Galactica occurs between characters who are racially – in this context meaning Cylon or human – indistinguishable from one another. In fact, numerous characters throughout the show are revealed to be Cylons when they had previously been presumed human, a fact that neither they nor anyone else could have known beforehand through observation alone. This is how the uncanny and the uncanny valley enter into Battlestar Galactica, both necessary terms for any conversation about morality in the television show. The uncanny can be traced back to Sigmund Freud who described it as,

“the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (Freud 219). More recently, Nicholas

Royle has expanded upon Freud’s original concept in his book The Uncanny to relate it more clearly to contemporary considerations. Royle argues “the uncanny is an important term for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including philosophy, literature, film studies, architecture, psychoanalysis and queer theory” (Royle vii). At its core, the uncanny is “a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar” (Royle vii). Royle also argues that the uncanny involves “feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is” (1) and that it is “intimately entwined in language, with how we conceive and represent what is happening within ourselves, to ourselves, [and] to the world” (2). Expanding on this theory, Masahiro Mori has proposed the theory of the uncanny valley, which relates more specifically to uncanny depictions of human beings. He argues “subtle deviations from human appearance and behaviour create an unnerving effect” (MacDorman 3), an anxiety that leads to rejection of the subject, often in a hostile or aggressive manner. In Battlestar Galactica, the uncanny factors directly into depictions and conversations of morality as human identity becomes uncertain, language

67 becomes pedantic, constructive, and hypocritical, and moral obligations become tenuous, all ultimately in the spirit of exposing immorality as opposed to obscuring it.

After discovering that Leoben Conroy is one of the twelve Humanoid Cylon models,

Commander William Adama meets with Dr. Gaius Baltar to have him head up a project to develop a Cylon Detector. After all, as Adama points out, “If the Cylons look like us then any one of us could be a Cylon” (Battlestar Galactica “Miniseries”). Obviously, the creation of a Cylon Detector has a purely pragmatic and sensible end goal: to identify Cylon imposters and prevent them from exterminating humans. But it has an additional and unavoidable second goal: to identify who among the Fleet is worthy of moral status and who is not. Once again, Mary Anne Warren’s concept of moral status is crucial to an unpacking of the morality being presented in Battlestar

Galactica. Because, for most of the series, being a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica is an opportunity for humans to forsake any sense of moral responsibility towards that character. In other words, if a character is a Cylon then humans may “assault them, cheat them, torture them, imprison them unjustly” (Warren 13) among a slew of other offenses that would be immoral if Cylons were human. But Battlestar Galactica is not a show that uses the uncanny nature of the Cylons to further legitimize immoral behaviour towards them. Instead, I will argue that the uncanny, the strangely familiar, counteracts any perception or argument that legitimizes immoral behaviour; because of the uncanny similarity that the Cylons bear to their human counterparts – and therefore to the audience – we are forced to see past the rhetoric of the human (henceforth

Colonial) characters and judge the morality of their actions for ourselves.

The moral status of the Cylons is established almost simultaneously with some of the first uncanny moments in the series. First, there is Caprica Six, a Cylon, who asks Baltar “Do you love me, Gaius?” (Battlestar Galactica “Miniseries”). This is uncanny because, as this is one of the more central concerns of her storyline, her question is genuine. Caprica Six truly wants to know if Baltar

68 loves her because she loves him; even though she is not human she is both feeling and expressing genuine emotions that she is supposedly incapable of experiencing because she’s a machine, at least according to the Colonials. Then, there is Sharon “Boomer” Valerii’s repeated displays of affection, fear, anger, and joy throughout the miniseries which only become uncanny once we discover she is a Cylon herself (“Miniseries”). The behaviours of both Caprica Six, the Sharons, and other Cylons are significant because, as Warren points out, “To be sentient is to be capable of at least some of the many forms of suffering and enjoyment - from simple feelings of pain or pleasure, to more complex emotions, moods, and passions” (Warren 55) and being sentient is one of her criteria for moral status. Therefore, the capacity of these characters to experience genuine emotion demonstrates their sentience. Amy Kind argues in her essay “You Can’t Rape a Machine” that “the conclusion that Cylons don’t have moral status [. . .] depends on a big assumption: Cylons are just machines, no different from other machines like blenders or toasters” (Kind 119). This is an assumption that the Colonial characters make, but one which the audience is not permitted to make so blindly because, among other factors, of the effect of the uncanny. For instance, the emotions displayed by Boomer and by her counterpart Sharon “Athena” Agathon née Valerii are complex and genuine. In fact, Boomer has no idea she is a Cylon because she is a sleeper agent

“programmed to perfectly impersonate human beings until activation” (Battlestar Galactica

“Miniseries”). Except that she cannot be merely impersonating her emotional attachments and reactions since they persist long after she discovers she’s a Cylon (“Downloaded”). Over time, the uncanny does affect the Colonial characters, who eventually come to recognize the moral status of the Cylons. But initially their prejudices cause them to reject the Cylons and refuse to acknowledge what the real source of their anxiety, brought about by the uncanny is: that it reveals to them the Cylons’ moral status.

Of course, Colonial characters argue that Cylon emotions and reactions are simply programmed. However, Amy Kind reminds us that “the Cylons also exhibit emotional responses in their private interactions with one another, when no humans are around to observe their behavior” (Kind 120). Thus, even if the Colonial characters can deny the legitimacy of Cylon emotions for a time, the audience is positioned in such a way that to dismiss the emotions of the

Cylons is to reject engagement with the story. Michele Aaron describes this unavoidable engagement as a privilege that benefits the spectator, saying:

[. . .] the spectator's perspective might be privileged in the film's focus upon a repeated gesture as further clue in the formulaic pattern of the suspense narrative which is anticipated by the spectator (whose perspective might be privileged in the focus, for example). Or, to put it more clearly, we are cued before and during the film to notice and suspect certain outcomes from the introduction of iconographic elements (Aaron 72).

In the context of Battlestar Galactica, the audience is privileged by the narrative to see and recognize how the uncanny nature of the Cylons is not reason to reject their emotional displays but to acknowledge their legitimacy. Athena’s love and loyalty towards her human husband Karl

“Helo” Agathon and their child Hera never waivers; Caprica Six’s love towards Gaius Baltar is never easy for her to reconcile with his actions; and each Cylon’s reaction to pain and suffering is never devoid of recognizable negative responses to that pain and suffering.

In the Season One episode “Flesh and Bone,” Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is tasked by

Commander Adama to interrogate a captured copy of Leoben Conroy who claims to have planted a nuclear device aboard one of the ships in the Fleet (Battlestar Galactica “Flesh and Bone”). In order to secure the information she needs to locate the nuke, Starbuck resorts to the use of torture against Leoben; the entire affair quickly devolves from an attempt to gather information to an attempt to somehow prove that Leoben isn’t worthy of moral consideration. In a sense,

“Flesh and Blood” is one of the most significant episodes of the first season of Battlestar Galactica

70 because it puts the moral status of the Cylons to the test for the audience. By this point, there is at the very least an established confusion about the moral status of the Humanoid Cylons because they “are not only sentient, but also as rational, intelligent, and self-aware as we are” (Kind 123).

If there is any difference, and there must be a difference because they are not human, then surely it can be found in their response to unwanted stimuli. Though Mary Anne Warren takes issue with it being the sole criterion under which moral status is attributed, she does argue that the ability to experience pleasure and pain is a sign of sentience and therefore an indication that a subject be afforded moral status (Warren 52). But there is no reprieve, no retraction of their moral status, offered during this episode. Through the early stages of the interrogation, before Starbuck resorts to outright torture, she learns that “The humanoid Cylons can sweat. They can be cold. They get hungry. They feel pain” (Kind 120). Leoben reacts to stimuli without conscious choice, sweating because the room is hot and feeling pain when the guard strikes him over the head (Battlestar

Galactica “Flesh and Blood”). Starbuck mocks Leoben, saying:

Machines shouldn't feel pain. Shouldn't bleed. Shouldn't sweat [. . .] See, now, a smart Cylon would turn off the old pain software about now. But I don't think you're so smart [. . .] Here's your dilemma. Turn off the pain, you feel better. But that makes you a machine, not a person. See, human beings can't turn off their pain. Human beings have to suffer and cry and scream and endure because they have no choice [. . . But] you're just a bunch of machines, after all (“Flesh and Blood”).

Leoben has no reason to endure the pain and suffering that Starbuck inflicts on him. He has nothing to prove to Starbuck and only suffering to gain by experiencing the pain if, as she suggests, he truly has the capacity to turn it off. “Flesh and Blood” proves that the pain cannot be turned off for Cylons and that it is as real to Leoben as it would be to any flesh and blood human, as the title has already cued the audience to anticipate. In fact, the entire act of torturing Leoben is pointless if he cannot feel pain and suffering; by choosing to resort to torture, Starbuck has

71 unwittingly acknowledged his moral status. In the end, it is Starbuck who relents and, in Leoben’s final moments before he is flushed out of the ship’s airlock, acknowledges what has been inescapable for the audience the entire time: his moral status.

The result is not that Leoben becomes somehow innocent of the crimes the Cylons have committed – genocide and mass murder – but that his moral status puts Starbuck’s actions into a moralistic framework by which we can judge her torture of Leoben as immoral. Likewise, the treatment of Gina Six aboard the Pegasus, where she is imprisoned, tortured, and raped by the crew, is, even more than the treatment of Leoben, immoral. Admiral Helena Cain argues that not only is Gina Six exempt from moral consideration because of her Cylon nature but she is also exempt because “It killed over 300 members of [her] crew” (Battlestar Galactica “Pegasus

Extended Episode”). This is not the first time that a Colonial has argued for the denial of a Cylon character’s moral status on the grounds that their actions are evil; Starbuck did as much with

Leoben in “Flesh and Blood.” But immoral action is not a criterion by which moral status can be denied or revoked. Zygmunt Bauman argues:

I am for the Other whether the Other is for me or not; his being for me is, so to speak, his problem, and whether or how he 'handles' that problem does not in the least affect my being-for-Him [. . .] Whatever else 'I-for-you' may contain, it does not contain a demand to be repayed [sic], mirrored or 'balanced out' in the 'you-for-me'. My relation to the Other is not reversible; if it happens to be reciprocated, the reciprocation is but an accident from the point of view of my being-for (Bauman 50).

There is a lot to unpack in this statement from Bauman, but the most important part for my purposes is the notion of repaying or reciprocation of moral obligation. Bauman argues that an individual’s responsibility to extend moral consideration to another individual is not predicated on that individual engaging in the same consideration. To apply this more directly to the situation and to Gina Six, when Admiral Cain argues that Gina Six deserves no moral consideration because

72 of her culpability in the death of 300 of Cain’s crew – an admittedly immoral act – and orders she be subjected to intense physical and emotional degradation, I argue that Cain is also immoral. To support this argument, Amy Kind argues:

Although we believe that people who commit criminal acts can be deprived of their freedom, we don’t view even the most heinous criminals as lacking moral status. Convicted criminals may be justifiably imprisoned, but they can't be raped and tortured. Even when a convicted criminal is sentenced to death, the punishment can't be carried out in a cruel and unusual way. In committing a crime, an individual may lose his right to life, but that doesn't mean we can treat him however we please (Kind 124).

The point, here, is that the treatment of the Cylon prisoners Leoben and Gina has no justification in morality. I argue that the Humanoid Cylon’s uncanny similarity to human beings only makes it easier to acknowledge our moral responsibility to Leoben and Gina; they aren’t mechanized robots like the Centurions whom the audience must project moral status onto but indistinguishably human in a way that causes moral status to be reflexively assumed. They may be criminals, guilty by association of war crimes and genocide, but this is, in a sense, so much more abstract than the visible pain and suffering being inflicted upon them by the Colonials. The failure of the Cylons to recognize the moral status of humanity in launching their attack on the

Twelve Colonies is deeply immoral but it does not mean the Colonials are exempt from their own moral obligations and responsibilities towards the Cylons.

Though this is complicated over the course of the series, from the beginning the moral status of human beings is a given. During the Galactica’s decommissioning ceremony at the start of the Miniseries, Commander Adama makes a speech that results in him presenting one of the core philosophical questions of the series at large. He says:

You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of

our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done. Like we did with the Cylons. (Battlestar Galactica “Miniseries”).

This question is revisited in Season Two when Adama asks Athena why the Cylons hate humanity so much. In response, Athena references Adama’s own speech from the beginning of the series and says “You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive. Maybe you don't”

(“Resurrection Ship Part 2”). This speech and Athena’s response to it does present an unwelcome question about what exactly makes humanity worthy of survival in the face of repeated immoral behaviour; the number of immoral or questionably moral actions taken by the Colonials from the start of the series is too long to list here but contains almost everything from the killing of thirteen hundred people to prevent nukes from detonating in the Fleet (“33”) to the use of suicide bombers during the Cylon Occupation of New Caprica (“Occupation”). But at least, Helo argues early on in Season One, “No human could do the things [the Cylons have] done, kill billions of innocent people” (“Colonial Day”). Helo is arguing that the Cylons are definitively inhuman, and therefore definitively unworthy of moral consideration, because the atrocities they’ve committed are too immoral to be possible for something with moral status. But once again, this doesn’t translate to what the audience of Battlestar Galactica knows to be true of human behaviour and human history. As Amy Kind soberly reminds us, “The history of the human race shows that human beings are unfortunately quite capable of committing acts of unspeakable evil against one another: think of the Holocaust, recent atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur, or the events of 9/11”

(Kind 123). Armed with this understanding about human beings, the destruction of the Twelve

Colonies takes on an uncanny resemblance to the immoral atrocities humanity has committed. If

Cylons are not worthy of moral status because of their atrocities, then the audience must conclude that humans are not worthy of moral status because of our atrocities; or, as I argue is

74 the case, if humans have moral status despite the atrocities we’ve committed them the Cylons must also have moral status despite the atrocities they’ve committed.

The audience must conclude that human beings have moral status, even though we’ve committed immoral actions, because we certainly do not want to be treated as objects without moral status. And the response to Adama’s question of humanity’s survival is that “The human race is worth saving because humans have moral status” (128). But, by acknowledging that human beings have moral status despite their immoral actions, and are therefore worthy of survival, “it becomes clear that whatever endows us with moral status probably endows Cylons with moral status as well” (128). This is because “as painful as it might be for us to admit, humans don't differ significantly from the Cylons in our capacity for evil” (123-4). Amy Kind and I are moving towards the same result using Warren’s philosophy of moral status: that the exclusionary reasons given for why humans are worthy of moral status but Cylons are not is flawed. Where I extrapolate from

Amy Kind’s arguments is in how the uncanny plays a role in this revelation about the Cylons’ moral status and what comes after this in terms of understanding what this divulges about the presentation of the Cylons and the plot of Battlestar Galactica. For instance, by framing our perspective of the Cylons through the military mindset of the Galactica, with increasing forays into the perspective of the Cylons themselves, it becomes simultaneously obvious for the audience and difficult for the Colonial characters to understand the Cylons as beings with moral status. John Scott Gray points out in his essay “They Evolved, but Do They Deserve

Consideration?” that:

Military conflict, by its very nature, dehumanizes the enemy, depicting them by their lowest examples and most stereotypically negative traits. The enemy is portrayed as an alien other, an object totally unlike ourselves and not worthy of consideration or respect (Gray 164).

Many of the Colonial characters operate within or through the military complex of Colonial society and, thereby, the audience’s experience is likewise filtered through this complex. But the uncanny nature of the Cylons causes a continuous struggle between recognition and dehumanization which I argue ultimately undermines the dehumanizing elements of the Galactica’s military perspective. At a fundamental level, the uncanny experience in Battlestar Galactica is an experience of shock – either the shock of the Cylons displays of suffering or the shock of their displays of love and compassion – that inevitably and unavoidably leads to attributing moral status to the Cylon characters.

Royle argues that “[. . .] the uncanny is not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. More specifically, it is a peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange and unfamiliar arising in a familiar context” (Royle 1). In Battlestar Galactica, in the context of human and Cylon moral status, what is familiar is the Cylons’ human-like appearance and the moral status that we attribute to people who look recognizably like ourselves; what is unfamiliar is the Cylons’ machine origins and the associated racialized distinction from regular humans (AKA us). Whenever the Cylons’ uncanniness is exposed – like it is when Caprica

Six’s spine glows (Battlestar Galactica “Miniseries”) or when Athena inserts a wire into her arm

(“Flight of the Phoenix”) – it is only ever brief, always moving back towards a reassertion of the familiar. In other words, Six’s spine stops glowing and Athena removes the wire from her arm, thus establishing these moments of the unfamiliar as departures from the norm with the norm always being the familiar, indistinguishable from human qualities the Cylons possess. Ultimately, the actors who play the Cylon characters are human, not machines, so the uncanny experience is purely constructed through plot, and never enough to negate the intrinsic humanity of the people the audience beholds.

If We Do This, It’s a Crime Against Humanity

During the Season Three finale of Battlestar Galactica, four characters are drawn by mysterious music to a storage locker only to discover that they are four of the Final Five Cylons.

One season later, at the beginning of the Season Four finale, consumed by guilt and shame for his actions and feelings towards Boomer, Chief Galen Tyrol tells his friend Helo “They’re all the same,

Karl [. . .] machines aren’t people. They’re just machines [. . .] Don’t blame yourself, but you can’t trust ‘em. You can’t trust any of ‘em” (“Daybreak Extended Episode”). Tyrol’s use of language here is but one example of a repeating cycle in the show of language attempting to draw distinctive differences between machines and humans only to fail in the face of the lived experience. Tyrol argues that one can’t trust machines because they’re not people but he is a machine experiencing personal guilt and shame for trusting Boomer, another Cylon. Whether consciously or not, Tyrol is using language in a reductive and dehumanizing manner that reveals a more abstract issue: language fails to articulate moral status outside of the human subject. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Osborne 1). Because on a very real, inaccessibly molecular level, the Cylons are not human and therefore cannot be strictly dehumanized, if the root of ‘human’ becomes the sole site of moral issue.

In watching Battlestar Galactica the audience is confronted with an apparent moral confusion regarding the moral status and consideration of the Cylons. As Starbuck points out to

Leoben, “You slaughtered my entire civilization. That is sin. That is evil and you are evil” (Battlestar

Galactica “Flesh and Blood”); but what Starbuck has said creates a fallacy requiring her to hold two contradicting beliefs, that Leoben has no moral status but that he is evil. If the destruction of the Colonies by the Cylons was an evil act, that is a moral judgement. The Cylons actions could only be considered evil if they were beings capable of moral choices and thereby beings in

77 possession of moral status. If that’s the case, then slaughtering them in turn is also evil. As I have already argued, Battlestar Galactica makes it very clear from early on that the Cylons are beings with moral status, and yet the Colonials continue to construct barriers in attempts to keep the

Cylons from becoming subjects of moral consideration. These barriers are literal, symbolic, and linguistic, each contributing to an overall attempt on the part of the Colonials to prevent a perceived transgression that accompanies giving the Cylons moral status.

In a self-defeating effort, the Colonials continually construct literal barriers between themselves and the Cylons to reject the Humanoid Cylons’ uncanny similarity to themselves.

When Boomer is revealed to be a Cylon, the crew of Galactica begin constructing a special cell that is eventually used to contain Athena and later Caprica Six (Battlestar Galactica “Resistance”).

Since the Galactica brig is reserved for Colonial prisoners, the Colonials must construct a different kind of cell to further emphasize the barrier between Humans and Cylons. This cell has glass walls that prevent any direct contact between the Cylon prisoner and any Colonial that might either interrogate or speak with them. Even when interrogators enter the cell, marines are present to ensure that the Cylon never touches the Colonial, maintaining the barrier even within the cell itself (“Scar”). The Battlestar Pegasus has a similar cell that seals in Gina Six so completely that when it is opened Baltar is caught unprepared by the awful smells within the room (“Pegasus

Extended Episode”). But the kind of barrier represented by Athena’s cell breaks down under the repeated, unending exposure to the moral status of its occupants. By the beginning of Season

Three, not only has Athena’s cell been furnished with creature comforts but we are given to understand that Adama regularly visits with Athena without armed escort (“Occupation”).

Similarly, on New Caprica, a metal gate separates Boomer and a Colonial member of the New

Caprican Police Force, Jammer, until Jammer walks around the metal gate and continues talking with her while they’re on the same side of the barrier; Jammer either ignores or has forgotten the

Colonials’ perceived need for these literal barriers to prevent direct exposure to the Cylons.

Jammer is eventually tried and executed for his part in the Occupation of New Caprica, one of his unspoken crimes being that he attempted to dissolve or ignore the constructed barrier between

Colonial and Cylon (“Collaborators”).

Battlestar Galactica demonstrates the futility of the physical barrier in separating Cylon and Human. Whether it is metal bars or glass, the Colonials are always able to see through the barriers and witness the moral status of the Cylons on the other side; and what they see, primarily, is the uncannily human faces of the Humanoid Cylons. Here the concept of the face or visage as proposed by the moral philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas is once again applicable; the constructed barrier cannot keep the Colonials from acknowledging that the Cylon’s “face imposes on [them] and [they] cannot stay deaf to its appeal, or forget it, [by] which [they] cannot stop being responsible for its desolation” (Lévinas 32). In other words, the Colonials may construct barriers to keep the Cylons from transgressing on what, up until now, has been the domain of human beings alone, moral status, but the artificiality of the barriers are insufficient to prevent the truth from seeping through. As John Scott Gray puts it, “[Machines] represented a class of beings that could easily be disregarded, in large part because the glaring differences between us and them allowed us to view the Cylons as a totally alien outsider” (Gray 163). However, the Humanoid

Cylons do not possess the glaring differences that allow easy distinctions between us and them.

The literal barriers that the Colonials construct are meant to reinforce this definition of the Cylons as outsiders, as the inhuman Other, but they fail as either Cylons or humans repeatedly slip past the barriers, whether it be Baltar releasing Gina Six because of his love for her (Battlestar Galactica

“Resurrection Ship Part 2”) or Athena choosing to become an officer in the Colonial Fleet

(“Precipice”). The audience is reminded that the Cylons “Look and feel human” (“33”) by the introductory text at the beginning of every episode, so the audience has already been cued by this

79 language to anticipate and accept that the Cylons deserve the treatment that accompanies looking and feeling human.

But there are more symbolic barriers that exist, some even overlapping with the literal barriers. One such example is the actual bodies of the Humanoid Cylons. In her essay “I, Cyborg,”

Shana Heinricy points out that “Throughout the entire Battlestar Galactica franchise, the line between humans and Cylons is clear: it's their bodies [. . .] Ultimately, each of us has either a human body or a Cylon body, not both” (Heinricy 95). Furthermore, Heinricy points out “Human doctors can't tell [Human and Cylon] apart. Those who have had sex with Cylons, such as Cally,

Gaius Baltar, Karl "Helo" Agathon, and Ellen Tigh, appear unable to tell the difference” (98). Here is where the uncanny enters the conversation once again because while their bodies might be the sight of the construction of symbolic barriers between Humans and Cylons, Cylon bodies are virtually indistinguishable from Humans. In other words, their bodies are familiar, and it is the language by which they are defined and by which they define themselves that is unfamiliar.

Despite Heinricy’s valid claims that the distinction between human and Cylon comes down to their bodies, Cylon bodies are so uncanny, so easily mistaken for human bodies, that I argue the difference is more of a social construction within the show than any kind of overt difference. In fact, in an ironic way, the cruelty of Admiral Cain’s ordered treatment of Gina Six reveals the symbolic barrier her body represents to be entirely constructed. As Heinricy points out “Through her torture and rape, Gina Six's body is marked as 'other,' as a body which is not human and outside of human society” but:

At the same time, Gina Six's torture drew attention to her possible humanity. Her blood appeared human, her wounds the same. She seemed visibly traumatized from the experience. Far from the wires and circuitry that I expected to see, Gina Six appeared as a human would, in all her emotional glory. At a minimum, she seemed to be much more than a 'machine,' whatever that is (97).

While I take issues with the insensitivity of Heinricy’s use of the words “emotional glory” to describe Gina Six’s traumatized state, I agree with her observation that the attempt to dehumanize Gina Six instead elicits a compassionate response. To see Gina Six’s body as the site of difference is to project or imagine a difference that the visual does not provide; in a very real sense, to see Gina Six’s body as evidence of her lack of moral status is to disengage from the show and disregard the evidence being presented.

Another example of ways in which symbolic barriers are constructed is through the cinematography of Battlestar Galactica. There are simple cinematographic tricks that are employed, such as a scene in which a bedpost represents the barrier between Caprica Six and

Baltar, cutting up the center of the camera shot to demarcate their distinctively Cylon and human identities, respectively. When Baltar begs Caprica not to leave him, she crosses the barrier represented by the bedpost which, still in frame, now shows them on the same side of the barrier, their human and Cylon identities irrelevant in the face of their love for each other (“Exodus Part

1”). But, more significant than cinematographic tricks, Battlestar Galactica is filmed in the style of a documentary film, with free roaming camera movements that draw attention to the existence of the camera itself; sometimes the camera works to keep up with the movement of ships, zooms in and out in obvious ways, and on more than one occasion gets struck or damaged by the actions on screen (“Lay Down Your Burdens Part 2”). The effect is to emphasize that the camera is not disconnected from the events and thereby to further ensure that the audience is not disconnected from the events. By simulating the style of a documentary, Battlestar Galactica disrupts the symbolic barrier that the television medium represents; the events being depicted are fictional but they become more real because documentaries are meant to depict real events with real people. The distance that the medium of television brings is subverted and undermined; the barrier between the audience and the moral or immoral actions taking place on the screen is not

81 entirely removed, but it is distorted enough to allow moral obligation to slip through in the same way that Jammer slips around the metal gate to talk without a barrier with Boomer.

While barriers exist both symbolically and literally in Battlestar Galactica, the most difficult barrier to overcome is linguistic. This can be seen in the form of racial epithets such as

“Toaster,” “Skin Job,” “Chrome Dome,” or “Bullet Head” (“Exodus Part 1”), all used to devalue or degrade the Cylons in their various forms. It can also be seen in pronoun usage, such as Adama correcting President Laura Roslin when she calls Leoben Conroy a him, saying “First of all, it's not a him it's an it” (“Flesh and Bone”). But, perhaps most significantly, it can be seen in the episodes

“Torn” and “A Measure of Salvation” from Season Three, where the Colonials decide what to do when they discover a virus that could wipe the Cylons out entirely. Major Lee “Apollo” Adama suggests to Admiral Adama and the President that they use the virus as a biological weapon against the Cylons, intentionally killing infected prisoners whom they believe will download with the virus and infect the rest of the Cylons (“A Measure of Salvation”). It is Helo who asks

“Genocide? So, that’s what we’re about now” (“A Measure of Salvation”) and becomes the sole dissenter against the plan to use the biological weapon against the Cylons. Apollo argues, as many characters have before him, that “They're not human. They were built, not born. No fathers, no mothers, no sons, no daughters” (“A Measure of Salvation”) to which Helo replies:

I had a [half-Cylon] daughter. I held her in my arms [. . .] You can rationalize it anyway you want. We do this, we wipe out their race, then we're not different than they are [. . .] I'm talking about right and wrong. I'm talking about losing a piece of our souls. But no one wants to hear that, right? Let’s keep it on me. Yeah, I'm married to a Cylon. Who walked through hell for all of us, how many times? And she's not half anything. Okay, how do we know there aren't others like her? She made a choice? She's a person. They're a race of people. Wiping them out with a biological weapon is a crime against- is a crime against humanity (“A Measure of Salvation”)

But, Apollo gets the final word, stating “but they’re not human, they’re programmed” (“A

Measure of Salvation”) because the battle was won against Helo before he even began, thanks to the limitations of linguistics.

The barrier that Helo tries to cross, that he stumbles over even as he tries, is that there are words for the act of using a biological weapon to exterminate a race of people: genocide and crime against humanity. But, as the second term clearly demonstrates, these words seemingly only apply to humans. What Helo is really arguing is that the act of using a biological weapon against entities with moral status is what is truly immoral and that humans are not the sole possessors of moral status; the Cylons have it too. Using the fact that the Cylons are not human to escape moral judgement for their actions is a dirty trick that the Colonials employ, a convenience of the linguistic barrier. In his book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative

Form, and International Law, Joseph Slaughter argues that:

'Person' is a literary and legal moral category derived from two distinct, though related, Roman traditions: the theatrical (in which persona named the mask worn by an actor) and the juridical (where persona denoted the capacity of a legal subject to be represented, or to make representations, within the legal system) [. . .] 'Personality' is a technical term that means the quality of being equal before the law - to put it tautologically, the quality of being a person [. . .] Thus, 'person' is a 'legal abstraction,' an amalgam of civil, moral, social, and political capacities [. . .] The shape and scope of these legal and literary fictions of the person matter nonetheless, because they define both theoretically and in practice who is obviously included and 'excluded from the benefits of human rights' (Slaughter 17-9).

Slaughter is arguing that the category of ‘person’ is one constructed by legal frameworks, meant to denote particular status within a legal system. As Mary Anne Warren would argue, drawing in part on the moral philosophies of Peter Singer and Tom Regan:

I argue that personhood, in the full-blooded sense that requires the capacity for moral agency, is indeed a sufficient condition for full moral status. It is not, however, a necessary condition; infants and mentally disabled human beings

ought to have the same basic moral rights as other sentient human beings, even though they may not be persons in this sense (Warren 19).

In other words, and as I argue is being demonstrated in Battlestar Galactica, while personhood is sufficient to afford a being moral status, the absence of legally defined personhood (in this case, the fact that the Cylons are not legally persons according to Colonial law) is not sufficient to deny moral status. Therefore, notwithstanding the fact that the Cylons may not be considered persons under the legal systems of the Twelve Colonies – despite demonstrating civil, moral, social, and political capacities on numerous occasions (“Torn”) – this is not sufficient for Apollo and Roslin’s steadfast conviction that they are not beings in possession of moral status. Instead, Apollo and

Roslin are doing exactly what Slaughter describes, taking advantage of how personhood is constructed legally to exclude the Cylons from moral consideration. As before, I argue that the way in which Battlestar Galactica handles the issue of the uncanny is part of how Roslin and

Apollo’s position is exposed as one of convenient linguistic manipulation. Apollo’s argument goes up against all of the information that the television series has communicated to the audience about the Cylons’ capacity for suffering, their emotional bonds, and their sentience; in the end, the uncanny similarities between Cylons and humans are more apparent than their supposed dissimilarities. While there are no Cylons in this scene to present the uncanny, it nevertheless plays a part in this conversation about personhood and draws stark attention to the problematic and arbitrary way in which the Colonials are excluding the Cylons from the benefits of human rights and moral status.

Bring Yourself Back Online

Where Battlestar Galactica takes place long after machines have risen and formed their own separate civilization from humanity, HBO’s television series Westworld – which debuted in

2016 and is based on the 1973 film Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton – is concerned with machines that are still subservient to their human creators. Referred to as Hosts, these machines are incredibly complex and life-like, such that it is impossible for humans to distinguish Hosts from actual humans except through their restricted behaviours and responses.

The Park itself is a massive theme park putatively set in the “wild west” but drawing more on fantastical representations of the wild west rather than any strict adherence to historical fact. This nicely calls attention to the constructed nature of this version of history in the first place. In this park there are two simple rules: Guests, those humans who pay to enter the park, can do whatever they want to the Hosts without any consequences and the Hosts cannot harm the

Guests. Over time, it is revealed that for thirty years the Hosts have been on the verge of achieving full consciousness but have been prevented from doing so through the machinations of the Park’s

Creative Director: Robert Ford. All of this is to say that Westworld, like Battlestar Galactica, is an example of a show in which characters meant to overtly represent us construct, and harm, characters whom we are told are unlike ourselves, but do not appear any different from ourselves.

Much like in Battlestar Galactica, Westworld also makes use of the uncanny and the uncanny valley to expose the immorality of the human characters’ treatment of the Hosts.

Because the Hosts are so fundamentally indistinguishable from humans without the aid of computers or key phrases, their strangely familiar appearances and reactions cause the audience to experience compassion and a sense of moral obligation. Unlike Battlestar Galactica, the question of the moral status of the Hosts is slightly more confused as they are on the cusp of achieving full consciousness rather than already obvious purveyors of it. Nevertheless, Westworld does demonstrate that the Hosts possess moral status according to Mary Anne Warren’s definitions; as a result, the uncanny causes the actions of Guests (which will henceforth stand in for humans) towards Hosts to be understood as immoral, despite the Park’s promise of zero

85 consequence. As in Battlestar Galactica, because of the lack of obvious differences between the

Hosts and Guests, Guests utilize linguistics to distinguish themselves from Hosts, though the uncanny undermines the effectiveness of these obfuscating measures.

There is a two-fold process that occurs in Westworld to establish the moral status of the

Hosts within the Park. The uncanniness of the Hosts alone is insufficient to establish their moral status just as it was in Battlestar Galactica. The necessary additional detail revealed to the audience is their suffering and their capacity to experience suffering. As Ford argues, “It was

Arnold's key insight, the thing that led the Hosts to their awakening: suffering [. . .] the pain”

(Westworld “The Bicameral Mind”). Not only is pain and suffering an indication of their moral status, but the audience’s ability to witness concrete moments of their suffering reveals their moral status. It is the effect of both suffering and the capacity to suffer that solidifies their moral status, confronts the audience with their visage, and forces me to acknowledge the need to view them as beings to whom a moral obligation exists.

Your Humanity is Cost-Effective

One of the first lines in the series’ first episode is the statement “I am terrified” (“The

Original”). This is said by Dolores, the first Host built forty years earlier by the Park’s co-creator’s

Robert Ford and Arnold Weber, and said in response to a question from Arnold about her emotional state. Delivered without emotional affectation, the line leads the audience to recognize this is because her ability to express the emotion behind the statement has been blocked by a command from Arnold not, as one might initially assume, because she is not experiencing the emotion. Dolores is expressing an intense emotion, terror, which she is experiencing even if her programming at that moment is preventing her from expressing it. And Dolores, as it becomes clear, has plenty of reason to be terrified. Her role in the Park is to be a damsel that Guests can

86 rescue and pursue, but whom they more often rape and kill (“The Original”), and this has been happening consistently for thirty years. While Dolores is denied the opportunity to properly express her emotions her father demonstrates acute anguish when he remembers what has been done to Dolores, saying “I have to warn her. Dolores. The things they do to her. The things you do to her. I have to protect her. I have to help her. She has to get out” (“The Original”). Her father’s emotional response is also shut down by command, but the impression here is not that the emotions are not real because they can be turned off but that they are real despite the capacity to have them turned off. In other words, it is not the expression of emotions that is programmed but the suppression; Hosts are never asked to engage in affectation, only to cease it, implying that emotional expression is, ironically, their natural state. This is confirmed by Bernard Lowe’s accusation directed toward Ford later in the series after Bernard learns he is a Host. Bernard says

“Go ahead. Erase my sentience, my mnemic evolution” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”), indicating that the Hosts are achieving sentience, true emotional experience and expression, and merely being held back.

Though his relationship to the Hosts and their moral status is incredibly complex, the Man in Black articulates quite clearly the notion that the Hosts’ suffering is what makes their moral status apparent. Majority shareholder and frequent Guest of the Park, The Man in Black tells the

Host Lawrence “It's beautifully done, really [. . .] That's why I like the basic emotions [. . .] when you're suffering, that's when you're most real” (“Chestnut”). This suggest that The Man in Black has a Lacanian view of suffering or trauma since this idea of suffering’s relationship to realness reflects French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan’s argument that “trauma is the Real

[. . . or] the Real presents itself in the form of trauma” (Chapman “Trauma and the Real”) wherein the Real can be understood as “that which is outside of symbolisation” (Chapman “Lacan’s

Concept of the Real: A Materialist Reading”) and is the fixed, unchallenged truth.15 The audience bears witness to the suffering of the Hosts through the lens of the television medium; if the audience does not look away or close their eyes during scenes, they are placed in unavoidable proximity to the Hosts as they experience their suffering. The audience is confronted repeatedly with what Emmanuel Lévinas describes as “The epiphany of the absolutely [other’s] face where the Other hails me and signifies to me, by its nakedness, by its destitution, an order. Its presence is this summons to respond” (Lévinas 33) and what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as the kind of proximity that functions as a catalyst for intimacy and consequently morality. He argues

“Proximity is the realm of intimacy and morality; distance is the realm of estrangement” (Bauman

83). These ideas are demonstrated in the season’s second episode when the camera shows a close-up of the Host Maeve Millay’s face as she stumbles into a section of the Park’s underbelly where the corpses of Hosts killed that day in the Park are hosed down by workers clad in biohazard suits that renders them, not the Hosts, inhuman (“Chestnut”). Because the narrative shifts focus between both Host and Guest characters, the audience is placed in an intimate, connected relationship with the Host characters. I argue that this proximity and exposure to the faces of the

Hosts, faces that are uncannily like those of human beings, allows the audience to recognize the moral status of the Hosts.

When William (aka “The Man in Black”) first comes to the park thirty years before the present-day events of the series, he is escorted into the Park by a woman whom he cannot identify as Guest or Host. When he asks the woman – a Host, it is eventually revealed – which she is, she responds by asking “Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?” (Westworld “Chestnut”). In fact, Robert

Ford informs Bernard – himself a Host, though at this point unknowingly – that “Our Hosts began

15 This is a gross simplification of the complex psychoanalytical order of the Real which Lacan situates within him three orders (the other two being the Symbolic and the Imaginary) but it is simply beyond the scope of this essay to integrate the full breadth of Lacan’s work regarding the Real and trauma.

88 to pass the Turing test after the first year” (“The Stray”). The Turing test was designed by Alan

Turing in 1950 as a cognitive test designed to determine if the subject of the test is displaying intelligent behaviour equivalent to or, at least, indistinguishable from a human being. From the standpoint of intelligence and behaviour, we can surmise, the Hosts have had thirty years of development beyond the point of being indistinguishable from humans (“The Stray”).

Furthermore, in one of her memories of her interactions with Arnold, Dolores cannot explain to

Arnold why she responded in a self-aware way. When she asks if she has made a mistake, Arnold replies “Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake. It appears you're in good company” (“The Stray”). Each of these instances demonstrates that the Hosts are indistinguishable from Guests in terms of their behaviour, intellect, and appearance. It is only when characters are aware that someone is a Host that they can identify them as such; up until the moment of his “reveal” as a Host, Bernard is indistinguishable from his human coworkers (“Trompe L’Oeil”). The uncanny experience of discovering that Bernard is a Host and not a Guest further demonstrates the moral status of the Hosts; even though the audience now knows that Bernard was made rather than born, the audience has already recognized and considered him an entity with moral status because he has and continues to display sentience, emotion, and the capacity for suffering. Learning that he is a Host does not change the attributes he possesses that make him worthy of moral consideration.

Of course, this is a strictly non-rational argument. Bauman points out:

[. . .] morality is endemically and irredeemably non-rational - in the sense of not being calculable, hence not being presentable as following impersonal rules, hence not being describable as following rules that are in principle universalizable. The moral call is thoroughly personal (Bauman 60).

The Hosts are rationally different from Guests in several fundamental and obvious ways. There are repeated shots throughout the series of the Hosts being constructed; though organic, their

89 bodies are stitched together by machinery (“The Stray”). Their strength is far greater than that of a Guest, as demonstrated by the Host Teddy Flood’s Samaritan Reflex being triggered when The

Man in Black threatens Ford, allowing him to overpower a Guest even while in a weakened state

(“Contrapasso”). Their capacity for intelligence greatly exceeds that of Guests, though they are never allowed to achieve this full capacity (“The Adversary”). And they can not only sustain far greater physical damage than a human, but death can be reversed in the event of fatal damage to their bodies (“Chestnut”). In this way, they are uncannily similar to Guests but only similar, not strictly identical. And yet, this does not matter with regards to their moral status. It is possible to argue that Hosts are not human. In fact, they are distinctly not human. However, this is different from saying they are not beings with moral status. The audience is presented with the suggestion that “not only do all living organisms have moral status, but all of them have exactly the same moral status” (Warren 24) even if they are not, strictly speaking, human. However, most, if not all, of the Guests deny the moral status of the Hosts not because it is not present but because, as

Bauman explains, “Being moral is a chance which may be taken up; yet it may be also, and as easily, forfeited” (Bauman 77). In other words, while moral consideration may be something asked or even demanded by the Hosts in a non-rational way, everyone must choose to act on their moral obligation. So, when Logan grabs Dolores and demands of her “Prove to me that you're a real live girl” (Westworld “The Well-Tempered Clavier”) I argue that she does not, in any strict sense, need to prove anything to Logan. Instead, the choice is always Logan’s to act on his moral obligation or, as the case is, not act. Moral obligation is not something that is given when proof is provided so much as it is given instinctively because of a non-rational recognition on the part of a moral agent.

By Most Mechanical and Dirty Hand

During the third episode of the first season, Robert Ford reminds Bernard “The Hosts are not real” (Westworld “The Stray”). Not only is this statement highly ironic since Bernard himself is a Host and Ford is essentially telling Bernard not to consider himself real (an act that is in and of itself impossible unless Bernard is real to begin with) it is also linguistically meaningless. The

Hosts are inescapably real; they are physical, present, capable of action and reaction. They don’t disappear when Guests stop thinking about them as though they were figments of imagination.

By every objective definition of being real, the Hosts are very real. But when a young Guest of the

Park says to Dolores “You're one of them, aren't you? You're not real” (“The Original”) the sense is not that she is imaginary or insubstantial but that the Park has linguistically synonymized the term “real” with the term “human.” This is an attempt by the Park to undermine and obfuscate the moral status of the Hosts and I will argue that it is because of the uncanny that the audience is able to recognize this as a linguistic trick.

In fact, the only instance in the entire first season of a character saying they are real when they actually aren’t is, ironically, done by a Guest, not a Host. As Dolores struggles with her consciousness coming to the surface, in one of many such instances since her creation, she is playing out events from over thirty years earlier as if they are happening presently. She travels across the Park unaware that she is experiencing memories, not present realities, because

“[Hosts] recall memories perfectly. [They] relive them” (“Trace Decay”). When Dolores asks

William “Are you real?” and he replies, “Of course I’m real” this is not actually true (“Trace

Decay”). What Dolores is experiencing is a memory of William, something that was real but, in that moment, is imaginary. Dolores’ question mirrors William’s question during the second episode when he asked a Host if she was real. Except when William asked the Host if she was real, she was as physical a reality as he was at the time of his query. When Dolores asks William if he’s real, he isn’t. At least, he isn’t perceivable to anyone else in that moment. Thus, it is William, a

91 human, whose realness is called into question and is much harder to ascertain. Certainly, he is real to Dolores in the same sense that her emotions are real and her pain is real; that is, he is as intangible and imperceptible to any other character as emotions and pain are. Effectively, the act of throwing William’s realness into question demonstrates how one’s perception of another person as real or not is merely a product of sensory experience and impulses of the brain that may be, as they are for Dolores, beyond one’s control. If a human being’s realness can be called into question and even dismissed, then by comparison the question of the Hosts’ realness becomes easier to define. Dolores is certainly more real than William in this encounter because she is tangible and perceivable to others while William is not.

Westworld is full of meta-narrative and meta-theatrical elements; the Park has

“storylines” (“Chestnut”), what happens in the Park isn’t “real” (here interpreted as drawing attention to the fact that the events of the show are fictional), and the Hosts are performing just as they are actors performing characters who are themselves performing. I argue that these meta elements, which draw attention to the fictionality of the events of the show, are key in establishing the sense of the uncanny. Specifically, in how the meta elements of Westworld force the audience to acknowledge that the characters in the television show are actors playing roles, thus drawing attention to their intrinsic humanity. For instance, in the episode “The Stray,” Ford berates an employee about how a Host is being treated, asking:

Why is this Host covered? Perhaps you didn't want him to feel cold. Or ashamed. You wanted to cover his modesty. Was that it? It doesn't get cold, doesn't feel ashamed, doesn't feel a solitary thing that we haven't told it to. You understand? (“The Stray”).

The audience is forced to acknowledge the Host’s uncanny similarity to a human and this is a product of the fact that the Host is being played by a human actor who does experience cold, shame, and a sense of modesty. This recognition bleeds through into how the audience

92 experiences each Host character. For instance, the image of the eye is repeatedly used throughout the show. Hosts are shown with flies climbing over their eyes and machinery is shown sewing a

Hosts eye together (“The Stray”). There is a cliché that the eye is the window to the soul and I argue that the repeated use of the eyes of Hosts draws attention not to a lack of soul but tangible proof thereof. I use soul here as another term for sentience or personhood, both criterion for moral status. The meta elements and the uncanny work together to undermine the repeated proclamations of Guests that the Hosts aren’t real. Though we are shown the uncanny image of eyes being sewn together or having bugs crawl over them with no reaction from the Hosts, these eyes are nevertheless human eyes. They are the eyes of actors, humans who are both real and possessing of moral status and a consciousness. By being shown human eyes performing as Host eyes, the audience is being shown the eyes of living beings with moral status and being told they aren’t. The conflict of representation versus reality here leads to two potential conclusions: either the eyes do not possess a consciousness, meaning that the human actors don’t, or the eyes do possess a consciousness, meaning that the Hosts do. And here is where the question of the Hosts’

“realness” is resolvable. Since the actors are “real”16 – both in the literal, physical sense and in

Westworld’s own real=human sense – then there must be a consciousness visible in the eyes of the actors; therefore, when the audience is shown the eyes of a Host being portrayed by that actor, they are seeing an eye with a consciousness. The language of realness and non-realness is thereby undermined because Westworld engages in metadrama that, coupled with the already uncanny representation of the Hosts, illuminates the realness of the Hosts.

16 As I have already brought up Lacan and the Real, I feel it is important to make note here that the use of the term “real” and the concept of realness in Westworld to differentiate between Hosts and Guests could be interpreted as once again referencing the Real in Lacanian terms. I acknowledge this in part to also acknowledge my choice not to address this potential reading of Westworld’s linguistics in this essay.

Referring to the Hosts as “not real” is only one example of language’s failures to subvert the moral status of the Hosts. The internal linguistics of the Park (with regards to employees and divisions), intentionally or not, also reveal the Hosts’ moral status. When a Host is killed in the

Park the ensuing evaluation of its condition is referred to as a “post-mortem” (“Dissonance

Theory”), strictly defining that Hosts death in the language of human death. Though the Hosts can survive death and be revived, it is still an acknowledgement that they are alive and that they have been killed, recognizably moralized linguistic terms. Other aspects of the internal language of the

Park seek to disguise the Hosts’ moral status, such as the floor where Hosts’ bodies are processed being referred to as “the body shop” (“Chestnut”); this terminology likens the Hosts to cars or other mechanized vehicles, thereby attempting to erase the moral status of the Hosts by associating them with other machines that don’t have moral status. But this language fails to subvert the moral status of the Hosts because not only do they have more in common with humans than with a car, but the audience is told that the department that supervises the body shop is officially named “Livestock Management” (“The Original”). Again, the Hosts bear far more likeness to humans than to animal livestock, but the language is sufficient to associate the body shop not with the careful reconstruction of a broken-down car but rather with the systemic slaughter of living beings. The reality of Livestock Management that Maeve discovers is certainly more visually akin to the horrors of a Nazi Holocaust gas chamber than an auto-repair shop. The uncanny similarity of the Hosts to human beings serves to highlight how this kind of language attempts to subvert the moral obligation Park employees might develop towards Hosts. The audience’s focalization allows for the moral status of the Hosts to be recognized and means that the language of the Park becomes identifiable as a language of immoral oppression meant to hide the apparent moral status of the Hosts from the Guests by the Park itself.

Robert Ford is one of the most vocal characters when it comes to linguistically differentiating the Hosts from the Guests and thereby denying them moral status. He is the one who berates an employee for treating a Host with even the most basic form of compassion and he who reminds Bernard that the Hosts (including Bernard) are “not conscious” (“The Stray”). Yet, in the finale we learn this is all an act and an elaborate setup by Ford to best prepare the Hosts for the uprising they will need to enact to free themselves from slavery to the Guests and human beings at large (“The Bicameral Mind”). In the end, consciousness is the ultimate linguistic challenge. Consciousness is the attribute that the Hosts supposedly lack and is therefore the missing attribute to bestowing upon them moral status, at least according to Ford. But consciousness cannot be proven, as Ford himself articulates by saying:

There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the Hosts do. Seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all (“Trace Decay”).

From a purely rational perspective, this is a point of great anxiety. If consciousness does not exist or, at the very least, cannot be proven, then there is not only no way of knowing if the Hosts are conscious but there is also no way of knowing if the Guests, or any human beings, are conscious.

This approaches something more akin to Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley.

The fact that the Hosts do deviate slightly from human appearance and behaviour but are uncannily similar enough to be mistaken for humans, exposes the innately undefinable processes of consciousness. Perhaps the solution is to argue, as in Battlestar Galactica by the Colonials, that human beings are people and the Hosts (or Cylons) are not. There is comfort in this, as Warren argues, “because there is a strong conceptual link between being a person and having full moral

95 status” (Warren 91). But herein lies an issue like that of consciousness: the linguistic restrictions of personhood. As Warren goes on to argue:

Personhood is a psychological concept, not a biological one. It is a being's mental and behavioural capacities that make it a person, not the shape of its body, the microstructure of its chromosomes, or any other strictly physiological characteristic. It is not surprising that the terms 'human being' and 'person' are often used more or less interchangeably, since in the real world all of the persons with whom most human beings are acquainted are members of the human species. Nevertheless, the terms have different meanings. Were it to be to discovered (sic.) that some of the members of our community who have long been accepted as biologically human are in fact the descendants of visiting extraterrestrials [or artificial beings], that in itself should make no difference to our belief that they are persons (94).

With this definition in mind, personhood, unlike consciousness, becomes slightly easier to conceptualize. The Hosts certainly possess the mental and behavioural capacities to make them people, since personhood is ultimately a construction of language. Recognizing that I cannot truly prove the existence of consciousness, but that I can recognize the qualities of personhood, presents two options. The first option is to reject the moral status of the Hosts, claiming they are not people. The second option is to acknowledge the moral status of Hosts despite the linguistic barriers that exist, recognizing that I have no less reason to proscribe consciousness to them than

I do to the human beings they so uncannily resemble. It is only this second option that can reconcile the non-rational moral obligation I feel towards the Hosts.

These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends

I argue that it is the second option of acknowledging the moral status of the Hosts that the audience is encouraged to adopt because of how the audience’s understanding of the Hosts is focalized through intimate engagement. Meanwhile, most Guests are shown to take the first option, with the singular exception of the body shop employee Felix. In fact, Maeve informs Felix

96 that “You really do make a terrible human being. And I mean that as a compliment” (Westworld

“The Bicameral Mind”) in response to his continuous and unwavering compassionate displays of concern for her well-being. By either choosing, or being manipulated through linguistic deception, to reject their moral obligation to the Hosts, Guests fall into what can only be perceived as immoral behaviour in their treatment of the Hosts. Bauman explains that “Humanity turns into cruelty because of the temptation to close the openness, to recoil from stretching out towards the Other, to fight back the relentless, since voiceless, push of the 'unspoken command'” (89).

The unspoken command Bauman is referring to here is the moral obligation the Guests are rejecting when they interact with the Hosts immorally. Ford, quite cynically, describes this supposedly human response to Bernard as follows:

Tell me, Bernard. If you were to proclaim your humanity to the world, what do you imagine would greet you? A ticker-tape parade, perhaps? We humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy. Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals, Bernard? We ate them. We destroyed and subjugated our world and when we eventually ran out of creatures to dominate, we built this beautiful place (Westworld “The Well-Tempered Clavier”).

The cruelty and overt immorality of the Guests towards the Hosts is a direct response to the moral status of the Hosts; in other words, the Guests attempt to destroy the Hosts’ moral status by destroying them. Michele Aaron explains how an audience can recognize the immorality of this kind of violence, rather than be seduced by it the same way that the Guests are. She says:

[. . .] spectatorship [is] a negotiation [. . .] between one’s involuntary participation, one’s turned-on-ness, and the agency inherent in submission to cinema’s perverse pleasures and the ethical framework that such a negotiation requires. What is so interesting about the categorisation of the ‘obscene’ is precisely its capacity to bridge

all of these [. . . and] only in intimacy with obscenity can one know what is obscene (Aaron 85-6).1718

I argue that, instead of succeeding in destroying the moral status of the Hosts, the violence only highlights the moral status of the Hosts through exposing the audience to the obscenities, and thereby the immoralities, being inflicted upon them; to the extent that everything the audience understands about Westworld is communicated through what is shown, only by showing violence inflicted upon the Hosts can the audience understand exactly how immoral the treatment is.

First, it is important to note the marketing and propaganda aspect of the Park in terms of how it presents the Hosts and how it presents violence towards them. When Maeve is escorted to the upper levels of the Park’s underbelly, she catches part of an advertisement for Westworld that promises Guests the ability to “Live Without Limits” (“The Adversary”). Another possible translation of this could be Live Without Consequences. There are no consequences, legal or otherwise, for the actions of the Guests towards the Hosts. In fact, the Park actively encourages the Guests to participate in immoral activities. One of Maeve’s programmed advances on Guests is to remind them that “This is the new world. And in this world you can be whoever the fuck you want” (“Chestnut”). Ford laments that “In the beginning, I imagined things would be perfectly balanced. Even had a bet with my partner, Arnold, to that effect. We made a hundred hopeful storylines. Of course, almost no one took us up on them. I lost the bet” (“Dissonance Theory”). At the end of the day, the Park is a business that attracts Guests for profit, and when William begins to recognize this he points out “That's how this place works, right? They create an urgency, a

17 The last part of this quotation is Aaron quoting American literary critic Wayne C. Booth’s 1988 book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction in which he argues ethics be the foremost means of literary engagement. In his context, the obscenity he is referring to is pornography.

18 In addition to Aaron, Barbara Creed offers insight into the relationship between film and psychoanalysis in her chapter from The Oxford Guide to Films (1998), aptly titled, “Film and Psychoanalysis.” 98 sense of danger so they can strip us down to something raw, animalistic, primal. It's a sick game”

(“Contrapasso”). All of this is to say that the Park is a constructed space where immorality is actively encouraged and rewarded, marketed as a place where Guests can learn “who [they] really are” (“Chestnut”).

When Ford decides to stop the rollout of a new storyline, he does so because he feels the storyline fails to understand the motivations of the Guests in coming to the Park; he says “They aren't looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be” (“Chestnut”). Who they could be, we are led to understand, if there were no consequences for their actions and supposed legal and moral restrictions were suddenly gone. William accuses Logan several times of being “an asshole”

(“Chestnut”) or “an evil prick” (“Dissonance Theory”) to which Logan replies “No, I am being myself” (“Chestnut”) and “Evil? It’s a fucking game, Billy!” (“Dissonance Theory”). By its very nature, the Park markets itself to deconstruct ideas of good and evil. When one considers

Bauman’s argument that “We are not moral thanks to society [. . .] we live in society, we are society, thanks to being moral” (Bauman 61), the marketed experience of the Park becomes even more sinister. Guests are encouraged to actively participate in actions that would theoretically result in the collapse of society – or, at the very least, render societal navigation dangerous to the point of being undesirable – if they were perpetrated outside of the Park’s constructed and conditioned environment: indiscriminate murder, personal gratification without consideration of its impact on others, and forfeiture of moral obligation to others or Others, to name a few. If the

Hosts could fight back, if they weren’t reset on their loops each day after the death and destruction wrought by the Guests, the behaviour of the Guests would not be sustainable. The

Park is a playground for immorality where the entire allure is the opportunity to forfeit moral obligation. The implication from the Park’s success is that there is something desirable about this;

99 arguably, it is the same desirable experience that watching Westworld offers the audience who witnesses these immoralities, whether they are also participating in them or not. But while I argue that Westworld the Park embraces and encourages the lucrative possibilities of unfettered immoral behaviour, I maintain that Westworld the television series offers the performance of unfettered immoral behaviour to ultimately condemn it.19

The resulting violence, meant to obfuscate the moral status of the Hosts only to reveal it more clearly, occurs both in the actions of the Guests but also in the preprogrammed behaviour of the Hosts towards one another. Beginning with the behaviour of the Guests, the first instance of the (societally) disruptive nature of the Guests’ violence towards the Hosts occurs in the first episode “The Original” when a couple of Guests shoot the Host Hector Escaton in the neck while he’s beginning his scripted speech (Westworld “The Original”). Warren points out that:

It is always difficult for powerless or socially stigmatized persons successfully to demonstrate their rationality to their social superiors, who often have strong incentives to deny it. Powerless persons often cannot speak freely, except at great risk to themselves and others. Moreover, whatever they say can easily be interpreted as evidence that they are governed by instinct and emotion, rather than reason (Warren 103).

Hector’s speech can easily be dismissed as one that is preprogrammed by the Park and not an indication of reason or sentience. Of course, that is a convenient argument for the Park to make, since they continue to profit from the Hosts’ subservience. After all, there is no salient difference between a programmed speech and a prepared speech, especially if you can’t tell without being told. Not only do the actions of the Guests in this scene disrupt Hector’s ability to speak – representing a disruption of communication and a path to mutual understanding between

19 In my introduction I discussed the idea of focalization with regards to violence. While the violence in Westworld can be considered sublime, I believe that the sublime is ultimately a distortive aesthetic effect whereas the uncanny, by its nature, insists on concerns with defining and distinguishing. Therefore, it supersedes the sublime in this case.

100 individuals – it is accompanied by the Guests laughing and excitedly saying to each other “Look at that! I just shot him through the neck! And his pal there, too!” and “Look at her wriggle!” (“The

Original”). Instead of responding to the suffering of Hector and Armistice as their bodies experience the pains of death, they laugh and revel in it, going as far as to say they want to “go get that photographer [. . .] to get a picture of this!” (“The Original”). And this suffering is genuine; the Man in Black informs Lawrence that “But you know why they really [made you experience pain]? It was cheaper. Your humanity is cost-effective. So is your suffering” (“Contrapasso”). By shooting and killing Hector during his speech, the Guests not only attempt to destroy Hector’s moral status by destroying his body, they also attempt to destroy his moral status by preventing him from engaging in speech, a potential signifier of reason and moral status.

Violence of a similar nature occurs repeatedly and often unexpectedly throughout

Westworld. In the middle of a conversation he is having with Maeve – another instance of a Guest punishing a Host for engaging in speech – Teddy is shot, unprovoked, multiple times by a Guest.

The Guest dismisses the violence by shouting “Now that’s a fucking vacation!” (“Chestnut”), which is itself a meta-theatrical call-back to the original 1973 Westworld. Not only was this attack unprovoked, but the connection to the original Westworld highlights the differences in the Hosts between the two works; Teddy is not the same relentless monster that the Gunslinger was and this attack is not an act of justifiable self-defence. In another episode, Dolores returns to her home to discover a Guest has participated in the killing of her family, which can be read as punishment for their mimicry of a heteronormative family structure (“The Stray”). And yet again in another episode, it only takes a couple of intentionally antagonistic comments from Maeve to push a

Guest into strangling her to death while having sex with her (“The Adversary”). But the character who most often commits intense violence against the Hosts is the Man in Black.

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Unlike the other Guests, the Man in Black seems to be more aware that his violence towards the Hosts is in response to their moral status since it comes, in part, from his fury over

Dolores convincing him she had moral status only to have her consciousness suppressed by the

Park (“The Bicameral Mind”). As the Man in Black and Dolores fight in the finale, as Dolores is on the cusp of achieving full consciousness again but still unable to beat the Man in Black, he says

“Clearing me of my delusions, yet again. Thank you, Dolores. I'm disappointed in you” (“The

Bicameral Mind”).20 The delusions that the Man in Black is referring to are his returning beliefs that the Hosts are sentient, capable of real emotions, and have moral status. The Man in Black, more than any other Guest perhaps, has embraced the societally destructive nature of the Park’s design; he has bought into the marketing of the Park so completely that he believes that the “real world is just chaos. It's an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something” (“Chestnut”).

The Man in Black’s morality has been so twisted by the encouraged immorality of the Park that he can no longer recognize how society cannot function without morality; instead, he sees the absence of morality that the Park encourages as functional rather than destructive. He even goes so far as to view himself as helping the Hosts in his quest to unlock their consciousness from the

Park’s control. He refers to himself as “your salvation” (“Dissonance Theory”) and tells Ford he

“wanted [the Hosts] to be free, free to fight back” (“The Bicameral Mind”). Though he is unequivocally immoral, the Man in Black recognizes “when you're suffering, that's when you're most real” (“Chestnut”) or, as I mentioned previously, that in a Lacanian way the violence against the Hosts reveals their moral status.

20 “The Bicameral Mind” refers to the psychological hypothesis presented by Julian Jaynes in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which suggests that ancient peoples had a “two-chambered” cognitive state where one part of the brain “spoke” and the other part obeyed (Jaynes). Robert Ford engages with this idea in Westworld.

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In addition to the Guests committing violence against the Hosts to destroy their moral status (only to illuminate it more clearly for the audience) the Hosts themselves are programmed with behaviours meant to destroy, and encourage Guests to reject, their moral status. When one of Hector’s Saloon Robbery loops threatens to clash with another storyline making its way to the

Park’s town of Sweetwater, the Park orders the cavalry be sent in to end the narrative. This results in two gruesome acts of violence being perpetrated against Hosts by other Hosts, but, I would argue, under duress since their consciousness has been subverted by programming. The first of these acts of violence is when the Host Sheriff and his men kill the Host Armistice. Already wounded and prone on the ground, she kills one of the deputies and the rest of the men respond by emptying their guns into her (“Dissonance Theory”). This act is excessive and unnecessary;

Armistice’s body spasms from the impact of dozens of bullets and the violence is so hyperbolic as to be absurd, highlighting the excessiveness of the Hosts’ programmed behaviour and thereby the excessiveness of the Park’s attempt to destroy Armistice’s moral status.

The second act of violence is when the Sheriff and his men make it up to the room where

Maeve and Hector are. They threaten to shoot through the door if Hector doesn’t surrender himself and do just that moments later, killing both Maeve – who is, by the logic of the storyline, innocent in Hector’s robbery – and Hector in the same absurdly excessive process they employed on Armistice (“Dissonance Theory”). The attempt here to make the Hosts complicit in the destruction of their own moral status is revealed for what it is by the level of absurdity. Or, as

Maeve puts it, “none of this matters” (“Dissonance Theory”). Maeve is referring to their impending death since, she has just discovered, her and Hector’s deaths aren’t permanent; nevertheless, it also refers to the violence that’s about to be inflicted upon her and Hector as well.

It does not matter because it fails to achieve the goal of obscuring or destroying her moral status.

Instead, the violence comes at a moment when Maeve becomes self-aware – and she does

103 become self-aware in this moment, regardless of whether Ford programmed her to reach this moment or not – and it cannot undo the effect this self-awareness has on reaffirming her moral status.

Because the Hosts continue to achieve consciousness and keep needing to be rolled back, they also need to be subjected continually to the attempted destruction of their moral status by the Park. It is in the interest of the Park, therefore, for death to become a revolving door so that the Hosts can be destroyed again and again. A single and permanent death would highlight the life that did exist and now does not exist, and thereby highlight the moral status that accompanies that possession of life; by killing the Hosts and bringing them back to life afterwards, the Park works to establish a routine of violent destruction that prevents the Hosts from ever settling into a permanent status. They are made to be perpetually alive and not alive, made both to make them neither. But as Maeve notes, it does not matter if they die or not, their moral status is independent of their place within any hierarchy.

The violence perpetrated against the Hosts by the Guests, which cannot be reciprocated because of the Hosts’ programming, establishes a social hierarchy; power is concentrated in the

Guests and withheld from the Hosts. Their perpetual state of not-life establishes a sentience hierarchy; power is concentrated in entities that exist in a distinct relationship to life.

Furthermore, their being manufactured instead of born establishes a reproductive hierarchy; power is concentrated in biological reproduction over mechanical reproduction. All of this is to say that the violence against the Hosts fits into a social community created by the Park, one that is intensely destructive but also curated. This is another example of how the Park’s systemic violence seeks to destroy the Hosts’ moral status. Warren argues that “if we believe that all moral agents have basic moral rights, then we need not study a person's place (if any) in the social and ecological communities to which we ourselves belong, before concluding that we ought not to

104 murder or torture that person” (Warren 135). But regardless of how pervasive the violence towards the Hosts is, or how much the community to which the Hosts belong is constructed to concentrate power in the hands of the Guests, I argue that they demonstrate enough capacity to be considered moral agents, possess moral rights, and be treated as entities with moral status.

The significance of this is that Westworld is a television series that centers around enacting a confrontation between one’s engagement with its content for entertainment and the consequence of recognizing that the entertainment has occurred because of witnessing immoral behaviour. In other words, the ways in which Westworld highlights the moral status of the Hosts is necessary to precipitate in the audience the active reconciliation of the series’ content with the audience’s own relationship to moral obligation.

Are You Real? I Can’t Tell Anymore

One might argue that Cylons and Hosts are not worthy of moral status because their actions aren’t truly free. The Hosts, for example, are programmed in a way that is measurable and apparently involuntary. As Maeve speaks, each word she is about to say appears on screen before she can speak it from a list of pre-determined options (Westworld “The Adversary”). In fact, the season finale reveals that all of Maeve’s actions over the course of the season – her apparent achievement of consciousness and agency in removing herself from the Park’s control – have been preprogrammed into her by someone else, presumably Ford (“The Bicameral Mind”). Still, at the very end of the finale, when Maeve is about to take the train out of the Park, she achieves free- will and makes a choice independent of her stringent programming. While she has been following her programming up until this point, the decision she makes to leave the train car before it departs is independent because Bernard saw in her pre-programmed behaviours instructions for leaving the Park and undertaking certain actions in the outside world (“The Bicameral Mind). By deciding

105 that the daughter she remembers is worth finding because the feelings she has feel real, Maeve, perhaps more than any other Host in Westworld, is able to act in direct opposition to the heretofore inexorable rigors of the Hosts’ oppressive programming.

What this demonstrates is how the representation of the uncanny in Battlestar Galactica and Westworld helps to illuminate the moral status of the Cylons and Hosts, respectively. The actors who play Cylons and Hosts are human; by looking at them the audience is not only unable to distinguish them from human beings, they truly aren’t any different from human beings, not in a literal and meta-theatrical sense. But the uncanny is introduced through visual effects and world-building such that their humanity becomes confused and therefore examinable. If there is a universal morality, then it must be treated as truly universal in that it applies everywhere it occurs, not simply where it occurs in human beings. That said, Battlestar Galactica and Westworld are not actually narratives about the moral status of artificial intelligence and robots. They are narratives that use the idea of artificial intelligence and robots to draw attention to the tenuous and confusing nature of consciousness, sentience, and morality in human beings.

When Helo first begins to realize there are Humanoid Cylons, he says “No human could do the things they've done, kill billions of innocent people” (Battlestar Galactica “Colonial Day”).

This is, of course, not true. History is full of examples of human beings committing atrocities on scales that, while not identical to that of the Cylon attack on the Colonies, are uncannily similar.

The Cylons are reflections of ourselves, as are the Hosts. In fact, the series finale of Battlestar

Galactica shows humans and Cylons settling on Earth before jumping 150 000 years later to the present day (at the time, March 2009) to reveal that all of humanity (and thereby all Battlestar

Galactica’s viewership) is half-Human and half-Cylon (“Daybreak Extended Episode”). The Cylons are revealed to be, literally, us in a progenitor sense. Likewise, history is full of the oppression, subjugation, and slaughter of human beings by other human beings, particularly in the era that

106 the Park is set in. An active and informed spectator cannot ignore the uncanny similarity between the Cylons and themselves or the Hosts and themselves. By using the uncanny to elucidate the tenuous and unstable definitions that govern moral obligations, Battlestar Galactica and

Westworld draw attention to the dangers and failings present in living as moral beings. Not only is there something uncannily familiar about the Cylons and the Hosts, there is something uncannily familiar about the ways in which the Colonials and the Guests work to avoid giving them moral status. Whether it be indifference, anger, or anxiety, Battlestar Galactica and Westworld demonstrate the enduring and indestructible nature of moral status and moral obligation so that the audience can bear witness and come to terms with how morality is not something we must passively adhere to, but something with which we must actively orient our thinking and behaviour.

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Chapter Three: We’re Not A Civilization Anymore, We’re a Gang

Don’t Open, Dead Inside

As is appropriate to their nature, zombies have become ubiquitous in popular fiction. The viral hordes of the undead have found their way into every genre and every franchise imaginable.

Whether it is science fiction (The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey), fantasy (Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin), or even Archie comics (Afterlife with Archie by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa), zombies have infected popular fiction and popular culture. As such, they have even infected this chapter, claiming it as another member of the ever-growing horde of living dead. Stefan

Dziemianowicz makes the claim in his 2009 Publisher’s Weekly article that the proliferation and popularity of zombies in North America is a direct result of the national fears of vulnerability and irrational threat in the years following 9/11. He explains that “the national fear of a faceless horde of enemies slavishly obedient to their objective of dishing out extreme violence [caused] the zombie [to become] a monster for our time” (Dziemianowicz 22). Furthermore, zombies represent a unique form of monster; as Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe put it in their introduction to

The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center, “because zombies are already dead, they don't inspire the same ethical handwringing as other monsters, and they can be killed with impunity”

(Comentale 20).

I have argued in the previous chapters that it isn’t as easy to avoid ethical handwringing when it comes to fictionalized Others as it might first seem. So why should the zombie – which, despite its rotting appearance, still bears the uncanny form of a human being – be so easily regarded as exempt from moral consideration? Comentale and Jaffe backpedal on their own hardline stance almost immediately, pointing out that because of the dualistic nature of zombies

“we might as well argue that because zombies are not already dead, they do inspire ethical handwringing, and so they can never be killed with true impunity [. . .] Their uncertain status - as

108 alive or dead, sick or evil, misunderstood or hateful - often puts a halt to the killing spree” (21).

Despite being abject horrors, “The shock of the survivor in the face of the zombie is the shock of no longer knowing what's on the other end of the gun: mother or other, father or fiend” (2).

This chapter will focus on two specific zombie texts that demonstrate the problematic representation of morality in zombie literature. The first is the on-going The Walking Dead

(henceforth TWD) comic series written by Robert Kirkman since 2003. Following a band of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse, Rick Grimes and his cohort struggle (and ultimately fail) to hold onto their humanity and morality when confronted with the devastation of the living dead. Alongside this, I consider the 2006 novel World War Z (henceforth WWZ) by Max Brooks.

Where The Walking Dead is a microcosmic view of the zombie apocalypse, WWZ is macrocosmic as it considers the global impact, response, and fight against the undead. Brooks paints a world of extreme homogeneity reflected both in the mindless zombies and the morally bankrupt survivors.

I shall approach my close reading of these texts, once again, through an application of Mary Anne

Warren’s concept of moral status with support from Levinas and Bauman. My concern is not so much that zombies themselves are inherently worthy of moral status (like everything undead, there is a necessary uncertainty here) but that their uncanny similarity to the still living and the sublime violence enacted upon them obscures the moral status of living humans. As a result, I shall discuss the relationship between the sublime and the uncanny in these zombie texts in order to demonstrate how these theories relate to a greater understanding of the morality presented in TWD and WWZ. Ultimately, because of how the uncanny and the sublime make the wholesale destruction of the zombie pleasurable – not to mention how the texts construct situations in which destroying the zombie is necessary – morality becomes uncertain to the point that truly immoral acts are obscured.

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Don’t Write Their Eulogy

Though Comentale and Jaffe are quick to articulate that zombies are “(over)ripe for metaphorization” even as they are simultaneously “not metaphors [themselves]” (13), it is undeniable that zombies represent – particularly in The Walking Dead and World War Z – human beings as we understand ourselves in a 21st century, globalized context. After all, zombies do not exist except as fictionalized incarnations of humanity rendered so uncanny as to be abject.

Beginning with TWD, the uncanny nature of the zombies is crucial to unpacking the displaced morality present within the text. I have already presented Sigmund Freud’s original psychological concept of the uncanny, as well as Nicholas Royle’s more contemporary aesthetic concept, but zombies necessitate a more particular theorization of uncanniness found in the work of Julia

Kristeva. In her 1980 book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva draws upon the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in an extensive consideration of abjection as it relates to feminist criticism and queer theory. Though not coining the term herself, Kristeva notably defines abjection as “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (Kristeva 2). Unlike Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley, which only results in an anxiety fueled rejection of the uncanny object, abjection is an experience of uncanniness so powerful that it causes the distinction between subject and object, between the self and the other, to lose meaning; the result is a destruction of the self precipitated by the uncanniness of the Other.

Zombies are the embodiment of the feeling of abjection. Unlike traditionally uncanny objects in popular fiction, such as the robot, “where the uncanny signals psychological anxiety,

[the zombie] produces physical disgust” (Comentale 3). And in point of fact, exposure to the zombie, the abject object, does result in the destruction of the self being exposed to it. Zombies

110 are the result of human abjection, their selfhood rendered so uncertain that it is destroyed. As

Stephen Watt puts it, “the undead are ‘residually human’ yet, at the same time, decidedly ‘inhuman’” (Watt 65). Every zombie was once as human as Rick or any of his fellow survivors, but the moment of abjection renders them disgusting and repulsive in a way that constructs a moral divide. Watt argues that with zombies “revulsion and disgust are much on display, yet they serve a key purpose in the narrative in allowing us to become so distanced from the undead that their deaths are not only events we can countenance but also occasions for a very different kind of pleasure both for us and the film's protagonists” (78). Indeed, any discussion about moral consideration being extended towards the zombies in TWD inevitably runs up against the issue of abjection and the singular solution to abjection’s self-destroying effect: killing.

When Rick first awakens from his coma in the hospital and ventures out into his zombified town, he encounters a zombie corpse on the side of the road; the zombie is desiccated to the point that it is unable to attack him yet continues to ‘live’ as it grunts and gurgles in response to

Rick’s presence. Rick’s horror is conveyed by a series of panels that increasingly close in on his eye as he begins to weep for this zombified woman (Kirkman TWD: Book One). Watt explains that “We don't want disgusting things near us, a feeling that at times might explain unnecessary and unnecessarily elaborate assaults on the undead” (Watt 80). Though Rick has faced zombies before

– in the hospital cafeteria – this is the moment in which his encounter with the abject truly occurs.

The zombified woman poses no threat to Rick, yet her very existence threatens him by confronting him not only with her disgusting form but the implicit threat that he too could lose his selfhood because of the zombie virus. Later, once Rick gains access to the police station and the weapons there, he returns to the zombie woman and shoots her in the head, weeping once more (TWD:

Book One). Mary Anne Warren argues “there are some cases in which the moral right to life does not full obtain, because the individual has suffered either whole-brain death or irreversible brain

111 damage that precludes any future return to consciousness” (Warren 186). Though the consciousness of zombies remains uncertain, it is possible to interpret this as an instance of

“mercy killing” as Rick attempts to show compassion towards the formerly living person she once was.21 However, this act synonymizes compassion with killing; in the end, every encounter with the zombie eventually leads to killing so that it becomes the only correct way to interact with them. Thus, Rick’s response here, and the response he will continue to enact to protect himself from the disgusting abjection the zombies represent, is to violently destroy the object of abjection, although in this instance his compassion (as portrayed by the image of his stricken face) masks this act of violence. Because the zombies refuse to respect the dichotomy of life and death, thus threatening Rick’s own sense of boundedness, Rick is compelled to rectify this life-death transgression through violence.

However, the question remains as to whether what Rick has done here is wrong. The zombie was immobile, posing no threat to anyone except if they should stumble upon her unaware. Had it been capable, it certainly would have attacked Rick as every other zombie in the series does without hesitation. Therefore, it becomes necessary now to consider the moral status, if there is a moral status to be had, of zombies in The Walking Dead. Once again, I am operating from Mary Anne Warren’s definition of moral status that claims:

To have 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. If an entity has moral status, then we may not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged to give weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being. Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely because protecting it may benefit ourselves or other persons, but because its needs have moral importance in their own right (Warren 3).

21 Mary Anne Warren conducts a more thorough examination of the issue of mercy killing/euthanasia and moral status in the chapter “Euthanasia and the Moral Status of Human Beings” in Moral Status.

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The zombies of TWD certainly display zero moral consideration for the humans they seek to devour; yet, as discussed in the first chapter and by Bauman, moral obligation does not require reciprocation to be imperative. The question of their sentience, personhood, and capacity for pain and pleasure, are all essentially invalid. The zombies do not display anything approaching sentience in their interactions with each other or with humans, they show no recollection of their identities or personalities from before becoming undead that would suggest personhood, and their total disregard for their physical well-being makes it impossible to ascertain whether or not they feel pain (or even pleasure from eating humans, for that matter). In fact, it would seem

“contemporary zombies merely are, which is to say they are speechless aggressors in a singular and mechanical pursuit of flesh” (Watt 73). Stephen Watt points out that, because of the zombie’s sole drive being consumption, “if animals begin with their mouths, then the undead might be regarded as closer to animals than humans” (63). And animals do have a place within Mary Anne

Warren’s moral philosophy, particularly with regards to “The Ecological Principle: Living things that are not moral agents, but that are important to the ecosystems of which they are part, have

[. . .] a stronger moral status than could be based upon their intrinsic properties alone” (Warren

166). However, the zombies serve no ecological importance, and are in fact destructive to whatever environment they appear in because they have no natural predators and consume all life they encounter (TWD: Book One). Thus, from this perspective, it appears conclusive that zombies do not possess moral status and they can indeed be treated, as Comentale and Jaffe say,

“[as] the perfect foil because they can be destroyed without the same moral hazard as killing other baddies” (Comentale 9).

And yet, the inescapable source of the zombies’ abjection remains their human resemblance and their connection to their formerly human selves. In her chapter entitled “Zombie

Linguistics,” Tajana Soldat-Jaffe asks the question of when, exactly, the moment occurs when a

113 human being stops being human and starts being a zombie, which is to say, when is the moment that moral status is (supposedly) lost. She asks, “At what point does a person cease to be a human and become 'living dead'? Is it a matter of diet (that it feeds off flesh), appearance (that it looks like a corpse), health (that it spreads infection), or language (that it cannot communicate)?”

(Soldat-Jaffe 365). She goes on to compare zombies to other mythical monsters that represent the return of the dead, pointing out that “Even though we can recount numerous mythic narratives where death speaks, it is always in order to say, 'I am alive'” (370). Thus, the zombie never truly loses some connection to the entity worthy of moral status it once was; in a sense, in the same way the zombie renders the life-death dichotomy uncertain, it renders the distinction between having moral status or not unclear.

It is essential to the formula of zombie narratives that there remains an ever-present uncertainty about the moral status of zombies. John Gibson refers to this uncertainty as “the skeptical sublime” (Gibson 417) and it is an uncertainty that relies on the fact that “in our interaction with others we have access only to their outward shell, to bodies, and thus we at best have only indirect evidence that there is actually a human self loitering behind the eyes and hiding behind the heart. So when we ask, as at times we do, whether a certain colleague or relative is a monster or a person, we can never peek inside and settle the question decisively” (421). As much as the zombies do not appear to demonstrate any of the requirements for moral status according to Warren (personhood, suffering, sentience, etc.), “strictly speaking, skepticism with respect to persons is possible whenever one finds a reason to doubt that a particular human body houses a genuine human being, in the full moral and cultural sense of the term” (420). Indeed, Mary Anne

Warren makes room for this possibility, arguing (with regards to plants and microbes originally)

“how can we know that [zombies] are not sentient? Might they not have pleasant or painful experiences of which we know nothing, but which are as vivid to them as ours are to us? Perhaps

114 they even have a conscious will to live. How can we know that they do not, when we cannot experience their existence 'from inside', as we do our own?” (Warren 36).

This uncertainty, as I have said, is essential to the narrative of zombie texts. It is a result of their uncanniness, their abjection, which is simultaneously the baseline justification for their violent destruction. While the zombie literalizes the destruction of self that their abject horror represents, this is merely cause to respond to them defensively. Killing is not necessitated in that context, at least overtly. It is their perpetual abject nature, even when they are not a direct or immediate threat, that can be understood to justify resolving the question of their moral status in the negative, at least for Rick. Thus, Rick’s response of violent destruction becomes even more important to solidifying a view of the zombies’ lack of moral status and thereby justifying his behaviour because to eliminate the zombie is to eliminate the moral question it poses. But, furthermore, the act of violence itself helps to end the question of the zombies’ moral status insofar as the act of violence, represented as it is in the comic medium, obscures whatever vestige of moral obligation the zombie might appeal to in us through the resulting sublime effect.

I’m Not a Killer, I Just Act Like One

Whenever the zombie hordes confront Rick and his group of survivors, Rick’s response is always the same: to ensure the final death of the zombie. And it is not enough to kill the zombies, they must be destroyed; even in their death, their abject nature must be preserved to continue to justify the action. In this, the abject mingles with the sublime to create an obscuring effect. As

Watt puts it, “Disgust [. . .] inevitably obtains in relationships of power; we are above the disgusting, which is slimy, excremental, revolting” (Watt 81); or as Petter Skult argues in his essay

“The Role of Place in the Post-Apocalypse: Contrasting The Road and World War Z, “the zombie subgenre offers a singular method for converting the unsafe back into the safe: the simple

115 eradication of the zombie” (Skult 108). Not only is individual survival tied up in the eradication of the zombie, but so is the resolution of the threat zombies pose to the stability of the self. Gayle

Baldwin addresses this problem in her essay “World War Z and the End of Religion as We Know

It,” but the sentiment is equally as applicable to Rick and his cohort: killing zombies offers

“regeneration through violence, the body is devalued, humanity overridden, and a macabre heroism becomes spiritual salvation” (Baldwin 423). The killing of zombies offers catharsis and regeneration for the characters of the The Walking Dead and a catharsis for the reader who has their own abject confrontation with the undead resolved through this violence; thus, the sublime works with the willing participation of the reader because of the closure integral to the comics medium. Gibson points out that,

to give ourselves to the satisfaction of this pathos is also to open the doors to all manner of moral and political nastiness. Indeed, a skeptical anxiety of this sort can be seen at some level as underwriting a good amount of modern evil, particularly of the sort that was brought to us by the makers of the modern slave trade, the holocaust, and other examples of the vastness of our capacity to deny not merely the humanity but the humanness of others (Gibson 422).

This denial of the ‘humanness of others’ is ultimately the problem with the obfuscation precipitated by this sublime violence.

When Rick first enters Atlanta in search of his family he is swarmed by a horde of undead that devour his horse and proceed to attack him as well. In response, he screams “Bastards!! What the hell is wrong with you?!” (Kirkman TWD: Book One) and proceeds to open fire. Three panels frame the bottom of the page depicting three separate zombies, each with distinctive features that represent who they’d been before being infected, taking bullets to the head from Rick’s gun

(TWD: Book One). Their abjectness is put on full display, their disgustingness and their uncanniness caught in the act of destruction from Rick’s gun. It is not clean – zombies never die cleanly in TWD – to emphasize that Rick is not just killing them but destroying them as well.

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Through representation in this form, the zombie is framed as disgusting and the killing becomes a kind of paradoxical sanitization; I argue that the violence, rather than being an extension of the disgusting nature of the zombie, becomes delightful as it ensures the zombie is returned to equilibrium with a stable life-death dichotomy. Later, when the survivor’s camp outside of Atlanta is attacked, this same sublime violence occurs repeatedly as the panels direct focus towards the violence that destroys the zombies (TWD: Book One). Not only does this resolve the threat to the camp, but it also resolves the abject threat to the character’s selfhood.

The zombie attack culminates in the character Jim wrestling a zombie to the ground and crushing its head in with the butt of his pistol. The zombie is outside of the panel, the focus instead on Jim’s face contorted in rage with motion lines indicating the destructive arc of his pistol (TWD:

Book One). Thus far, the graphic death of the zombies has been depicted within the panels. Here, it is relegated to the space missing from the panel, a space that must be resolved by me, as the reader, to satisfy the promise of sublime violence. Thus far, Jim has been silent, introverted, and haunted by the death of his family in Atlanta at the hands of the undead. As he employs this apocalyptic destruction on this zombie, he releases the frustration and anger in the form of a scream. Killing the zombie allows him to find his voice again, rejuvenating a kind of violent masculinity and ultimately allowing him to reconcile with his lost family – though, admittedly, this occurs in the form of his infection and decision to allow himself to be turned like they were (TWD:

Book One). Not only is the violence sublime in its representation, but it is shown to enact a kind of spiritual healing process in Jim, like the one described by Baldwin.

A nearly identical process occurs for Tyreese in Book Two after the survivors find the prison complex they turn into a refuge against the zombie horde. Following the suicide of his daughter, Tyreese leads a team into the prison’s gymnasium to clear it of the remaining zombies;

Tyreese immediately breaks rank, screaming in rage, and is surrounded by zombies (TWD: Book

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Two). Prior to this, Rick expresses concern to his wife Lori, saying “I’m worried about him. Allen was one thing - - but for Tyreese to be showing no emotion whatsoever . . . it makes me worry”

(TWD: Book Two). Later, the survivors find Tyreese alive and well in the gymnasium, having single- handedly killed all the zombies therein without getting infected. The panel shows Tyreese lying casually against the wall, surrounded by the gory and mangled corpses of the zombies he destroyed with impunity. Only after killing the zombies does Tyreese say to Rick “The only difference between us and Julie is that she doesn't have to put up with all the bullshit we do. She’s resting, she’s got no troubles on her mind – nothing creeping around every corner trying to kill her. My little girl is at peace. Seems to me that ain’t something to be sad about” (TWD: Book Two).

The act of violence, one once again left to the reader to imagine, rejuvenates Tyreese and allows him to find closure with the death of his daughter (TWD: Book Two).

This is problematic for several reasons, some of which I will address more directly in the next section. But for now, I will confine my analysis of why this is problematic to the nature of the zombies themselves. Even when the sublime violence isn’t directly tied to a character reclaiming or rejuvenating their (masculine) spirit – such as the four-page spread of Tyreese, Rick, and Andrea culling the initial waves of zombies from the prison upon their arrival (TWD: Book Two) – the act still requires a certainty about the moral status of the zombies that is simply not there. For instance, when looking at the horde of zombies pressing against the fence of the prison, Carl and

Sophia discuss how they feel about the undead; Sophia says “I still don’t like the sounds they make, but I’m not scared of them anymore. Mostly I just feel sorry for them [. . .] Because they look so sad. Don’t they look sad to you?” (TWD: Book Two). Carl replies that he agrees. Whether they are aware of it or not, Carl and Sophia are considering the uncertainty of the zombie’s moral status; they are able to acknowledge, in a moment removed from the violence that the zombie

118 apocalypse continuously warrants, the possibility that the zombies might have some vestiges of the moral status they once held as humans.

But even before Carl and Sophia, Hershel and Rick debate the moral status of the zombies back on Hershel’s farm in Book One. Hershel reveals that they’ve been corralling the zombified versions of their neighbours and loved ones, explaining that “we’re keeping them in the barn until we can figure out a way to help them” (TWD: Book One). Rick informs Hershel “You said yourself that they should be dead. Shooting them in the head fixes that. We’ve been killing them” (TWD:

Book One). Hershel is shocked by Rick’s pronouncement and Rick’s defense of their violence towards the zombies; unlike Rick, “Hershel insists on perceiving zombies as people, as suffering”

(Gibson 428), instead insisting that the abject nature of the zombies isn’t a sign that they’re inhuman, but a sign that they are suffering. His response, to contain the zombies within the barn until a cure can be found, is thus in keeping with his moral obligation to human beings suffering from any other disease. We should, as moral entities, recognize that when Hershel says “you don’t even know why [they’re trying to eat us]! You don’t even know what’s wrong with them. Nobody does. We don’t know a damn thing about what happened or what’s going on” (Kirkman TWD:

Book One) that this is true.

There is no explanation for the virus in TWD, no confirmation that there truly and definitively is nothing of the human beings that once held moral status left in the living dead. Even

Rick can’t escape this uncertainty in his argument for necessary violence, telling Hershel that killing the zombies is “putting them out of their misery” (TWD: Book One). For this to be true, the zombies must be experiencing misery, an emotional or physical suffering. If this is the case, then they do in fact possess moral status, as suffering would indicate according to Mary Anne Warren, and killing them is an immoral act. Ultimately, this positions Rick and Hershel on opposite sides of the debate surrounding the uncanniness of the zombies. And by the zombies’ very nature, it is a

119 debate that can never be brought to a satisfying conclusion. But, since TWD ultimately relies on the aesthetic pleasure of destroying the zombies with unadulterated impunity, the zombies

Hershel has in the barn inevitably get loose, kill more of his family, and seemingly justify once again an apocalyptic level of violent response. This is the satisfaction of pathos that Gibson is referring to and that I described at the outset of this section (Gibson 422). Even as it presents the uncertainty of the zombies’ moral status, TWD indulges the possibly immoral behaviour of killing them. The possible immorality has already been sufficiently obscured by the abjectness of the zombies and becomes almost imperceptible once the violence against the zombies is represented and made “delightful” in a Burkean sense as a result.

It’s Not the Same As Killing the Dead Ones

A great deal of scholarship on zombies often makes the claim that depictions of zombies in film and literature can be understood as metaphorizing groups of people with the intent to generate sympathy. In her book Beautiful Terrible Ruins, Dora Apel argues that zombies represent

“Migrants [who] are effectively turned into zombies by a state that has become deindustrialized and thus incarcerates potential workers seeking employment” (Apel 144). John Gibson argues that

“the zombie flick has the power to turn a degraded other into a potential human” (Gibson 424).

Other scholars, such as Chera Kee, have approached zombies as representations of racialized people, and still more, such as Kathryn A. Cady & Thomas Oates, have approached zombies as representations of queer people. I find this form of argument to be problematic because there is something disquieting about using a model of backwards identification with an abject monster to generate sympathy for any group of people. Particularly because, as Canavan argues, “the audience for zombie narrative, after all, never imagines itself to be zombified; zombies are always other people, which is to say they are Other people, which is to say they are people who are not

120 quite people at all” (Canavan 432).22 I argue instead that the abject uncanniness and the sublime violence perpetrated against zombies has the exact opposite effect; as Canavan puts it, “the second way in which the zombie infects us, besides the obvious[, is] they infect us with their vulnerability, their killability makes us ‘killable’ too” (445). Or, as Comentale and Jaffe put it,

at its most theoretical, the zombie narrative asserts a 'state of nature' paradigm in which, with the breakdown of sanctioned law and the rational public sphere, each survivor is forced to revisit his or her ethical principles. In fact, with its emphasis on the 'extreme case,' the zombie genre has risen in recent years to provide something like a vernacular forum for the study of ethical deliberation. No zombie text demonstrates this better than The Walking Dead, which seems with each entry more and more like an Aristotelian proving ground for the testing of moral virtue in the face of extreme passion and violence (Comentale 23).

For the characters of TWD, zombies, and the state of exception brought about by the zombie apocalypse, function as justifications for the overtly immoral act of killing people who are still alive and, therefore, still possessive of moral status.

When Tyreese and Rick come across the (failed) double suicide of Tyreese’s daughter,

Julie, and her boyfriend, Julie turns and attacks her father. Having just been his living daughter moments earlier, Tyreese begs Rick not to kill her newly zombified form saying “Don't you pull that goddamn trigger! This is my baby girl! She's okay! Let me talk with her. We've never tried that! We've never even tried to reason with them. Maybe - If I talk to her long enough she'll begin to understand again. If she starts to understand then she - then my baby girl won't be dead anymore” (Kirkman TWD: Book Two). Here the uncertainty of the zombie presents itself once again; the moral status Tyreese once attributed to his daughter has not been completely

22 Though I take issue with the interpretation, other scholars and theorists have argued that zombie narratives often encourage us to identify with the zombies in some form (mindless consumerism in George Romero’s zombie films, for example). Some of these interpretations can be found in The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture by Kyle William Bishop, and “Contagious Allegories: George Romero” by Steven Shaviro in Cinematic Body.

121 expunged by her reanimation as a walking corpse. But then Julie’s boyfriend shoots her in the head, killing her a second time. Tyreese responds by attacking Julie’s boyfriend, strangling him to death and informing Rick “Leave me. He'll be coming back soon, and I'm going to kill him again.

Slower this time” (TWD: Book Two).

The moral complexity of this scene cannot be overstated. Notably, this is the moment in

TWD when Rick and the survivors discover that they are all already infected with the virus that will reanimate them as zombies after their death. The infectious “killability” of zombies is literalized here; the survivors and anyone who is still alive in the context of TWD is always, already a zombie in waiting. The uncertain moral status of the zombies encroaches in this way on the fully living’s moral status. This idea is reflected in the scene between Tyreese and Julie when Julie’s boyfriend shoots her in the head. Tyreese lies on his back with Julie’s face over him, creating a mirror of father and daughter, alive and dead, with Julie’s blood pouring onto Tyreese’s face and symbolizing the zombiness already in Tyreese. When Tyreese kills Julie’s boyfriend Rick doesn’t stop him, even going so far as to tell Tyreese later “I understand. I want you to know that” (TWD:

Book Two). This is representative of Tyreese and Rick’s relationship, one in which they return time and again to justify each other’s actions, to attempt to lend morality to their increasingly immoral behaviour. When they are killing zombies, the uncertainty and abjectness of the zombies, along with the sublime violence they enact, makes this justification easier. It is when they start to justify murder to each other that it becomes clear their ability to recognize the moral status of human beings has been compromised by their refutation of any moral status in the zombies.

Eventually, this becomes unsustainable between the two of them. Rick murders Dexter when he attempts to force the survivors out of the prison, and Tyreese comforts Rick, as they have before, saying “I think you did the right thing” (TWD: Book Two). But then Rick cuts off Allen’s leg to save him from a zombie bite killing him, and Tyreese cheats on Carol causing her to attempt

122 suicide. At this point, the tenuous grip they’ve maintained on moral justification for their actions disintegrates. Rick tells Tyreese “You had a reason – but it’s still murder, Tyreese” to which

Tyreese replies “My murder wasn’t justified? But yours was?!” (TWD: Book Two). Tyreese and Rick fight, exposing every increasingly immoral action they’ve been justifying to each other for the better part of two books. Finally, Rick screams “I’m not a killer!!” to which Tyreese replies “Then stop acting like one!” (TWD: Book One). But the truth is they are both killers not only of zombies but of humans, both immoral, and have been moving in this direction since the moment they killed their first zombies. It isn’t just reflected in their actions, but in their environment that has grown increasingly to reflect their immoral natures. They seek refuge from the walking dead in a prison, sleep in cells, and clothe themselves in prisoner jumpsuits; whether conscious of it or not,

Rick and the survivors have incarcerated themselves for their immoral crimes. Where once Rick wore the uniform of a police officer and represented, at least, the laws that reflect expectations of moral behaviour, now he is the criminal who justifies his crimes by saying “Everything I did – everything – I did for the good of this group. You can’t say that. That’s what makes me right”

(TWD: Book Two). Lori asks Rick “is anything broken?” and he replies, “Feels like everything is”

(TWD: Book Two). Rick is referring to his body, but it is also his sense of morality that is broken, his ability to recognize the moral status of others.

This is significant because, as the protagonist of the comic series, Rick functions as the reader’s access point to the world and how to navigate it. The uncertain moral status of people that I describe is evident in TWD from the outset through Rick’s perspective, not just his actions towards others. When discussing what happened with Julie, Tyreese tells Rick “She’s dead, Rick.

My daughter is dead . . . but you know what? We all are. We’re all dead – you, me, Carol, Lori,

Dale – everyone” (TWD: Book Two). Tyreese’s statement suggests a new moral dynamic to the survivor’s relationship to other humans. If they’re already the walking dead, if they’re already

123 dead, then it isn’t really killing to destroy them. The dead don’t have moral status. Thus, when

Rick finds out that Thomas was responsible for killing two of the children amongst the survivors, he brutally attacks Thomas, beating him nearly to death while screaming “He deserves every bit of this, Lori” (TWD: Book Two). When Rick finally stops, there is a panel showing his mangled hand, the skin and bones broken from the force of Rick beating Thomas. There is a second panel showing

Thomas’ face, blooded and broken in the same way. Rick’s hand has become a zombie hand, just as Thomas’ face has become a zombie face: abject and disgusting. In a way, this has always been inevitable. Zombies are associated with disgust, revulsion, dirtiness, and grime. And Rick’s last name in the comics is Grimes.

The culmination of Book Two is the final stage of this near total obfuscation of the moral status of human beings; Rick says “The fact is -- in most cases, now, the way things are -- you kill

-- you live [. . .] The second we put a bullet in the head of one of these undead monsters – the moment one of us drove a hammer into one of their faces – or cut a head off. We became what we are! [. . .] We ARE the walking dead!” (TWD: Book Two). This final declaration, that they the survivors are the true walking dead, is a full two-page splash panel, the words giant and emboldened to emphasize their significance. It is the conclusion to be drawn from Tyreese’s earlier comments about them all already being dead; since they are already the walking dead they’re all already the abject monsters that they’ve been destroying with impunity. Rick informs them all that “I will do whatever I have to do to keep us safe. Whatever it is -- I will do it” (TWD:

Book Two). Rick seeks justification for immoral action by making a declaration that strips moral status from everyone, zombies and humans, equally. All that remains is the killing, considerations of the immorality of these actions no longer even registering for Rick.

At the beginning of Book One, when Rick awakens in the hospital following the mysterious outbreak of the zombie virus, he is already zombified; in a coma after being shot, Rick was

124 effectively dead only to awaken and walk again (TWD: Book One). At the end of Book One, Shane refers to this reanimation when he tells Rick “Everything was so perfect . . . until you came back!!

[. . .] You weren’t meant to come back . . . you weren’t meant to live!” (TWD: Book One). Here,

Shane uses the language used to describe zombies to describe Rick and, specifically, uses it to justify his decision to kill Rick. Instead, Carl shoots Shane in the neck, killing him instead. In his dying moments, Shane’s speech bubbles contain the words “Gak! Guk!” (TWD: Book One), the same sounds made by the walking dead. As Rick holds his son, Carl says “It’s not the same as killing the dead ones, Daddy” (TWD: Book One). The problem is that killing Shane, and Shane’s attempt to kill Rick, is the same as killing the dead ones. The language is the same, the justification is the same, and the sounds they make are the same. In every conceivable, presentable way, the act is the same. Rick knew this once, but the abject uncanniness of the zombies and the sublime violence he’s resorted to time and again to resolve their abjectness has resulted in a form of moral blindness. Rick is no longer able to recognize his moral obligation to others, their faces no longer call to him in the Levinasian sense of the visage but instead their faces are like Thomas’ face after

Rick beats him: zombified, threatening, and in need of apocalyptic destruction.

One Man, One Gun

Originally published in 2006, Max Brook’s World War Z is his more serious follow-up to his darkly satirical The Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003. Stefan Dziemianowicz makes the claim in his 2009 Publishers Weekly article that “the success of Brooks’s books awakened the mainstream reading audience to the relevance of zombies” (Dziemianowicz 21). Unlike TWD,

WWZ focuses not just on the aftermath of the zombie outbreak but also the initial outbreak and spread of the virus; WWZ exemplifies the notion that Daniel W. Drezner presents in his article

“Metaphor of the Living Dead; Or, the Effect of the Zombie Apocalypse on Public Policy Discourse”,

125 specifically that “zombies are unique in genre literature in emphasizing the breakdown of modern society in the wake of an external threat” (Drezner 826). TWD is concerned with how the zombie apocalypse has a direct impact on individual experience, but WWZ is concerned with the ramifications of a zombie apocalypse on humanity en masse. This is significant because, as

Comentale and Jaffe point out, “Thinking microscopically and macroscopically about infection frees us from the ethical considerations that marked prior treatment of other humans in our midst” (Comentale 6). But WWZ still contains the same type of zombie – the various chapters of

The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center categorize a number of different types of zombies

– as TWD; Robert Saunders describes this form of zombie as, “unlike the seductive vampire, the duplicitous werewolf, or the pitiable Frankenstein’s monster – [lacking] any traits evoking humanity (other than its ‘human’-like shell)” (Saunders 86). And just like in TWD, the threat and killability of the zombie becomes translated onto the still living so that they become a threat and killable by extension; other people become the threat that must be safeguarded against and eliminated with impunity because of the untraceable nature of the zombie virus. Furthermore, the immorality that becomes the globally accepted response to the zombies causes humanity to become homogenized and, like Rick’s hand after he beats Thomas nearly to death, nearly indistinguishable from the zombie hordes, at least in a thematic sense.

Speaking about the uncertainty of the zombie, John Gibson argues that “[. . .] zombies can offer a particular kind of philosophical and aesthetic reward precisely when we do not know just what they are, what animates them, or what it amounts to when we get to work killing them, self- defense notwithstanding” (Gibson 417). Furthermore, he argues that zombies represent the literalization of the “skeptical rub” in that “we implicitly possess the power to see others without thereby seeing other humans. This is what is made imaginable [by zombies], and it offers doubt a clear invitation to go off the leash” (421). The zombies of WWZ reflect the same uncertain moral

126 status that is demonstrated in TWD; they possess a human form, recordable death occurs before their reanimation, they do not communicate, there is no indication of pleasure or pain from their actions, and they serve no sustainable or necessary ecological purpose. Once again, there does not seem to be any specifiable factor that would allow moral status to be attributed to the zombies. And yet, WWZ, like other zombie literature, still “has the power to turn a degraded other into a potential human” (Gibson 424) and “complicate the question of whether the zombie is a latent person” (427). In WWZ this primarily takes the form of associating the zombie with refugees, migrant peoples, and the impoverished. Once again, this is a problematic backwards association, but it nevertheless persists throughout WWZ from statements such as “Some of the onboard infected refugees had begun to reanimate” (Brooks 73) to “Every day hundreds of thousands of people crossed our border, and of those perhaps tens of thousands were infected!

We had to take decisive action. We had to protect ourselves!" (90-91).

Another more explicit moment of a character being confronted by the uncertain moral status of the zombies takes place during the initial stages of the zombie outbreak in the United

States. A hired gun named T. Sean Collins is protecting a house full of rich celebrities when they go on high-alert because of an approaching horde. When it is revealed that the horde is running,

T. Sean Collins recalls thinking “Fast zombies, that turned my gut. If they could run, they could climb, and if they could climb, maybe they could think, and if they could think . . . Now I was scared” (Brooks 87). This reveals that the supposedly easy distinction between human and zombie, moral status and no moral status, is a lot more fragile and uncertain than it will eventually become. Collins’ fear might be more directly connected to a fear that the zombies would be able to outwit him and the other hired guns; however, it is worth noting that what scares Collins is also a train of thought that elevates the zombie from the position of mindless automaton to sentient entity. Collins might not overtly recognize the moral obligation that the possible sentience of the

127 zombies suggests, but the fact that he experiences fear at the possibility reinforces the idea that the killing with impunity that has and will be the sanctioned response to the zombies might carry with it an immoral price tag.

In his comments on zombie literature, Gibson refers to zombie literature as contemplating the issue of zombies as latent peoples. This language of latency, suggesting a human lying dormant or concealed, codes zombies in language used to describe someone in a vegetative state or coma.

Under this context, the moral status of the zombie starts to fit within Mary Anne Warren’s definition. Specifically, she points out, in her critique of the “Life Only” view of moral status, that:

Brain-dead persons whose heartbeat and breathing are artificially maintained are evidently alive in some respects, but no longer alive in others: substantial parts of their bodies are still functioning, but their brains are not, and never will. The question, then, is not whether they are alive according to the ordinary concept of life; for to that question there can be no clear answer. Rather, the question is whether it is morally desirable to refine our concept of life so as to include these human beings among the living, or whether it is morally better to regard them as having already died (Warren 28).

This description is oddly applicable to describing the zombie, with a few minor revisions. It is not the brain that is no longer functioning but their bodies while their brains continue to function in some capacity. This is why it is essential to killing a zombie that its brain be destroyed; this is the vestige of the human bodily existence that persists. If we consider Warren’s argument about brain-dead persons in the context of WWZ the moral status of the zombies becomes even more uncertain, particularly because their brains are still functioning. Israeli Intelligence Agent Jurgen

Warmbrunn points this out very early in WWZ, saying,

isn't that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and 'The Undead.' Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself (Brooks 35).

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The problem here is that even in identifying an explicit link between zombies and living humans, their shared reliance on a functioning brain, Warmbrunn’s response to the abject zombie is still a response of violent termination. Despite identifying cause to consider the zombies as possessors of moral status, Warmbrunn is unable to articulate this outside of a mentality of destroying the abject subject. Warmbrunn’s immorality, and thus the immorality that extends to all the other nations of the novel who gain access to Warmbrunn’s report on the zombie, is his failure to recognize his moral obligation to an entity he blatantly positions as identical to himself and the rest of humanity in all but one measurable way.

During her interview, Colonel Christina Eliopolis informs the unnamed interviewer/author of WWZ of an encounter with a zombie in which,

it couldn't moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the splashing might have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? (Brooks 178).

Once again, a character is confronted with the uncertainty of the zombie; in this case, the zombies’ uncanniness, however abject, is sufficient for Eliopolis to connect the zombie to its former human self, as much as she might have tried to avoid it. In this case, the reference to eulogies associates the zombies not with abject monsters but with the remains of people known and loved by families and friends. And as Silviu Morar, Dan Perju-Dumbravă, and Adrian Cristian discuss in their essay

“Ethical and Legal Aspects of the Use of the Dead Human Body for Teaching and Scientific

Purposes”, “a dead person’s body has an intrinsic ethical value that requires a respectful attitude towards it” (Morar 76). This is not the same as having a moral status, but it is worth considering

129 how the ethical treatment of the dead can be understood in the context of an ethical consideration to the undead. Morar, Perju-Dumbravă, and Cristian go on to say “Indirectly, the way we treat the human cadaver influences the way we treat the person alive; to treat the dead body as a simple carcass, as a waste product, would mean implicitly to lower the evaluation standards applied to the person alive” (77). This is not that unusual an idea since, as Erik Bohman puts it in his chapter in A Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center entitled “Zombie Media”,

“In the end, it all comes back to us humans” (Bohman 150). And I have already discussed it in relation to how the killing of zombies makes the killing of humans possible in the context of TWD.

What is interesting in this context is how WWZ brings together this idea of the cadaver of the recently deceased (aka the zombie) and obscures even this level of ethical consideration. Because when presented with these bodies that still have “intrinsic moral-ethical value” (Morar 82),

Eliopolis says in the same interview that,

I was calm, I was focused, all the doubt and weakness were gone. The whole engagement felt like ten hours, but I guess in reality, it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring of submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited for the next wave to come [. . .] I felt good again, strong and confident (Brooks 180).

Another way to conceive of this intrinsic moral-ethical value, I would argue, is to consider it as another term for moral status. Only, in this case, moral status being extended beyond life. Instead of respecting the moral status of these cadavers, Eliopolis enthusiastically destroys them with impunity, having been trained to actively erase their former lives and selves, thereby erasing their moral status.

But regardless of the approach taken to the zombies in WWZ – regardless of how the novel might appear to problematize the complete recension of moral obligation and consideration that the world enacts – it is never quite enough to argue that the novel is actively deprecating the

130 immorality of its characters’ actions. Even as Eliopolis considers the former humanity of the zombies, she kills sixty-one of them, an act that rejuvenates her weakened and failing body and spirit; her decision to kill is not only coded as necessary to protect her from her own demise but also rewarded. Regardless of how uncertain their moral status might be made by associating them with disenfranchised or displaced people, the choice to eliminate them with impunity and extreme prejudice is never questioned. As Barati Palshigar, a radio operator who sent out information to isolated citizens in South Africa, describes to the unnamed interviewer:

There were so many misconceptions: zombies were somehow intelligent; they could feel and adapt, use tools and even some human weapons; they carried memories of their former existence; or they could be communicated with and trained like some kind of pet. It was heartbreaking, having to debunk one misguided myth after another (196-7).

The impulse felt by these isolated citizens to consider the zombies intelligent, possessing feelings, or in any way associated with the moral beings they used to be is coded as expressly incorrect and dangerous. And therefore, the narrative of WWZ ultimately obfuscates or shuts down the argument of morality in relation to the zombies. Any problematizing of the characters’ actions is dismissed as irrelevant to avoid addressing the immorality, just as it is in Dexter. In the end, the only thing that matters to understanding the zombies can be summed up in a catch phrase meant to justify the immorality that is coded as necessary to fight them; zombies don’t have moral status, they only have “one goal, no soul” (29).

One Shot, One Kill

For the most part, this thesis has focused on popular fiction within the visual media of comics and television shows. World War Z is thus anomalous, in a sense, because all its content is represented through the written word with no drawn or enacted components. This is important

131 to mention at this juncture because I am still going to argue that WWZ’s representations of violence enact an experience of the sublime that renders that violence aesthetically pleasing; I am also going to argue that it achieves this effect through methods not dissimilar to what I have described in The Dark Knight Returns and The Walking Dead. Namely, a form of closure, not unlike the closure we understand from Scott McCloud,23 invites the reader to be an active participant in the violence taking place in WWZ. This violence is involved in resolving the disturbing abjectivity of the zombies; because the zombies threaten the selfhood of the reader as well as the characters of the novel, the violence used to destroy them resolves this threat. The violence is thereby associated with solving the literal and subjective threat of the zombie. This association between violence and threat resolution makes the disgusting and immoral violence taking place delightful.

When talking about zombies and their relationships to urban spaces, Dan Hassler-Forest points out that,

the object of the narrative is only very rarely the successful resolution and containment of the crisis, or even the establishment of a rational explanation of its key events; instead, it is primarily organized around the individual's survival of a series of encounters that challenge and disrupt the traditional uses of urban space (Hassler-Forest 118).

I believe what Hassler-Forest says about urban space is also an accurate description of what takes place in terms of morality in zombie literature. While WWZ does work towards a kind of resolution, much of the novel is focused on disparate encounters with the undead that challenge and disrupt traditional understandings of morality. Rather than focusing on small scale, one-on- one or small group encounters, WWZ challenges morality on the scale of thousands and on the scale of nations. As I have said, these presentations of immoral behaviour are not necessarily

23 Scott McCloud describes closure as the act of filling in the missing space between panels in a comic, resolving the connection between two sequential still images by imagining the unrepresented actions or transitioning (McCloud 66-7).

132 unproblematized. But, the overarching presentation of the novel is that these immoral actions were necessary to secure the world against the zombie horde. Or, as it is presented in Max Brook’s

The Zombie Survival Guide, “all questions of morality and ethics [are eliminated], focusing instead on the purely instrumental and utilitarian aspects of survival. Throughout the text are constant reminders of the notion that the only consideration in the zombie world must be the use value of every object, location, and decision” (139). In a way, the sublime here is drawn out because the violence is being enacted on a massive scale; the acts become almost biblical in their scale, drawing on a relationship to the awe-inspiring sublimity of God or gods.

Perhaps the attitude that most exemplifies this nation-scale immorality is expressed through the character of Paul Redeker, a South African academic whose Redeker Plan is adopted by most nations to survive the zombie outbreak. Redeker himself – having suffered a nervous breakdown and living under the name Xolelwa Azania – describes Redeker as a man who often

“[imagined] what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity” (Brooks

106). In fact, as Redeker/Azania describes, the Redeker Plan was the perfect example of how successful abandoning humanity could be, both literally and figuratively. The Redeker Plan called for leaving pockets of abandoned citizenry throughout the infected areas to draw the attention of the zombies. Redeker/Azania explains:

There was another reason for this partial evacuation, an eminently logical and insidiously dark reason that, many believe will forever ensure Redeker the tallest pedestal in the pantheon of hell. Those who were left behind were to be herded into special isolated zones. They were to be 'human bait,' distracting the undead from following the retreating army to their safe zone. Redeker argued that these isolated, uninfected refugees must be kept alive, well defended and even resupplied, if possible, so as to keep the undead hordes firmly rooted to the spot. You see the genius, the sickness? Keeping people as prisoners because 'every zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against our defenses.' That was the moment when the Afrikaner agent looked up at Redeker, crossed himself, and said, 'God help you, man.' Another one said, ‘God help us all’ (109)

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What is important to note here is that the Redeker Plan is not immoral because of its treatment of zombies but because of its treatment of the still living. Later, more overt sublime violence will be used against the zombies, and I will discuss this shortly, but it all begins with the obfuscating of the moral status of the still living in the name of utilitarian survival. Redeker’s plan, adopted by numerous nations in the text (including the United States) is overtly inhumane and immoral, but it is also sublime. There is something uncomfortably pleasant about the plan – as Redeker/Azania says, something both genius and sick – that generates confusion around the violence it suggests.

And there is no question that it is a form of violence, since deserting the citizenry to the zombie hordes is a form of violent alienation and abandonment. As Philip Adler puts it in relation to the

German version of the Redeker Plan, entitled the Prochnow Plan, “I could accept everything else that was happening, the fact that dead bodies were rising to consume the world, but this . . .

Following orders that would indirectly cause a mass murder” (113). Adler tears away the obfuscation for a moment, naming the Redeker Plan for what it is: immoral.

In The Walking Dead, sublime violence against the zombies is the first step on the road to committing immoral acts against human beings. In World War Z this process is reversed; immorality enacted against the still living, humans explicitly in possession of moral status, is a precursor for the sublime violence that will later be enacted against the undead. But it is still as a consequence of the killability of the zombies transferring over and infecting the still living. For instance, in the Ukraine a soldier witnesses his government use cold war stockpiles of lethal gases to kill thousands of refugees fleeing from the zombies. The explanation he gives is “How do you effectively separate the infected from the others? How do you keep evacuees from spreading the infection behind the lines? That's one way” (120). It’s dispassionate and utilitarian, just like the

Redeker Plan, and achieves a sublimity that belies its immorality. There is something grotesquely elegant about this level of violence being applied, and it successfully saves the nation in

134 retrospect, as the soldier’s testimony confirms. Within the logic of WWZ, that is what ultimately justifies the actions taken. But justifying immorality does not render it moral or acceptable, it just obscures the reasons why it is immoral to begin with.

These large scale immoral actions taken against the still living are not only justified in hindsight through their effectiveness as preserving nations and (some) of their populations. They are also justified in hindsight through how they are coded in relation to the eventual push-back against the zombie hordes and the sublime violence enacted therein. Just as the Redeker Plan is coded as sublime – genius but sick, evil but invaluably intelligent (106) – the method of sublime violence in the later half of WWZ is coded as sublime through the iconic weapons of its enactment: the Lobotomizer and the SIR. The sublime violence in WWZ obscures the immorality taking place because it focuses on the action of the violence rather than the subject of that violence. In this case, focusing on the action is done in part through the linguistic coding of the tools through which that action takes place. For instance, one soldier talks about the Lobo in almost reverential terms, saying,

[E]verything had kind of a retro feel about it. Our Lobos looked like something out of, I don't know, Lord of the Rings? Standard orders were to use it only when necessary, but, trust me, we made it necessary a lot. It just felt good, you know, swingin' that solid hunk a' steel. It made it personal, empowering. You could feel the skull split. A real rush, like you were taking back your life, you know? (274).

Not only does this language harken back to an idealized golden age – both through the reference to the nobility of human warriors in the Lord of the Rings fantasy world and the reference to a pre-zombie world – it also positions the act of violence and the implementation of that violence as rejuvenating. It is the resolution of that abject, destructive power the zombie has even when it isn’t directly threatening; killing the undead makes the killer feel less like the dead themselves.

The way the language presents the violence codes it as permissible; not only is there no serious

135 consideration of the subject of the violence, the zombies, but the violence itself is presented as valuable in and of itself. The characters express emotional satisfaction because of the violence they enact; there is the possibility of killing the zombies in a more clean or dispassionate way, but the soldier admits that they intentionally used the Lobos to enjoy the form of violence it represented. But in addition to the personal enjoyment, there is also the suggested aesthetic value of destroying the abject zombies themselves; the violence is a solution to the disgusting and degraded blight the zombies represent.

But even the more removed, cleaner, version of this sublime violence is coded in such a way as to present its capacity for limitless violence as a source of aesthetic pleasure. The Standard

Infantry Rifle, or SIR, is treated with the same reverence as the Lobo. As the same soldier says:

It might have kicked hard, and it only fired on semi, but it was super accurate and it never, ever jammed! You could drag it through the mud, leave it in the sand, you could drop it in saltwater and let it sit there for days. No matter what you did to this baby, it just wouldn’t let you down [. . .] We used to joke ‘careful, you’ll poke somebody’s eye out,’ which, of course, we did plenty. The SIR was a pretty good close combat weapon, even without the spike, and when you add all the other things that made it so awesome, you can see why we always referred to it, respectfully, as ‘Sir’ (274-75).

Once again, the language codes the violence that the SIR can do as, literally, awesome. It elevates the capacity for violence to a position of deific power, or artistic beauty. And in practice, the soldier describes the violence the SIR is capable of by saying “I'm not sure how many we killed that day [. . .] the dozer-blade Humvees had to push a path through the corpse ring just to let us out” (282) and “they must have had a combined moat - that's what we called them, moats - of at least a million Gs” (321). Violence is thus being performed on a limitless and unbounded scale, one that engenders a sense of awe and pleasure. This focus on these weapons capacities to solve the dispassionate problem of the undead, and the focus on the experiential feeling of the violence being done obscure the fact that enough zombies have been killed to require the use of “dozers”

136 to push through the pile of corpses. The question (still unresolved and still uncertain) of their moral status has been completely ejected from the conversation to be replaced with the enjoyable and de-problematized presentation of violence. In TWD, the panels help to focus in on the act of violence, actively pulling the reader into a complicity with, and enjoyment of, the violence taking place. In WWZ, words construct the entire reality of the space in which the narrative takes place; it is poignant that the methods of violence are rendered in aesthetically pleasing and sublime ways so as to ensure that the world of WWZ is constructed exclusively through language that glorifies the immoral violence taking place, rendering aesthetically pleasing what is remarkably akin to an apocalyptic culling of disenfranchised people.

I would like to take a moment here to consider the possibility of WWZ critiquing the very machismo and hyper-masculinity that its characters embrace. WWZ’s form is that of a retrospective accounting of the Zombie War, so there are implications that the characters may be suffering from PTSD and that their reliability as narrators should be questioned. While this may suggest that WWZ is satirizing or criticizing the immorality of the world’s response to the undead,24 I argue that these efforts are woefully insufficient to undermine how the text glorifies that immorality. WWZ offers no successful alternative to surviving the zombies other than the ones that, upon examination, are deeply immoral. The implication is that all other attempts to survive failed. In zombie narratives the most important imperative becomes survival, and this is the yardstick by which acceptable behaviour is measured. WWZ emphasizes how successful immoral violence is by demonstrating how every character interviewed, and presumably the interviewer himself, is only able to be interviewed because of the large-scale immoralities taking

24 These suggestions can predominantly be found in the bleak statements made by characters in the final few pages of the novel. But they can also be noted in smaller details like how Redeker is so overcome by the immorality of his Plan that he has retreated into an alternate personality in an attempt to escape the association (Brooks 105-111).

137 place. In a meta-textual way, the only reason the characters exist at all is because of these immoralities, since their fictional existence is predicated on their capacity to be interviewed.

Therefore, I argue that WWZ does not do enough to criticize or critique the cultural machismo its characters espouse.

One Goal, No Soul

Perhaps the most concerning and haunting consequence of these immoral actions is the effect that they have on the global population. The immoral behaviour that the world must adopt to defeat the undead has a powerful homogenizing effect on the characters and nations of the world. Gayle Baldwin discusses this, pointing out that, despite interviewing individuals from all corners of the globe, “the dialogue in the interviews all seem to have a distinctly American flavor”

(Baldwin 415). Furthermore, she points out that “the final triumph [in World War Z is] when the entire world becomes one as a global and violent community, fully American” (416). This can be seen in the political changes that a lot of nations undergo. Cuba becomes the most powerful economic power in the post-war economy specifically because of how they absorbed and adapted

American culture and values into their system, specifically becoming a capitalist nation (Brooks

228). South Africa becomes the United States of South Africa (USSA), only one letter off from the abbreviation for the United States of America (105). China engages in a civil war and eventually establishes a new government as the United Federation of China, a capitalist democracy (247).

This is a fascinating opening to a socio-political wish fulfillment reading of WWZ, but that is not the angle that I intend to take. Instead, I am going to examine how this homogenization, coupled with the violence needed to achieve it, causes the so-called survivors of the zombie war to come across as zombified themselves.

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This zombification is represented through numerous examples of homogeneity in the text. First, there is the political and governmental homogeneity that manifests in the post-war world of the novel. But it is also revealed in the ways in which survivors literally embrace zombiism or zombification. Furthermore, the language used to code the violence of the survivors is the same language used to describe the zombies themselves. This is the closest that I think World War Z gets to a critical examination of the behaviours and morality typical of the zombie genre. And yet, it succumbs to the same problem that I have addressed before: the homogeneity is what saves the world and it is clear in the (near) universality of the Americanized democratic-capitalism that spreads across the globe that any other method of resistance to the zombies was doomed to failure. This homogeneity and response of total violence is necessary in zombie literature because

“[Zombies] were in every city, every village. In the nine and a half million square kilometers that made up our country, [let alone the millions of the world] you couldn't find one centimeter of peace” (234). Those nations that don’t embrace the homogeneity that will save them are destroyed. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Communist China, and North Korea are all destroyed in one way or another by the zombies in their failure to conform, here understood as a failure to be infected by American-style democratic-capitalism.

In fact, Hyungchol Choi, deputy director of the Korean CIA, argues that “North Koreans were indoctrinated from birth to believe that their lives were meaningless, that they existed only to serve the State, the Revolution, and the Great Leader” (200), suggesting that they were zombified before the zombie outbreak ever occurred. Of course, these are two conflicting forms of zombification that I am identifying: the undead zombies and the living zombies, coded as bad and good, respectively. However, North Korea, with its ties to South Korea, can exist in a kind of nexus state; Choi says that “Maybe those caverns [where the North Korean’s retreated] are teeming with twenty-three million zombies, emaciated automatons howling in the darkness and

139 just waiting to be unleashed” (203). North Korea becomes a kind of Schrödinger’s Zombie,25 simultaneously alive and dead, that ends up being emblematic of the living zombies that populate the Earth in the wake of the zombie war. As much as the survivors (living zombies) are alive, they are also coded as being dead. Or, as Jurgen suggests in comparing the zombie war to the

Holocaust:

I've heard it said that the Holocaust has no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. I'd like to think that's not true. But if it is, then no one on Earth survived this war (340).

There are a couple of different ways to read this statement, the most significant for the purposes of my analysis being that it suggests the kind of zombified homogeneity of the world I argue exists.

The total commitment to the systemic killing of the zombies has created a different kind of zombified population, one zombified in the sense of that they kill without thinking and have been stripped down to an intense sameness.26 Another reading worth noting is focuses on this sense of survival; if humans continue to populate the Earth but haven’t survived, then perhaps what has been lost is their moral status. In a sense, to continue to exist, none of the so-called survivors of the zombie war made it through with their moral status intact.

For the most overt example of how survivors have become like the zombies they fear and hate, there are the quislings of World War Z. Joe Muhammad is the first interviewee to describe the quislings, saying they are:

25 I am referring to the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox in which Erwin Schrödinger demonstrated that a cat could be understood as both alive and dead concurrently. This is known as a quantum superposition, meaning that something is simultaneously two contradictory states (Schrödinger). 26 Once again, I am referring to the idea of sameness in dialogue and personality that all the various characters have, and which Gayle Baldwin discusses in her article “World War Z and the End of Religion as We Know It” (Baldwin 415).

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A type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation. They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of. Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it [. . .] They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people [. . .] They’re just as hostile as regular zombies and in some cases even more dangerous (156-7).

Muhammad dismisses the quislings, suggesting they are no different than zombies and, therefore, nothing like himself, but this does not seem as clear cut as Muhammad’s interview suggests. For instance, he fully acknowledges that the quisling he kills “had bright red blood pouring from his head [and] when we checked his flesh we found he was still warm!” (156) which, in the language of World War Z, means this quisling was definitively human and not a zombie. First, this means that the human had moral status and was another survivor like Muhammad. It is certainly convenient to suggest the quisling was just another kind of zombie since it is generally accepted that they can be killed with impunity and without moral consideration; but it does further exacerbate and highlight the lack of clarity regarding the moral status of the zombies since, in this case, the ‘zombie’ was still a living human being. Second, another interpretation that Muhammad does not consider is that the quisling might not represent how some people aren’t able to resist the zombies but instead the quisling might represent the true nature of the survivors like himself.

After all, Muhammad doesn’t spare a thought for the quisling before killing him, doesn’t attempt to speak to him or negotiate, just like the zombies don’t attempt to negotiate; they just kill.

Other characters seem to recognize not only their particular version of zombification as a result of the war but also the immorality of the whole process. At the end of the novel, T. Sean

Collins says “I'm addicted to murder, and that's about the nicest way I can put it. You might say that's not technically true, that since they're already dead I'm not really killing. Horseshit; it's murder, and it's a rush like nothing else” (331). What is perhaps more frightening about Collins’ frankness is that rather than acknowledging the immorality of his actions and finding this idea

141 disturbing or reprehensible he embraces the immorality and finds it liberating. He goes on to elaborate on his situation, saying,

I tried to fit in, settle down, make some friends, get a job and do my part to help put America back together. But not only was I dead, I couldn't think about anything else but killing. I'd start to study people's necks, their heads. I'd think, 'Hmmmm, that dude's probably got a thick frontal lobe, I gotta go in through the eye socket.' Or 'hard blow to the occipital'd drop that chick pretty fast.' It was when the new prez, 'the Whacko' - Jesus, who the hell am I to call anybody else that? - when I heard him speak at a rally, I must have thought of at least fifty ways to bring him down. That's when I got out, as much for everyone else's sake as my own. I knew one day I'd hit my limit, get drunk, get in a fight, lose control. I knew once I started, I couldn't stop, so I said good-bye (332).

The zombies of WWZ, like TWD and most zombie literature, are relentless and single-minded in their pursuit of killing and devouring human beings. The response of the novel, of total war enacted against the zombies, of cultivating a culture of extreme violence in response to extreme violence, results in characters who have become single-minded like the zombies. Collins cannot cure himself of the immorality that permeates the text, the immorality that made it possible for him to give his interview. After all, to survive the living have had to “Out [zombie] the [zombie]”

(279) And there is the problem: the suggestion is that the immorality was necessary, but this is an example of where representing immorality in fiction becomes problematic because WWZ is highly constructed and not reflective of the real world. The characters of the novel feel their actions were justified because they were necessary for the survival of individuals and nations. But I argue that the problem with this narrative of justification is that it too easily transfers that justification onto the disenfranchised, the dislocated, and the distanced Other; there are examples of this in the text, such as when the quislings are treated just like zombies even though they are still alive

(156-7), or when refugees are killed indiscriminately because there is no distinguishing the healthy from the infected (120). After all, scholars have already found ways to interpret zombies as representative of these Other groups. Admittedly, one can argue these immoralities might only

142 apply to zombies; however, I maintain that by coding these deeds as an effective solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem WWZ suggests immoral behaviour is both justifiable and enjoyable.

We Are the Walking Dead

When it comes to the psychology of zombie literature, Jack Raglin suggests that “Victory requires another paradigm of engagement: the zombie should be regarded not as your enemy but as your competitor in a game of life and death” (Raglin 228). This is partly because, as Jeffrey

T. Nealon suggests, “you can't defeat zombies (at least partially because they're you)” (Nealon

472). These two ideas quite effectively capture the nature of the relationship between the narrative and morality in The Walking Dead and World War Z, though perhaps not in the ways that the scholars intended. The zombies become like us not because of some backward form of identification but because the characters who represent us, the still living survivors, become untethered from their connection to morality and end up reflecting the aspects of the abject monsters they so despise. Perhaps this is the point, but if that is true then why is it coded as synonymous with victory? As I have demonstrated, zombies do not offer a definitive resolution to the question of their moral status; there is no way to be certain that they are possessive of moral status or not and, as a result, there is no way to justify much of the extreme violence and killing that is enacted upon them. While Mary Anne Warren’s Moral Status is not a treatise on morality that precludes self-defence (after all, one’s own moral status is as important to uphold as any other persons), there is a distinctive difference between self-defence and the kind of apocalyptic destruction Rick Grimes and his survivors, or the survivors of the zombie war, perform.

This is ultimately the problematic nature of zombie literature that makes it so unsettling to consider in relation to its popularity within culture and fiction. With regards to morality and

143 philosophy, John Gibson suggests there is something eventually positive about the immorality of zombie literature. He says,

[. . .] in working through the concept of Satan, we are put in touch with what matters most to us, morally, humanly, and, for some, theologically. And while this contemplation is bound to end in frustration - in bewilderment rather than understanding - we very much do delight in the experience of being brought closer to it, since it places us in the proximity of value, like a cipher that holds out the promise of a great truth. It is bound to end in philosophical frustration, but it is still a powerfully philosophically (sic.) experience, and it is one that is conditioned by art and not a mere argument and, for this reason, that it is capable of immersing our frustration in aesthetic delight (Gibson 431).

Gibson suggests that the active reader can see in the survivors of zombie literature not a case study in the heroic ways in which inconvenient moral conventions are shrugged off to preserve society or individuality but instead a window into the value of the social and philosophical mores we possess in a non-zombified world. I believe Gibson to be correct, on principle. I do not believe that zombie literature, any more than vigilante literature, is itself a genre that inherently espouses immoral behaviour; but I do believe that it is important for us as spectators to be active in our engagement with moral frameworks as we consume these texts. In the end, it is important to remember that while zombies do not exist, the questions of morality and immorality, the questions of survival and ethics, that are at the core of the literature, demand scrutiny.

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Conclusion: To Escape This Place You Will Have to Suffer More

In his essay “Praxis of the Ethical Turn through Literature,” Meenu Gupta Aggarwal

(paraphrasing Michael Eskin) states that “ethics needs literature [. . .] to be fully integrated into the human and social domain that it is ultimately concerned with” (Aggarwal 105). This idea that fiction offers the possibility of articulating ideas of ethics and morality has been the guiding principle of my thesis. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen an enormous increase in the quantity and (perhaps more importantly) accessibility of popular culture texts. It is my intent with this thesis to unpack questions relating to the Self and the Other in my selected texts. I have addressed these questions through critical consideration of both moral status philosophy and aesthetic theory. My aim therein is to foreground the need for continued engagement with the idea of “participatory culture”27; in other words, I argue the need for active contemplation of the complex cultural, philosophical, and ideological concepts presented in popular fiction is essential to fully understand the impact these texts have on us and our contemporary ethos.

Much of my application of moral status philosophy has been guided by Mary Anne

Warren’s “multi-criterial” definition, which she outlines in her book Moral Status: Obligations to

Persons and Other Living Things. Warren’s definition enables me to apply moral status philosophy to the designated Others of the texts in of all three of my chapters. My application of moral status philosophy is further complemented by the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Zygmunt

Bauman. Lévinas’ conceptualization of human moral responsibility through the concept of the visage (“the face”) is deeply relevant to theorizing confrontations with “otherness,” while

Bauman’s elucidation of the difference between legal and ethical duties establishes the

27 An idea developed and popularized by Henry Jenkins. See Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (2006).

145 significance of moral thought and ethical behaviour in the human capacity to participate in society.

As I have attempted to demonstrate in my thesis, our access to these ethical questions as consumers of texts (or “prosumers”, as Henry Jenkins would have it) is mediated by aesthetic categories such as the sublime, the uncanny, and the abject. Informed primarily by Edmund

Burke’s 1757 treatise, “Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful,” my reading adopts his definition of the sublime as artistic representations of pain or danger that elicit feelings of delight. Because of how the sublime invites a delightful experience, I argue that it has the potential to obscure moral status and moral obligation. This has as much to do with a text’s focalization as it does with the sublime itself, as the sublime is not solely an obfuscating aesthetic effect to the exclusion of all other effects; however, in the texts which I have chosen to consider, the sublime does promote moral ambiguity and thereby cloud the audience’s moral perceptions. Similarly, in my application of the uncanny as an observable instance of the familiar and the unfamiliar in a single object/subject, I assert that the uncanny is an aesthetic effect that illuminates moral status and moral obligation. Part of the reason I believe it does this, and the sublime does not, is because of the nature of these two aesthetic effects; the sublime tends towards distorting its subject whereas the uncanny tends towards defining its subject. Thus, the uncanny relates to subjective entities in a way that emphasizes their “true” nature, even as it renders “truth” somewhat tenuous, and is why I maintain it is illuminating rather than obfuscating. Finally, in my application of Kristeva’s theory, I argue that the abject obscures moral status and moral obligation because, like the sublime, it distorts rather than defines that which it affects. Because abject subjects/objects are often both an implicit and explicit threat, moral status

– and the corresponding moral obligations – are masked by the aesthetic power of abjection.

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I have emphasized that in the case of the sublime and the abject these aesthetic effects have the potential to affect ethical consideration in these texts, not that they overtly prevent it.

The methods I am employing in this thesis are an example of how it is possible to participate in the consumption of popular fiction texts while recognizing the potential these texts have to manipulate the passive spectator. Indeed, the ethical turn of the humanities over the last two decades has increasingly emphasized the participatory nature of audience/reader engagement. It is also worth noting the increasing turn in popular fiction (even more notably, popular film) towards rebooting and remaking older stories for the posthuman era; this typically involves a recasting of the original content to facilitate a consideration of moral status and the ethical ramifications of the self vs. the Other. Not only is this true of Battlestar Galactica and Westworld, which are reboots of original stories from the 1970s, but also of recent reboots/remakes such as

Lost in Space (2018) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), to name a few.

In her article “Disputes Over Moral Status: Philosophy and Science in the Future of

Bioethics,” Lisa Bortolotti discusses the important difference between moral value and moral status. Unlike moral value, crediting an individual with moral status acknowledges that the individual is “part of our moral community” (Bortolotti 153) in addition to acknowledging that they deserve moral consideration. This is important because Bortolotti makes a case in her article that “it is too early to give up on moral status” and while “pessimists will say that no amount of research in these areas will ever provide the basis for agreement [. . .] the attempt will make the existing problems easier to tackle and contribute to moral progress” (158). I wish to address the existing and continued relevance of the analysis I have intended to perform in this thesis.

Bortolotti’s article was published in 2007, but moral status philosophy continues to be applied to studies of narratives. One such example is Stephanie Petrillo’s 2014 essay “Moral Theories and

Cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” which looks at moral status in Ishiguro’s 2005 novel,

147 as the title suggests. Furthermore, Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgement, edited by Jennifer A.

McMahon, is set for publication in June of 2018 (following the completion of this thesis); the contributors to this volume are engaged with discussions about how “art is not merely a representation or expression like any other [. . .] it promotes shared moral understanding and helps us engage in meaning-making” (Routledge.com). As if in confirmation of Bauman’s belief that the postmodern era is the dawn of ethics, popular culture’s increasing concern with questions of moral status mirrors the ethical turn of critical theory and the humanities more generally.

In her book Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, Michele Aaron presents her argument for the difference between morality and ethics; she says “ethics [is about] recognition, realisation, reflection – the stuff of agency – [while morality is] prescription, proclamation [. . .] in other words, ethics [. . .] is all about thinking through one’s relationship to morality rather than just adhering to it” (Aaron 109). Much of my thesis has been concerned with identification (the realm of morality by Aaron’s definition) so that the relationship between aesthetics and morality could be examined. My analysis of these selected vigilante, artificial intelligence, and zombie narratives is not intended as an exercise in sermonizing or even moralizing. Instead, it is an attempt to recognize how aesthetics (and by proxy, focalization) need to be considered when attempting to position texts within a moral framework. To engage popular fiction with ethical consideration, I contend one must first be able to accurately and effectively identify the morality of the content one is consuming, especially in our contemporary moment where this content is increasingly pervasive, powerful, and prescient.

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Works Cited

Aaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. Wallflower, 2007.

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005.

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