Category: Volume 28 – Number 1 – September 2017

James Belflower is Teaching Assistant Professor at Siena College. As a poet/critic, his current research and creative projects employ artistic models to investigate how we mingle with matter. His most recent book is the multimedia project Canyons (Flimb Press 2016) with Matthew Klane. Past projects include The Posture of Contour (Spring Gun Press 2013) and Commuter (Instance Press 2009), among others. He also edits Fence Digital, the electronic imprint of Fence Books.

Carol Colatrella is professor of literature and co-director of the Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published three books: Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner (1990); Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading (2002); and Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology (2011). She edited Technology and Humanity (2012) and coedited (with Joseph Alkana) essays published in honor of Sacvan Bercovitch, Cohesion and Dissent in America (1994).

Martin Harries teaches at UC Irvine and works on twentieth-century theater, modernism, and theory. He is the author two books, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (2007) and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (2000). His book in progress about the impact of mass culture on postwar drama is called “Theater after Film.”

Tracy Lassiter is an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico-Gallup. Her predominant research area is petrofiction, and she has published on this topic in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies and a 2015 anthology entitled Energy in Literature. She also has a co-authored chapter in the 2018 book, Library Service and Learning: Empowering Students, Inspiring Social Responsibility, and Building Community Connections.

Nidesh Lawtoo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at KU Leuven and Principal Investigator of the EU-funded project Homo Mimeticus. His work focuses on the transdisciplinary concept of mimesis as key to reframing (post)modern subjectivity, culture, and politics. His books include The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (2013), Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (2016) and (New) Fascism: Contagion, Myth, Community (2019).

Murray Leeder holds a PhD from Carleton University and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Calgary. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), as well as the editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and of ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). His work has also appeared in Horror Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Film and Television and other periodicals.

Lucia Palmer is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Heidelberg University in Ohio. She has published articles in journals such as International Journal of Communication, Studies in Popular Culture, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Her interests primarily revolve around the intersections between media, culture, and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality. Currently, her research focuses on how cultural and political movements use media, in particular alternative and independent formats, to struggle over meaning production.

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz lectures in the Modern Languages and English Studies Department at the University of Barcelona. She is a member of the Research Centre ADHUC–Theory, Gender, Sexuality (UB). Her research focuses on film genres and women’s cinema in the USA and Spain. She has published book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Kimberly Peirce, Icíar Bollaín and Isabel Coixet. She co-edited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017). Her monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers has been published by Edinburgh University Press (2018).

Tano S. Posteraro is a PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at Penn State. He works at the intersection of continental philosophies of nature and contemporary innovations in the life sciences. He is co-editor of Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory (forthcoming, Edinburgh). His dissertation, The Virtual and the Vital, rereads Henri Bergson as a philosopher of biology in dialogue with the evolutionary theory of today.

Stacy Rusnak is an Associate Professor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. She received her PhD in Communications/Moving Image Studies from Georgia State University. She also holds an MA in Spanish Language and Literatures. Her publications include book chapters on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception in Children of Men, the role of MTV and the music video during the 1980s satanic panic, and the intertwining of cannibalism and Mexican urban identity in Somos lo que hay. Most recently, she contributed an essay on the women of Twin Peaks to a book of essays (forthcoming).

Tano S. Posteraro (bio)
Penn State University

A review of Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.

“Materialism” functions today as an obligatory academic shibboleth. Against the somatophobia of the Western philosophical canon, many consider this a welcome relief. Elizabeth Grosz has herself done much to emphasize the force, significance, and ineliminability of the biological body in her analyses of everything from gender, to art, to political futurity. It is worth noting, then, that her latest book orients itself differently, arguing for nothing less than a turn to everything that is not material, not in order to leave materialism behind, but rather to complete it and to save it from itself. “Every materialism,” Grosz writes, “requires a frame, a nonmaterial localization, a becoming-space and time, that cannot exist in the same way and with the same form as the objects or things that they frame” (28). It would be wrong, of course, to spin this declaration in opposition to her earlier work. But it would be just as wrong, I think, not to see in it a punctuating point in a newer phase of Grosz’s thinking. Either way, in the end, one may be left wanting more than the series of figure studies that make it up.

The pragmatists used to insist that philosophy realizes itself most fully only in the attempt to ensure that the future will differ from the past—for the better, one hopes. They meant this at least in part as an indictment of metaphysical speculation. The Incorporeal pursues this precept, but argues for its location in the realm of ontology: “This is a book on ethics,” Grosz tells us early on, “although it never addresses morality, the question of what is to be done” (1). That’s because it is a book, more obviously, about ontology—”the substance, structure, and forms of the world” (1)—that attends not only to how the world is but more significantly to how it might be, in what ways it is open to change, in what those changes might plausibly consist, and through what processes they are brought about. The Incorporeal is a book about ethics in the sense that it seeks to secure, at the ontological level, the possibility for change in political, social, collective, cultural, and economic life. Grosz calls this “ontoethics.” It does not ask the (moral) question of what is to be done, but attends rather to the conditions that underwrite and direct the myriad (ethical) ways by which that question might be taken up and carried out.

These claims are far from novel. In making them, Grosz remains in the comfortable if crowded company of the feminist new materialists—Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, Rosi Braidotti, and others—who have been deploying similar neologisms for at least a decade (Barad 2007: 90). To be fair, Grosz’s own Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism may be considered one of the movement’s founding texts. And this is part of what makes The Incorporeal feel new. The subtitle of the 1994 text designates corporeality as its theoretical aim. Twenty-three years later, it is that very same corporeality that is now to be completed with its opposite number. In this respect, The Incorporeal, even as it remains a work in ontoethics—and even while many of its sources as well as the overarching purposes to which they are put remain continuous with the work of the other new materialists—nonetheless represents a marked departure from the rest of the field.

The incorporeal is Grosz’s name for what is immaterial but not anti-material; what it is that conditions the material without itself being material; what is ideal, not as an objection to or a transcendence over the material, but as a production out of materiality that simultaneously frames, orients, and completes what produces it. The point, for her, is that the corporeal finds the principle for its creativity, its openness, and its futurity, in the incorporeal—and so it is to the incorporeal that an ontoethics ought to turn. The Incorporeal traces something of a subterranean history of the elaboration of that concept.

This history begins with the Stoics. They are presented at the outset as the poster children of ontoethics. It is in them that Grosz finds the first example of a thoroughgoing materialism that, far from dismissing or devaluing ideality, posits it as the necessary condition for the intelligibility of the material as such. It is in the Stoics, too, that Grosz finds an early indication of her ontoethical thesis that “our views of what the world is and how it functions make a difference to how we understand ourselves and our place in relation to other living beings and the cosmos itself” (18). This is so, for the Stoics, because the ethical task—the task of living well, in accordance with nature—is coincident with the rational pursuit of understanding ourselves as bodies causally imbricated within a corporeal order that exceeds and determines us without fully exhausting what we are capable of. Grosz endorses that position wholesale.

Two of the Stoics’ ontological doctrines matter most for this project: their account of bodies and causes, and their postulation of the incorporeals. To be a body is to be capable of acting or being acted upon (24). Activity and passivity are not designators of different kinds of material, but qualities of the causal relations between bodies made of the same sort. They are all informed and activated by an animating breath—pneuma, the creative principle of Stoic ontology. This principle is itself material, and works to distinguish the Stoics’ world of flux from the aridity of an inert mechanism; it does not inform matter from the outside, but rather runs through the distinctions between active and passive bodies. All bodies are particular, since abstract categories are incapable of causal effectivity. The universal “animal” cannot be acted upon, so it is more like an error in reasoning, a reification of what appears common across a set of individuals (27). Any materialism of this stripe requires a thoroughgoing nominalism. Everything that is, is a body, but the real is not exhausted by everything that is. Bodies are situated in space, their fluctuating relations are measured temporally, and at the limit of corporeality exists the void, the absence of body. Space, time, and the void are all instances of what the Stoics call “incorporeal,” that which is not capable of being touched, that which can neither act nor be acted upon. These three incorporeals frame and condition all of corporeality.

There is (at least) one more incorporeal in Stoic ontology, this being the one most important for Grosz’s project: “lekton” (30). If all corporeal bodies are causes, then they cannot cause each other, at least not as causes do effects. They connect instead as causes to other causes in order together to produce changes in another ontological register. These are changes in a body’s predicates, what is “sayable” of it—what the Stoics call lekta. Grosz rehearses Deleuze’s favorite example, the relation of a cutting body to a body cut by it. The first does not relate to the second as a cause does to an effect; they are both causes, together, of a change in the attributes or predicates—i.e., in “what can be said”—of each. These predicates are not corporeal, not of the body, because they can neither act nor can they be acted upon. They are pure effects, epiphenomena, subsisting at the surface of the bodies of which they are predicated, causally inert and yet not nothing. In the event of cutting, the cut body acquires the predicate “being-cut” while the cutting body acquires an “is-cutting.” These predicates subsist or insist “on top of” bodies, but they do not exist in them (28). The production of sense is in the event of an alignment of a body with the predicates that hover over and exist outside of it. Even though the predicate “being-cut” does not come to be or pass away with any one particular act of cutting, that particular act, in aligning a wounded body with the predicate that designates its wound, institutes a novel relation of corporeal and incorporeal; it is an event of sense.

The effects of corporeal causes are incorporeal predicates. Language apprehends those predicates in order to materialize them, because speaking, listening, writing and reading are all bodily acts (38). The sense of that which is spoken, heard, written, or read is, however, strictly incorporeal—as distinct from the act of speaking it as is the predicate “cutting” from the particular event of a knife’s doing what it does. This means that predicates subsist independently of the minds that would contemplate or ascribe them. Grosz considers this among the Stoics’ most important insights, that there is more to the real than the material, but that this excess of ideality is not indexed to contemplating minds, experiencing subjects, or intentional acts. Importantly, this is not a dualism. The ongoing concatenation of causes that constitutes the material world is constantly throwing off incorporeal effects the way a running engine lets off steam. Thought orients itself toward those effects and language materializes them.

Fate is what the Stoics call the corporeal operation of all causes on each other (27). Grosz takes this to be one ethical implication of their ontology of bodies, that human life is sundered between a corporeal determinism and an incorporeality of sense that hovers over the chain of bodies and causes that make up the material world. Ethics is about the affirmation of incorporeal events, the alignment of bodies and sense. Freedom is about cultivating the ability to desire what happens, to bring one’s own nature into accordance with nature as such. The more we understand that causal order, the better we become at distinguishing what it is that we can control from what it is that we can’t. We can control our responses to what happens; we can cultivate our nature, our behavioral dispositions. We cannot control nature as such, and so the best we can do is to affirm its order (52). This motivates a shift from the depths of our own bodies to the surface of corporeality across which incorporeal events flash as the various transformations our bodies undergo. This is the Stoic lesson, that the rational concurrence of our nature with the natural order is attendant on the implication of the ethical in the ontological.

The Incorporeal follows a study of the Stoics with Spinoza, beginning, again, with Deleuze, who did perhaps more than anyone to secure the revolutionary implications of Spinoza’s ontology of immanence. But this is nothing new, and one can’t help but ask here the awkward question of audience. This chapter reads like a neatly written rehearsal of well-known Spinozan themes in a well-known Deleuzian tone. Who is it for? It might serve as an introduction were it not for the decidedly Deleuzian slant. But no one already familiar with Deleuze has much to learn from it. And it would surprise me to hear that most of Grosz’s readers don’t already know something about him. Grosz does at times try to position Spinoza in terms of her larger theoretic aims, and in so doing, she does, to be fair, occasionally move beyond a summary of the Deleuzian interpretation; the trouble here, however, is that the insights and lessons Grosz draws from Spinoza in this register don’t seem to add much to her reading of the Stoics. Points of disagreement aside, both serve for Grosz above all else as thinkers who see rational self-understanding as a tool for the extension and intensification of our capacities within a nature causally ordered. They both think the human being as ineluctably embodied and affectively engaged with the bodies around it, and they both take the situation of the human being as a living thing within a larger whole as an ethical challenge to be resolved through ontological analysis.

The next chapter, on Nietzsche, is unfortunately beset by a similar set of issues. Much of it consists in familiar themes, redescribed now in terms of incorporeality. Take the will to power. Grosz reads it as an incorporeal condition for material wills instead of the set of all their conflicts (111). This counterintuitive interpretation seems to rely on two closely related claims. First, if we understand individual bodies as material, then we have to conceive the impersonal field out of which they take shape, are oriented, and into which they dissolve as necessarily immaterial. Second, material bodies require a principle of individuation; they have to be bounded, delimited, particular, otherwise it makes little sense to call them material or corporeal. Since the will to power is supposed to designate precisely that which exceeds the individual—”a monster of energy” in continual self-transformation without beginning or end—then it is best understood as incorporeal, at least qua impersonal and undelimited (112). The eternal return, the overman, fate, and amor fati all receive similar treatments. In the end, Nietzsche comes out sounding a lot like Spinoza (maximize joyful encounters!), who comes out sounding a lot like the Stoics (affirm what happens to us!), all of whom sound unsurprisingly a lot like Deleuze, the subject of the next chapter (121).

While incorporeals abound in Deleuze’s work—Difference and Repetition‘s virtual and its intensities, A Thousand Plateaus‘s Body without Organs and the Nonorganic Life traverses it—Grosz focuses instead on What is Philosophy? and its concepts of the concept and of the plane of immanence. Her analysis departs from typical accounts of Deleuze’s metaphysics in order to bring together the ontological (plane of immanence) with the ethical (ethology of affects). Grosz reads What is Philosophy?‘s plane of immanence as the abstract coexistence of ideas and concepts in an order of eternality not unlike the realm in which the Stoics’ lekta subsist independently of their alignments with spatiotemporally determinate bodies (137). The plane of immanence is, for Grosz, the plane proper to a thought unbound from particular thinkers and from individual events of thinking (139). It is traversed by concepts, which are fabricated out of the components of other concepts, emergent from out of the histories of their elaboration, and internally consistent, i.e., sufficiently autonomous from their conditions of creation for them to assume a place on the plane of immanence. Concepts on the plane are incorporeal, available to divergent actualizations across space and time and ingredient in different events of thought while remaining irreducible to each (145). Concepts are produced and affirmed by particular bodies in particular conditions. They bear witness to forms of life or styles of living (149). Thinking is another way of navigating the world. Ethics is about learning to do that more joyfully, less resentfully, more powerfully, less sadly. And just as that involves a learned style of bodily comportment away from the toxic and towards the enlivening, so too does it require a form of affirmative thought, a production and coordination of the right concepts.

Here, again, is the relation between the corporeal and the incorporeal, between ethics and ontology. A compelling move, no doubt—but a simple one. And it isn’t exactly clear what the chapter’s other preoccupations—Uexkull’s ethology, the brain-subject—are supposed to add to it. The Incorporeal pivots around this chapter. It’s followed by dense introductions to the work of Simondon and Ruyer, both of whom play serious roles in Deleuze’s early metaphysics, but neither of whom seems to have all that much to do with the book’s first three chapters. They may prove illuminating studies for some readers, but one can’t help but wonder again whether any such reader really exists for a book like this one. For the Deleuzian, they are redundant. For anyone else, they might seem interesting, but no real argument is provided for why one ought to concern oneself with them outside of their importance for understanding Deleuze. Grosz’s chapter on Simondon runs through his theory of individuation, his endeavour to explain the generation of individual things outside the Aristotelian scheme, his postulation of the preindividual, and his taxonomy of phases of individuation. While Grosz does provide the reader a few hints at what a Simondonian ontoethics might look like, it isn’t clear what role incorporeality is supposed to play in that project, and one is left wondering again about the significance of the chapter outside of Deleuze studies.

Simondon repurposes a concept from thermodynamics in order to describe the state of preindividual being as “metastable,” retaining unexhausted potentials for the generation of various orders of individuality (173). Metastable being resolves itself in the individuation of an extensive entity; that individual thing realizes and cancels the instabilities that initially catalyzed it (179). Biological individuation is open-ended. Life comes correlative with a distinction between interiority and exteriority—a membrane—that places its internal system in communication with a milieu outside it. This communication lasts as long as does the living thing. Psychic individuation, or thought, emerges from another order of complexity, out of the tensional relations and instabilities between a living body’s affects and perceptions (188). Perception orients the body in a world by simplifying that world into an action space; affect allows that body to feel its way through that space. The psyche continually recalibrates these distinctions and their relations to the world outside them, placing the living thing once again in circuit with the preindividual potentials from which it arose.

This process involves the implication of a living thing within a collective, which affords it the ability to consider possible points of view, other perceptions and affections, and to orient itself in terms of this excess of others over itself. The further the individual extends itself in these directions, the more it “transindividuates” itself, losing its identity with itself in order to gain access to a richer field of preindividual potentials (193). This gain heralds the introduction of the ethical into human life as the task of making resonate higher and higher orders of potentiality, of “sett[ing] off new becomings in the processes of (endless) individuation” (206). Ethics, for Grosz, is nothing other than this affirmation—of amplitude, openness, and creativity, all immanent to the ongoing individuation, that is, the becoming, of the living being (207).

In her final chapter, Grosz discusses the work of Raymond Ruyer, who is just beginning to enjoy something of a revival today due almost entirely to his status as an influence on Deleuze. So it’s no surprise to see him placed up against Simondon. They do share a number of theoretical concerns, but most important for Grosz is Ruyer’s relatively unique aspiration to save a concept of finality from the advances of an increasingly popular mechanistic biology. That biology goes wrong, on his account, in its limitation to the spatiotemporally determinate, the corporeal. As with Simondon, Ruyer thinks that the explanation of individuation requires a preindividual field. Ruyer calls it the “transspatial” (226). It’s made up of themes, patterns, or potentials that underwrite the actualization of particular individuals.

Actualization eludes exhaustively causal specification. Causes operate determinatively; they are actual, localizable in space and time. The equipotentiality of the embryo (and of the brain) is not itself a property, but the state of being able to realize a multiplicity of different properties. The presence or absence of what embryologists call “chemical organizers,” which are causal artifacts of the genetic composition of the embryo, can be construed as triggers of potential themes, which once invoked by them pass into spatiotemporal actuality (233). But they cannot be considered causes; invocation is something else entirely. It operates vertically, drawing into the actual relevant themes from the mnemic, the transspatial. Triggers, or “invokers”—pressure, temperature differential, chemical gradient—act like smells that recall memories.

The brain retains the equipotentiality of the embryo; it is the embryo in the adult, just as the embryo is its own brain. Thought occurs in the brain’s invocation of sense, ideas, and values—all incorporeal, the domain of themes and potentials. Goal-directed action would be impossible were it not for these. In orienting ourselves toward potentials in acting we cannot but feel, as Grosz has it, “the pull of the future, of an ideal to be accomplished or a goal or purpose to be attained” (244). The ideals that orient us are not imposed from without like moral precepts but rather suffuse and direct the world’s myriad becomings, luring it from the future into different and new creative transformations. Ethics, Grosz suggests again, is about experimenting with these possibilities, affirming the excess of the world over itself, the inexhaustible potentials into which life is endlessly resolving itself (248).

Ruyer calls this “neofinalism,” a theory of ends that casts them not ahead of us but in another ontological register that allows them to fully saturate the corporeal world as the fiery pneuma of the Stoics does the bodies of their plenum. These ends also comprise a reservoir from which new forms of life can be drawn, whether in technological innovation, aesthetic stylization, the creation of institution and collectives, or indeed in the act of thinking itself. Since Ruyer’s ethics of creativity relies upon his postulation of incorporeal ends, and since those incorporeal ends (or themes) themselves are responsible for the creativity of the world right down to its basic components, he stands, I think, as perhaps the book’s best example of an ontoethical thinker. The Incorporeal presents itself as an attempt to theorize a neglected ontological domain by uncovering its existence across a selective genealogy of thinkers. But sometimes it seems as if what we get is just another book on Deleuze—how easily it could have been reframed and retitled Deleuze and the Incorporeal—whose chapters begin with summaries of his monographs and commentaries (the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche), pivot around his own work, and conclude with analyses of some of his lesser known inheritances (Simondon and Ruyer), without doing all that much besides. Some of the chapters work well as pillars for Grosz’s project—as with the Stoics and, to a more complicated extent, Ruyer—but others feel forced into relation with each other and with the thrust of the book as a whole.

In the end, The Incorporeal seems to hesitate between the development of an original ontology and a work of Deleuze scholarship. It seems to hesitate just as waveringly between a set of introductions and a creative trajectory of recharacterizations. Grosz’s latest effort is at its strongest when it is thematizing the subterranean ontological importance of its title concept across Deleuze’s history of philosophy; it is at its weakest when it tries to press from that ontology an ethics consistent across thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Simondon, or Spinoza and Ruyer. The direction of the text is promising, no doubt, but one is left hoping that in her future work Grosz will be able to detach the elaboration of some of its themes from the figure studies that make it up.

Nidesh Lawtoo (bio)
KU Leuven

A review of Connolly, William. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Duke UP, 2017.

Despite—or rather because of—the cosmic scope of William Connolly’s latest book, Facing the Planetary does not propose a reflection on universal, transcendental ideas about what the planetary condition is, or should be. Nor does it encourage readers to advance to “the edge of the universe” (13) in search of alternative, habitable planets. It is rather from within a gravitational pull of immanent forces faithful to planet Earth that Connolly, in his singular and plural voice, invites us to explore “a series of attempts to face the planetary” (9) and to reevaluate the dicey entanglements of political, cultural, and natural processes that are currently giving new speed to the age of the “Anthropocene.”

Adopting the eagle-eyed perspective of a political theorist who remains true to the ancient vocation of this term (theory, from theaomai, to behold, and horaô, to see), Connolly aspires to make us see our fragile and beautiful planet from the temporal distance the Anthropocene imposes. He does so by plunging, with intellectual courage, theoretical sophistication, and deeply felt appreciation for the human and nonhuman forces that tie human destinies to what he calls “the planetary,” by which he means “a series of temporal force fields, such as climate patterns, drought zones, the ocean conveyor system, species evolution, glacier flows, and hurricanes that exhibit self-organizing capacities to varying degrees and that impinge upon each other and human life in numerous ways” (4).

The task of articulating the plural modalities in which self-organizing planetary processes impinge on human processes of becoming, while humans are simultaneously acting as aggressive geological forces on the planet, calls for an open, experimental, and transversal disciplinary approach. Swimming against mainstream academic tendencies that all too often still confine research to narrow territorial turfs, Connolly establishes much-needed “heterogeneous connections” that straddle the science/humanities divide. In particular, he draws on a “minor tradition of Western philosophy” (from Nietzsche to Whitehead, Foucault to Deleuze) “that resists dominant nature/culture and nonlife/life division” (97), while at the same time engaging with recent developments in the earth sciences, evolutionary biology, and the neurosciences. This cross-disciplinary assemblage allows him, in turn, to face a multitude of entangled (non)human problematics central to the contemporary condition as diverse as climate change, tectonic plates, the ocean-conveyor system, neoliberal capitalism, free will, consciousness, and different spiritual creeds by moving back and forth between macro- and micro-politics. “My aspiration here,” he writes, “is to face the planetary while connecting that face to regional, racial, and urban issues with which it is imbricated” (33).

Connolly’s aspiration rests on a pluralist, materialist, and immanent ontology that will be familiar to readers of his latest books—Pluralism, A World of Becoming, and The Fragility of Things—and that continues to inform Facing the Planetary as well. At the most fundamental level, this political ontology is succinctly articulated in the opening affirmation that this book posits the “primacy of forces over forms” insofar as these human and nonhuman “forces . . . both enable and exceed a stability of forms” (6). For Connolly, then, there is an excessive, protean, and unpredictable power animating planetary forces that always threatens to disrupt the equilibrium of rational human forms. Creatively convoking advocates of an ontology of becoming to face the specific challenges of rapid human-induced climate change and its devastating effects (global warming, polar ice-cap melting, ocean acidification, rising-sea waters, hurricanes), Connolly posits an unstable world of immanence over a stable world of transcendence; the power of a material world that has been considered ontologically “false” in the past over intelligible ideal “Forms” that are currently proving illusory in the present; horizontal, rhizomatic assemblages over vertical unitary ideas; in short, forces over forms. While the ontological opposition could not be clearer, the agonistic (yet respectful) confrontation could not be more ancient—and contemporary.

It is thus no wonder that Connolly does not open his book by proposing a stabilizing, unifying meta-theory of the planetary. Instead, he steps back to what a longstanding idealist tradition in political philosophy has tended to dismiss as false, namely, myth, in order to reveal the visionary power of myth to foresee potential threats that are already present. In particular, in the Prelude, “Myth and the Planetary,” Connolly reframes the Book of Job in the Old Testament by going beyond anthropocentric or theocentric readings, and reminding us that the Nameless One addressing the suffering Job is actually not speaking from peaceful heaven but from a catastrophic “tornado.” This shift of perspective from the Voice of God to the voice of a tornado, in turn, opens up an immanent, a-theological and “cosmic” reading of a myth that sounds strikingly contemporary, for “the Anthropocene,” Connolly writes, “has become the Whirlwind of today” (7). This mythic scene is thus at least double: it addresses not only Job, or his friends, whose stable image of the cosmos the Voice threatens, but stretches into the present to interpel contemporary climate change denialists who, believe it or not, are still not alarmed by the increasing power of hurricanes enough to “see” and “feel” that “we have now become playthings of planetary forces, forces that a few regimes have agitated but none controls” (7).

And so, the attentive reader might wonder: is this a divine Voice bellowing through a major catastrophic force outside of us? Or is this rather a minor human voice that, with different intensities and tonalities, is already speaking from within us? Connolly does not advocate between these alternative positions, and for at least two reasons that orient the whole book. First because from the immanent, materialist, and non-anthropocentric perspective he adopts, humans and nature are “made of the same stuff” (8). Hence, new interdisciplinary collaborations between the human sciences and the hard sciences—what he calls “entangled humanism”—are needed to think across reified binaries such as nature/culture, mind/body, center/periphery, sacred/secular, etc. And second, in an invitational pluralist gesture dramatized by the stylistic register of his narrative voice, Connolly encourages different, often competing, yet potentially complementary constituencies to join forces at both the micro- and macropolitical levels in order to unite in a “new pluralist assemblage organized by multiple minorities from different regions, classes, creeds, age cohorts, sexualities, and states” (9)—what he calls the “politics of swarming.” Facing the Planetary is the singular-plural voice that, from these two entangled currents, cautions us that “we are playing with a wildfire and it is playing with us” (161).

In recent years, several studies in the burgeoning fields of environmental studies, ecocriticism, political theory, and continental philosophy—that is, fields in which Connolly has been one of the most active and influential players over the past fifty years—have been emphasizing the precarity and fragility of our condition. Facing the Planetary stands out for its interdisciplinary scope, political engagement, and life-affirming power. The planetary challenge Connolly urges us to face is specific. It does not simply “emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” characteristic of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 17), but also stresses that planetary forces—tectonic plates, glacier flows, the ocean conveyor system, among others—operate as “agentic,” “self-organizing” processes that can enter into “fateful conjunctions with capitalism, socialism, democracy, and freedom” (30). This is a crucial point that gives a specific timbre of urgency to the voice addressing us. Contrary to, say, advocates of deep ecology who believe that “if we lift the human footprint nature will settle down into patterns that are benign for us” (20), Connolly draws on post-1980s developments in the new earth sciences (oceanography, geology, climatology, evolutionary biology) that reframe the doctrine of “gradualism”—the idea that prior to the Great Acceleration in the 1950s the environment changed gradually—in light of new and compelling evidence that the environment was punctuated by rapid changes well before entering the Anthropocene. Thus, in an untimely echo of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God at the twilight of the nineteenth century, Connolly’s poignantly renews the prophetic call at the dawn of the twenty-first century as he asks elsewhere: “Haven’t you heard? Gradualism is dead!” (Connolly and Lawtoo).

This temporal shift of perspectives does not leave humans off the hook. Quite the contrary. As Connolly shows in detail in Chapter 4, “Distributed Agency and Bumpy Temporality,” self-organizing process like the ocean-conveyor system operate on a temporality that is not linear and gradual but “bumpy” (106) and unpredictable instead. In fact, if a tipping point is reached, such processes can serve as “amplifiers” (104) that will accelerate human-induced climate change even further, with unexpected, catastrophic, and potentially irreversible consequences. For instance, in Facing the Planetary we learn that a growing number of oceanographers are now convinced that “If [the ocean conveyor system] were to close down, … a rapid, extreme cooling period would settle into Europe and northeastern America, though climate warming would probably continue elsewhere” (103). The general political lesson Connolly draws from the latest research in the earth sciences is as simple as it is fundamental: “be wary of accounts in the human sciences on the Right, Center, or Left that revolve around themes of sociocentrism” (92), that is, accounts that explain “social process by reference to other social processes alone,” thereby treating nature as a stable background or a “deposit of resources to use and master” (16), rather than a force with an agentic power of its own.

The ethical, political, and ontological consequences of this central realization are drawn from the “case studies” that constitute the book. Thus, in Chapter 1, “Sociocentrism, the Anthropocene, and the Planetary,” Connolly steps back before the onset of the Anthropocene to classical figures in political philosophy as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and, more recently, Isaiah Berlin and Friedrich Hayek who, despite their diversity, shared a sociocentric notion of human “belonging” that is all too human insofar as it fails to consider the agentic—albeit not necessarily conscious, or intentional—power of the nonhuman. Extending his conception of entangled humanism, first articulated in The Fragility of Things, Connolly sets out to agonistically and respectfully “challenge human exceptionalism by coming to terms with bumpy processes of planetary self-organization that interact with each other and with human cultures” (33).

And yet, critique is not the main focus of this book; it is rather the first step necessary to propose positive and affirmative alternatives. Thus, in Chapter 2, “Species Evolution and Cultural Creativity,” Connolly folds “sociocentric” cultural concerns with freedom, consciousness, responsibility, and creativity within the broader dynamic of species evolution out of which humans emerged. What makes us culturally distinctive, he argues, cannot be dissociated from “evolutionary accounts of how the most complex capacities arose” (40); and conversely, theories of evolution cannot be dissociated from the cultures from which such theories emerged. Deftly avoiding the Scylla of “reductionism” and the Charybdis of “sociocentrism,” this chapter establishes a bridge between new biological research on dynamic evolution and philosophers of the “open cosmos” (Nietzsche and Whitehead, Deleuze and Bennett) in order to propose a view of creative (“teleodynamic”) drives that “projects differential degrees of agency into multiple, heterogeneous, interacting systems” generating vibrant assemblages that resemble an open rhizome rather than a closed organism (44). Such rhizomatic connections, in turn, open up conceptions of “freedom,” “consciousness,” and “creativity” that foster what Connolly, echoing Nietzsche again, calls an “ethic of cultivation” (57)—that is, an ethic in which the evolution of a thought, a self, a relation, or a political assemblage is not driven by a solipsistic ego, let alone a reductionist genome, but rather, as Nietzsche puts it, “‘grows up in us like fungus,’” thereby leading the creative thinker to be “‘the gardener … of the plants that grow in him’” (qtd. in Connolly 57).

This ethics of cultivation is further expanded in Chapter 3, “Creativity and the Scars of Being,” which operates a shift of perspective from the creative evolution that roots humans in nature to specific intersubjective relations that bring us back in touch with the body. The main connection forged in this chapter is one between current research on “mirror neurons” in the neurosciences and the “tactics of the self” that operate on unconscious that responds viscerally to fluxes of affective contagion that operate on bodies and minds. Tapping into a conception of the unconscious that is “not organized by repression” (72) but rather, as Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team have shown, has mirroring bodily reflexes (or mimesis) as an empirical manifestation, Connolly zeroes in on what a minor, and often marginalized Nietzschean tradition in critical theory considered the via regia to a mimetic unconscious: namely, mirroring “embodied responses to nonhuman and human agencies that usually fall below the threshold of awareness” (71). The chapter subsequently sets out to establish heterogeneous connections between Alfred North Whitehead’s non-agentic conception of “creativity” (65), Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “instinct” as “socially encoded” (70), and Gilles Deleuze’s diagnostic of the “power of the false” as an unrealized “affect-imbued thought” (79). The political tactic here is to encourage citizens to work actively on the habitual register of cultural life in order to “augment perception of nonhuman beings” (73) and, in the process, “better appreciate how the nexus between creativity, freedom, and presumptive generosity is crucial to critical theory and collective action” (77).

While Chapter 4 sharpens our understanding of the systemic implications of the distributive agency at play in nonhuman amplifiers already mentioned, Chapter 5, “The Politics of Swarming and the General Strike,” most clearly and forcefully advocates for collective political action. Given the book at hand, it should come as no surprise that Connolly does not find an effective tactic for facing the Anthropocene in an ethnocentric vision of anthropos that is literally at the center of the problem. Rather, he finds a mimetic source of inspiration for micropolitics in nonhuman assemblages that constitute what he calls a “swarm.” Honeybees in particular function as the paradigmatic exemplum for people, if not to passively mimic, at least to actively and creatively capture. Although Connolly does not rely on etymologies to support this heterogeneous connection, it is interesting to note that ethnos in Greek originally meant “people” but also “throng” or “swarm of bees.” The connection might not only be linguistic and symbolic but material and biological. Anyway, when honeybees relocate to a new hive they do not immediately swarm in unison. Rather, they send out specialized female “scouts” that explore possible locations and return to assemble other bees, in a progressive expansion predicated on a “decision-making assemblage without central coordinator” (124). Transpose this decentered, yet specialized process of communication from nonhuman to human forms of collaboration, and a “politics of swarming” could potentially emerge in which citizens draw on their specific knowledge in order to generate “pluralist assemblages” at the level of not only the family, schools, and neighborhoods, but also factories, churches, and hospitals. Connolly is here productively reworking Michel Foucault’s conception of the “specific intellectual” by expanding its scope beyond the walls of academia to include all “specific citizens” who can rely on their “expertise and strategic position to call into question rules of normalization” (126). Specific citizens who respond to the everyday challenges of micropolitics might, if assembled, not only “become part of a rhizomatic complex with considerable growth potential” (128); they could also trigger “cross-regional general strikes”—a nonviolent tactic that could effectively spread, by mimetic contagion, across national boundaries and help us, if not to avoid completely, perhaps at least to contain tragic and violent possibilities that loom large on the horizon.

Is the emergence of a general strike realistic? Connolly does not claim that it is. He speaks of an “improbable necessity” instead, and stresses that in view of the acceleration of climate change, “it is wise to scale back utopian images of human perfection while simultaneously upping the ante of militancy against extractive capitalism and the world order it promulgates” (122). True, given the radical individualism endemic to neoliberal capitalism, which already turned culturally embedded instincts of consumption into second nature, Homo sapiens might have a long way to go to come anywhere near honeybees’ collaborative swarming, a model that, while fully immanent, seems at times to occupy the position of an ideal, albeit rhizomatic form of cooperation. And yet, since humans are, nolens volens, mimetic animals driven by mirroring and plastic drives, our instincts are potentially open to creative rewirings shaped by the models that surrounds us. Animal models of swarming could, in principle, open up lines of flight on which the politics of swarming gathers speed, intensity, and momentum.

There is, however, a second, more insidious danger nested in the model of the swarm, a mimetic danger which should be faced in a network society in which scouting is predicated on human, all too human political models that are far from exemplary but whose power of impression is amplified via all kinds of new media endowed with infective potentialities. In fact, while relying on molecular/mimetic modes of communication that include affect, contagion, and mirror neurons, members of a swarm behavior have the potential to turn into its negative, nihilistic, and destructive counterpart—that is, a crowd behavior driven by irrational, exclusionary, violent, and potentially catastrophic actions that spread contagiously across the body politic, generating resentful movements that are not decentered by informed citizens but centered on dangerously misinformed new fascist leaders. And it is precisely at this decisive turning point that we should pause, and hesitate—before a pluralist politics of swarming tips into its negative double: namely, the swarming of fascist mimesis.

This hesitation is internal to the philosophical tradition Connolly convokes. As a careful reader of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who took it upon himself to further their reflections about a pluralist, deterritorializing “cosmos” that is not immune to the territorial danger of “fascism,” Connolly is fully aware that there are at least two sides to the politics of swarming. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (arguably the major source of inspiration for Facing the Planetary): Observe a “swarm (essaim) of bees: here they come as a rumble of soccer players in striped jerseys” (34). Or consider a “swarm (meute) of mosquitos: . . . . Sometimes it is a specific animal that occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack (meute)” (271). The lesson, for Deleuze and Guattari is double: “The rhizome [like the swarm] includes the best and the worst” (8). In the process of becoming animal, then, human swarms or packs can indeed be attracted to mimetic leaders that serve as models for the best and for the worst. Perhaps, then, the pluralism of swarming indicates that Elias Canetti’s influential distinction between crowd and pack (or swarm), on which Deleuze and Guattari draw, might not be as stable as it appears to be—if only because the micropolitics of swarming, characterized by what Canetti calls “men in a state of excitement whose fiercest wish is to be more” (93), can, in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and endlessly rhizomatic new media, potentially gather in the “great number” of the fascist crowd, a mimetic crowd characterized by a “state of absolute equality,” which, as Canetti puts it (echoing a long tradition in crowd psychology), is willing to “accept any goal” (29).¹

Now, in Facing the Planetary Connolly is primarily concerned with the liberating, life-affirmative and revolutionary dimension of the politics of swarming. The emphasis is thus on promoting a horizontal micropolitics of resistance rather than on denouncing the danger of a vertical macropolitics of oppression, on stressing the importance of differentiation of roles rather than on diagnosing the mimetic equality of contagious affects, on promoting active dissent rather than condemning passive submissions. And yet, if we read closely, we see that from the distance characteristic of the specific citizen Connolly senses the disconcerting mimetic efficacy of the pathos of political leaders like Donald Trump to trigger a state of pathological excitement into crowds aspiring to be part of a (new) fascist movement. Writing before the 2016 US presidential election, when few took this possibility seriously, Connolly states, for instance: “today we face the risk of neofascistic reactions to the perils of climate change” (131), adding crucially that the working class “respond viscerally together to the body language, thinly veiled threats, and aggressions of Donald Trump at a campaign rally” (73). The lesson internal to this (un)timely diagnostic is as ancient as it is fundamental. Mimetic behavior, just like the mythic tales that incite it, cuts both ways, depending on the model we mirror: if it can potentially turn a specific citizen into a model of resistance at a distance from power, it can also turn a democratic assemblage into a neofascist crowd under the hypnotic power of a leader’s pathos. Hence the need for what Nietzsche called a “pathos of distance” (12) to diagnose the spiraling loops generated by the swarming of mimesis.

In a sense, then, what we see at play in the politics of swarming brings us back to the mythic insights with which Facing the Planetary starts. Just as ancient myths can be convoked to challenge the modern myth of sociocentric progress, a politics of swarming can effectively be assembled to counter the politics of fascist crowds. As what used to be considered an exemplary democracy is now led backwards to reproduce nationalist, racist, sexist, territorial, militarist, and anti-environmental myths (or lies)—while at the same time becoming increasingly vulnerable to the swirl of catastrophic hurricanes of unprecedented magnitude—cross-regional strikes perhaps have the potential to turn from an “improbable necessity” into a necessary probability. “Situations,” Connolly foresees, “can arise when radical modes of opposition to prevailing practices become imperative” (58). We are now inevitably entangled in such human and nonhuman situations that give speed, substance, and power to the Whirlwind of the Anthropocene. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election and his subsequent rapid withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, we can also sense that a minor swarm in favor of environmental forces can be slowed down by mimetic crowds subjected to a politically dominant anti-environmental ideology. Either way, we’d better face it: we are all nolens volens, entangled in the catastrophic forces induced by rapid anthropogenic climate change that casts such a long shadow on the Anthropocene.

If the voice speaking from Facing the Planetary tactically emphasizes the revolutionary power of the politics of swarming, readers of Connolly’s protean work should have no reason to fear a univocal diagnostic. Quite the contrary. In a deft inversion of perspective that furthers tragic possibilities already incipient in Facing the Planetary, Connolly’s new book, Aspirational Fascism—which appeared with the speed of a lightning bolt—already provides a timely and illuminating diagnostic of the swarming of mimetic, all too mimetic forces that now cast a shadow on democratic ideals. It is also an invitation to assemble a plurality of voices to counter new forms of fascism—and side with The Planet.

Acknowledgment

This review is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 716181, HOM—Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism).

Footnotes

1. I have argued elsewhere that, prior to Canetti, a marginalized mimetic tradition that includes fields as diverse as crowd psychology (Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde), continental philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille), literature (Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence), and psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Trigant Burrow) had insightfully diagnosed the propensity of crowds to capitulate to the hypnotic will-to-power of fascist leaders. See Lawtoo, Phantom.

Works Cited

• Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
• Connolly, William E. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Duke UP, 2017.
• —. Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. U of Minnesota P, 2017.
• Connolly, William, and Nidesh Lawtoo. “Rhetoric, Fascism, and the Planetary: A Conversation between Nidesh Lawtoo and William Connolly.” The Contemporary Condition, 9 June 2017, http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.de/2017/07/rhetoric-fascism-and-planetary.html.
• Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” IGBP Newsletter, No. 41, 2000, pp. 17-18.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, Continuum, 1987.
• Lawtoo, Nidesh. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. Michigan State UP, 2013.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith, Oxford UP, 1996.

Tracy Lassiter (bio)
University of New Mexico-Gallup

A review of Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Stone is a book to engage with on one of those days: a day when something happens to make you feel your age, or when a series of mundanities is sufficient to wear you out, or when banality or harsh weather makes you crave something poetic and imaginative. Read some passages from Stone and before long you compare your human age against lithic formation. Or read it to recognize that the mundanities that wear on you are even more fleeting than your life, and question whether they’re truly worth your exhaustion. Pick up Stone to ponder lines such as this one: “A dense nexus of unpredictable relation-making, stone discloses the enchantment inherent to things, the powers of which cannot be reduced to history, use value, contextual significance, or culture” (165). Decide for yourself if you agree that this is so, and to what degree.

How wonderful, to pause at the idea of the enchantment inherent to things. Cohen’s lyrical style makes its way into your thinking with statements like these, and soon you find yourself taking life’s matters at a slower, more considered pace. More importantly, Stone is, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen admits, “something of a thought experiment, attempting to discern in the most mundane of substances a liveliness” (6). A Medievalist by training, Cohen mobilizes the belief in rock as a living entity to which we are connected in holistic ways:

Medieval writers knew well that the world has never been still . . . [H]umans may dream a separation from nature, may strive to exalt themselves from the recalcitrance of stone, but remain earth formed from earth, living upon the earth through alliance with earthen matter, returning at death to earth again. (6)

In contrast with contemporary literary scholarship that focuses on the post-human, the cybernetic, and the dystopic, Stone reminds us of our fundamental terrestrial and lithic connection, a connection that begins with the very composition of our bones. In this and other ways, Cohen wishes to remind us that stone is never completely inert. It remains a living substance in some regards, even though our comparatively short lifespan alongside lithic formations means we often fail to apprehend this. Cohen’s book follows similar object studies he has undertaken, such as those included in Inhuman Nature, an anthology of essays based on an “ecologies of the inhuman” roundtable held in 2012.

Stone‘s text is often as dense as its namesake. It forces you to move through it slowly, in a style reminiscent of glacial creep or of the time it takes water to erode a rock face. This is no accident. As Cohen states in the introduction, “Because of its density, extensiveness, tempo, and force, there is something in rock that is actively unknowable, something that will not surrender itself to stabilities…. In that reproach inheres a trigger to human creativity and a provocation to cross-ontological fellowship” (8). Departing from other texts like Manuel DeLanda’s “Inorganic Life,” Cohen is interested in recognizing stone as an ally in humanity’s long history of material production; Stone wants to remind us that nature is not separate and apart from human life. Thus, in Stone we see the geological, the ontological, the material, and the epistemological. It’s a large undertaking, but one that Cohen handles thoughtfully, using literary and cultural-studies analyses to help readers gain a perspective of geologic time and relative human existence.

Earth’s cosmological history is difficult to grasp beyond the superficial understanding that its age contains a lot of zeroes. It’s like trying to get one’s head around the national debt: thinking in terms of trillions is rather abstract until the figure is fully written out, down to the fourteenth digit. Likewise, it’s difficult to apprehend Earth’s formation and evolution from the perspective of our own comparatively recent emergence from the primordial soup. Cohen uses cultural references, including to literature and architecture, to help us realize that long view because he connects human experience with the terrestrial. While geology as a field attempts to give us a sense of Earth’s ancient past by demarcating epochs, strata, and materials, Cohen’s approach is humanistic, not scientific. He moves from the teleologic to the ontologic, linking stone’s history with moments from human history, so our sense of the eons becomes more discernible. Reckoning with such scales of time can be unsettling, as Cohen acknowledges when he writes, “Stones are the partners with which we build the epistemological structures that may topple upon us” (4). Cohen believes it’s important to showcase “an aeonic companionship of the ephemeral and the enduring, the organic and the material” (17). Cohen offers us an important reminder that the earth will survive long past us. Scientists and others¹ argue that considering the Anthropocene and its consequences requires an epistemological shift, one that notes that climatic and other environmental processes, as well as geopolitical borders, are irrelevant. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have made an irreversible mark on the global biosphere. Stone reminds us that lithic materiality is largely immune to this impact, despite our interaction with and use of it.

As we ponder the lithic, so much that makes us human becomes evident. We use stone to build houses and cathedrals; we use stone to heal and to punish; we mine stones; we use stones for exchange, memorials and recreation; to sculpt, to dam waters, to pave roads. So many things that reflect our cultural–our human–values begin with stone, yet this book reminds us that stone will endure beyond us and any human society that interacted with it. Cohen’s study presents examples that reveal the myriad ways we have connected with stone throughout our history. He sets up the book’s chapters not chronologically or by genre but according to poetic ways he considers stone–in a chapter subtitled “the weight of the past,” for example, or “a heart unknown.” I especially enjoy his analysis of events or stories we’ve long heard about but never paid particular attention to with regard to stone’s role. For example, in his chapter “Soul,” Cohen analyzes Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, noting the scholarship that connects the ancient rocks in the tale to the Welsh people whom Chaucer never acknowledges; instead, he relegates them to a past that pre-dates him. Such instances of “Chaucerian appropriations occur only to petrify the British history from which they are plundered . . . What stirred for a moment—geological and indigenous history, the possibility of enduring geological and indigenous life—is stilled into drowned stone” (199-200). The erasure of the Welsh from Chaucer’s text is one example of how cultures have been written out of—or used to “petrify”—literary or cultural history. In another essay, Cohen explains that, to medieval citizens, minerals and gems were far from inert or immobile; rather, stones could influence the world and even sought alliances with organic beings (“Stories” 59). In the example above, Cohen revives Chaucer’s stone from its “drowned” past by reminding us of stone’s “in/organic alliance” with the human and, thus, the latent stories it may contain (Stone 198).

Other of Cohen’s arguments leave me less interested as when, for example, he uses his personal travel as an opportunity to discuss stone. In the book’s conclusion, Cohen describes visiting Iceland, because to “journey Iceland is to traverse a landscape thick with story, a topography known already through medieval sagas” (253). Cohen has visited Iceland, he claims, in order to finish writing the book, but besides noting that the “[h]uman trace is far more recent” there than in landscapes in Ireland, Britain, and France, he concludes that due to its volcanic activity and mountains of ice, “Iceland reminds that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient” (255-56). Cohen references volcanic activity because it suggests stone’s “liveliness,” and he sees in the rocky terrain “art catalytic to the project’s instigation” (255). However, his analysis ends here without providing a literary connection–to, say, one of the Icelandic sagas he mentions–that makes reading the book so informative. Instead, the connection of the human to the lithic is glossed, with Cohen remarking simply: “Except for the occasional remains of a farmstead’s hearth, fire and stone collaborating to send story forward, the landscape holds few lithic communication devices” (256). After insisting so long that the lithic seeks alliance with the organic in “cross-ontological fellowship,” it seems odd that Cohen would focus on where that connection is absent. Here, stone is simply a remnant, marking its temporary usefulness in a home.

Additionally, Cohen strays from his purpose with some of his analyses. For example, he includes a scene from History of English Affairs where a passerby hears a party taking place inside a small hill. The traveler is welcomed into the party by the revelers, and as soon as he drinks the cup that’s offered to him, he flees, taking the goblet with him. Cohen poses a series of rhetorical questions concerning the narrative—e.g., “What would have unfolded if the drunken traveler had joined the celebration instead of pilfering the tableware?”—yet the episode has little to do with stone per se except that the celebration is held underground (204). The goblet is made of an unknown material, which perhaps could be a reference to an unusual clay or other earthen material, yet the passage seems to focus on “otherworldliness” and the subterranean as a potential portal to such a place. In contrast to many other instances where Cohen makes the lithic central to the literary or cultural encounter, it seems the role stone plays in this event is oblique. He is retelling the story and so has no control over its content. However, had the goblet been created from a particular stone that was believed to contain certain powers, or had it included precious gems, it would have seemed more in line with earlier examples. Cohen uses the scene to suggest that the hillock has been transformed “from a local landmark of no great significance to a space at once alien and racialized” given the multiplicity of partiers (205). Yet this seems a tenuous connection to stone, which otherwise features so substantially in his other analyses.

Stone appears at a literary time when humanity’s connection to natural and virtual worlds is diversely fictionalized and analyzed. As Cohen states, Stone can, therefore, serve as “an interlocutor in some lively critical conversations: ecotheory and environmental studies, posthumanism, medieval studies, and the new materialism” (16). The recent Dirt: A Love Story also focuses on material earth. The scientists, authors, artists, and others who contributed to that anthology consider soil from myriad perspectives, just as Cohen does with the lithic. Like Dirt, Stone‘s various perspectives provide scholars with multiple ways to academically, morally, and philosophically consider the natural world that surrounds us yet remains unseen. A similar text is Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, a transdisciplinary anthology that invites readers to “encounter ants, lichens, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste” and other forms humans share the planet with in this environmental stage. But scholars have studied the relationship between organic and inorganic life for decades, analyzing how they work together in the sort of alliance medieval citizens envisioned. In “Nonorganic Life,” for example, DeLanda describes the “[s]elf-organizing processes [that] drive the geological cycle,” and argues for taking the time to study rocks, which appear to remain stable and permanent but really contain “migrating atoms” and fissures that constantly form and propagate (142). Studying these processes is said to allow us to gain the “‘wisdom of the rocks,’ a way of listening to a creative, expressive flow of matter for guidance on how to work with our own organic strata” (143). What distinguishes Stone from DeLanda’s work is Cohen’s sole focus on stone and his emphasis on the organic-inorganic alliance. He combines his knowledge of Medieval paradigms with scientific scholarship to show how this alliance might be manifest, such as with crystals or other stones that have healing powers. The scope of Cohen’s material, from biblical texts to modern film, demonstrates how much work like this remains unexplored.

Roger Caillois published The Writing of Stones in 1970, two decades before DeLanda’s work. In Writing, he analyzes rock samples and cross-sections and ascribes to them an ability to tell stories, create microcosmic landscape “paintings,” and depict planetary orbits. Caillois offers what he calls “a series of reflections on what I have learned from familiarity with certain stones,” interpretations that seem to be based less on rationality than on “mysticism”—or the simple human impulse for pattern recognition (ix, xiv). Cohen’s work is more rational than Caillois’s in that he shows the long interconnection between the human and the stone through minerals and elements, but also through history and culture. He doesn’t impose humanistic interpretations on geologic formations, like seeing a “landscape painting” in mineral formations, as Caillois does. However, he does seem to take from Caillois a sense of the poetic. While Caillois states, “Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so” (1-2), for Cohen “the lithic offers passage into action, a catalyst, a cause” (5). It is easy to believe that Cohen took inspiration from Caillois, and indeed his text, like DeLanda’s, appears in Stone‘s bibliography.

If the future is more cybernetic, our connection with the earth will become even more profound as metals and elements-based wiring support human life systems more fundamentally and organically than they do now. As scholars consider the Anthropocene, the posthuman, the virtual and the natural worlds, Stone reminds us of our connection to the lithic—its presence in our life and our alliance with it. If one were to ask Cohen about our human-lithic connection, I imagine he would say it’s a beautiful thing. After all, as he notes, “We love stone, and the marks we make upon stone, and the marks stone makes upon us. Stone insists not because it is so different from we who build families of whatever kind against cataclysm, but because of its deep affinity, its enduring tectonicity . . . its strangely inhuman (I don’t know what else to call it) love” (73).

Footnotes

1. For example, see Crutzen and Stoermer and Schellhuber (cited in Peter Verburg, et al.) and Louis Kotzé.

Works Cited

• Caillois, Roger. The Writing of Stones. Translated by Barbara Bray, U of Virginia P, 1985.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Stories of Stone.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 2010, pp. 56-63. doi:10.1057/pmed.2009.1.
• DeLanda, Manuel. “Nonorganic Life.” Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone, 1992, pp. 129-167.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elain Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Martin Harries (bio)
University of California Irvine

A review of Rounthwaite, Adair. Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Audiences speak. This assumption is essential to the method and to the argument of Adair Rounthwaite’s Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York, and around that assumption the book’s considerable strengths and occasional weaknesses constellate. In her commitment to pursuing archival traces of audience responses, Rounthwaite produces a textured account of a carefully selected set of works. Her pragmatic attachment to what individuals say or have said about their experiences as part of an audience also raises questions about what it means to speak for, or to speak as, an audience. Do audiences speak?

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Rounthwaite is interested in art that foregrounds the potential for participation. “Participatory” might seem redundant when applied to art, but here the word takes a strong form. Participation is at once a description for the kind of engagement audiences commit, and a goal to which certain kinds of art aspire: participation is responding to art as doing or praxis– or, at the very least, as dialogue. Asking the Audience, then, describes both the mode of certain kinds of participatory art and the method of this book, which is to ask members of audiences to speak about what they thought about events in which they participated. Rounthwaite’s focus is compellingly narrow. Her objects are collectively curated exhibits put together in 1988 and 1989 by the Manhattan collective Group Material, and a similar exhibition from 1989 by the artist Martha Rosler. These exhibits happened at the Dia Center, and marked departures both for the artists, who unusually affiliated themselves with the wealthy institution, and for the Dia, which had been, and largely remains, dedicated to a more austere abstract and minimalist tradition, what Rounthwaite calls Dia’s “antisocial sublime aesthetic” (77). She is especially interested in the “town-hall meetings”–Rounthwaite herself uses quotation marks when first using the term–that were part of these exhibits. At these town-hall meetings, the artists invited people to talk about issues relevant to their exhibits, including education in New York City, homelessness, and AIDS. Archived recordings of these meetings are crucial to what Rounthwaite calls her “archivally substantiated understanding of audience experience” (7).

A critique of existing art history grounds her practice: “Contemporary art history is dominated by accounts in which scholars and critics align themselves with the radical goals of the artists without paying equally close attention to how those goals turn out in practice” (11). Close attention to the archival traces of “audience experience,” she contends, can illuminate “how these goals turn out.” The projects on which she focuses are notable for the sheer volume and remarkable richness of the archives that concern them, but surely she is right that more scholars could seek out and pay close attention to more extensive archives of responses to works beyond the reviews of a few privileged critics. (This criticism applies well beyond her field of art history.) For Rounthwaite, this task is also urgently specific to her objects because the kind of participatory art she studies explicitly makes the claim that audiences or viewers participate– and yet rarely do the archives of such participation receive much scholarly attention. Participatory art, she writes, “confronts the scholar with living people” (25). That these works anticipate what Nicolas Bourriaud has dubbed “relational aesthetics” to describe the practice of such artists as Thomas Hirschhorn is also important to the stakes of this argument and points beyond the moment of Group Material and Rosler. Rounthwaite, indeed, sees this moment as an important precedent for a range of art practices since the late 1980s, the period on which she focuses.

Living people confront the scholar, but in what form? Mediated in what ways? Rounthwaite’s unpublished archive includes two main sources: recordings and other written, printed, and photographic remains; and interviews conducted and emails exchanged in the years leading up to the publication of her book. Her archive, then, is substantially divided between records in several media from almost forty years ago and interviews conducted thirty-five or more years later. The contemporary records illustrate the contentious and sometimes tumultuous exchanges around these pieces. Rounthwaite’s documentation of interventions at the town-hall meetings is especially intriguing; the recordings she consulted show that participants sometimes responded in rebarbative ways. Her discussion of the artist Cenén’s contribution to the town meeting on “Homelessness: Conditions, Causes, Cures”–a contribution that included a scream–is a vivid example of the thick description that follows from her painstaking listening and attention to archival traces of powerful affect (67-70).

A central term here, “participation,” remains under-theorized. Or it may be that the term is multiply over-theorized: so many accounts of what participation might be attach themselves to the term that one is unsure in the end what the word means. Participation involves the generation of information (8, citing Hans Haacke); participation is a matter of co-presence (57) and “live input” (87); of “an affective materiality generated by the audience” and of the connections produced by affect (23); of sheer proximity (64); and so on. It is around the ideal of participation that Rounthwaite does not escape the critical trap she describes so well: assumptions that stem from the critic’s alignment with “the radical goals of the artists” she studies are taken as axiomatic. A longer passage illustrates both the skepticism that Rounthwaite brings to her analysis and the axiomatic thinking underlying it:

On the one hand, the collaboration between Group Material and elite Dia … raised legitimate questions about how the project’s socially engaged address related to its institutional frame. Group Material members, with their own investments and positions, also retained a privileged role relative to audiences. On the other hand, Group Material’s choice to set in motion a democratizing process by bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience staged the impossibility of ever achieving experiential satisfaction relative to that goal. What exactly does a democratizing process feel like? … Not only does pedagogical-art-practice-as-open-ended-communication resist measurement in terms of concrete outcomes, but the participatory artwork collapses any distinction between the work itself and how it feels to participants. (96)

The axiom shared by artists and critic here is the belief that, for all its faults, Group Material had put a “democratizing process” in motion. But is “bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience” itself such a process? Shared affect becomes itself a measure of potential praxis. The notion of the collapse of the distinction between the artwork and “how it feels to participants” recalls the phantasm of theatrical participation that Jacques Rancière critiques in “The Emancipated Spectator.” Rancière’s description of the desire driving much theatrical activity after Brecht and Artaud applies also to Group Material: “Even if the playwright or director does not know what she wants the spectator to do, she at least knows one thing: she knows that she must do one thing–overcome the gulf separating activity from passivity” (Rancière 12). Rancière’s intervention challenges just this opposition:

Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms the distribution of positions. (13)

Rancière’s recuperation of viewing does not solve the problem of how to theorize the politics of embodied art forms, but his questioning of the desire for the transformation of spectatorship into action, and of the binary between passive spectatorship and salutary action that underwrites this desired transformation, might have provided a way to rethink the theory of participation here. Rounthwaite never claims that attendance at one of the town meetings was simply political action as such, and she is bracingly self-conscious about her own desires for what these works might have been (e.g., 189). An oscillation between descriptions that assume a democratizing politics and theoretical passages skeptical of these very assumptions is a mark of the critical self-reflexivity of this book; this oscillation is also, sometimes, frustrating.

Partly because of the archival richness of their documentation, the town meetings are the focus of much of Rounthwaite’s book. But one senses that she also devotes so much space to them because they seem to her the most vivid demonstration of “the democratizing impulse.” Around the town meeting especially a few terms cluster that indicate the shape of the problem: democracy, social space, community, exchange, dialogue. The artist Tim Rollins’s boyhood in a small town in Maine appears to have inspired the use of the town-meeting form (87). No doubt there is some danger in romanticizing this political form– and Rounthwaite might have thought more about the history of, and fantasies surrounding, this form of local government–but from the start, the “town meeting” staged in downtown Manhattan can only distantly resemble the town meeting in a small town. Do town meetings have “audiences” at all? What town met under the auspices of Group Material, and what decisions could it make? In what were those present participating? The works of Group Material and Rosler, Rounthwaite writes, “mark the first public emergence at Dia of an explicit articulation of the importance of audience conceived as a broad, nonspecialist public” (33). What emerges, in public, is a conception of the public: the almost tautological shape of that formulation indicates a blurring of the difference between the desire for a certain public and actually reaching or producing that public. Some pages later, the words of a grant application submitted to the NEA by Dia are somewhat jarring: “while the primary audience must necessarily be the New York art community in all their diversity, artists and the art world as they are represented across the country will be involved as much as possible” (61). Is this town the art world? What system represents “artists and the art world”? While Rounthwaite is alert to the contradictions that might underwrite such engagements with publics, she largely remains committed to an ideal of art as a “goad” to democratization: her implicit argument that these works achieve that ideal is not fully convincing. This commitment is most visible often not when she reflects theoretically, but when she describes pieces: sometimes description, a mode she champions, erases theoretical caveats and complexities, as if the works had subsumed difficulties of which she is otherwise aware.

The unexamined axiom that underlies Rounthwaite’s project as a whole is the association of other forms of aesthetic experience with non-participation; these forms are even, simply, outside of public experience. “For Group Material, outreach and dialogue were the artwork” (110). By contrast, and thinking immediately of the other kinds of work Dia sponsors, she writes: “the minimalist sublime that forms its aesthetic heart is conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (108). Richard Serra is Rounthwaite’s representative figure of this anti-public sublime aesthetic (108). There is no doubt something to this, but the history of what counts as public and what doesn’t is a complicated one. In the decade leading up to the experiments of Group Material documented in this book, Serra was, indeed, a key figure in debates about public art in New York: the controversy around the destruction of his Tilted Arc, a massive sculpture in the city’s Federal Plaza, was, to use Rounthwaite’s terms, about whether that “minimalist sublime” was indeed “conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (cf. Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk). Surely those who dismantled the sculpture agreed that it was practically opposed to their conception of what public art should be and of what “the” public is. The “outreach and dialogue” Group Material and Rosler fostered and the kind of publics that interest Rounthwaite are of a very different order from what Serra imagined as the public of his monumental public art. All the same, it might be more useful to think of antinomies between kinds of publics–about publics and counter-publics (Warner)–rather than asserting that one aesthetic is plainly “antonymous to publicness as such” while another encourages it.

The ideal of the town meeting is inextricable from Rounthwaite’s notion of what makes a real public: “The town-hall meetings held for Democracy created a relational plane for live social interaction at the heart of the work itself” (201). The exhibit “ran from September 1988 to January 1989 and was followed by Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here . . . from January to April, 1989″ (1). There were four separate town meetings during this period; the archives of those meetings are very rich. But these vivid records of speech and dialogue also raise the question of what has become of all those experiences that left no trace in the archives, of the visitors who came to Dia when town meetings were not happening, and did not attend the meetings, or of those who attended them and did not speak. Were they excluded from “the heart of the work”? Did they not participate?

Works Cited

• Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009, pp. 1-23.
• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.
• Weyergraf-Serra, Clara, and Martha Buskirk, editors. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. MIT P, 1991.

Carol Colatrella (bio)
Georgia Institute of Technology

A review of O’Gorman, Marcel. Necromedia. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

My engagement with information technology encompasses necessity and distraction. Times I am frustrated by my inability to stop engaging with social media alternate with periods of appreciation for technical capacities to increase my productivity and to be aware of unfolding events. Most recently, I learned from Facebook that a college classmate has a friend who inherited a Miele vacuum cleaner from Jean Stapleton; my former classmate posts amusing collages of the deceased actress, his dog, and the vacuum. His creations prompted me to think about whether my household’s Miele vacuum will last beyond my death: “will I take care of my vacuum so that it has a life beyond mine?” This question bedeviling me is a quotidian, overly personal, and rather morbid version of the one posed in the publicity release for Necromedia: “Why does technology play such an important role in our culture?” Marcel O’Gorman’s latest book falls in a genre of critical theory works that consider how technology and cultural anxiety become linked in digital and material objects and theories about them.

Examples of similar critical works include Mary Anne Moser’s and Douglas MacLeod’s Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (1996), Peter Lunenfeld’s Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (2001), Margot Lovejoy’s Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age (2004), Richard Rinehart’s and Jon Ippolito’s Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (2014), and Melissa Langdon’s The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalisation (2014). These texts, some anthologies and some monographs, look at the ways in which digital technologies and art are enabled and constrained by their technological and social legacies. Other recent works in media studies discuss the convergence of media technologies–computer, television, mobile phone, e-reader, printed book, video game–in identifying design conventions and opportunities such as Janet Murray’s Inventing the Medium (2012) and in distinguishing specific products within the field of media archaeology such as Augusta Rohrbach’s Thinking Outside the Book (2014) and Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces (2014). These critical texts provide systematic considerations of digital media, explaining the interrelationships of design aesthetics and cultural values and referencing humanistic debates about the evolution and immortality of technology; however, they skirt the central topic of Necromedia, which provides a distinctive account of digital technologies related to human fears of death.

O’Gorman’s book focuses on technology’s abilities to distract us from mortality and to help us withstand its blows. A volume in the Minnesota series Posthumanities, Necromedia alternates the author’s accounts of diverse digital media projects, including his own, with his careful theorizing about how technology and culture are intertwined in our own day around our interest in death. Chapters in Necromedia build on concepts from media theory, posthuman animal studies, and the philosophy of technology, including object-oriented ontology, to pay “close attention to two universal and inevitable elements of human being: death and technicity” (4). Although O’Gorman explains that technology falsely promises us “immortality,” a state “facilitated by our technologically mediated ability to vanquish time and space” (10), he also offers diverse examples of how technology enables humans, consumers, to manage the finitude of human life, at least virtually.

Since popular culture’s fascination with death and the after-life serves as the basis for many narratives, O’Gorman discusses popular television programs looking at death. He claims that “on any given night I could watch a death program on cable television” (38). He sets aside gangster shows like The Sopranos, pointing instead to shows that depict the business of death: Dead Like Me (2003), a Showtime series about “a lovable grim reaper”; Six Feet Under (2001), a HBO 2001 show about “a terminally dysfunctional group of undertakers”; Family Plots (2004), an A&E series about “a quirky and lovable family of undertakers”; and the HBO mini-series Angels in America about the AIDS crisis in New York (38). O’Gorman also notices a broader set of media and popular cultural products that “register technological anxieties”; he coins “the term necromedia as a philosophical neologism to describe the relationship between death and technology” and uses it “to describe films, literature, and other cultural artifacts” (39). Necromedia is a category including murder mysteries, procedurals, hospital drama, or shows incorporating supernatural figures such as zombies, vampires, or ghost hunters. Following Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2004), O’Gorman considers cultural anxieties about death in postmodernist theories related to spectacle (Guy Debord), surveillance apparatus (Michel Foucault), and hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard). The book’s comprehensive bibliography and useful topical index enable readers to trace references to these and other theorists.

O’Gorman describes the development and reception of some fascinating digital art projects, including his Border Disorder based on filming his border crossing from Canada to the US in the days following 9/11 (chapter 2), his research presentation Dreadmill performed while he ran on a treadmill (chapter 4), and his collaboration Myth of the Steersman, which incorporated restoring a cedar-and-canvas canoe as part of an exhibition about the disappearance of “the iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson” (chapter 8). Discussions of his own art and of media art created by others are touchstones for O’Gorman’s philosophical meditations on technology. Addressing contemporary cultural concerns about terrorism, political inequality, and sustainability, along with reminding us of historical circumstances affecting the development of media technologies, O’Gorman’s blending of art and media criticism with philosophical, historical, and cultural analyses could become tedious in its piling up of references; however, the book’s compelling personal anecdotes and its rigorous, careful analysis of art, media, and culture sustain its focus on the question of how technology staves off and reminds us of death.

A number of critical theorists and philosophers inform O’Gorman’s account. He finds inspiration in the work of Ernest Becker and draws on Cary Wolfe’s discussions of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the specter applied to recording, David Wills’s recognition that such an archive enables human memory, and Bernard Stiegler’s claim “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized technologically” (12), which is a claim for immortality. A discussion of the film American Beauty becomes “an excellent backdrop for investigating the role that technology plays in the cultural pathologies laid out by Kierkegaard and Becker” (43), while acknowledging the technophobia surrounding the development of the telephone. O’Gorman describes our current “collective consciousness”: “Technological gadgets of all sorts—driven by an economy that capitalizes on human attention and abides by the law of progress—are designed to distract us from any sort of existential contemplation,” a claim that builds on Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technologies as “social extensions of the body” and Sherry Turkle’s conclusion that “individuals seek to be alone and distracted” (47). Later in the book, O’Gorman describes Nicholas Carr’s claims that the printing revolution caused cognitive changes in human consciousness and that our current preoccupation with “the Internet, which fosters sound bites, video clips, text browsing, and hyperlinking, is transforming our print-oriented brains” (144). Carr’s claims about the inability of students to read whole books match what Katherine Hayles and O’Gorman see in their classrooms.

O’Gorman has a clear political goal for his readers: to resist “the commodification of attention demanded by a capitalist technocultural system” (24). He regards Necromedia as proposing “a technical therapeutics that treats the toxicity inherent in our current technocultural hero system” (25). Applying “the cognitive habits of humanities research” could be part of the prescription, while another element involves encouraging humanities scholars to “learn to think and work more like artists,” without sacrificing traditional humanities research (143). In addition to paying “attention to language, deep reading, and history” as Alan Liu recommends, O’Gorman argues in the chapter titled “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum” that “applied media theory takes shape through an integration of phenomenology and poesis, research and creation” (148).

The final chapter of Necromedia, “From Dust to Data” builds on the book’s preceding considerations of thinking about things and making things to take up “a discussion of the relationship between terror, horror, technoculture, and contemporary philosophies of being, including, but not limited to object-oriented ontology” (172). O’Gorman connects ethical concerns about the non-human (who speaks for the dust?) while distinguishing between terror and horror. He does so by tracing the history of the distinction from Anne Radcliffe and Edmund Burke to Adrianna Cavarero’s comparing suicide bombing and the Holocaust and to Cary Wolfe’s statement agreeing with Cora Diamond that nonhuman animals should not be thought of “as bearers of interests or rights holders but rather as something much more compelling: fellow creatures” (184).

The ethical dilemmas raised by digital technologies are shaped by and shape human understanding of one’s own identity when confronted by death, whether real or virtual, and one’s sense of social responsibility. For example, Michael Nitsche’s 2008 Video Game Spaces describes a video gamer who establishes a “growing relationship with the game world” by playing Silent Hill (Kitao and Gallo 1999), a game that “takes the player into ever-deeper pits of horror,” forcing one of Nitsche’s friends to decide whether to “kill” a “formerly friendly game-controlled character” that turned into a “zombie character” (47); the gamer found this dilemma tested his human capacities. Evoking Anastasia Salter’s What Is Your Quest? (2014), a history of quest games, Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel The Female Persuasion (2018) provides an imagined example of a compelling video game that would bring a player in contact with a deceased loved one. Wolitzer’s character Corey Pinto pitches his idea for a game to a prospective angel investor: “What if you were on a quest to find the person you love, who’s died? . . . You search and search, trying to find the person through dreams. . . . through whatever means you can find. . . But in the game version, in our version, which for the moment I’m calling SoulFinder, you might actually stand a chance of finding them” (418). The prospect of using technological mechanisms to overcome death has been the basis of fictions since Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), which represents the deadly consequences of a budding scientist’s attempt to create life within a plot that connects birth and death. If we accept Janet Murray’s persuasive claim that “All of human media can be seen as an elaboration of the baby’s gesture of pointing at something in order to draw the caregiver’s attention to it” (14), we recognize that a caregiving relationship, with its ethical obligations, is foundational for developing and appreciating the context, content, and design of media.

Such concerns about how the prospect of death affects human relationships and ethics are woven through O’Gorman’s work. In sum, Necromedia offers an elegantly argued account of how technological innovations and cultural preoccupations with mortality define humanity in the age of the posthuman. The author threads discussion of other media theorists, artists, and philosophers whose ideas help contextualize the provocative digital media projects showcased in alternating chapters. Necromedia provides a useful overview of digital humanities practice and theory that promotes the value of incorporating artistic creativity into humanistic study of where technology and culture meet. The book has helped me to better understand the needs driving many of us to use social media and teaches that being playful with media–creating, constructing, and curating it–ought to be the drivers that guide our engagement with technology.

James Belflower (bio)
Siena College

Abstract

The psychoanalytic trope of “unsettlement” in American postmodern documentary poetry typically aims to narrate the emotional intractability of historical records into an impasse: a position of emotional unintelligibility designed to interrupt a reader’s conventional modes of empathic identification with trauma. However, the affective dimension of this impasse—and its capacity to reconfigure the emotional negotiations required for empathic response—remains largely under-examined. This essay theorizes that impasse by arguing that Charles Reznikoff’s documentary poem Holocaust rewrites it as an affective surface on which emotional contracts are unsettled by a textual materiality inflected by affect’s somatic “touch.”

Can a poem have a surface? Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that it can. He frames a mingling of sensory surface and sign as a system formed in part from language’s material dynamism: “words are nature and matter, order of place, changing place and force” (Fortino 113). Words swell and undulate, pressing on consciousness and touching us in a very physical way: “Words exert pressure. They go straight ahead of meaning, pressing at its sides: they sway themselves. The poem is a swaying of words” (Fortino 113). At the distended thresholds of the poem, the motion and matter of language’s pressure disclose its lively materiality and transmute it into sensory expression; the poem is a place where “words are no longer just words, language is no longer just language. It touches its limit, and displays it” (Nancy, Finite 28). In this essay, I ask what constitutes the sensory pressures of this limit and how it displays the material maneuvers of language that “move” the reader in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), an exemplar of one form of American postmodern documentary poetics. American postmodern documentary poetry “moves” the reader by drawing attention to the materiality of this limit as a genre trope.¹ In this essay, genre operates through Lauren Berlant’s definition of it as “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take” (847).² For Reznikoff’s Holocaust, and documentary poetry generally, the material of this affectual contract consists of found text from corporate, governmental, and/or institutional archives. The text is typically reorganized and scored, then juxtaposed with more figurative language to narrate and excavate “diverse constituencies”: alternative discourses, emotions, and social injustices from within the unspoken or silenced voices that linger in the historical record.³

The sensory limit of the documentary contract is equally defined by narrating maneuvers—the motions of Nancy’s “sway”—which predict that readers will undergo processes of emotional signification. Chief among these processes is the event of emotional emplotment: the organization of linguistic trajectories that attempt to forecast a reader’s emotional response to the text. Although emplotment plays a large role in much postmodern documentary poetry, the techniques I focus on gravitate toward the fragmentary end of the spectrum, where the cause and effect sequences common to conventional forms of emotional emplotment are disrupted. Though diverse in their approaches, poets working in this vein (such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Robert Fitterman, and Mark Nowak) generally employ linguistic configurations that attempt to “unsettle” vicarious adoptions of the victim(s’) subject position, no matter how mundane or extreme the subject matter.⁴ However, these approaches often result in an emotional impasse, a threshold at which the narrative of emotional identification is occluded by language’s failure to voice it. For much documentary poetry, this event of the “unspeakable” is ultimately designed to elicit empathy from the reader. However, because this impasse is typically theorized linguistically, it disregards sensory experiences that remain untranslatable but crucial to the reading event. Encountering such unintelligible emotional impasses, the text seems to suggest, is to realize the breakdown of emotional codification that aims toward empathy and thereby represent trauma’s extremity more accurately. But the emotional impasses predicated on this breakdown are better understood as perceptual contact zones, sensory transactions that ultimately form a surface of affect. Affect is, of course, distinct from emotion; it cannot be intended, but its perceptual atmosphere can be shared socially.⁵ In addition to inflecting matter, its sensory dynamism presses on words and their referents. As Brian Massumi explains, language “can resonate with and amplify [affective] intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant . . . Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static—temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (25-26). For this essay, affect emerges in the way words distend their semantic fields when they are pushed to the limit of their capacity to qualify emotion. By mapping this affective “sway” in the text, I reveal its capacity to inflect alternative forms of transaction between reader and text, and demonstrate how these transactions alter the typically narrow contractual prediction that emotional emplotment must lead either to identification or to unintelligibility.

In Reznikoff’s Holocaust, affective maneuvers are often transversal, splitting referential seams, eroding cause and effect narratives, and flickering after images of violence through presupposed emotional contracts to reveal that the impasses defined by these transactions are not decided, but are yet-to-be-determined experiences, guided as much by asignifying perceptual phenomena as by signifying processes. Holocaust chronicles the Jewish experience of World War Two, from the forced deportation of German Jews in 1933 to the few prisoners and students who escaped to Denmark in 1945. Unlike more popular accounts such as Elie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, Holocaust is composed exclusively of court transcripts from the Nazi Criminal war trails in Nuremberg (1945-46) and the Adolf Eichmann Trial (1960). Although Reznikoff had used similar methods in his two volume Testimony: The United States (1885-1900), he did not reduce that source material as drastically and left much of it in prose. For Holocaust, he employed a meticulous practice of “selecting, editing, scoring, and rewriting” over 100,000 pages of court transcripts (Franciosi 249).⁶ He did not add new imagery or language. Editing consisted mostly of redacting traces of authorial interpretation and judgment from the testimony by eliminating rhetorical embellishments and reducing emotional signals. Using techniques from his early training as a journalist and writer of trial summaries for the law encyclopedia Corpus Juris, he organized much of the testimony into short, pithy scenes, where surprising juxtapositions of time, space, and violence are linked, delinked, and reshaped by the gaps that separate them.

What remains is a book-length poem so stripped of rhetorical appeals to emotion that Reznikoff’s wife, Marie Syrkin, claims it expunges “any subjective outcry” over the violent torture and genocide of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust (Syrkin 64). Paul Auster’s description of the pre-verbal world of Holocaust is comparable, though more generous: Reznikoff’s Holocaust “yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly what it means to say” (161). Robert Alter challenges the book’s purpose, arguing that it lacks the imagination necessary to repsychologize its traumatic history: “the ultimate breakdown of his whole problematic relation to the past is starkly evident in the flattened landscapes of disaster that take the place of round imagined worlds” (132). And David Lehman asserts that Reznikoff “leaves unspoken the emotions” so that a reader “may be counted on to provide [emotion] for himself” (39). Though their diction—”flattens,” “stiff,” “expunged,” and “unspoken”—speaks to their attitude toward Reznikoff’s rhetorical choices, it also implies an empathic emotional structure necessary for approaching the text: emotion that manifests itself through subject/object recognition is “expunged;” emotion cannot be produced in response to a style that does nothing to elicit it, and emotion remains unspoken without imagination. Lacking this emotional architecture, it would seem that Holocaust is flat; it does nothing aesthetically to frame the “round imagined worlds” required to predict empathic encounters. However, by attending to the emergence of affect that resides in these same configurations, I suggest that an empathic encounter confronts the reader with a surface where emotional limits meet affect’s insistent sensibility.

Affect’s Tonal Seams

Throughout Holocaust, Reznikoff stacks tonal registers edge to edge. Like his sentences, these registers operate paratactically, binding and loosening emotional connections to the content like an affective seam. This content is generally presented in a detached tone: almost clinical descriptions of the horrors of daily camp life. For example, the diction in the section titled “Gas Chambers and Gas Trucks” remains relatively impartial in the first two lines of the passage. Its tone is informative and objective, the traditional voice for legal documents designed to reduce tonal fluctuations almost completely. However, because it is the voice of a speaker, we must consider that alternative tones linger, and that they unsettle the objectivity of this narrative of Nazis industrial genocide.

The bodies were thrown out quicklyfor other transports were coming:bodies blue, wet with sweat and urine, legs covered with excrement,and everywhere the bodies of babies and children.Two dozen workers were busyopening the mouths of the dead with iron hooksand with chisels taking out teeth with golden caps;and elsewhere other workers were tearing open the deadlooking for money or jewels that might have been swallowed.And all the bodies were then thrown into the large pits dug near the gas chambersto be covered with sand. (Reznikoff 31)

The passage describes the plundering of Jewish bodies by Sonderkommando, and although it begins impartially, a subtle sense of urgency floats into the speaker’s voice as it indicates that the bodies were thrown out “quickly.” ⁷ This urgency reappears when the speaker describes the “busy” scene where “two dozen workers” dissect the dead for valuables. In both instances, clinical diction describes the decay of the bodies, their color (blue), the types of excrescence that occurred during and after death, and how they were mined for valuables. At first, this visceral content eclipses the subtly urgent tone of the opening passage. However, the frank diction of violent dissection—”opening … with iron hooks,” “chiseling… teeth,” “tearing open”—inflects that urgency with a note of despondence. For this reason, it is difficult to interpret whether the speaker has witnessed so many identical scenes that typical emotional reactions have been exhausted, or if the objective voice of the court glosses other, more subdued tonal timbres in the testimony. In both examples, the objective/despondent tone resonates in part from the generalization of “bodies,” signifying an unknown quantity and identity. However, after the first colon, the coordinating conjunction (“and”) distinguishes specific bodies—”women” and “children”—who are “thrown out” from the transports into an unspecified space, and the tone changes. The awkward syntax of the speaker—who places “everywhere” before identifying specific bodies—delicately contributes to the timbre of despair by amplifying its tone of hopelessness, quelling further emotional motion as the speaker is confronted with the magnitude and rigor of the scene. Despair murmurs again in the final line, a grainy sigh that reverberates into the inevitable future (“to be covered”) with the sound of sand sliding into the mass grave as it covers the dead.

These small modulations of tone stacked using coordinating conjunctions reveal where the seams of emerging emotional structures separate from narrative forms. To put it another way, the tonal sway throughout this scene fluctuates so minimally that it almost completely eliminates emotional expression in the passage. Although tone is minimized, its micro-fluctuations form an intensive series, Gilles Deleuze’s term for a sequence of motions that tend toward a critical instant (Cinema 1 87). As tone minimally emplots emotion into the speaker’s narrative, it also marks how it unfastens determinate exchanges of feeling and resists establishing an emotional contract with the reader in spite of the passage’s visceral subject matter. The scene “moves” me, but not because its narrative sequence predicts my capacity to respond emotionally; I can’t determine much of its emotional motion. So what moves me? Affect moves me here, tonally pushing me against the magnitude, mass (both size and material density), scale of genocide, and efficiency of murder. To be clear, I am “moved,” but I do not move, because that would require emotional cognition. The tension of exchange remains, for I cannot yet identify the emotional currency of this scene. Rather, for a moment, I am wound in the seams of its affective economy by the absence of the expected motion toward emotion.

Of course, the passage requires further analysis to identify its emotional trajectories, which would, no doubt, yield further labels. The important point, however, is that affect accompanies these tonal undulations, rending obvious emotional trajectories from narrative flow. In this more autonomous condition, affect signifies emotional static. A similar indeterminate suspension of emotional motion often emerges with(in) more overt tones, as in this description of an honorary dinner for the Nazi officials of the camp:

At a dinner to honor the officials of this camp—and others like it—the Professor of Public Health was making a speech:”Your task is a duty, useful and necessary.Looking at the bodies of all those Jewsone understands the greatness of your good work—all its greatness! Heil Hitler!“And the guests shouted, “Heil Hitler!“(Reznikoff 31)

In this scene, the “Professor of Public Health” gives a speech that reframes the brutal business of the previous episode into a National Socialist narrative of “good work.” The tone of the Professor’s speech is overt; its diction is celebratory, lauding the camp officials (“your task is…useful and necessary”), and decidedly exuberant when the guests and the Professor exchange salutes. In addition to the Professor’s tone, at least two other tonal strata in this passage correspond with the witness and reader. The narrative starts with an unidentified speaker, who we might assume also witnessed the atrocities in the previous stanza. The speaker’s tone is flat, objective like the previous speaker’s, and only quietly supplemented with another tone of despondency when s/he mentions the large number of camps “and others like it” (Reznikoff 31). This flat tone is stacked in blunt juxtaposition to the celebratory salutes of “Heil Hitler” (Reznikoff 31). A third tonal stratum emerges if the reader aberrantly decodes the Professor’s speech as an expression of verbal irony, an interpretation implied by the genocidal labor in the first stanza, where “Good Work” becomes a euphemism for state-sanctioned “Public Health” services.⁸ However, it is not possible to determine whether the speaker who expresses this quotation inflects it with irony. As a result, the tone is doubly encoded and registers meaning not by antiphrasis, but by a relational process of differentiating and combining both explicit and implicit meanings that emerge from at least three different discursive contexts. The first discourse is judicial and flattens the tonal peaks into the objective voice of the witness. The Professor’s diction in the second discourse is earnest, evoking a range of emotions from his sense of national fraternity (“your task is a duty”) to feelings of collective pride (“one understands the greatness of your good work”) (31). In the third discourse, verbal irony becomes situational irony; readers are confronted with the fact that they perceive the Professor’s tone ironically, although no rhetorical devices support this reading. Tone thereby becomes structural, maneuvering a rhetorical surface on which affective seams flatten a movement toward emotional “depth:” the capacity to adopt perspectives from tonal emplotment that lead to identification (or—in the case of the Professor—the attempt not to adopt them).

Instead, in this passage, tone both rubs against and opens onto moments of affective intensity, drawing attention to the problems inherent in how we appraise the emotional structures through which we feel what another person feels. In the passages I have examined so far, emotional vantage points remain subdued, suggesting that empathy does too. However, empathy is a highly elastic phenomenon—so elastic that affect’s unfastening of the necessary rhetorical conventions of situational irony in the previous passage might undercut a move from emotion to empathy. This cut reveals another dimension of empathy, one with less access to the cognitive or emotional possession of another’s subject position, in which we feel the affective seams between these perspectives whether or not we can empathically adopt the viewer’s or the speaker’s perspective. Affective seams “move” us by suspending empathy’s adoptive vantage points and instead instantiating functionally redundant feeling that binds us sensorily in the moment: “two sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing” (Massumi 35).

Affective Erosion

Affect also emerges in Holocaust through the erosion of humanizing and dehumanizing referents. In an episode that shows more of the genocidal labor of the camps, one prisoner drags another toward a wagon that will carry his body to a mass grave. Note the repetition of many different pronouns, but particularly the way the identifying terms “man” and “body” erode into near meaninglessness.

From “Work Camps”

Once a transport came from another camp.
Something had gone wrong with the gas chambers there
and those who came spent the night in the open courtyard.
They were almost skeletons:
did not care about anything 5
and could hardly speak.
When beaten, they just sighed.
The Jews working in the camp
were ordered to give them food;
but those who had come had trouble just sitting up 10
and stepped on each other
to get what little food they were given.
Next morning they were taken to the gas chambers.
In the courtyard where they had spent the night
were several hundred dead. 15
Jews of the camp they had come to were told:
"Undress the bodies
and carry them to the wagons.
"But these Jews were too weak to carry the bodies on their shoulders
and had to drag them, 20
take them by the feet and drag them along;
and the Germans beat those who dragged to go faster.
One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment
and the man he thought dead
sat up, 25
sighed and said in a weak voice,
"Is it far?"
The Jew dragging him
stooped and put his hand gently around the man's shoulder
and just then felt a whip on his back: 30
an S.S. man was beating him.
He let go of the body—
and went on dragging the man to the wagons.
                                                                                                   (Reznikoff 42-43)

Starting in line three with the demonstrative pronoun “those,” the iterations of “man” and “body” alternately humanize and dehumanize the various stages of a prisoner’s dying moments. “Bodies” [17] refers to the dead who had arrived and died overnight. The second iteration of “bodies” [19] refers to the previous “bodies” [17]. However, the third repetition [23] destabilizes this link, strongly associating the dragged “body” with connotations of death and the erect “man” with connotations of life: “One Jew left the body he was dragging to rest for a moment / and the man he thought dead / sat up” (Reznikoff 25). A similar destabilization occurs in the final iterations. As the Jewish prisoner comforts the dying “man” [29], referring to the “man he thought dead,” he is whipped by the S.S. “man” until he continues dragging the “body” and “man” to the wagons [30-33]. The pronouns here are not exactly reversed; instead, the tragic absurdity of the dragged man’s question (“is it far?”) perturbs this binary relationship. “Body” in this iteration is paradoxical, implying a kind of living death. As the prisoner lets go of the “body,” the term also releases any humanizing associations accumulated in its previous iterations. In the final iteration, “man” returns like a hyponym of “body”; a “man” becomes a type of body, its humanizing diction eroded, and, like the bodies thrown into the wagons, made indistinct from them in the semantic field of the poem.

This type of referential disruption is common in postmodern documentary poetry. Among other things, it revives the materiality of the language, foregrounding alternative connections within its semantic field. Additionally, emotional emplotment is disrupted when referents are delinked and reoriented, and emotional structures founded on cause and effect relationships are often reconfigured, as when the prisoners who have just arrived to the camp “just sigh” in response to beatings (42). In many cases, this disruption can lead to emotional impasses in the text, areas where emotional identification is muted because its emplotment appears arbitrary. However, following my reading of an affective materiality in Holocaust, these impasses can also be read as formalized affect. To understand this from the vantage point of affect, we must recall that the prisoners who sigh when beaten are historically called Müselmann. Jean Améry describes the Müselmann’s condition in the camps:

The so-called Müselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. (qtd. in Agamben 41)

Without the capacity to cognitively structure reality using emotional responses, the Müselmann’s sigh indicates the erosion of a typical cause and effect relationship with the brutal beating. Although the sigh may be read as an emotional signifier, this reading overlooks the fact that even though it is elicited by the beating, it is equally an asignifying noise, a merely physical function: two sidedness as heard from the side of the person.⁹ In fact, the Müselmann’s sighing sonically expresses Améry’s condition of dissociation by formalizing the physical convulsions of affect. Read in this way, the sigh testifies through sensory non-language to the inadequacy of language to represent the Müselmann’s condition, and likewise to the auditory potential in noise to give witness to that condition without reducing it to the expression of a psychological state. This is an important point, because if the affective sigh discloses the threshold where language erodes into noise, then by attending to what was considered extraneous to the system (the sigh), language can insist on this threshold as a crucial part of redirecting empathic processes of identification along this affective seam.

Affective After-Image

With haptic seams that tighten and loosen empathetic bonds, and noise that erodes and inflects the signification of emotional trajectories, affect interrupts our felt responses, revealing the complexities of the emotional contract we enter into by reading Holocaust. In addition to these affective structures, Reznikoff also employs an after-image of the face, a flickering image more felt than seen that troubles the legibility of one of the most semantically-encoded signifying systems in literature.¹⁰ Historically, the face is considered the most complex signifying surface of the body because its features are assumed to express the activity of the mind behind it. As a literary trope, the face is typically understood to represent the internal psychology of a character through a wide range of facial expressions. Faces appear throughout Holocaust, often in encounters directly preceding murder: “The German looked into their eyes / and shot them both” (Reznikoff 20); “And he lashed her across the face with his whip / and drove her into the gas chamber” (30). Many encounters show that the face of the victim was forcefully attacked or destroyed, but other scenes do not mention the face, instead focusing on small motions of the head: “Then he aimed at her: took hold of her hair / and turned her head around. / She remained standing and heard a shot / but kept on standing / He turned her head around again…” (21). These scenes usually operate antithetically; they imply parts of the face through synecdoche, initiating the empathetic exchange commonly associated with viewing a face only to have that moment of identification cut short. Yet, rather than end the exchange there, in the lingering after-image I propose, parts of the face emerge through motion toward a trajectory of emotion, without forming a “round imagined” image. The following scene is no exception:

As always, S.S. men were walking about with pistols loaded
to shoot at those too weak to climb the steps leading to the vans.
And one of those on the night shift
saw a girl about ten
coming from a heap of dead bodies 5
and beginning to walk feebly—
an S.S. man shot her in the neck;
saw a little boy,
half naked,
quietly sitting in the middle of the path. 10
The S.S. man, head of his group—
the Jews among themselves called him "grandfather"
because he was elderly—
tried to shoot the little boy in the neck.
The little boy turned his head 15
and just managed to say the first two words of the prayer orthodox
Jews about to die say
when he was killed,
and his body thrown on one of the trucks.
                                                                                                        (Reznikoff 35)

The murder of a young girl and boy in this episode are particularly violent moments, because they emplot a more recognizable emotional series that aims the reader toward a tragic encounter with the young boy’s face. Synecdoche associates the girl’s execution style “in the neck” with the proximity of her face, and anticipates the identical execution style of the little boy later in the scene (35). Likewise, the spatial intimacy required for the guard to carry out such specifically targeted executions shares an oxymoronic conceptual closeness to the familial nature of his moniker: “grandfather.” Lest we dismiss this as verbal irony, which we could not do in previous passages, Reznikoff includes the reason behind the guard’s moniker: “because he was elderly.” As in other passages, he abuts a banal detail against the objective description of the guard’s murderous “familial” narrative, suspending a judgmental tone that might sharply define and thus elicit a presupposed emotional response.

Any determinate emotional state is further suspended because the familial associations signaled by “grandfather,” combined with his murderous narrative path through the scene, initially parallel the emotional trajectories leading to the visual intersection of the gun and the after-image of the boy’s mouth in prayer. However, the intersection of these trajectories does not ultimately qualify an emotional event, but an intensive, affective one. Reznikoff’s editing destabilizes the parallel trajectory between emotional and narrative motions in this passage. Of utmost importance to this disruption is the fact that the boy’s face is not initially seen in the final sentence, but rather evoked through synecdoche, causing a facial outline to emerge. In contrast, Reznikoff subtly troubles the narrative certainty of his death, noting that the guard tries “to shoot the little boy in the neck,” his weapon aiming at the turning profile of the child’s head as the boy speaks (35). The sequence of sensual perceptions—the turning outline of the bewildered boy’s face, the movement of his mouth in prayer, the resonance of his spoken words, the crack of the gun, the damage to the boy’s face, his falling body, and his body being thrown onto the trucks—does not result in an imaginative leap into a round imagined “I,” through which an image of the boy’s face responds to or expresses an emotional state. Instead, the series of uncertain movements, particularly the boy’s minor ones—turning head and moving mouth—assemble into an affective after-image of his sensory presence that lingers after he is killed.

Crucially, just as the boy’s face never entirely appears, the spoken words of the boy’s prayer are not included in the text. The first two words of the Hebrew Vidui—the prayer before dying—are “I acknowledge,” a declaration that brings the boy’s mouth, and the associated after-image of his face, into greater conceptual and visible relief. This statement (“I acknowledge”) is one of the most affirmative enunciations of a prisoner’s identity in the text. Yet because the boy’s final utterance remains unwritten, which also effaces his capacity for (a culturally recognizable) subjectivity, readers are obligated to “fill in the blank.” In this way, the after-image operates like the affective seams discussed above. While the flickering outline of the boy’s face stitches readers into a contract of confrontation with the affective after-image of the boy’s face, the fact that the prayer’s text is not printed reworks this contract by distinguishing readers who do not know Orthodox Hebrew custom from those who do. In a sense, their act of response—mouthing the words of the Orthodox prayer or trying to imagine what that vocalization might be—visually and vocally stitches them into a “witnessing” position. And this is vantage point which has become more of an intensive series than a qualitative one because it lacks a qualifying emotional configuration. Much as they do the Müselmann’s non-referential sigh, readers feel the visual and auditory transition from a signifying to an asignifying chain in this affective moment more than they can identify its emotive demands.

Because of the overt sensory nature of the boy’s after-image, this intensive series establishes a relationship between affect and ethics. The boy’s flickering profile evokes Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known theory of the intersubjective encounter. Levinas argues that perceptual judgments can become capable of justifying murder, because they rely on a reductive logical grasp of the profusion of sensory experience. In opposition to this reductive grasp, affect is a type of perceptual “interruption” that counters sensory logics predicated on control and domination.¹¹ In this system of control, the face is as much a sensed affective intensity as a qualifiable sensory experience, and thus always exceeds the grasp of perception. For Levinas, the resistance of this affective excess to qualitative logic produces an ethical resistance to murder. The resulting “epiphany of the face” exceeds consciousness, and as a result, actualizes an intensive insistence—an undeniable, unqualifiable encounter with the presence of another that is as affective as it is material (Levinas 199). The after-image of the boy’s face is this actualized affective insistence. The boy’s after-image “interrupts” perceptual judgment’s qualifying narrative and emotional clutches to emerge affectively. His face flickers to the extent that its insistence remains felt more than cognizable. And this affective flicker of the face appositionally accompanies the delicate narrative indeterminacy Reznikoff weaves through what is an otherwise inevitable sequence of murder. In essence, this perceptual unsettlement is the affective material of the ethical, the “unique matter” of the face that inherently resists the industrial ideology of murder in this scene and throughout Holocaust (Levinas 199).

The Surface of the Document

I have argued that Holocaust formalizes a surface of affective blocks, seams, and after-images by unsettling presumed intersections between emotional and narrative emplotment. This reading reveals that the contract between reader and emotion is affectively formed and unsettled by the sensory surface of American Postmodern Documentary Poetry. Most importantly, noting documentary poetry’s affectual contract with trauma in Holocaust reveals how affect can redistribute what we sense in a text and reorient emotional structures of response; we haptically sense a young boy’s after-image in the moment of his murder, we hear the testimony lingering in a Müselmann sighing, and we feel the sensory sway of National Socialist fervor. In reading for affect, I do not suggest that emotional structures are inadequate for interpreting Holocaust. Rather, I claim that by contending with the seamed, eroded, and after-imaged unsettlement of presumed parallels between narrative and emotional trajectories, our reading does not culminate in impasses, but instead travels across affective surfaces on which presupposed emotional exchanges are renegotiated. Emotional contracts in this exchange resemble a “sustained ‘act of attention,’” in which active listening, feeling, and seeing constitute as much or more of our engagement with the representation of suffering than does identification (Gubar 9).

But what do we gain by revealing a type of affective cognition in the surface of this genre of documentary poetry? What is the benefit of tracing the seams, erosion, and after-images that formalize affect’s pressures? And, in attending to these fluctuations between typical emotional structures, what do we learn by showing how affect resists the impulse for identification through emotional classification? Reading Holocaust as a text with a surface discloses a “nervous system” connecting the somatic and the social, demonstrating how the public voices of eyewitness testimony intertwine the private embodied experience of the reader within a larger socius.¹² The testimonies demand that we contend with the contiguity of representation and represented—think body/human. To be sure, affective cognition emerges from this contiguity, specifically from the growing awareness that reading embeds us in an event that both inflects and reorients the ways in which we identify with its content. As Michael Davidson believes, Reznikoff’s use of eyewitness testimony from court transcripts “produces a kind of collective witness” that can “transcend [a reader’s] local conditions” (151). In addition to Davidson’s focus on the symbolic dimension of this collectivity, I would argue that an affective contract musters this collectivity and presses readers into the apposition of representation and represented. Given that the surface of much of American postmodern documentary poetry is crisscrossed by the transmission, translation, and transformation of affect, it might plausibly capture affective residue across time and space. Theresa Brennan, theorizing the transmission of affects, suggests that they are contagious, “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” (139). Similarly, affect could be transported by a linguistic contagion transmitted with, through, and across readers embedded in affect’s transhistorical seams, erosion, and after-images. Read this way, Reznikoff’s Holocaust discloses “the presence of the other and the social” in the historical document by establishing the conditions for a collective event of emotional negotiation that exceeds socio-cultural and historic boundaries, because its affective intensity lingers in the document whether it emerges or not. What Reznikoff transmits through Holocaust is thus the potential for a type of affective cognition to reinscribe the historical particulars of the court transcripts into a contingent materiality, a surface that, because of its unsettled nature, is capable of transforming a reader’s emotional contract to the Holocaust by confronting them with the influences of affect on their emotional production. Ultimately, Reznikoff’s emphasis on the surface of the document—where affective cognition reorients the processual nature of empathetic identification—reveals how an emotional relationship to the victims of the Holocaust must begin anew in each episode through one of the many faces of testimony.

Footnotes

The excerpts from Holocaust cited herein are © 2007 Charles Reznikoff/Black Sparrow Press.

1. The American postmodern documentary poetics I examine share these aesthetically productive techniques for sequencing, rearranging, and selecting from the historical document with “Investigative Poetics,” the genre defined by Ed Sanders in his manifesto Investigative Poetry (1976).

2. Raymond Williams’s seminal work on the “structures of feeling” in Marxism and Literature (1977) also inflects my essay. Throughout this analysis I emphasize the nascent formation of Williams’s explanation. Structures of feeling are “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined by exchange” (131).

3. In Ghostlier Demarcations, Michael Davidson describes a similar sensual contract with Reznikoff’s text, noting that the work is composed of “surfaces of identification” on which understanding is constructed (138). These surfaces are also political for Davidson. He explains that in the 1930s, the new documentary culture of the American Left, of which Reznikoff was a part, read “American history not as a narrative of Adamic discovery and perfectibility but as a material record of diverse constituencies” (140).

4. “Empathic unsettlement” is Dominick LaCapra’s term for aesthetic techniques in a text that trouble empathic modes of identification that tend toward an occupying strategy of victim subject positions.

5. Theresa Brennan looks primarily at the social forces of affect in The Transmission of Affect, but her argument that affects are “carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the other and the social in the system” does support reading as an historicizing moment of meaning making, and therefore a part of the social forces she theorizes. For my purposes, this means that reading documentary poetry draws us into a particular type of presence of the other and thus makes possible a particular type of affective transmission (139).

6. In “‘Detailing the Facts:’ Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust,” Robert Franciosi describes Reznikoff’s four-part writing process:

Selection: This involves the reading of many volumes of law records (in the case of Testimony literally thousands of volumes) to find suitable material…Editing: Reznikoff cuts the selected testimony to a core of material that he feels has poetic value. Often he reproduces the legal language verbatim, but he does not hesitate to alter it for the sake of clarity and direction. Scoring: The edited law case is lineated, typed out as verse. Those details Reznikoff wants to emphasize are strategically placed, both within the line itself and in the entire selection. Rewriting: This process may consist of a number of drafts and is essentially a honing of the rhythms, lines’ and details in order to enhance the intended emotional and poetical effects. (249)

7. The SonderKommando were work units made up of prisoners. They were composed almost entirely of Jews who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid in the plunder and disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.

8. “Aberrant decoding” is Umberto Eco’s term for interpreting a text or other communication with a different code than the source code used to create it.

9. In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben describes the Müselmann’s erosion through “biopolitical caesuras,” the Nazis’s state sanctioned reduction of a prisoner’s biological continuum to the point at which there is no more possibility for degradation. For Agamben, the Müselmann’s existence testifies to “the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another caesura” (85). Though he emphasizes the biopolitical dimension of this degradation, his concept applies equally to the reductive linguistic movement I have traced in the passage above. There, the reduction of identifying terms to an indeterminate position between functional and non-functional reference diminishes their capacity to identify a particular subject or be further divided with semantic distinctions. In other words, by the end of this passage, the terms “man”/”body” do not evoke a psychological depth characteristic of emotional or intellectual signification. In this limit condition, they “identify” the Müselmann as an organism to which orienting terms can only loosely adhere. Ultimately, to think the Müselmann is not to fix the terms into a designation that establishes a classical subject, but to attend to the ways the transition from signification to its limit sustains a tensile surface of indecipherability between language and extra-linguistic intensities.

10. I draw on both Gilles Deleuze’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theorizations of the face in this section; respectively, they delineate the two fields of theory from which my analysis benefits: film and ethics. I employ Deleuze’s framing of the face in cinematic terms as a “reflecting surface” where “micro-movements” create intensive affective series that tend toward the open-ended processes of virtual and material actualization. I employ Levinas to frame the face as an ethical encounter with the affective and signifying dimensions of another’s face. See Deleuze 87-101 and Levinas 194-219.

11. Levinas writes, “The very distinction between representational content and affective content is tantamount to a recognition that enjoyment is endowed with a dynamism other than that of perception” (187). Although Levinas recognizes the pleasurable aspects of affective content, his explanation of the affective dynamic interruption of perception can equally be applied to trauma.

12. “Nervous System” is Michael Taussig’s concept for a text’s stylistic embodiment of the relationship between content, historical event, and reader. “[The Nervous System] calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being represented and not suspended above and distant from the represented—what Adorno referred to as Hegel’s programmatic ideas—that knowing is giving oneself over to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it from above” (10).

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, 1999.
• Alter, Robert. “Charles Reznikoff: Between Present and Past.” Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977, pp. 119-135.
• Auster, Paul. “The Decisive Moment.” Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. National Poetry Foundation, U of Maine at Orono, 1984, pp. 151–165.
• Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 4, Winter 2008, pp. 845-860. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/alh/ajn039. Brennan, Theresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004.
• Davidson, Michael. Ghostlier Demarcations: modern poetry and the material world. U of California P, 1997.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, U of Minnesota P, 2006.
• Franciosi, Robert. “Detailing the Facts: Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the Holocaust.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1988, pp. 241–264. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/1208439. Gubar, Susan. Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Indiana UP, 2003.
• LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. John Hopkins UP, 2001.
• Lehman, David. “Holocaust.” Poetry. vol. 128, no. 1, 1976, pp. 37-45, JSTOR, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=128&issue=1&page=49. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford UP, 2003.
• —, and Virginie Lalucq. The Overflowing of the Poem. Translated by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue, Omnidawn Publishing, 2004, pp. 100-189.
• Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust. Black Sparrow, 2007.
• Syrkin, Marie. The State of the Jews. New Republic Books, 1980.
• Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. Routledge, 1992.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1978.

Murray Leeder (bio)
University of Calgary

Abstract

This essay discusses the declining academic and continued popular currency of Carol J. Clover’s concept of the Final Girl, and examines the term through X-Ray or Hospital Massacre (1981), a film of the first slasher cycle with a more mature protagonist than most. It extends Clover’s ideas by showing how X-Ray is heavily concerned with medical issues, in particular the Foucauldian “medical gaze.” The titular X-ray becomes a structural model for the invasive, destructive gazes deployed throughout the film, both by its villain and by the medical environment itself.

Carol J. Clover’s phrase “the Final Girl” has penetrated public consciousness in a way few academic terms have. Introduced in her 1987 article “Her Body, Himself,” it was popularized by her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. In recent years, there have been films called both Final Girl (2015) and The Final Girls (2015). The page for Final Girl on the popular culture website TvTropes.com has hundreds of entries and only a smattering of acknowledgements of Clover. The concept itself is simple: a slasher film supplies many “girls,” most of whom are killed off by the slasher until only one remains:

She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; who we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. (Clover, Men 35)

And yet she is also generally the one who battles the killer, alone or with help: “Finally, although she is always smaller and weaker than the killer, she grapples with him energetically and convincingly” (40). Arguing that she is boyish–often with an androgynous name, like Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween (1978)–and phallicized, Clover resists reading the Final Girl as legitimately female, but rather sees her as a figure of transvestitism, a boy in drag: “to the extent that she means ‘girl’ at all, it is only for purposes of signifying male lack . . . To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development . . . is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking” (53). Although Clover’s concept has come to roost in popular culture, it has been roundly critiqued in academia. Barbara Creed argues that the Final Girl should not be understood as the phallicized “false boy,” but as an incarnation of the femme castratrice (158). Other scholars have tried to recuperate the Final Girl as a potential figure of female or feminine agency and resistance, against Clover’s objections (e.g. Pinedo 1997, Short 2006). Perhaps the most trenchant critiques–for example, by Richard Nowell and Janet Staiger—suggest that the concept is simply not accurate, that Clover’s corpus of films is too small and her interpretation of the character type too selective. In slasher films, Staiger writes,

[w]omen are usually the victims and the heroines, but they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense Clover implies. They may be quite feminine. Boyfriends, fathers or father figures, even other women and children, often support and aid them. They learn from those people so that they do take control of their battle with the killer. And they are rewarded not just with survival but also with romance. (222)

Similarly, Jeremy Maron notes the presence of male characters in the structural position of the Final Girl, and suggests that “Final Subject” is more apt.

The decline of the Final Girl as the dominant explanatory framework for the slasher film is a positive development, allowing us to explore the genre’s diversity more fully. But do we still need the Final Girl paradigm, or should we consign it to popular culture? I argue that critics should not discount Clover’s ideas altogether, but rather explore their possible extension through connections with other discourses. Here, I examine an obscure slasher film that both fits within and extends Clover’s model of the Final Girl. Directed by Israeli director Boaz Davidson and distributed by exploitation specialists Cannon Films, it was released both as X-Ray and Hospital Massacre in 1981, in the thick of the first slasher cycle triggered by Halloween.¹ Never discussed by Clover or other early thinkers on the slasher film like Vera Dika and Robin Wood, X-Ray is almost absent from the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film. Certainly, many of the character dynamics of Clover’s model are at play in X-Ray, especially in the relationship between the “assaultive” and “reactive” gazes. Yet its setting in a thinly-populated urban hospital—in contrast to the rural and suburban settings of most slasher films, but constructing a similar dynamic of isolation—permits those gazes to operate within the paradigm of a Foucauldian “medical gaze.” In so doing, X-Ray invokes a range of anxieties about masculine medicine, its spaces, and its practitioners.

Medical Gaze, Medical Horror

Wood distinguishes between two related cycles in the 1970s and 1980s that he calls the “teenie-kill pic”—largely coterminous with the later constellation of the slasher film—and the “violence against women movie,” a higher-rent and glossier (though often more misogynistic) variant associated with filmmakers like Brian de Palma (194). X-Ray is a hybrid of the two: it borrows structurally from the slasher film, but involves older characters;² has the stock sexually frustrated villain, but no emphasis on virginity or promiscuity; and sexualizes its protagonist Susan (Barbi Benton) significantly more than most slasher films sexualize their protagonists, making her the only woman to appear naked in the film. X-Ray also fits within a longer history of horror in medical contexts. Its villain echoes the deranged surgeons of Golden Age films like Mad Love (1935) and The Raven (1935), both motivated by twisted, impossible love for a virtuous woman. Later films also play up the fear inherent in medical settings, as in Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Horror Hospital (1973). The key director associated with medical horror is David Cronenberg (especially for films like Rabid (1977) and Dead Ringers (1988)),³ yet the slasher film had its dalliances with medical settings too. In his book on the slasher film, Adam Rockoff dismisses X-Ray and Visiting Hours (1982) as “inferior films which effectively killed off the minor trend of hospital slashers” (129) alongside the better-known Halloween II (1981). X-Ray‘s most significant predecessor might actually be Coma (1978), Michael Crichton’s more mainstream Hollywood medical thriller and certainly one of Wood’s “violence against women” pictures. X-Ray echoes Coma in its chases through sparsely-populated medical facilities and in its third act, in which the female protagonist (in both films named Susan (Geneviève Bujold in Coma)) is strapped to a medical table for an unnecessary procedure meant to kill her.⁴ Though the lofty considerations of medical ethics in Coma are nowhere to be found in X-Ray, Davidson’s film contains many of the same anxieties about the hospital space, masculine medicine, and (especially female) bodies that are on display in a less intellectual fashion.⁵ The formal differences between Coma and X-Ray are instructive, especially in terms of their medical settings. Coma‘s mise-en-scène favours brightly-lit, self-consciously bland modernist spaces with brutalist influences; the dark conspiracy at the centre of the film ironically goes on in spaces of apparent transparency. By contrast, the hospital in X-Ray is a gloomy place full of narrow corridors, vacant floors, implausibly low-key lighting, cluttered, dangerous areas, and grotesque patients. It epitomizes what Clover calls the “Terrible Place” (30), redolent of Victorian medicine crossed with torture and sadism (echoes of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Thomas M. Sipos observes that the film (as Hospital Massacre) “draws much of its terror from a mise-en-scène that magnifies all our paranoid fears about doctors and hospitals” (45); furthermore, a careful deployment of a horrific variation on the medical gaze is a major part of its queasy effectiveness. Not only does X-Ray take place almost entirely in a hospital, but its villain is a medical professional: the seemingly helpful intern “Harry” (Charles Lucia), who disguises his identity behind a medical mask and manipulates medical imaging to his vile purposes.

The film also develops its paranoia through a recurring emphasis on the medical gaze. In using this term, I am of course evoking a concept introduced by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic (1963). What has been variously rendered as the “medical,” “clinical” and “observation gaze” is a feature of Foucault’s modern episteme as it emerges around the beginning of the 19^th century; “[f]acilitated by the medical technologies that frame and focus the physicians’ optical grasp of the patient, the medical gaze abstracts the suffering person from her sociological context and reframes her as a ‘case’ or a ‘condition’” (Hsu and Lincoln 23). The gendering here is no mistake; in reducing the patient to a passive position or even rendering her corpselike, the medical gaze makes its subject essentially feminine. Graeme Harper notes that “in Anglophone film circles, we must be wary of interpreting Foucault’s translated discussion of the clinical ‘gaze’ too literally as a primary version of the filmic gaze. The French word Foucault uses is ‘regard’ which can mean a gaze or a look or an expression or a glance” (99-100). This caveat actually suits my argument here, because the “medical gaze” on display is not limited to an individual character—indeed, almost every medical practitioner in the film falls far short of the standards of objectivity, although empowered by those standards—but is rather attached to the clinical environment itself. The ur-slasher Halloween transforms the town of Haddonfield into a haunted environment in which Michael Myers’s gaze is implicitly unpinned from his physical body and becomes omnipresent.⁶ X-Ray does something similar with less supernatural coding; it detaches the gaze of the killer from Harry and attaches it instead to the hospital itself, creating a space replete with many “gazes.” Almost all of these gazes are pointed at Susan, and like the X-ray itself, they ultimately aim to penetrate her body.

In the X-Ray

In this paper, I use the title X-Ray over the more descriptive Hospital Massacre, partly because the 2014 Blu-Ray/DVD release from Shout! Factory uses X-Ray, and partly because it is the more poetic and evocative, and in a strange way, more appropriate title. True to its name, the film’s opening titles unfold over a succession of X-ray images, blue and luminous as if displayed on a light box. The first is a skull, its empty eye sockets staring directly “towards” the camera. Already the spectatorial theme formulaic to the slasher film is emphasized. The next image shows a pelvis; as with the eyes, genitals are suggested by their absence, introducing a sexual theme (although the sex of the body is not clear from the image—shades of Clover’s discussion of gender ambiguities in the slasher film).⁷ Following this image, a skull appears again, this time in profile and facing right. The fourth image shows vertebrae, with something denser than bone alongside them: a stethoscope, alluding to the film’s medical setting (perhaps this is an image of the film’s villain). Next, a skull in profile again, this time facing left. Then a rib cage, another view of the pelvis, and lastly the skull again, over Boaz’s director credit.

Accompanied by a nervous synthesizer-heavy score, the title sequence establishes the medical gaze as a key theme and taps into the cultural history of medical imaging in general and of X-rays in particular. The X-ray was unexpectedly discovered by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895; relatively easy to replicate and largely circulating through the popular press rather than scientific channels, it triggered an “X-Ray Craze” that threatened to overshadow the debut of cinema that same year (Crangle 1998). X-rays were mindboggling, unthinkable, and arrived in a fin de siècle climate hungry for novelty. The “living” skeleton was previously a contradiction in terms and served mainly as an artistic representation of death, but with Röntgen’s discovery, it was suddenly observable. The tensions raised by the technology were articulated by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924), when Hans Castorp’s glimpse of his own X-ray triggers a profound reckoning with his mortality and corporeality:

Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness.(215-6)

Yet the X-ray did not so much show the skeleton as turn bodies inside out, reducing “solid” flesh to a ghostly but still perceivable half-presence. As Catherine Waldby writes:

The surface of the body, its demarcation from the world, is dissolved and lost in the image, leaving only the faintest trace, while the relation between depth and surface is reversed. Skeletal structures, conventionally thought of as located at the most recessive depth of the body, appear in co-registration with the body’s surface. (91)

Of course, the “deathly” qualities of the X-ray would take on a different inflection once it became clear that the rays were dangerous, capable of inscribing themselves on living bodies and causing nausea, hair loss, and burned or peeling skin. Most experimenters ultimately displayed these symptoms to some degree, and the numerous victims of the X-ray entered the annals of medical history as martyrs who suffered and even died to advance scientific research (Herzig 85-100). The only female “X-Ray martyr,” Elizabeth Fleischmann-Ascheim, was exalted as “America’s Joan of Arc” after her death, sanctified much as Marie Curie would be as a fellow experimenter and victim of radiology (98).

As unsexy as skeletons might appear, the X-ray developed a powerful erotic potential in its apparent ability to dissolve all those layers of Victorian clothing.⁸ An 1896 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette complained of the “revolting indecency” of the ability to “see other people’s bones with the naked eye” (qtd. in Goodman 1043), and other texts expressed anxiety about “the X-Ray’s perceived capacity to dissolve sexual identity by figuratively decomposing the organs and flesh” (Cartwright 119), rather the same way that the opening images of X-Ray are at once sexualized and de-sexed. The deathly/erotic dynamic of the X-ray is also on display in The Magic Mountain, where Castorp makes a fetish of an X-ray image of Clavdia Chauchat. Simultaneously, the X-ray is associated with destruction, invasion and penetration. Akira Mizuta Lippit writes: “To see and to burn. The two functions and effects are fused in the X-Ray, which makes the body visible by burning it. The extravisibility of the X-Ray is an effect of its inflammatory force . . . It sees by burning and destroying” (50). In X-Ray, the villain embodies the looking/destroying duality of the X-ray: a spectatorial agent of the gaze in familiar slasher villain form, with a penetrating medicalized force that destroys as he gazes. If the tensions concerning X-rays seem to have been soothed by the 1980s, X-Ray makes the interesting decision to evoke them from its opening moments. A literal X-ray plays a brief if crucial role early in the plot, serving to mislead and manipulate, and makes a third act cameo long enough to be splattered with blood. The film exploits many of the issues that the X-ray and the broader culture of medical imaging have raised historically: professionalism, eroticism, privacy, interiority and exteriority, and death.

What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?

In her study of the “stalker film,” Vera Dika notes a conventional two-part structure derived from Halloween. Its initial setup occurs in a section marked as the past:

1. 1. The young community is guilty of a wrongful action.
2. 2. The killer sees an injury, fault or death.
3. 3. The killer experiences a loss.
4. 4. The killer kills the guilty members of the young community.

X-Ray replicates this structure. It opens with a short sequence that establishes who the killer is and why he targets the “Final Girl.” A title card identifies “SUSAN’S HOUSE, 1961,” and the setting’s “pastness” is signaled formally by a slight, gauzy overexposure. The sequence is full of hearts–conventional Valentine’s Day hearts have been cut out and placed all over the young Susan’s (Elizabeth Hoy) house–and it soon introduces a gaze. The boy Harold (Billy Jayne) is looking in the window at the object of his precocious obsession, accompanied by a point-of-view (POV) shot zooming in to her face. Harold leaves a bright red envelope on her doorstep, matching the color of his coat and a pattern on his shoes.⁹ He knocks thrice and flees, and then watches as Susan and her friend David (Michael Romero) open the envelope. Inside is a red heart-shaped note. The words “BE MY VALENTINE” are written crudely on the outside, and on the inside it says, “TO SUSAN FROM HAROLD” and, barely visible, “I [HEART SYMBOL] YOU.” Susan and David laugh at the discovery that the card is from Harold, crumple it, and toss it on the floor. When she goes to the kitchen to slice a birthday cake with an overdramatically huge knife,¹⁰ she returns to find that David has been murdered with surprising speed and quietness, hanged from a hat rack; she turns to see Harold grin maniacally from the window and then run away. The camera lingers on the literal “broken heart” on the floor.

X-Ray joins Halloween, New Year’s Evil (1980), You Better Watch Out (1980), Prom Night (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Graduation Day (1981) and more in taking place on a holiday, or more precisely on two different Valentine’s Days. Be My Valentine . . . Or Else is given as an alternative title for the film (a pre-release title, according to the Internet Movie Database; perhaps it was discarded because the film was not released in February).¹¹ Valentine’s Day plays an almost literal background role in X-Ray through the mise-en-scène of the hospital festooned with banners and hearts. Curiously, Susan never mentions the murder she witnessed on a Valentine’s Day two decades before (are we supposed to conclude that she has repressed the memory?),¹² but the heart symbol ties in with the killer’s motivation: to claim Susan’s heart. In keeping with the emotional stunting of slasher film villains, Harry fails to discriminate between poetic metaphor and corporeal reality. Martin Kemp writes that, despite a tendency to insist that the heart symbol bears little resemblance to a real heart, in fact, “[t]his lack of resemblance is considerably overplayed” (85).¹³ The symbol does derive from the shape of a literal heart, with its two atria in place and much else excluded. The heart symbol migrated from anatomy to become an easily commoditized symbol of romantic love; Harry has reversed that trajectory.

As X-Ray continues past the opening sequence, another title card reads “19 YEARS LATER” over the base of a skyscraper; as in so many slasher films, the tree-lined suburban streets of Halloween vanish after the opening. Here we are introduced to the adult Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton), and find that she is unlike the virginal cliché of the Final Girl. She is a divorced woman who has a daughter, a bitter relationship with her ex-husband, and a current boyfriend. Her dark red business attire and the thick binder she carries associate her with success and professionalism.¹⁴ This Final Girl is distinctly a Final Woman. Indeed, all the victims in the film are adults, except the pre-pubescent boy of the opening sequence. But while other women are killed in X-Ray (doctors and nurses), none are Halloween-style “friends” of hers, and with some she never comes into contact at all; Susan is afforded a “specialness” they lack. In part, that specialness is carried over from off-screen. Benton was best known as a Playboy model, having been on the cover of the magazine three times by then (and again in 1985), as well as being Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend for a period in the 1960s and 1970s. The most obvious precedent for casting her as the lead in a horror film is Marilyn Chambers in David Cronenberg’s Rabid. Though Chambers was a hardcore pornographic film actress and Benton a nude and semi-nude model, both carry their extra-cinematic star personas through to the comparative “mainstream” horror film.¹⁵ Chambers’s and Benton’s characters are replete with the “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Laura Mulvey famously ascribed to women on screen (809), in each case deployed within a medical arena. Like most Final Girls/Women, Susan is not only the subject of the look of the killer (and other males), but increasingly possesses an investigative gaze of her own.

The Eye of (Medical) Horror

Clover suggests that horror is, “intentionally or unintentionally, the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres” due to its compulsive thematization of looking (Men 168). She discriminates between the masculine “assaultive gaze,” often represented by POV camerawork, and the feminine “reactive gaze,” linked to femininity and vulnerability. However, she argues that “over and over, horror presents us with scenarios in which assaultive gazing is not just thwarted and punished, but actually reversed in such a way that those who thought to penetrate end up themselves penetrated” (Men 194). X-Ray certainly does not match the complexity Clover finds in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960)–itself interested in the long-term consequences of the medical gaze of the protagonist’s psychiatrist father–but it does something interesting in its own right by affiliating the typical voyeuristic-sadistic killer’s gaze of the slasher film with the “medical gaze.”

From the moment Susan arrives at the hospital, where she needs to pick up test results required for a new promotion, she is being watched. As a quick tilt and zoom reveals, an unseen man in surgical garb observes her from a hospital window when she enters the building for her tests; later we see his POV in a darkened room, caressing a framed portrait of Susan as a child with an elastic-gloved hand. When Susan checks in, a creepy janitor leers at her undisguisedly, drumming his fingers on a desk. Soon we realize that the killer has causal control over the environment of the hospital, trapping Susan in an elevator and luring Dr. Jacobs (Gay Austin) to a deserted floor of the hospital with the intercom. Jacobs is spooked by a skeleton, a medical specimen seemingly “staring” at her, and by a medical dummy stretched out on a table like a corpse, but she overlooks the real danger; she is jumped from behind and knifed to death, plumes of blood squirting onto the killer’s surgical garb. With her dies the hope of a “feminized” medical establishment.¹⁶ Susan loses the regular physician with whom she feels comfortable and is thrust into the “care” of a range of sinister male doctors, especially the decidedly unprofessional Dr. Saxon (John Warner Williams), whose diffident manner leads us to suspect he may be the killer. Before meeting Susan, Saxon is introduced taking off a medical mask and stashing it in a drawer in which medical instruments are casually stored–but he is not actually the murderer. Though he is a red herring in narrative terms (and is himself murdered), he is central to the film’s deployment of the medical gaze, which feels leering and prurient under the barest pretense of medical objectivity.

The purpose of Dr. Jacobs’s murder, we later learn, is to tamper with Susan’s files so that she is required to stay longer than necessary in the hospital. Several other murders, including that of Saxon, occur when characters come close to uncovering Susan’s actual (healthy) medical status and thus allow the pathologizing of her body to persist. Later, when Saxon examines her X-ray, he finds a huge mass of what looks like snakes or worms in her abdomen. One by one, male physicians look at this (putative) image of Susan’s body and react with contained horror (including Harry, who logically must be playing along). Her apparent condition is not disclosed to her right away; they contrive to detain her for further tests, and—rather like the female protagonists of Dark Victory (1939), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) and The Nun’s Story (1959)—she is “benevolently” misled about her apparent malady by the masculine medical establishment.¹⁷ More specifically, she is denied a certain variety of reactive gaze–the ability to look on images of her own body and make decisions accordingly. This exchange follows:

Susan:
But this whole check-up is just a . . .
 
Saxon:
A what? 

Susan:
A simple formality. I've been promoted and I just need some sort of medical certificate for my new insurance. 

Saxon:
No check-up is ever just a simple formality, Miss Jeremy.

Next we are shown most of the film’s themes in miniature. Saxon insists on an examination, instructing her to “get undressed” and adding only a half-hearted “please” to his order. Up to this point in the film, Susan, having come to the hospital directly from work, has worn business attire (it only reappears in the very last scene, signaling the return of her independence from the masculine medical gaze). Her low-key battle of wills with Saxon ends with her reluctantly giving into the authority of male medicine, her own agency compromised. Susan undresses behind a scrim; backlit, her silhouette reveals the contours of her body, and in pure Mulveyan fashion, Saxon stands and watches, the audience sharing his gaze.

Fig. 1.
Dr. Saxon (John Warner Williams) observing Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) undress. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

This striptease–and so it appears, a performance for an audience rather than simply a character undressing–is reminiscent of a peepshow, or even of the “keyhole films” of early cinema like Esmé Collings’s A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896) and Georges Méliès’s Après le bal/After the Ball (1897), in which a woman undresses before the implied gaze of a male spectator whose perspective is shared by the viewer (Nead esp. 186-94). The sequence feels like a pornographic scenario thinly repurposed for a horror film.¹⁸

Yet the film then begins to establish the significance of a counter-gaze: Susan’s own. Dr. Beam (Den Surles) casually intrudes. He and Saxon first discuss the disappearance of Dr. Jacobs and Saxon says that he wants to explain “this,” at which point he shows Beam the suspect X-ray of Susan. At this point we switch to Susan’s perspective, gazing out from behind the scrim, giving us her POV shot, a narrow view of the two men. The doctors’ voices become inaudible from her perspective and the object of the male gaze suddenly becomes an investigative gazer herself, even as the men scrutinize what is purportedly an image of her body. This scene is echoed later when she observes the killer from behind a similar scrim. It is the Final Girl’s formulaic act of “reversing the gaze” (Clover, Men 241), here literally looking past the medical establishment. As Beam leaves, Saxon summons Susan over to the table. He removes her gown (literally unveiling her), exposing her breasts, and reaches behind her to adjust her hair, gestures that feel intrusively sensual rather than professional and clinical–as if he is reorienting her for his personal gaze rather than for any medical reason. Donning his stethoscope (and recalling the opening sequence), Saxon listens to her heart and takes her blood pressure (heartbeats on the soundtrack add tension and increase our affiliation with Saxon’s perspective); the shot starts behind Susan and tracks around in a semicircle to reveal her breasts. “Lie down on the bed,” Saxon says, once again adding a perfunctory “please.” The examination couples the visual gaze and auditory examinations facilitated by medical technology to a tactile exploration of Susan’s body. Roy Porter explains that physical examinations emerged in the 18^th and especially the 19^th century and, despite having a relatively limited utility, “the sick have so far come to expect being physically examined . . . that they regard the doctor whom omits ‘hands-on’ examination as negligent” (179). Despite her obvious discomfort, Susan reflexively permits the unannounced touching of her body by Saxon as a necessary feature of the medical environment. He runs his hands up her leg before probing her abdomen. The camera follows up the length of her legs and places her breasts fully in frame as he moves his stethoscope about, repeating “in, out” in an unmistakably sexualized fashion.

We then see a face at the window, peeking through a gap in the curtains. It is another red herring character, a drunken mental patient named Hal (Lanny Duncan) whom Susan encountered earlier; the film alternates between his leering face and his POV gazing at Susan, framed by the askew curtain and the edge of the door to emphasize the theme of voyeurism.

Fig. 2.
A voyeuristic shot of the examination from Hal’s point of view. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

But Hal’s voyeurism is itself public; a nurse says, “I see you” and asks what he’s doing. He says, “Nothing . . . sight-seeing.” She orders him back to his ward, but he barely makes it a few steps before he paws at another female patient and then resumes peeping at Susan. Hal is still presumably watching the remainder of the examination unfold, though we get no further shots of him to confirm as much–his gaze diffuses into the medical environment itself.¹⁹

An extreme close-up of Saxon’s stethoscope applied to Susan’s stomach returns us to the examination. Dr. Saxon places his hands around her neck, presumably to check nodes but framed as if to strangle her; the camera holds on her frightened expression. The next cut is elliptical, moving to a POV shot from Susan’s perspective of Saxon’s eye that rack-focuses to an ophthalmoscope he switches on, beaming a bright light into the camera; we cut to her eye dilating as the light is trained on it. A blood sample follows; he slowly ties an elastic around her arm and just as slowly reaches for the syringe. As he uncaps the needle, it is framed against her eye, the focus racking between her face and the needle in his hand–another striking visual of Susan’s double status, as subject and object of the medical gaze. Saxon swabs her arm and the film edits between her flinching, his obsessive expression, and the needle’s insertion. Susan momentarily loses her composure and flinches (a classic example of the reactive gaze). The needle fills with blood and the final shot of the sequence shows in extreme close-up Saxon extracting the needle, which results in a small, orgasmic spray of blood–foreshadowing the penetration and extraction that Harry intends for Susan. The interplay of Saxon’s assaultive gaze and Susan’s reactive one in this overwrought medical examination is so paramount that it approaches self-parody. The scene could be described as a piece of empty titillation with next to no narrative justification (why does she have to be topless throughout, exactly?), and yet it also taps into a set of powerful images of male science dominating a female body. Although Saxon is putatively checking her body for evidence to support the conditions indicated by the X-ray, his professional aim is thoroughly obscured by the film’s presentation of the examination, which stands firmly at the juncture of horror and pornography. Meanwhile, Susan’s counter-gaze begins (however tentatively) to scrutinize the medical gaze deployed against her. The themes in this sequence become literal at the film’s climax.

Nature Unveiling Before the Slasher

In her book Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ludmilla Jordanova examines the theme of “unveiling” a female body through Louis-Ernest Barrais’s 1899 statue of “Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science.” The statue depicts a young woman veiled except for her breasts, which she is in the process of uncovering. Jordanova writes that the statue “mobilizes . . . a number of devices commonly used over many centuries: personification, veiling, the use of breasts to denote femininity, the gendering of both science and nature” (87). The affiliation of science with masculinity and nature with femininity obviously resonates with the examination scene, where Saxon is “probing” Susan’s body for non-existent secrets and imperfections hidden within her idealized body. Jordanova notes that medicine has historically evoked masculine sadism towards women, but also that “an idealization of women is as prominent a theme as violence–possibly these two constitute two sides of the same coin” (62). X-Ray idealizes Susan’s body as an image of feminine perfection that Harry’s machinations have transformed into an object of scrutiny. From the examination scene on, Susan wears a thin, translucent hospital gown that suggests “veiling” in its skimpiness and draws attention to Susan’s body (and to Benton’s) even as it conceals it. The recurring use of scrims, which simultaneously conceal and reveal bodies, functions similarly.

Themes of the gaze and female bodily idealization versus degradation also inform X-Ray‘s strangest subplot, that of the three old women with whom Susan shares a hospital room. They echo mythical and literary witch trios (the Graeae in the myth of Medusa, the “weird sisters” of Macbeth, etc.) and are associated with Christian imagery (rosaries and icons of saints). They stare at, taunt, and judge Susan. After overhearing Saxon finally tell Susan (without specifics) that she may have a serious illness, they have this exchange: “They say she’s terribly sick.” “But she’s so young and lovely.” “Young and lovely on the outside, maybe, but old and rotten on the inside. Putrid, foul . . . All her bones are decaying and her organs are all rancid and her blood is malignant as slime.”²⁰ The puzzling trio plays a minor role in the conclusion, accidentally distracting the killer long enough for Susan to escape, but their principal function is thematic. Philip Brophy suggests that “the contemporary horror film tends to play not so much on a fear of death but of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” (8). The women’s dialogue externalizes Susan’s (ultimately unfounded) fear of a loss of bodily control, and, like Dr. Saxon’s nurses, they function as patriarchal women who perpetuate the system that constrains them. Their barbs articulate a key, perverse theme of internal and external natures in X-Ray that ultimately applies to Harry, both in his self-preservation (the façade of a trustworthy medical professional concealing the psychopathic murderer) and in his goal (the extraction of Susan’s heart).

Several of the film’s themes come together in the climactic image of Susan lying on a medical table while the killer pants behind his identity-concealing facemask. The atmosphere is inexplicably smoky, functioning formally to echo the overlit glare of the opening sequence. The killer fondles dissection equipment and holds a serrated tool aloft. Susan pulls off his mask, revealing Harry: “It’s not Harry, it’s Harold,” he says, “It’s Harold,” cuing a black and white montage that ends with the broken Valentine’s heart from the opening scene. “What do you want?” Susan asks, and Harry answers, “What I’ve always wanted.” The film cuts to her face and hair being fondled by his latex-gloved hand before he adds, “Your heart.”

Fig. 3.
Harry (Charles Lucia) plans his dissection of Susan. Still from X-Ray © Shout! Factory, 1981.

The image of Harry looming over Susan while clutching the tools of dissection echoes a body of 19^th and 20^th-century artwork that Jordanova discusses, in which one or more figures of medical science stand over the body of a beautiful young woman preparing for an autopsy. Jordanova draws attention to the paintings of anatomist-artist John Wilkes Brodnax (1864-1926), preoccupied with such scenes of erotic dissection, sometimes depicted as dreams and including skulls and other symbols of death.²¹ A poem written by Brodnax—published posthumously in a college yearbook and entitled, curiously enough, The X-Ray—reads:

This comely maiden, once buoyant in life 
            By the dread hand of disease expires,
Is now subject to the dissector's knife,
             To carve and mutilate as he desires. 
                                                                                       (qtd. in Jordanova 104)

Jordanova understands Brodnax “not as reveling in or celebrating male medical power over the female corpse, but as attempting to come to terms with what appears obvious to him: the relationship between anatomist and anatomized is quintessentially gendered” (104). In X-Ray, Harry is a version of the slasher villain (“permanently locked in childhood” (Clover, Men 28)) crossed with Brodnax’s obsessed anatomist. In formulaic slasher film fashion, not only is he a penetrator but is also himself penetrated. Susan snatches up a knife and stabs him before escaping. In the subsequent chase through the hospital’s vacant corridors, she douses him with a convenient “flammable liquid” sitting lidless on a shelf and flees onto the roof. She beats Harry with a metal pipe; again formulaically, he does not die, but grapples with her one last time. In unmistakably sexual imagery, he climbs on top of her (her legs visibly splayed), wielding the knife he has extracted from his own body, and they struggle before she uses a lighter to set him on fire. The film’s last indignity to the human body is one of overt conflagration rather than the subtler “burning” implied by the X-ray, now turned back onto the medical “gazer.” The blazing slasher makes one last run at Susan before falling off the roof and collapsing spectacularly to the ground.

Leaving the Hospital (Massacre)

X-Ray‘s climax is standard slasher fare, and its medical setting becomes all but irrelevant once the chase moves to the roof. Its denouement is oddly sudden: a few seconds of Susan collecting her wits on the hospital roof, and then a cut to a daytime scene of her leaving the hospital, wearing the same dark red business attire she wore on the way in and being greeted jubilantly by her daughter. A freeze frame of their embrace while the ex-husband stands nearby remains on screen as the credits roll. The film is putatively without what Vera Dika calls the “but the heroine is not free” ending that she finds structurally vital to the “stalker” film (60); instead, it insists unconvincingly on the restoration of normalcy and on Susan’s resumption of the role of mother and perhaps of wife in the potential reconciliation with the ex-husband. Her victory anticipates a more “triumphant” strand of the Final Girl, emblematized by Stretch (Caroline Williams) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): Final Girls who do not simply survive, but win. At the same time, however, the normalizing tendencies of X-Ray‘s ending are opposed by the tensions it articulates about the medical gaze, which outlast Harry, the “hospital massacre,” and the film. One can read into its truncated conclusion a certain restless unwillingness to deal finally with its own implications. On some level, it is difficult to dispute Rockoff’s assessment that X-Ray is a minor, “inferior” slasher film, in part because of the film’s unintentionally comedic tone. Many sequences—for example, when blood appears to drip onto Susan’s shoe, but is revealed to be ketchup from Hal’s hamburger—seem more appropriate for a parody like Student Bodies (1981) or Scary Movie (2000). In the interview accompanying the Blu-Ray release of X-Ray, Davidson says that he tried to direct the film straight, but got compliments that suggest it was received as a comedy.²² The film’s tonal ambiguity lends it a sickly quality that goes well beyond the killer’s individual pathology, and is attached instead to the entire medical establishment. X-Ray may not be some lost subversive masterpiece, but from its messiness comes a peculiar fascination that remains unblunted by the normalizing, formulaic ending.

As I have noted, the apotheosis of the Final Girl in popular culture has been in almost direct opposition to its declining academic credibility. X-Ray is an example of a film in the first slasher cycle, but one that doesn’t fit Clover’s model neatly; the slasher film, even in its definitive stage, is a more diverse form than Clover and others have articulated. A person so inclined could create a checklist of Final Girl characteristics that do and do not apply to X-Ray: “[s]he . . . is the only character to be developed in any psychological depth” (44), check; “her inevitable sexual reluctance” (48), no check. Conversely, one could see X-Ray and films like it as a reason to discredit the Final Girl altogether. Neither approach is ultimately productive. Rather, as I have tried to show, the path forward lies in extending Clover’s ideas and linking them to related discourses, in this case, to discourses of medical horror and to the medical gaze.

Footnotes

1. Richard Nowell terms Halloween a “trailblazer hit” (48), the unexpected success of which ensured a wave of imitators. He mentions X-Ray only in passing.

2. Barbi Benton was in her early 30s when filming X-Ray, and her character Susan is clearly meant to be around the same age.

3. One can also point to later slasher-influenced films with medical settings like Dr. Giggles (1992), Anatomie/Anatomy (2000), and Valentine (2001). The latter seems to show X-Ray‘s influence through its hospital and Valentine’s Day setting.

4. Elizabeth Cowie has shown that Coma‘s “strong woman” protagonist is actually narratively undermined by the film’s deployment of its conspiracy/mystery structure (36-71).

5. Coma‘s more legitimate descendants include medical thrillers like Flatliners (1990) and Extreme Measures (1996).

6. See Leeder, Halloween, esp. pp. 44-54.

7. See Clover, Men, esp. pp. 27-30.

8. See Leeder, The Modern Supernatural and “Eroticism and Death.”

9. Allan Cameron observes that, in a horror film, all uses of the color red tend to suggest blood (89). The many red objects in X-Ray‘s opening foreshadow the blood to come.

10. Though it perhaps foreshadows her eventual stabbing of the villain, the cake-cutting is a cringe-inducing bit of misdirection that briefly suggests X-Ray might be a killer child movie; indeed, the same actress, Elizabeth Hoy, starred as a 10-year-old murderer in Bloody Birthday (1981) the same year.

11. The West German video release was called X-Ray: Der erste Mord geschah am Valentinstag; rather prosaically, “The First Murder was on Valentine’s Day.”

12. At one point, Susan stares at a photograph of a heart extraction on Dr. Saxon’s wall, both a bit of foreshadowing and a gruesome counterpoint to the stylized hearts casually strewn throughout the hospital.

13. For more on the heart icon and the broader role of the heart in Western culture, see Vinken (2000) and Young (2003).

14. While it’s possible to read Susan as being “punished” for her status as a career woman and divorced mother, the film does relatively little to support that interpretation.

15. See Moreland (2015) for a discussion of porn-horror stardom.

16. Dr. Jacobs contrasts strongly with the two nurses who do Dr. Saxon’s bidding throughout; while superficially feminine, they act as instruments of the masculine system. This is most dramatically apparent when they strap her to a bed, insisting that “it’s for your own good.”

17. Later, the film takes on the Hitchcockian “no one believes the truth” structure. Susan’s increasingly distraught behavior (because she rightly believes she is being stalked) is misread as hysteria by the doctors and nurses; this development is deeply reminiscent of the way hysteria (derived from the Latin “hystera,” “womb”) has been used as a rhetorical device to subdue “rebellious” women (Showalter esp. 145-64).

18. For the classic treatment of the propinquity of horror and pornography, see Williams (1991).

19. The interview with director Davidson contained in the DVD release indicates a gaze of a different sort. It notes that the staff was all in attendance when Benton’s nude scene was filmed: “Everybody was there. Even the catering people came to the set.”

20. Compare Mother Nature’s (Tracey Ullman) excoriation of plastic surgery in Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007): “You can jump and peel and nip and tuck but your insides are still rotting away.”

21. For comparable research, see Bronfen (1992) and McGrath (2002).

22. Davidson is better-known as the director of sex comedies like the Israeli Eskimo Lemon or Lemon Popsicle series (1978-1982) and The Last American Virgin (1982).

Works Cited

• Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester UP, 1992.
• Cameron, Allan. “Colour, Embodiment and Dread in High Tension and A Tale of Two Sisters.” Horror Studies, vol. 3, no.1, 2012, pp. 87-103.
• Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1995.
• Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 187-228.
• —. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992.
• Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Crangle, Richard. “Saturday Night at the X-Rays–The Moving Picture and ‘The New Photography’ in Britain, 1896.” Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, edited by John Fullerton, John Libbey & Company Pty Ltd., 1998, pp. 138-44.
• Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
• Davidson, Boaz, director. “Interview with Director Boaz Davidson.” X-Ray, 1981, Shout! Factory, 2013.
• “Final Girl.” TvTropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl. Accessed 5 May 2017. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Vintage, 1994.
• Goodman, Philip C. “The New Light: Discovery and Introduction of the X-Ray.” American Journal of Roentgenology, vol. 165, 1995, pp. 1041-45.
• Harper, Graeme and Andrew Moor. “‘Either He’s Dead or My Watch Just Stopped’: Medical Notes in 1930s Film Comedy.” Signs of Life: Medicine & Cinema, edited by Graeme Harper and Andrew Moor, Wallflower P, 2005, pp. 92-104.
• Herzig, Rebecca M. Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. Rutgers UP, 2005.
• Hsu, Hsuan L. and Martha Lincoln. “Biopower, Bodies . . . the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health.” Discourse, vol. 29, no.1, Winter 2007, pp. 14-34.
• Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
• Kemp, Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford UP, 2012.
• Leeder, Murray. “Eroticism and Death: The Skeleton in the Trick Film.” Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, edited by Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore and Louis Pelletier, John Libbey, 2012, pp. 176-83.
• —. Halloween. Auteur P, 2014.
• —. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
• Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). U of Minnesota P, 2005.
• Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• Maron, Jeremy. “When the Final Girl is Not a Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film.” Offscreen, vol. 19, no.1, 2015, http://offscreen.com/view/reconsidering-the-final-girl. Accessed 19 August 2018. Moreland, Sean. “Contagious Characters: Cronenberg’s Rabid, Demarbre’s Smash Cut, and the Reframing of Porn-Fame.” The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, edited by Gina Freitag and André Loiselle, U of Toronto P, 2015, pp. 249-69.
• Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 803-16.
• Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. Yale UP, 2007.
• Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. New York: Continuum, 2011.
• Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State U of New York P, 1997.
• Porter, Roy. “The Rise of Physical Examination.” Medicine and the Five Senses, edited by W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 179-197.
• Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film. 1978-1986, McFarland, 2002.
• Short, Sue. Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980. London: Virago, 1987.
• Sipos, Thomas M. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. McFarland, 2010.
• Staiger, Janet. “The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement.” Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, edited by Wickham Clayton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 213-28.
• Vinken, Pierre. The Shape of the Heart. Elsevier, 2000.
• Waldby, Catherine. Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. Routledge, 2000.
• Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no.4, Summer 1991, pp. 2-13.
• Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Columbia UP, 2003.
• Young, Louisa. The Book of the Heart. Doubleday, 2003.

Lucia Mulherin Palmer (bio)
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

In the torture porn film Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), protagonist Liz is a character descended from Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl—she is forced to watch the torture and murder of her peers, while her wit and resilience help her survive. However, the body count surrounding Liz is not composed of sexually active white teenagers, but rather primarily of Mexican migrants. Using Undocumented as a case study, this piece argues for the continuing importance of Clover’s analytical framework and of the Final Girl as a trope, but insists on taking her race, class, and nationality into account.

Three decades ago, Carol J. Clover made a crucial intervention in feminist horror scholarship when she defined the trope of the Final Girl. In the decades since the Final Girl’s first appearances in early slasher films, she has persisted in various iterations that reimagine the slasher subgenre, often self-reflexively or creatively. She continues to materialize in updates and remakes and bleeds into other horror genres and cycles such as the zombie film. In her numerous reappearances, the Final Girl has challenged and reaffirmed Clover’s foundational insights, and remains an entry point into examining sociocultural anxieties, as well as a gauge of feminism’s impact in Western society.

A number of scholars have built on Clover’s work, noting the importance of her intervention as well as providing some important critiques and corrections, especially around Clover’s characterization of the Final Girl in terms of masculine aggression and phallic agency. Nowell argues that characterizing the Final Girl as boyish is a misinterpretation, providing evidence that the characters frequently fit more “conventionally feminine” norms (134). Other scholars are concerned about the utility of the Final Girl’s description as a masculinized proxy for a young male spectator, a structure that Sue Short worries excludes female audiences. Short argues that the character can provide a point of identification not because of her masculinization but because Final Girls are survivors capable of overcoming adversity, who thus “provide an image of self-sufficiency and resilience that sets them apart from female characters generally seen in cinema” (48). Rather than phallic, the Final Girl’s transformation is a rite of passage that makes her a responsible, self-reliant, and capable adult. Pinedo similarly intervenes with a concern for the female viewer, arguing that the Final Girl’s interpretation as a “male in drag” seriously restricts the potential for female agency (Recreational Terror 81). Her actions may be normatively coded as masculine, but they are nonetheless enacted by a young woman, a turn that troubles gender binaries in potentially progressive ways (84). However, the trope of the Final Girl remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles. In particular, the ways in which she is constructed in relation to race, class, and nationality are often overlooked, despite her reiteration again and again as a white middle-class US woman.

Although little has been written critiquing Clover for overlooking intersections between gender, sexuality, and race, Kinitra Brooks problematizes the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl. The Final Girl, Brooks argues, is compelling because of her ability to subvert Western patriarchy, becoming an agential character who survives due to her capability and intelligence (464). Brooks points out that this relies on her normalized whiteness, through which she is figured as “plucky” (464). This is made clear when contrasted with the stereotype of the “strong black woman” whose survival strategies are pathologized as innately too masculine and aggressive (464). Brooks questions Clover’s reliance on a model of gender as exclusively binary, ignoring its differential manifestations as well as gender’s intersection with race (465). Following Brooks’s insights into the overly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, this paper calls for deeper engagements with intersectional identities and social constructs in horror film studies. Even self-critical horror films that actively highlight and/or subvert the genre’s sexist and racist tropes¹ reiterate the Final Girl in whitewashed terms. And while the Final Girl might challenge oppressive demands for “proper” Western womanhood and femininity,² she does little to challenge the normativity of whiteness and white femininity and to show how these constructions intersect with normative ideas of US-based “Americanness.”

These tensions, anxieties, and intersections are made visible in writer/director Chris Peckover’s 2010 film Undocumented, a graphically violent horror film that follows a group of mostly white male documentary filmmakers as they travel with a group of undocumented immigrants clandestinely crossing from Mexico into the United States. After the group crosses over to the US side of the border, they are kidnapped by psychotic vigilantes resembling the real-life militia groups that formed part of the Minutemen Project on the Arizona border. The vigilantes take the kidnapped immigrants to an abandoned slaughterhouse where they are undressed, chained, and selected one by one to be tortured and killed. Meanwhile, the vigilantes hold the film crew captive and force the crew members to document the torture and brutalization of the Mexican immigrants with their cameras and audio equipment. Thus, the crew members are coerced into becoming passive witnesses to the vigilantes’ racist violence and are threatened with death at any sign of intervention. Soon the filmmakers themselves become the targets of this psychotic aggression, and are picked off slowly through psychological torment and excruciating physical trials.

Importantly, the film crew includes one female member, Liz (Alona Tal), who emerges as the protagonist most capable of keeping her cool, speaking back intelligently to the captors, assessing their ever-changing captivity, and finally enabling the escape of the remaining captives. Liz is recognizable early in the film as a Final Girl, distinguished from her goofball male crew members by her level-headedness, caution, and responsibility. Like other Final Girls before her, Liz is white, middle-class, and from the United States. This is a significant aspect of her character’s identity and of the film’s narrative, as Liz is not only differentiated from her male peers in the film crew, but also from the Mexican immigrants who are silent victims. Liz’s racialized, classed, and national difference, and the ways in which these intersecting identities enable her empowerment, are further reinforced when juxtaposed with the other female characters in the film, all of whom are of Mexican descent or women of color. Liz’s whiteness must be deconstructed in order to understand how it is rendered the norm for empowered femininity and how this is enabled through her juxtaposition with abject women of color.

A close reading of Undocumented‘s most resonant and longest torture scene, in which a Mexican woman’s body is slowly dismembered as a punishment for her husband’s inability to prove his Americanness while the witnessing crew is unable to intervene, makes visible the intersecting social hierarchies embedded in character development and the mechanics of spectatorship. What emerges is a concealing of “normal” whiteness in contrast to an abhorrent white supremacy, while white, US-centric feminism is written through Liz, the Final Girl, in ways that exclude women of color. The dismemberment of the Mexican woman demonstrates the ways in which national identity and citizenship are formed in relation to the gendered bodies of women of color, as she silently functions as a plot device to reemphasize her assimilating husband’s struggles, Liz’s empowerment, and the psychokiller’s monstrous deviancy. This essay examines the systems of meaning and sociocultural hierarchies embedded in Undocumented in relation to its expressions of certain societal fears and anxieties at this moment of increasingly potent nativism in the United States. Undocumented‘s Final Girl, her relationship to her fellow captives and victims, and her relationship to her psychokiller captors are the primary sites for this investigation. How does the figure of the Final Girl function as an empowered white female protagonist when placed on the US-Mexico border in the context of ever more visible nativist anxieties? How do the layers of identification structured around Liz, her crew, and the abject Mexican immigrant victims rely on normalized racial hierarchies? How do white masculinity and white supremacy manifest on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury? These central questions look at generic horror tactics in Undocumented to reveal crucial social dynamics that manifest in sometimes progressive and often problematic ways.

Torture Porn and National Anxieties

Undocumented belongs to the recent cycle of horror films commonly known as “torture porn,” a subgenre descended from the slasher that plays with tropes of explicit gore, psychokiller antagonist(s), and sexually charged violence. The slasher’s gusto for bodily pain and horrific violence paves the way for torture porn, a body of work that features abduction, captivity, and torture as its central narrative and aesthetic tactics of fright. Torture porn is identified by film franchises such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), as well as low-budget films like Wolf Creek (2005) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), all of which demonstrate the potential popularity and profitability of films vividly displaying torture and torment (Edelstein 1; Lockwood 41). In Undocumented, Peckover uses torture porn conventions to grapple with issues of border militarization, chauvinistic nationalism, and xenophobic racism.

Undocumented has a clear lineage in the slasher subgenre, which can be seen through Liz, a character that draws on the Final Girl trope. For Clover, slasher films express the shifting sexual attitudes of their time, and the anxieties unleashed by second wave feminism’s undermining of traditional gender roles (Men, Women, and Chain Saws 62). As she maps out the slasher film’s key elements—the Final Girl, the psychokiller, the Terrible Place, the phallic weapon, and the sexually active victims—Clover also unpacks the ideological components and anxieties that are embedded in these characters, narratives, and cinematic mechanics. Undocumented inherits the slasher’s sexualized violence, especially its tendency to linger on and spectacularly display the deaths of women; its longest and most resonant scene involves the slow dismemberment of a woman’s body. However, torture porn films contain important generic deviations related to post-9/11 anxieties around the penetration of national borders (Edelstein; McMann; Pinedo). In Undocumented, these fears are played out through the cruelty and madness of the film’s psychokillers, the powerlessness of the documentary crew, and the torture of captive undocumented immigrants.

Evidenced by the cycle’s emergence in the new millennium and its preoccupation with claustrophobic captivity and intimately rendered bodily violence, torture porn is closely connected to national fears and debates in the United States after 9/11 and in relation to revelations about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Edelstein; Gartside; Lockwood; Pinedo). Ben McCann understands torture porn as “politically charged allegory” working “to tap into national trauma” by addressing concerns about national invasion written onto the vulnerable human body (33). The spectacularly gory imagery in torture porn films excites audiences, but it is also important that the “attacks on the physical nature of the body allegorize fractures in the national body politic” (31). Thus, in the process of privileging bodily ruination and bloody violence, “the fear of the Other, the fear of invasion, and the fear of corporeal pollution all come into sharp focus” (43). Pinedo argues that torture porn is a “symptomatic and supple genre” that “tap[s] into social anxieties,” therefore helping us deal with disturbing fears and emotions in the context of war, terrorism and concerns over national borders (“Torture Porn” 359).

Torture porn emerged in the United States during a period marked by increasing apprehensiveness about the nation’s southern border with Mexico and a preoccupation with perceived threats from Central American immigration (Chavez). The new millennium witnessed increased visibility of nativist sentiments in the United States, nowhere more evident than in the spectacular performance of border insecurity by the nativist militia groups labelling themselves the Minutemen (Oliviero). Beginning in 2005, these volunteer-based groups patrolled the US-Mexico border in search of unsanctioned border crossers. The armed volunteers claimed to be nonviolent, but nonetheless their militarized demonstrations made visible nativist anxieties about border penetration as well as patriarchal impulses toward aggressive protectionism (Oliviero). These militia groups commanded media attention and inspired or terrified popular discourse surrounding them, desires and fears that are picked up and fleshed out in Peckover’s Undocumented.

Undocumented: Torture Porn on the US-Mexico Border

Released in 2010, Undocumented comes in at the tail end of the peak of the torture porn cycle, but it undeniably belongs to this subgenre due to its excessive aesthetic depictions of the pain and violence of captivity and torture. The reception and reviews of Undocumented tend to focus on its political subject matter, described by the president of IFC Films/Sundance Selects, Jonathan Sehring, as “part of the great tradition of political horror flicks that find the scariest things don’t have to be made up, because they exist within our society” (qtd. in B. Brooks). This description of Undocumented as “political horror” recirculated in numerous press releases and festival promotions for the film, accompanied by descriptions that privilege its themes of immigration and border crossing. Even as recently as 2017, director Chris Peckover continued to situate the film in the context of these national debates and aligned the film with progressive politics.³

Undocumented links its fictionalized cruel violence with the invisible quotidian violence of migration and exploitative labor relations, featuring small characters that speak briefly about dangerous working conditions or unfair wages and tying elements of the story’s torture and captivity to real-world issues (the torture of a drug mule, the administration of a citizenship test, the execution of a smuggler, the removal and commodification of organs, etc.). By bringing the hidden violence embedded in banal practices and processes to light, rendering them in spectacular displays of pain and terror, Undocumented dramatizes material issues in ways that might unroot them from the commonplace. Following Pinedo, we can understand the film in relation to the way cinematic horror “disrupts the world of everyday life” and “explodes our assumptions about normality” (Recreational Terror 18). This upheaval can function on ideological levels, questioning the status quo by recognizing its monstrosity.

Undocumented may help to make explicit the repressed monstrosities that underlie the policing of national borders, presenting psychokiller vigilantes that repulsively mirror a national self and overtly express the nativist racism and colonialist violence that threaten to erupt into the quiet of the everyday. The rhetoric used by the vigilantes continuously mimics real-life nativist discourse circulating in the public sphere, as well as more institutionalized terminology mobilized to justify aggressive border enforcement by the state. This mirroring begins when the immigrants and film crew are kidnapped while being smuggled in the back of a truck and brought to the vigilantes’ lair. Upon arriving at the lair, the truck containing the captives is unlocked and blinding floodlights are aimed at them (a tactic used by the Border Patrol) as a voice in Spanish declares authoritatively, “You will be detained, processed, and judged” (see Fig. 1). This scene mimes the language and the actions of the Border Patrol, but instead of being detained, the immigrants are chained and held hostage in a slaughterhouse.

Fig. 1. The arrival of the kidnapped group at the vigilantes’ lair, where they are told that they have crossed into the United States illegally and will be “detained, processed, and judged.” Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

While the undocumented crossers await violence, the vigilantes separate them from the documentary crew and command the crew members to continue filming, documenting their self-proclaimed “patriotic” practices and philosophy. This request directly contradicts the aims of the film crew’s in-progress documentary, which critiques the labor oppression and quotidian violence enacted on undocumented immigrants. The vigilantes commandeer the media narrative, forcing the progressive aims of the documentary to mutate into a film that passively observes violent nativism lashing out at the bodies of captive immigrants. The first torture scene that the crew is forced to document is that of a male drug mule, who is stripped down, chained to a chair, and forced to swallow a condom full of cocaine while a vigilante yells “take it all!” (making explicit the sexualized implications of this violent oral penetration). After the man vomits the drugs, a vigilante beats the condom into his face with a metal tool, killing the man while yelling that immigrants are destroying the United States and tearing apart American families. The film crew watches in horror and disgust and Liz tries to intervene, shouting “enough, enough of this!” in a futile effort to save the mule’s life (see Fig. 2). Although Liz is spunky, smart, and brave, in this early scene she is unable to contend with the phallic aggression of the vigilantes.

Fig. 2. Liz attempts to intervene in the oral penetration and beating of a drug mule in the first torture scene. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The film sympathizes with the politics of the film crew, and particularly with Liz, and associates nativist ideologies with unjustifiable violence. The vigilantes adopt commonplace nativist rhetoric while enacting torture, rhetoric that is routinely used in the United States to advocate for more aggressive border patrolling and militarization. The mirrored language and affect between the vigilantes and more quotidian forms of nativism link anxieties over national borders with extreme manifestations of these sentiments. But even as the film may work to question the normalization of violent ideologies, it also maintains many of their assumptions. In particular, the film reproduces racialized and classed hierarchies by leaving the privileging of white, middle-class molds of “American” identity unquestioned, embodied in the white crew members with whom the audience is encouraged to identify. These dynamics are nowhere more evident than with Liz, Undocumented‘s Final Girl. She is the most capable, most resourceful, and most aware. And she is also the most willing to stand up and protest, to fight against the violence she watches enacted on others. In the following discussion, it becomes clear that her empowerment is constructed in relation to the women of color in the film, rendered as voiceless victims. Liz embodies white, Western feminism, assumed as an ideal progressive version of womanhood that is capable of fighting against and surviving a regressive patriarchal order. The normalcy with which she emerges as the leader and survivor speaks to the ways in which her white, Western feminist manifestation is the invisible norm of female empowerment in horror cinema.

The Victims, The Psychokiller, The Final Girl

The viewer is first introduced to the documentary crew members as they ride in a van through southern Texas, affably joking with each other as they head to their next filming location. The dynamics in the van immediately establish the lead characters. Liz is distinguished instantly from her male colleagues, sitting apart from the rest of the crew in the front seat and abstaining from their antics. She displays a no-nonsense attitude, using a kind but authoritative tone of voice to cut short their distractions and keep them on schedule. She bickers with Travis (Schott Mechlowicz), the other lead character and her love interest,⁴ who commands much of the camera and dialogue in the film alongside Liz. As the documentary’s narrator, his viewpoint is also privileged and his monologues help drive the exposition forward. Third in line, in terms of character development and command of perspective, is the film crew’s only person of color, Mexican-American Davie (Greg Serano). Davie is the crew’s lead camera operator and Travis’s best friend, as well as the cousin of some of the immigrants who will become captives. Finally, the two remaining crew members, Jim (Kevin Weisman) and William (Tim Draxl), are both sympathetic characters; they are given emotive reaction shots but are rarely in command and have little narrative agency. This first scene’s jovial dialogue sets up the crew as a tightknit group of friends, each member immediately likeable, thus making them easy and comfortable characters for viewer investment. The early narrative follows the crew members as they drive through south Texas and make their film, eventually journeying into Mexico in order to travel clandestinely back across the border into the United States with the undocumented immigrants.

The horror commences in full after the crew and the immigrants are kidnapped during their crossing. The cameras and crew members are led through the setting of their captivity, revealing the immigrants in their undergarments bound by chains, their skin soft against the cold, industrial tile, the mise-en-scène filled with metal and concrete. The women are in one room bound to the floor, and the men are in another, strung up like animal carcasses with their hands over their heads. It is soon revealed that the setting is an abandoned industrial farm, a location that emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment of the immigrants.

As they walk among the confined bodies, the crew are horrified and exchange nervous glances with one another. A dominating masculine voice is heard just outside of the frame commanding that they “Come here, come closer.” The camera turns the corner, and the viewer is invited to behold the spectacle of the masked vigilantes. The leader and head psychokiller, Z (Peter Stormare), sits in a chair in the middle, surrounded by his compatriots like an entourage for a king (see Fig. 3). The vigilante group is composed of masked men who stand menacingly, directly facing the approaching camera. The camera comes to a halt when confronted by their threatening presence. The vigilantes’ fair skin shows through their masks and clothing, and each is coded in class-based visual markers as embodying a white working-class model of masculinity.⁵ Z is the epitome of this, wearing a black mesh hunting mask, a tan cap, a camo-patterned T-shirt covered by a red flannel shirt and a jean vest. These markers fit with stereotypes of nativist nationalist sects in the US population, in particular by playing with slippages between men who hunt (Z is outfitted head to toe in hunting gear), rural political conservatism, and working-class white men.

Fig. 3. The crew confronts the vigilantes for the first time. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

In constructing the villains as stereotypes, the film separates the liberal, well-educated film crew distinctly from the vigilante killers. This visual division associates white supremacist violence exclusively with forms of Othered whiteness, contrasted with the crew’s rationality and empathy. The vigilantes embody exaggerated forms of white nativism through their dress as well as their speech: they continuously comment that the immigrants are diseased, criminal, and contaminating. Much of what they say codes them as ignorant, as when a vigilante feeds some apples to a captive woman like a pet while calling her “Maria” because he cannot understand her actual name. The distinct contrast drawn between the group of violent white vigilantes and the sympathetic and progressive (mostly) white documentary crew encourages spectatorial identification with the protagonists. The documentary crew members are the only captive characters with enough agency to end the violence. While the immigrant captives are chained and remain largely silent, the crew moves through the facilities documenting the violence, able to see the threats that await. The narrative is rooted in their thoughts and actions, as they not only observe but also react, think, protest, and try to find a way out. And the primary instigator among the crew is Liz, the member who most frequently speaks out against the violence and the natural leader of the group. Like other Final Girls’, Liz’s power comes from her intelligence, level-headedness, and ability to act while her peers succumb to fear, anger, and defeat. She challenges Z in particular, especially in reaction to his diatribes about the ills of immigration during violent scenes of abuse and dismemberment. After witnessing the removal of a man’s kidney, for example, she accuses Z and his group of targeting vulnerable people, saying that, “This is just racism posing as patriotism.”

Point of view shots and subjective camerawork in Undocumented align the viewer with the documentary crew, and especially with Liz. Critical outcry against the slasher genre of the 1970s and 1980s often centered on the alliance created between the spectator and the psychokiller through subjective point of view camerawork, suggesting that the viewer might be experiencing misogynistic and sadistic pleasures as the killer stalks and murders his victims. But, as Clover demonstrates, identification can be slippery, and pleasure can also come from identifying with the character who resists, fights, and survives—the Final Girl. For Clover, the Final Girl’s climactic battle with the psychokiller depends on her adoption of an active investigative gaze.

Like earlier slasher films, Undocumented uses subjective camerawork that directs the audience to watch the murders from the point of view of the characters. But unlike the films from the 1970s and 1980s, Undocumented never aligns spectatorial identification with the psychokiller. Over the course of the film, the story unfolds through a mix of omniscient objective camerawork and handheld subjective shots from the crew members’ cameras. Using a documentary-style aesthetic popularized in horror films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008), the film shows much of the action through the perspective of an “I-camera,” handheld by one of the crew members. The viewer, like the crew, must watch the group’s atrocities, see the pain of the immigrants, and find comradery in the horrified reactions of the other crew members. This is also an uncomfortable position for the viewer because as the crew is forced to watch the unfolding torture and murder passively, their inaction renders them complicit in the violence.

The reactions of the crew members demonstrate their discomfort, disapproval, and disgust, but they remain largely silent and safe behind their camera lenses. Importantly, the “I-camera” in this film does not function to give the spectator a degree of narrative agency, but rather to create a sense of incapacitation, the feeling that the viewer is trapped in a passive position as the psychotic vigilantes torture and murder. While in the traditional slasher the victim is unaware of the psychokiller’s (and thus the spectator’s) gaze, in Undocumented all parties (killers, victims, and observers) are aware, and the privilege of observation is one that is coerced and thus robbed of much of its agency. The only crew member who is frequently depicted without video or audio equipment is Liz, who, as the producer, must stand and watch but is not forced to document the violence. Instead, Liz often becomes a point of identification in scenes of violence where she gets the most prominent reaction shot and is the site of emotional investment, her face shown unhindered by equipment. Her reaction shots become spaces for spectatorial identification, and her protests provide opportunities to experience brief moments of agency in a film structured around claustrophobic camerawork (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Liz reacts to the cruelty of the vigilantes, situated amidst disrobed Mexican immigrant women chained to the floor. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The viewer’s alignment with the crew—seeing what they see through their camera lenses, and watching them as they watch the violence—is significantly different from the viewer’s positioning in relation to the Mexican immigrant victims. The victims are dehumanized following their abduction, shackled, disrobed, and treated as animals awaiting slaughter (see Fig. 5). This device highlights the cruelty of the vigilantes and could encourage a critical awareness of the apathy and degrading treatment meeting Mexican immigrants in the United States. But it also works to occlude spectatorial identification, structuring a relationship between the spectator and the voiceless immigrants as one of pity. The violence enacted on their bodies is despicable and painful to watch, but it does not elevate the immigrants from their subhuman representations. The documentary crew members are also held against their will, but they are only locked in a room, remain fully clothed, and are periodically released and allowed to move unhindered by chains. Unlike the immigrants, the crew members are captives but can interact, discuss their situation and work toward escape.

Fig. 5. Shackled Mexican women immigrants, huddled on the floor. S Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz and Travis are the only crew members left alive at the climax of the film; fully realized and fully human, they are able to act as white saviors, unchaining the immigrants as they escape. The deaths of their fellow crew members are graphic, depicted aesthetically much like the deaths of the immigrants, with lingering close-ups of blood and gore. William is shot in the head after attempting to help supporting character Alberto (Yancey Arias), Davie is bludgeoned to death when he tries to intervene in the vigilantes’ violence, and Jim is encased in a giant piñata and beaten with a spiked bat. However, unlike the immigrant captives, they are not anonymous or interchangeable. Further, Liz enables the climactic release and escape of all the captives. Near the film’s climax, Travis breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably from the weight of the preceding violence. Liz, remaining level-headed, comforts and grounds Travis, cradling him and then finally kissing him.⁶ They are interrupted by one of the vigilantes who demands that Liz come with him. Travis attacks the vigilante, losing control as he repeatedly slams his head into the ground, blood and viscera flying. Liz again brings him back to reality, instructing him to grab his keys. When they leave the room, Liz initiates the final kick to the vigilante’s head, ensuring that he cannot follow them. The two free the rest of the immigrants and eventually escape.

An important dynamic of identification is also constructed through Liz’s relationship to the female Mexican characters in Undocumented. The vigilantes keep some of the women as slaves, dressing them in maid costumes and forcing them to clean the facilities. They are represented scrubbing and mopping the bloodied floors, figures hovering in the background in numerous scenes and locations. These domestic slaves symbolically critique the everyday exploitation of feminized domestic labor, positions that are often filled by undocumented immigrants. Liz watches disapprovingly when she encounters the enslaved maids for the first time. The camera shows a maid’s back as she cleans quietly in the background, while in the foreground we see shock and disgust in Liz’s facial expressions. Liz and Z confront each other when she voices her disapproval, after which she refuses to eat and instead continues to glare at her captors, while the silent immigrant woman cannot speak or protest. The racialized gender dynamics are crucial here. Like the maid, Liz is also subject to patriarchal aggression from Z, but unlike her, Liz is able to voice her disapproval and take resistive action. The female Mexican immigrant, unable to save herself, must rely on the white woman to speak for her, to defend her, and to look after her and her wellbeing.

The two best-elaborated captive female Mexican characters, Maria (Carmen Corral) and Selina (Lorél Medina), are only allowed limited development. Their characters are attended only in relation to Alberto, who, as Davie’s cousin, is the most well-developed Mexican immigrant character in the film. Maria is introduced as his wife and Selina as his daughter, but they remain simple figures circumscribed by their relations to Alberto as their husband/father. Their framing is contained within the supporting roles of wife, mother, and daughter, and the violence enacted on their bodies is registered most resonantly through Alberto’s anguished reactions rather than their own. Selina disappears from the film after the vigilantes pretend to let her go in an act of mercy, but during a later escape attempt she is found dead, face down in barbed wire surrounding the compound. Maria’s character development is confined to demonstrations of nurturing care or abject emotional distress, first when she must watch her daughter leave the compound, and later when she is slowly tortured to death in front of her husband. Maria is therefore limited by conventions of domesticity, matrimony, and motherhood. Liz’s empowerment and her capacity to fight back in Undocumented are enabled by her rejection of the submission and self-sacrifice that these roles demand in traditional patriarchal structures, roles that Undocumented writes onto the bodies of the captive Mexican women.

The Scene of Torture: Race, Gender, and the US National Imagination

The complex relational positioning of the various characters according to intersecting racial, class, and gender hierarchies is concentrated in the longest torture scene of the film, which features the opening of Maria’s body, the psychological torment of Alberto, and the crew members’ excruciating angst and fear. The eight-minute-long scene opens with a shot of one of the vigilantes standing in front of an oversized American flag, seen through a handheld camera that signals the witnessing presence of the crew. The camera pans left and down to reveal Alberto, stripped down to his underwear and bound to a chair, captive in front of the prominently displayed flag. The scene cuts to a tight close-up of Maria, whose face is lit in heavy shadow and partially obscured by her dark hair. She seems exhausted and distraught, while behind her bits of metal and chain hint that she is bound. It cuts back to a more tightly framed shot of Alberto, the American flag still conspicuous in the background, as he cries and emotes, looking directly into the camera with pleading eyes. The full threat of the violence that awaits is finally revealed to the viewer with a shot that starts at the ceiling and tilts down, revealing a torture device that spans the full height of the room, stretching all the way to the floor. The menacing device is black, metallic, and hard, composed of chains, gears, and angular bars. Maria is chained to the device, her arms extended and feet restrained, mimicking a crucifixion (see Fig. 6). The device is in shadow while a light hits Maria from beneath, showing her almost-nude body, her pinkish underwear and skin emphasizing her fleshiness next to the stern metal contraption. She seems to glow angelically, in contrast with the industrial cruelty surrounding her, heightening the suspense. She is flanked on both sides of the device by two anonymous vigilantes dressed in black, ready and waiting.

Fig. 6. Maria is chained to a torture device. Z enters the room in command of the coming violence. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Fig. 7. Alberto, disrobed and strapped to a chair, begins to realize what awaits when Z explains the rules of their citizenship test. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Z enters and sets up his sadistic game, explaining that Alberto will need to answer questions from a US citizenship test. The vigilante standing next to Alberto, poised behind a podium, explains the rules: for every question he gets right, they will undo one of Maria’s wrists, but each wrong answer will result in cranking the device (see Fig. 7). The first question asks how many representatives there are in congress, and when Alberto fails to answer correctly, the test administrator bangs his gavel and begins the torture. The shot cuts to the torture device as tense music heightens the suspense, the noisescape swelling with sounds of the machine grinding, flesh and muscle stretching, and Maria’s screams and moans in pain. Her face remains largely hidden, her eyes barely visible, but her mouth is open and wrenched. Her facial close-ups are cut together with tight close-ups of her hands, her arms, and the machine. Alberto shouts out and resists his restraints, unable to act. There is a pause and then a cut to a long shot of Maria’s body, now fully extended and taut.

The scene unfolds through intercut subjective camera work following the action and tightly framed close-ups of faces, hands, and the twisting and turning of the metal device. We do not explicitly see the ripping of muscles and limbs; Maria’s physical pain is conveyed through her mouth, hands, the grinding of chains, and the turning of gears. The viewer watches Alberto’s psychological torture, as his inability to answer the questions results in his wife’s slow and painful murder. Maria’s screams are audible and her body is spectacularly exposed, but her face remains largely hidden by the angle of her head and her loose-hanging hair. Instead, the film supplies Alberto’s face, twisted in desperation, as a focal point for registering the impact of the pain enacted on Maria’s body. Additionally, the scene provides reaction shots of the crew, demonstrating fear, disgust, and the anguish of coerced observation.

The levels of identification set up in the film privilege above all the perspective of the crew, who are more fully sympathetic and human, and to a lesser extent identifies with Alberto as a kindhearted husband and father trying to live out the “American dream.” At the bottom level of identification is Maria, the least developed character in the scene and the one rendered as an object, slowly mutilated into a body in pieces. The structures of identification in this scene rely on social hierarchies that are taken for granted, privileging the US citizen, middle-class, mostly white film crew, followed by the assimilating Mexican male immigrant, with the abject and victimized Mexican wife and mother last. And on the outside, separated from the sympathetic white characters, are the agents of violence, the vigilante group that polices the border and embodies aggressive forms of white working-class masculinity.

Liz steps in assertively when the inevitability of Alberto’s failure becomes clear and asks the vigilantes to stop (see Fig. 8). Z confronts her, blusteringly questioning her for defending a man who “doesn’t respect” the country he entered. Undeterred, Liz replies, “He doesn’t understand what you’re saying.” In response, Z menacingly points his finger at her, raising his voice to announce, “When it comes to fucking food stamps these people understand English perfectly well.” This confrontation, played out in front of the bound and incapacitated Alberto and Maria, reaffirms Liz and Z as leaders and nemeses. Meanwhile Maria is bound and helpless, a figure who becomes progressively more abject as the scene progresses.

Fig. 8. Liz stands up to Z, protesting Maria’s torture. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz emerges as a heroic figure over the course of the film not just because of her ability to survive her own captivity, but also because of her willingness to stand up against the aggressors and defend the helpless victims of the vigilantes’ violence. As a Final Girl, Liz is positioned against Z, a retrograde version of an outdated white masculinity that only tenuously conceals its violence and aggression. In this micro-battle between Liz and Z, viewers are encouraged to deepen their identification with her as the protagonist and the one who might be able to stop the violence. And importantly, this identification depends on the violence enacted on Maria; without a victim to defend, Liz could not materialize as a heroic defender. Maria remains bound also by traditional gender conventions through her character’s circumscription in the roles of wife and mother. Again, prior to this scene, Maria’s character is given screen time only in relation to her husband and daughter; during her death scene, she becomes a focal point exclusively as an object of violence (see Fig. 9). Liz, on the other hand, refuses to relinquish control to Z or to the other vigilantes, defying their models of white masculinity. Her racialized privilege is never interrogated in Undocumented. Liz embodies assumptions of female empowerment that are naturalized in Final Girls throughout the horror genre: Final Girls act out their gender-norm-defying agency while the films overlook and render invisible their US-centric whiteness.

Fig. 9. Maria in abject pain, close to death and unable to fight back. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

When Alberto has answered his final question incorrectly, the punishment is meted onto Maria’s tortured body. The crew members exchange fearful glances with one another. The gears begin again, louder than ever, and her screams are more desperate and blood-curdling than before. A series of extreme close-ups show her face in absolute pain, the chains behind her head, and the gears resisting against the pull of her body. The camera cuts to Liz, who averts her eyes, trying desperately not to panic. Again the shot cuts to Alberto before returning to Maria and the device, now suddenly accompanied by the sound of soft wetness, as her resistance gives way, the gears run smooth, and her screams cease. Immediately it cuts to Liz, looking at the ground, in absolute sorrow and terror, registering the horror as a mediator for the viewer. Thus, the scene sets up both her heroism and the full danger that she faces, and does so by enacting violence on Maria’s body. Liz’s power and strength are emphasized through Maria’s abjection and marginalization.

Conclusion

Undocumented ends on a haunting note with a brief video sent to a news station of the extremist vigilantes, with Z as their leader, demonstrating that their numbers have grown. The extremists hover at the margins of society, ready to violently burst into and disrupt the everyday, revealing the monstrous nativist underbelly of the US national project. The horrific evils in Undocumented, embodied by the vigilante psychokillers and especially by their patriarchal leader Z, are portrayed as barbaric, regressive figures, out of sync with more progressive and modern sensibilities that condemn their actions. The pleasure of spectatorship in Undocumented depends on the spectator’s identification with the white crew members and the act of witnessing from a position that condemns the violence and that is not fully culpable in the suffering of Mexican immigrant bodies. The spectator is twice removed from the torture of the Mexican immigrants, privileging the point of view of the mostly white film crew, and Liz in particular.

The gender, class, national, and racial aspects of the violence in the film go unquestioned. It appears natural that bigoted rednecks are mutilating the bodies of undocumented Mexican immigrants and that young white progressives are the ones who watch with fear and disgust. Further, the logic of Undocumented suggests that it is common sense for the white Final Girl to be the one who embodies feminist empowerment while the bodies of brown women are victimized. These hierarchies of cinematic identification are taken for granted and expected because they fit with the hierarchies upon which the US national project and global capitalism are built.

Clover interprets slasher films to indicate shifting attitudes in society and the anxieties that surround the instability of “normality.” For her, slashers express changes that accompany the women’s liberation movement and loosening sexual mores, anxieties that continue to be manifest in the recurring prominence of tropes like the Final Girl. A question this essay has tried to engage is how anxieties about gender and sexuality are manifest in torture porn, a descendent of the slasher film that draws on post-9/11 national anxieties in the United States. Undocumented plays out excessive dramatizations of nativist fears of border penetration and anxieties over national identity, making them explicit while pointing to our nation’s unsightly and potentially violent undercurrents. The vigilante killers, particularly Z, are compelling and terrifying in part because they are recognizable. They describe immigration as a plague, label immigrants as criminal, and justify hatred as patriotic—these are discourses that have circulated before and have gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic contemporary political climate. Perhaps, then, torture porn is a ripe horror cycle for exploring these frightening issues, making invisible violence explicit and working towards a reckoning of social contradictions.

However, it is important to keep in sight the construction of the victims in Undocumented and the racialized hierarchies through which they become fodder for the vigilantes. The commonsense hierarchies by which the Mexican immigrants are constructed as victims rather than as heroes, or even as Final Girls, maintain racialized logics that undergird nativist sentiments, here uncritically privileging the white, US crew members, particularly Liz, as the primary points of identification. As Clover points out, it is significant that most female characters of slasher films are objects of aggression, revealing sexist undertones that surface in horror cinema. For Clover, the juxtaposition of the Final Girl, who is gender-ambiguous and sexually abstinent, with the sexually transgressive female victims, reveals tensions between female empowerment and lingering anxieties about expanding sexual freedom. The difference in the deaths between male and female victims in terms of length, intimacy, and graphic violence is an important component that should not be overlooked and speaks to persistent misogynistic impulses toward violence against women. Similarly, it is crucial not to lose sight of the gendered and racialized dynamics at play in the victimization of the Mexican immigrant women in Undocumented. When Maria is slowly tortured to death, her nearly nude body is displayed spectacularly, stretched out in abject suffering. While earlier Final Girls are set apart from victims through their abstinence, Liz is set apart from these women through her whiteness. Behind these character contrasts are assumptions that the Mexican woman of color is trapped in domesticity, framed entirely by motherhood and matrimonial servitude, a woman confined to tradition by virtue of her skin color and nationality. These stereotypes allow Maria to be so easily victimized and pitied, while Liz is effortlessly empowered to speak, act, and save others as a consequence of her character development through white Western feminist typology. The Final Girl presents white, empowered womanhood as the ideal, an agential and powerful female character capable of resisting patriarchal violence, but at the cost of excluding women of color who remain silent and in need of rescue.

Footnotes

1. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn discusses the ways that the Scream franchise, for example, cleverly recognizes slasher tropes that punish transgressive sexuality, prey on the bodies of women, and situate nonwhite characters as disposable. Nonetheless, the films depend on Sidney, Scream‘s white middle-class heroine.

2. Kyle Christensen suggests that Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street exemplifies a feminist Final Girl because she subverts traditional requirements for femininity, such as domesticity, submissiveness, purity, and piety.

3. For example, Peckover’s twitter feed includes a March 6, 2017 tweet with a poster concept for Undocumented featuring a bloodied street sign warning of undocumented immigrants crossing the road. This is surrounded by a number of tweets criticizing President Trump’s policies, suggesting that Peckover wants his film to have continued relevance in current immigration debates.

4. Liz remains distinct from her male peers through her sobriety and capability from the start. It should be noted that the prototypical Final Girl outlined by Clover differs from her friends not only by her intelligence and clear-headedness, but also through her sexual abstinence. Liz, in contrast, is not only romantically interested in Travis, but has another boyfriend at the start of the film (who is quickly forgotten). Liz diverges from Clover’s typical Final Girl by having two romantic partners. However, this characteristic has been thrown into question by subsequent media scholars such as Nowell and Christensen, who point to other Final Girls who are sexually active and have romantic storylines.

5. One of the vigilantes is later revealed to be Mexican-American, but he demonstrates the attitudes and beliefs of white nativism and speaks hatefully to the Mexican immigrants.

6. Once again, Liz differs from Clover’s formulation of an abstinent Final Girl. In this scene, Liz not only engages in romantic activity but initiates it. While this may seem to challenge Liz’s position as a Final Girl, it can be read as reaffirming the endurance of the Final Girl as a horror trope that adapts to contemporary sociopolitical contexts. Liz’s character manifests sexual norms of the new millennium, in which hegemonic femininity is tied to individual sexual liberation and pleasure in ways that can actually work to undermine feminist politics. In this way, Liz is represented as the embodiment of a model of feminist empowerment that is naturalized as white, middle-class, and Euro-American. For more on sexual post-feminism in popular culture, see Angela McRobbie.

Works Cited

• Brooks, Brian. “IFC Midnight Gets Papers for ‘Undocumented.’” IndieWire, 13 July 2011, http://www.indiewire.com/2011/07/ifc-midnight-gets-papers-for-undocumented-53272/. Accessed Apr. 2017.
• Brooks, Kinitra D. “The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary Zombie Texts and Theories.” African American Review, vol. 47, no. 4, 2014, pp. 461–475. Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/article/577945.
• Chavez, Leo. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Stanford UP, 2013.
• Christensen, Kyle. “The Final Girl Versus Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, 23–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/23416349.
• Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, Autumn 1987, pp. 187–228. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2928507.
• —. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton UP, 1992.
• Connelly, Kelly. “Defeating the Male Monster in Halloween and Halloween H20.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12–21. EBSCOHost, doi:10.3200/JPFT.35.1.12-21.
• Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, 6 Feb. 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. Accessed Apr. 2015.
• Gartside, Will. “The Hostel Rhetoric of Torture: A Discourse Analysis of Torture Porn.” Projections, vol. 7, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 81–99. Berghahn Journals, doi:10.3167/proj.2013.070107.
• Kendrick, James. “Slasher Films and Gore in the 1980s.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 310–328.
• Lockwood, Dean. “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn.’” Popular Communication, vol. 7, no. 1, 2009, pp. 40–48. EBSCOHost, doi:10.1080/15405700802587232.
• McCann, Ben. “Body Horror.” To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, edited by James Aston and John Walliss, McFarland & Company Inc, 2013, pp. 30–44.
• McRobbie, Angela. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 255–264. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937.
• Nowell, Richard. “‘There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart’: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth.” Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–140. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/41342285.
• Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities.” Signs, vol. 36, no. 3, 2011, pp. 679–706. JSTOR, doi:10.1086/657495.
• Pinedo, Isabel C. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State U of New York P, 1997.
• —. “Torture Porn: 21st Century Horror.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 345–362.
• Queenan, Joe. “Slash’n’burn.” The Guardian, 1 June 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/jun/02/features16.theguide4. Accessed Apr. 2015. Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. Unruly Girls, Repentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen. U of Texas P, 2011.
• Short, Sue. Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Undocumented. Directed by Chris Peckover. IFC Films, 2010.

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (bio)
University of Barcelona

Stacy Rusnak (bio)
Georgia Gwinnett College

Autumn of 2017 marks thirty years since the publication of Carol J. Clover’s “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” The most enduring premise of this essay—which was originally included in the special issue Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy in the journal Representations and later re-published in an abridged version in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)—is Clover’s theorization of the Final Girl, a term that encompasses the common attributes of female survivor figures in slashers. As Clover famously argues, the Final Girl constitutes a powerful source of identification for the slasher’s (mostly) adolescent male audiences.¹ Through this concept Clover challenges the pervasive assumption that horror cinema is produced purely for misogynistic men in order to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies against women, advancing a radical rethinking of fundamental categories in Film Studies such as the gaze, identification, and spectatorial pleasures.

The remarkably mobile and infinitely interpretable figure of the Final Girl has evolved into an important concept for theoretical work on film, gender, and sexuality by scholars including Jack Halberstam, Isabel Pinedo, and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Despite its unquestionable influence on horror studies and on the directions often taken in this field in the intervening years, Clover’s model has been widely critiqued in academia. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Clover’s formulation has been the characterization of the Final Girl as a “male in drag” (216), which refers to her presumed masculine aggression and phallic agency. One of the central arguments in “Her Body, Himself”—and one that has led to many misconceptions that continue to surround Clover’s theory today—is that the Final Girl is gender non-normative or, in Clover’s words, “boyish” (204): “Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine…. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls” (204). In fact, as Clover clarifies at some point, the Final Girl is not even a girl, but an “agreed-upon-fiction” (214); she merely stands-in for male desires, a subject for a man to identify with, to use “as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies,” “an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty” (214). Significantly, and against the comprehension of the Final Girl as a strong, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of “Her Body, Himself”—Clover states: “to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development … is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking” (214).²

Another reading strategy that has persisted in the contemporary circulation of Clover’s theory—that the very raison d’etre of the masculinized Final Girl is to become a source of identification for teenage males—was challenged by Barbara Creed as early as the 1990s in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Creed’s contribution to these debates largely pivots on her insights into the “monstrous feminine,” a concept that has turned out to be equally groundbreaking and long-standing in horror criticism. According to Creed, “the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice” (emphasis in original, 127). The castrating woman in 1970s horror films, such as the rape-revenge I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and the psychotic slasher Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), points not so much to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, but to men’s fear of (and, importantly, ambiguous fascination with) monstrous women. Like Clover, however, Creed is cautious of reading these images as immediately progressive: “I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (7). Both scholars agree, then, that horror cinema is about the male psyche and male desire, and does not reveal much about the female experience of watching terror.

This particular premise has been revised by Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. According to Halberstam, although the psychoanalytic tools adopted by Clover and Creed have resulted in highly productive ways of approaching horror films, especially as far as notions of fear and desire are concerned, “fear and monstrosity are historically specific forms rather than psychological universals” (24). In his provocative analysis of the cult splatter films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Halberstam reads Stretch, the tomboy Final Girl of the second film, as a representation of the monstrous gender—or gender that splatters—that exceeds human categories, transforming into “something messier than male or female” (143). Pointing to the queer tendency of horror film in general—its capacity “to reconfigure gender not simply through inversion, but by literally creating new categories” (139)—Halberstam argues that the Final Girl’s femininity is recycled and transformed in new gender regimes. Thus, in his queer reassessment of the slasher film, Halberstam challenges Clover’s notion of the Final Girl as “boyish,” arguing that this approach “remains caught in a gender lock” (143): it re-establishes normative gender positions in relation to fear and violence, leaving little space for addressing identification between female audiences and the aggressor.

The assumption that the Final Girl operates as a masculinized point of identification for a young male viewer has been repeatedly questioned in scholarly writings on horror media. However, while Halberstam reads the slasher storyline as the process of “becoming-monstrous”—”enabling and activating monstrosity as opposed to stamping it out” (143)—other scholars seem to reclaim the Final Girl mainly as a figure of female agency and a potential source of female viewing pleasures. In Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (1997), for instance, Isabel Pinedo points to the productive possibilities of such pleasures: “Dancing through the minefield of the contemporary horror film, with its bloody display of the all-too-often female body in bits and pieces, is fraught with danger for women. But pleasure shares the field with danger” (69). Although their approaches differ in many ways, Pinedo coincides with Halberstam in her view that an ongoing overemphasis on the masculinization of female characters in horror films runs the risk of inscribing the genre within “a male-dominated discourse where power is coded as masculine, even when embodied in biological females” (81–2).

This revisiting of the Final Girl does not happen in a vacuum and should be considered as part of wider trends in feminist horror scholarship, which reclaims the horror genre for female viewing pleasures, usually under the assumption that it provides its viewers an aesthetic access to violence and rage, released in a previously assumed male-orientated form (Rowe Karlyn 2011, Kaplan 2012, Paszkiewicz 2018). Scholars such as Rhona J. Berenstein (1996) and Brigid Cherry (2002) offer evidence that women have always enjoyed horror, even in earlier days. In her examination of the marketing and reception of Hollywood horror films produced in the 1930s, Berenstein observes that “male and female spectators were offered a range of publicity, exhibition, and critical discourses that invited them alternately to act in line with traditional gender mores and to act out unconventional gender roles” (85). For example, classical Hollywood monsters provided spaces where female audiences could project fantasies of agency.³ Cherry, in turn, has addressed female horror fans who “refuse to refuse to look,” similarly challenging assumptions about horror film spectatorship with empirical research on processes and modes of consumption. Notably, her study references an earlier piece by Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1983/2002), yet another key text in feminist horror scholarship. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theory of the male gaze in narrative cinema, Williams suggests that horror is not a genre that can be enjoyed by women. Just as classical narrative cinema reproduces the structure of the active male gaze and the quality of the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women, in horror film the male spectator is said to identify with the active subject of narration, exercising a controlling look, while women are denied this look or are punished for exercising it (“When the Woman Looks” 62). When the woman looks, both as a character within the film and as a viewer in the audience, she invariably “is punished … by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy” (“When the Woman Looks” 61). Because horror cinema tends to represent women as passive victims (of the male gaze), the presumed female behavior when watching these films is that of a passive spectator who refuses to look.⁴

Such assumptions were radically questioned in the mid-1990s, partly because of the broad circulation of Clover’s Final Girl as a theoretical concept that enabled such revisions, and partly because of the appearance of a new slasher formula, alongside the growing visibility of female fans. As Alexandra West argues in her study of this new slasher cycle, films like Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997), I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Danny Cannon, 1998), Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks, 1998), Halloween: H20 (Steve Miner, 1998), Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), and Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000) differ significantly from what came before: “The Final Girls of this cycle were the products of third wave feminism, 90s alternative culture and the more mainstream ‘Girl Power’ which allowed the focus to shift to the female protagonist, her friends and their survival” (West). All of these examples tap into what can be considered “a female experience” or, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn calls it in her influential analysis of the Scream trilogy and its Final Girl, Sidney, “issues of particular concern for teen girls: 1) sexuality and virginity; 2) adult femininity and its relation to agency and power; 3) identity as it is shaped by the narratives of popular culture” (101–2).⁵

In addition to addressing the changes within the slasher form, considerable scholarship on the Final Girl has been devoted to the problems of definition. The most frequently quoted critiques, by Richard Nowell (2011) and Janet Staiger (2015), stress that the number of films investigated by Clover in her formulation of the Final Girl trope is too small to generalize across the subgenre. Interestingly, Nowell questions Clover’s assertion that the 1970s and 1980s slasher film was mainly consumed by young male viewers. He notes that several economic factors during the first slasher cycle already pointed to the heroic Final Girl as “being mobilized to appeal to a female youth” (128) in order to expand the potential audience and enhance box office results.⁶ Nowell suggests that Clover’s model of the Final Girl as boyish, which anchored her notion of the male viewer playing out sadistic and masochistic fantasies, fails to address the many Final Girl characters who exhibited traditionally coded feminine traits and looked glamorous (rather than “boyish”) on screen. In a similar vein, Staiger points out that Clover’s corpus of films is too narrow and selective. She expands her study to thirty-one films, and from this sample deduces that instead of being a Final Girl, the woman in slashers is more likely to be placed in the position of a “Final Victim.” Moreover, unlike in Clover’s definition of the Final Girl, this character is not necessarily masculine, a virgin, or disinterested in having sex: “Women are usually the victims and the heroines, but they are not always ‘Final Girls’ in the strong sense that Clover implies” (Staiger 222). An additional revision comes from Jeremy Maron (2015), who urges a shift away from thinking about the Final Girl as a specifically gendered female character, noting the presence of male characters in this structural position. He prefers the term “Final Subject” because it is more gender inclusive and appropriate in films where the Final Girl is identifiably gendered male, as in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984).

These critiques raise questions about the usefulness of Clover’s term in contemporary thinking about horror film. Although frequently dismissed as promoting a universalizing and monolithic notion of the Final Girl and for limiting itself to psychoanalytic theories of the subject, Clover’s approach has been, in fact, extremely productive in interrogating the ways in which feminist film theory (and film theory in general) understand gendered spectatorship. Clover’s take on malleable gender identity and “painful seeing” has opened up questions not only about cross-spectatorial identification and the indeterminacy of gender itself—notably in recognizing the fluidity of our responses to screen fictions and that, as Pam Cook (2012) suggests, we go to the movies to “experience the thrill of reinventing [ourselves] rather than simply having [our] social identities or positions bolstered” (33)—but also about an embodied mode of film viewing that further undoes the binary sexuality (see, for example, Powell 2005 and Rizzo 2012), questions that resonate with the recent preoccupation of film theory with cinematic affect, materiality, and film experience more broadly.

Three decades later, Clover’s work continues to be a significant reference in scholarly writing on the horror genre. It has also extended beyond the academic realm into popular culture. As Shelley Cobb and Yvonne Tasker observe (2016), Clover’s key term—along with other concepts such as Mulvey’s “the gaze” and “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or Creed’s “monstrous feminine”—found wider application in new online media and journalism, regularly appearing in feminist magazines including Jezebel, Bitch, Bust, and Feministing: “while popular feminist criticism is not in the business of providing in-depth readings of individual texts, criticism of patriarchal cinema and media culture is now widely generated by journalists and other cultural commentators who use feminist critical tools to question the circulation of sexist images and gendered value systems.” The widespread adoption of Clover’s term in popular culture is attested to by an increasing visibility of the Final Girl across a variety of media: the 2015 films Final Girl (Tyler Shields) and The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson); TV’s popular series Scream Queens, which concluded its first season with a finale titled “The Final Girl(s)” (Brad Falchuk, 2015); Clock Tower video games, whose main character, Jennifer, is crafted to be a Final Girl; Lolo’s “No Time For Lonely” lyrics, again with explicit references to the character; and Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls (2017), which plays on horror movie themes from Scream, among many others. These contemporary reformulations of the Final Girl in film, TV, fan blogs, and literature confirm the pervasiveness and flexibility of the trope, as well as the need to expand discussion of Clover’s framework beyond the traditional ruminations of the slasher subgenre that have been so central to most of research to date. While the Final Girl continues to materialize in slasher remakes, usually in a highly self-conscious way, it also circulates in other genres, such as dystopian Young Adult literature or science-fiction graphic novels, that refocus critical attention on the trope as a cross-media phenomenon (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).⁷

On the other hand, the most recent revisions of the slasher formula, such as the Oscar-nominated Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), demonstrate that discourses and ideologies of racialized identities provide even more opportunities for renewal and reinvention. Such a reinterpretation of the Final Girl model provokes questions about the racialized “Final Boy,” the oppositional gaze and black spectatorship (hooks 1992), and the capacity of horror film to mediate contemporary issues of race and racism, which are experienced, negotiated, and challenged by an audience more diverse than the white male viewership Clover described as “the majority audience” (209) for the slasher genre. The need for such analysis is particularly pressing because critical race theory has generally been underrepresented in reflections on the Final Girl. As Brigid Cherry (2009) reminds us in her study of horror cinema, “any one factor of identity cannot be analyzed without considering others: gendered identities can be strongly linked to class or racial identity, for example, and the one cannot be discussed without considering the other” (176).

While race in horror has been examined to some extent, mostly in relation to black male viewers, very little work has been done to address black female characters (and viewers) in slasher cinema even in feminist studies.⁸ Another recent film, Breaking In (James McTeigue, 2018), which alters Clover’s Final Girl model by placing a middle-class black mother at its core as a “Final Woman,” opens up a space where such issues can be reconsidered, for example by questioning the stereotypes associated with the strong black woman, traditionally represented as driven by either matriarchal or sexual instincts (Brooks 464, 467). Both Get Out and Breaking In push the boundaries of the Final Girl trope, urging us to rethink the intersections of gender, sexuality and race in contemporary horror film.

Given the abundance of onscreen material that has been produced since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems that the Final Girl, in all her guises and mutations, has yet to be accorded critical attention. This is not to suggest either an uncritical celebration of the trope, or the inevitable subversion of gender, sexual, or racial ideologies by horror’s inherent self-reinventing reflexivity. Rather, we want to emphasize the figure’s continuous inflections, and its status as a living trope, even though it frequently relies on older traditions and conventions. Therefore, our focus in this issue, on Revisiting the Final Girl, presents an engagement with two key questions: How does the contemporary horror film press us to reconsider Clover’s term of thirty years ago? And how can early manifestations of the Final Girl trope help us redefine or expand its parameters as a theoretical concept? In the process, we do not wish to discard old questions and knowledge, but to rethink, reconfigure, and revisit what is most useful from the past. What the Final Girl represents historically is a new way of seeing and thinking about identification, the gaze, and spectatorship; this idea, together with a sense of dialogue between past and present—looking backwards and looking forwards—was crucial for our purposes. We envision this temporality not as singular or evolutionary, but rather as a nonlinear, multidirectional flow of ideas that allows for a reconsideration of both our previous understandings of Clover’s term and its contemporary permutations and reworkings.

These issues are interrogated in the two essays that compose our dossier: Murray Leeder’s “X-Ray, the Final Woman, and the Medical Slasher Film,” which productively employs Clover’s theory to rewrite the slasher history, broadening the archive of films that articulate the Final Girl paradigm, and Lucia Palmer’s “The Final Girl at the US-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in Undocumented (2010),” which points to present and future directions in the horror genre—notably by acknowledging the intersectionality of the Final Girl and the current popularity of torture porn, a form that has evolved from earlier cycles of the slasher. Although they build on Clover’s work, insisting on the importance of her intervention in horror studies, the two essays offer a useful exploration of her main tenets, both in terms of the Final Girl and the slasher form.

Palmer demonstrates that, while torture porn films deviate from the slasher subgenre in important ways, they certainly inherit the slasher’s conventions of sexualized violence and the spectacular display of the mutilation of women’s bodies. In her insightful analysis of Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), with its longest and most poignant scene involving the slow dismemberment of a Mexican woman’s body, Palmer postulates that these generic fluctuations should be read in the context of post-9/11 anxieties surrounding the penetration of national borders and the anti-immigration rhetoric that has gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic political climate. If, as Clover argued, the 1970s and 1980s slashers expressed the shifting sexual attitudes of their time and the fears about the instability of the normal, then how are such anxieties manifest in the twenty-first century?⁹ Situating Undocumented within the context of ever more visible nativist sentiments in the United States makes it possible to interrogate not only the representation of women—whether as victim or as Final Girl—but also to ask how the conjunction. of white masculinity and white supremacy operates “when manifested as a monstrous psychokiller on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury.”

Focusing on the intersections between gender, race, class, and nationality (which, as previously mentioned, are almost unattended in the now-voluminous scholarship on the slasher film), Palmer offers new insights into Clover’s cinematic gaze, structures of identification, and painful seeing. As Palmer rightly observes, even though there are notable exceptions that challenge the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl, it “remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles.” The protagonist of the film, Liz, a level-headed female character who uses her intelligence to negotiate with, and eventually escape from, the white psychokillers who kidnap her and her friends from her filming crew as they travel across the US-Mexico border, proves to be yet another incarnation of a white, middle-class Final Girl. Following Kinitra D. Brooks’s critique of the predominantly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, Palmer addresses ways in which the complex layers of identification structured in the film around the Final Girl, her friends, and the abject Mexican victims rely on racial hierarchies and shows that they unequivocally reaffirm whiteness as the norm for female empowerment. Palmer contrasts the film’s camerawork with the common use of a subjective camera in earlier slashers that often aligns the viewer with the point-of-view of the killer, to argue that the use of a documentary-style aesthetic in Undocumented—which clearly evokes films such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—allows the audience to watch the atrocities and the pain of the immigrants through the perspective of the crew members. This, together with Liz’s “investigative gaze” that questions, if only subtly, the racialized, classed, and national power relations, seems to confirm the film’s progressive stance.. However, Palmer’s careful analysis of the structures of the gaze and hierarchies of identification reveals that whiteness is rendered a precondition for challenging the racist and patriarchal status quo, both in the film and in Clover’s Final Girl model, while women of color continue to be reduced to signs of abjection in the slasher film, a facet of the genre in need of critical attention.

Leeder, on the other hand, argues that there is continued value in exploring the Final Girl in early slasher films, underscoring its surprising pervasiveness in marginal texts that are often overlooked as part of the first slasher cycle because they do not fit neatly within Clover’s paradigm. In particular, Leeder examines how Boaz Davidson’s 1981 film X-Ray—never discussed by Clover or other early thinkers on the slasher films—both belongs to and does not belong to the Final Girl model, and addresses these findings by extending the conceptual frameworks offered by previous scholarship and by engaging with debates on early “keyhole” films and pornography, medical horror, and the medical gaze in a wider sense. For instance, his analysis shows that the film fuses the killer’s sadistic voyeuristic gaze with a Foucauldian medical gaze, which reveals anxieties about spaces and practitioners of masculine medicine as they relate to the surveillance of women’s bodies. Such a revelation points to deeply embedded hegemonic discourses not usually associated with the slasher subgenre; the film’s appropriation of different kinds of gazes enriches our understanding of the Final Girl, while bringing to light highly significant issues of power and agency within medical discourses on female sexuality.

In his evocative reading of the film’s interplay between the doctor’s “assaultive male gaze” upon the female body, the protagonist’s “reactive gaze,” which positions her as the object to be “looked at,” and her brief “counter gaze” when she tentatively scrutinizes the medical gaze of the doctors, Leeder proposes that the processes of identity construction vis-à-vis the power of looking have always already been more complicated than Clover’s Final Girl model implies. Furthermore, he observes that the X-Ray‘s Final Girl—the surviving female character—is, in fact, a middle-aged “Final Woman,” and not the typical teenager of the slasher film. What Leeder’s study of X-Ray demonstrates is that there is still room to consider other slashers not included in the Final Girl paradigm and that these films might help us to rethink the definition of the trope as outlined by Clover in her original essay.

In her later work, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover claimed that a strong “case could be made for horror’s being, intentionally or unintentionally, the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres” (168) due to its obsessive focus on eyes and looking. Interestingly, both articles published in this issue offer approaches that broaden Clover’s theory beyond a psychoanalytic framework, but they do return to one of its key terms: the question of the gaze. Leeder shows that the gazes in slasher films can be attached not only to the killer and his intended victim, but also to the space of the hospital and its technologies; Palmer, in turn, underscores the complex structures of looking and hierarchies of film identification in Undocumented to bring light to intersectional identity formation and the normative positioning of the Final Girl. These two contributions to scholarship on the Final Girl demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of Clover’s concept and its surprising pervasiveness across the last thirty years, in both academic criticism and popular culture. It is our hope to invigorate the debate within Film Studies about the relationship between horror, the gaze, and identification, as well as highlight the rich and diverse facets of the Final Girl trope.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Peter Marra, whose organization of an SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) panel on the Final Girl led us to the production of this special issue. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Postmodern Culture for their useful insights on the essays.

Footnotes

1. In her new preface to the 2015 edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover offers an insightful reflection on the discursive circulation of the trope, arguing that, in the course of history, the Final Girl seems to have “hijacked” the later debates on slasher media, eclipsing other figures and issues discussed in the book—such as the Final Girl’s victim-hero status, with an emphasis on “victim.”

2. Klaus Rieser, still in 2001, argues against the Final Girl as a potentially feminist figure. He suggests that scholars who have followed Clover’s model and reconsidered the Final Girl as a sign of female agency overestimate the progressiveness of the paradigm. For Rieser, the moments in slasher films when male viewers alter their identification towards the Final Girl and become “feminized” function merely as “‘playful’ intrusions into the gender field” (390) that fail to disrupt the hegemonic, heterosexist order.

3. Harry Benshoff (1997) makes similar claims in reference to queer audiences.

4. In a 2001 reflection on her earlier work, entitled “When Women Look: A Sequel,” Williams does acknowledge that the “Mulveyan paradigm” could not account for “the pleasures, however problematic, women viewers may take in this genre” and that women could learn “how to look” at horror in subversive ways.

5. While taking into consideration this revisionist impulse that turns to the female viewer, recent scholarship on gender and horror film seems more critical of understandings of the Final Girl through fantasies à la “Girl Power.” Much as it is potentially reductive to read the Final Girl in terms of a phallic woman, an unconditional exaltation of the Final Girl as a feminist subversion and/or agent of violence generates doubts about the extent to which these images can be considered empowering (see Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, forthcoming).

6. Between mid-1977 and the spring of the following year, profit margins significantly decreased for adult-centered horror films. In an attempt to increase ticket sales, the industry began targeting female youth as a cost-effective solution (Nowell 128).

7. As Ryan Lizardi argues in his study of the contemporary slasher remake, “the horror film genre has fully embraced this cinematic trend to remake, or re-imagine, its past.” It is significant, he argues, that “these remakes mostly stem from a particular period of slasher horror films, the 1970s through the early 1980s,” the era which “has been theorized heavily for its ideological issues with gender and political ambivalence” (114).

8. See Isabel Pinedo, Robin Wood, Robin R. Means Coleman, and Harry M. Benshoff on race and the horror film.

9. As Anthony Hayt has recently argued in his study of contemporary slasher remakes, “since 9/11, a common trend in horror film criticism has been to focus on the genre as a way of understanding and processing the trauma of the terrorist attacks that forever changed the cultural landscape of America, and of the world” (131). For Hayt, this approach frequently downplays gender, and he interprets it as evidence of “the misogyny of American culture at large, and of the ‘post-feminist’ era specifically, [which materializes itself in] making moves to discount the importance of upholding the vigilance of gender-based political struggle in favour of more ‘important’ political causes” (131–2). In this light, it is interesting to observe how the trauma motif is closely intertwined with gender, racial, and sexual politics in Palmer’s piece.

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