Annalee Newitz is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and a freelance writer in San Francisco. She is the former culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian and was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship in 2002–03. She is a coeditor of White Trash: Race and Class in America and Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. She has written for New York magazine, and numerous other publications, including The Believer, salon.com, and Popular Science. Newitz has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

PRETEND WE’RE DEAD

CAPITALIST MONSTERS IN AMERICAN POP CULTUREBy Annalee Newitz

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3733-1

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………….viiINTRODUCTION: Capitalist Monsters………………………………………………….11. SERIAL KILLERS: Murder Can Be Work………………………………………………132. MAD DOCTORS: Professional Middle-Class Jobs Make You Lose Your Mind…………………533. THE UNDEAD: A Haunted Whiteness…………………………………………………894. ROBOTS: Love Machines of the World Unite…………………………………………1235. MASS MEDIA: Monsters of the Culture Industry……………………………………..151NOTES…………………………………………………………………………..185BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….199FILMOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..207INDEX…………………………………………………………………………..211

Chapter One

SERIAL KILLERS

Murder Can Be Work

Affixed to the lid of the box was an old daguerreotype, very similar in style and composition to the Civil War work of the eminent photographer Mathew Brady. Based on the picture’s aged and battered condition, I judged it to be about the same vintage as Brady’s work. The image displayed was that of a dead white man: scalped, eviscerated, and emasculated, with arrows protruding from his arms and legs. His eyes were missing.-Caleb Carr, The Alienist

In his critically acclaimed bestseller The Alienist, Caleb Carr tells the story of a late-nineteenth-century serial killer named Japheth Dury who becomes a murderer because his cruel, frigid mother humiliates him constantly during childhood. Dury is the owner of the box and picture described above, which a team of investigators find in his tenement flat along with a bottle of human eyeballs floating in formaldehyde. Inside Dury’s box, under the photograph, the investigators find his mother’s dried heart. Dury’s parents, we discover, are the first of many people he has murdered in imitation of the photograph on the lid of his box-itself one of many photographs taken by his missionary father depicting white people killed by the Sioux in South Dakota. Having endured his mother’s mistreatment, his father’s photography, and life as a social outcast because of a disfiguring facial tic, Dury turns to murdering unruly young children (particularly cross-dressing boy prostitutes) who remind him of himself as a child.

Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the alienist (i.e., psychiatrist) of the book’s title, constantly reminds his team of investigators that murderers are created by their social context. The nature of their crimes can be ascribed to traumatic events in their early-or not so early-lives. Dury, for example, cuts out his victims’ eyes in part because of the photographs he saw as a boy and in part because he has suffered under the scrutiny of his mother and other people who taunt him about his facial tic. And yet there is more to this “context” than childhood trauma, for Carr’s novel traces not just Dury’s personal history, but the history of an entire nation, in the process of revealing its killer. Set in the New York City of 1896, and including in its cast of characters Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt and Professor William James, Carr suggests that intellectual and material history are just as responsible for “inventing” Dury as his mother’s abuse is. The Alienist is ultimately about how late-nineteenth-century philosophy, science, and economics help set the stage for a team of investigators who will be capable of finding a serial killer. This is not exactly a novel about serial killers, but rather about a social apparatus which detects them. Quite frequently, this apparatus is contingent upon historical developments such as the inventions of “alienists” and fingerprinting techniques. But just as importantly, the network of sociohistorical forces Carr associates with the origin of serial killers and their trackers is bound up with the pursuit of “real” history and human beings’ relationship to it.

Carr’s own novel follows the trajectory of this desire to possess knowledge of history-writing about serial killers, a fashionable topic in recent decades, he takes readers back nearly one hundred years to the first serial killer investigation ever conducted. Something about the random, apparently unmotivated violence of serial killing seems to send us to the history books, the research room, and psychoanalytic case histories. What is it about this particular form of violence that brings up history and historical “truth”?

Serial killings are characterized by their relative randomness and a lack of any personal connection between the killer and his or her victim. But the literature and popular culture surrounding serial killing, like The Alienist, are dense with explanations which clarify both the killers’ motivations and how society helped to create them. In a general sense, then, the serial killer narrative relies upon historical analysis of various kinds to establish what Fredric Jameson has called a “cognitive map” of what would otherwise appear to be meaningless brutality. The cognitive map provides a layout of the totality of social and historical relations which go into the creation of a given situation. Thus, the cognitive map provided by serial killer narratives tries to chart the way that human history and social relations can create random, senseless violence between people who do not know each other. To put it simply, these narratives try to answer one question often asked by people confronting (and participating in) a culture of violence: how did we come to this?

Narratives about serial killers have tried to answer or at least to present the question for audiences to puzzle out themselves. In their urgent need to figure out why people kill each other, stories about the past century’s most glamorous type of sociopath share stylistic and thematic concerns with nineteenth-century antiwar novels like Stephen Crane’s naturalist masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage as well as current turn-of-the-century narratives about terrorism. While most contemporary horror narratives have their roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic tales, serial killer stories are preoccupied with realism. To understand why books and movies about these murderers take the shape they do, it’s crucial to understand their origins in literary naturalism, whether that’s the old-school sensational realism of Crane or that of contemporary writer (and war chronicler) Norman Mailer. Following in these authors’ narrative footsteps, turn-of-the-century portraits of serial killers in pop culture treat their subjects as real-life monsters, and as a result many of these stories are based in fact or have a pseudo-documentary feel to them. Perhaps the most extreme examples can be found in fake documentaries like Blair Witch Project and in true crime biographies of notorious killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. But the realist’s urge to get at some kind of social truth haunts every story in the pantheon of serial killer tales.

At the same time, no storyteller-and especially no Hollywood moviemaker nor a writer with a major publishing house-wants to be the bearer of bad news. And thus the “truths” that our serial killers reveal to us in these stories often become comforting if creepy tautologies. Death is truth, they tell us, and truth is death. Other stories, however, offer a more complicated and tantalizing snapshot of social reality: there are many ways to be dead, and being executed by a serial killer might be less terrifying than many of them.

* Naturalist Origins

Like today’s gleefully blood-spattered serial killer stories, naturalist tales of murder in the late nineteenth century have often been viewed with critical disdain because of their preoccupation with topics unacceptable for drawing room chatter and small talk. American literary critic Donald Pizer sums up objections to naturalism in an essay defending it:

Because much naturalism is sordid and sensational in subject matter, it is often dismissed out of hand by moralists and religionists…. Many readers have also objected to the fullness of social documentation in most naturalistic fiction. From the early attack on naturalism as “mere photography” to the recent call for a fiction of “fabulation,” the aesthetic validity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.

The classic naturalistic style walks a strange line between “mere” photographic reproduction of social reality and an extreme interest in the “sordid and sensational,” or those events which deviate (perhaps a great deal) from ordinary experience. Later, Pizer continues, “A naturalistic novel is … an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and the contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature.” Therefore, we would expect a naturalistic story about murder to offer realistic-even “photographic”-portraits of exceptionally violent outbursts; but we would also expect those outbursts to “deal with the local and contemporary” or to gesture toward “the fullness of social documentation.” We would be anticipating a narrative which would use violence as a metaphor for ordinary human relations, while at the same time pointing out the ordinariness of extreme violence.

This is precisely what critics have argued The Red Badge of Courage provides. While Red Badge is not explicitly about serial killing, it is certainly preoccupied with mass killings-and its (anti-) hero Henry Fleming kills a number of people he does not know in a manner which is quite intentionally depicted by Crane as both senseless and basically meaningless. Death in Red Badge is not simply a matter of quick, “necessary” killing to survive. It is often romantically intimate, and dead bodies themselves become textualized-that is, readable or interpretable-functioning as aspects of the plot itself. Red Badge provides an aesthetic template for later stories about serial killers, and also underscores the similarities between serial murder and warfare. Crane’s corpses are windows on social truth: we learn about the context of Fleming and his comrades’ lives by “reading” the dead or mutilated bodies they create.

In a famous scene, Fleming happens upon a dead soldier, his first encounter with actual death in the war. Up until this point, he has had access to death only through stories which make him imagine “red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms” (11). While he’s prepared for mutilation and indeed yearns to earn “the red badge” of a wound for himself, Fleming is “horror-stricken” when he sees

a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded … The eyes staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip (41-42).

This is not the text he expected to find. The dead man does not have a “torn” body, nor do his bones stick out of him at fantastic angles. Indeed, he is strangely ordinary, except for the fact that he has “faded” all over. Terrifyingly, he is just a “thing” which ants step all over as they go about their business. The dead soldier’s body is itself a battlefield-discolored and faded from exposure to war, he is covered by busy creatures very near his eyes who don’t care if they have to march on something delicate and vulnerable to get where they need to go. From this highly codified dead body, then, we move forward in the narrative toward a generalized explanation of the social context which produces it.

The Civil War in Red Badge is-as Crane writes in a frequently quoted passage-“an immense and terrible machine” which “produce[s] corpses” (43). It is thus associated with industrial production and a repetitive, inhuman process. Soldiers in the war consider themselves industrial workers whose product is corpses. Fleming is “grimy and dripping like a laborer in a foundry” (33).

The war is also filled with numerous internecine conflicts which produce as much violence as the ostensible “real fight” against the Confederacy: Fleming, for example, earns his “red badge of courage” from a fellow Union soldier who is so eager to flee a battle that he hits Fleming on the head with the butt of his gun. Fleming, having already anticipated humiliation and scapegoating from his comrades after running in terror from the attack, lies about the wound and pretends he earned it in battle. Meanwhile, his superior officers lie in order to keep their soldiers fighting. The Civil War here is less a series of military engagements involving two opposing armies than it is a workplace where the laborers fight each other, lie, and unfairly use one another at every turn.

The dead soldier’s body may be a war zone, but the war zone itself is something else-a place packed with factories, workers, and petty (or large-scale) conflicts between men on various levels of the social hierarchy. It is, in short, something like urban environments of the late nineteenth century, an era famous for its deathtrap industrial factories, class-based conflicts such as the Chicago Haymarket Riots, and generally miserable conditions which many politicians tried to ignore or misrepresent to the public. Crane’s Civil War can function as an allegorical stand-in for another geographical space, but it more meaningfully stands in for another temporal space-Crane’s contemporary America.

As a journalist, Crane wrote scathing social satires and exposs about urban life and American militarism abroad in the Philippines, Spain, and Cuba. Amy Kaplan has suggested that Red Badge is an effort to reinterpret American history as an explanation, and justification, for its current domestic and foreign conflicts. She writes, “Crane’s novel participates in a widespread cultural movement to reinterpret [the Civil War] as the birth of a united nation assuming global power and to revalue the legitimacy of military activity in general.” To comprehend present-day American violence and global engagements, Crane goes back to what might be called an episode from America’s “original” violence-a war which fragmented the nation, then solidified its boundaries by force.

And yet what amazed Crane’s contemporaries most about Red Badge was its historical accuracy. Only twenty-four years old when he wrote Red Badge, Crane had never been in a war of any type. In a defense of Red Badge written in 1896, social reformer and Civil War veteran Thomas Wentworth Higginson congratulates Crane on being the only novelist besides Tolstoy who “brought out the daily life of war so well” and is particularly impressed with Crane’s refusal to paint a falsely heroic or noble portrait of war, like the “well known engraving of the death of Nelson, where the hero is sinking on the deck in perfect toilette.” Higginson contrasts this absurdly perfect picture of battlefield behavior with what Higginson calls Crane’s “bit of war photography.” While literary critics such as Milne Holton have discussed the possibility that Crane’s style is influenced by his training in journalism, and many others have noted that he modeled his descriptions after contemporary military engagements, none seem to have considered the possibility that his “photographic” style might, in fact, have been influenced by photography. Considering that the Civil War is the first American war which was extensively photographed, it seems possible that Red Badge‘s “accuracy,” particularly in visual terms, might have been inspired by camera images of the Civil War.

Pizer’s invocation of the complaint that naturalistic writing is “mere photography” makes it clear that many critics consider the literary analogue of photographic representation to be almost redundant (“mere photography”). Yet a photographic style, as Higginson implies, comes across as more historically accurate than an impressionistic one-it seems to represent events as they actually happened rather than how we imagine them in retrospect or memory. Of course, as both makers and theorists of film have noted, a photographic image can be as manipulative as a painting. If Crane’s history is photographic, it may not be “realism” which is at stake, but rather a realist aesthetic of the sort preferred by naturalists.

And this aesthetic owes a great deal to pioneering photojournalist Mathew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War. These are arguably the most famous and often-reproduced photographs taken during the mid-nineteenth century. Like Crane, who went on journalistic missions to report on American military engagements overseas, Brady set up his photographic equipment, assistants, and labs in the field so that he could send to newspapers the most accurate and up-to-the-minute visual images of the war. By 1862, Brady had thirty-five separate “bases” from which he could take and develop photographs of the war-he had, in other words, a small-scale photographic factory which produced images of combat. Due to the limitations in photographic technology, Brady and his crew shot only one (very hazy) photograph of action in the field. For the most part, he focused on portraits and still scenes, photographing soldiers, officers, and dead bodies left in the aftermath of battle. Brady’s images of dead bodies are quite similar to Crane’s descriptions of them-the men in them appear only to be resting save for their discolored faces. They also resemble crime scenes in that their authors (the killers) are gone: We cannot “read” these dead bodies in the context of political struggle without the aid of captions supplied by Brady, such as “Confederate Dead, Antietam, 1862.” In this particular photograph, the “Confederate Dead” are literally part of a battlefield: sprawled out along a wooden fence, their bodies seem at points to blend into their environment-legs disappear into patches of grass, and limbs that lean against the fence are (in black and white) nearly the same color and shape as the wooden fence poles. Another photograph (“Behind the Stone Wall on Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1862”) shows Confederate soldiers, bloody, limp, and dead, piled in a trench behind a stone wall. Their guns lean into and above the trench. It is easier to tell the guns apart from each other than it is to identify individual dead bodies. Prominent in the foreground, one dead soldier is clearly clenching his fist. His is the only body that seems to have been human once. The others look like “things,” as Crane would put it.

The effect of these images is hardly an unproblematic realism. They may be records of how dead bodies look when shot with bullets, but they are not accurate recreations of historical events. Red Badge and Brady’s photographs make it seem that dead bodies are as close as you can get to “real” war, but in fact isolated shots of corpses (even in battle postures, with their guns) still require captions to orient their viewers.

(Continues…)

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