Outi Hakola - Rhetoric of Modern Death in American Living Dead Films

First published in the UK in 2015 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2015 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright 2015 Intellect Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.

Series: Part of the Studies on Popular Culture series

Series editors: Bruce Johnson and Hannu Salmi

Series ISSN: 2041-6725

Electronic ISSN: 2042-8227

Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos

Copy-editor: Paul Nash

Production Manager: Tim Mitchell

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-379-6

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-381-9

ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-380-2

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Series Editors Preface

In academic institutions there is increasing interest in the meaning and place of the popular in the definition of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, in the twenty-first century, it is through popular culture in its various forms that the tensions between the local and the global are acted out most immediately, not only through the content of popular cultural forms, but in their means of production, distribution, and reappropriation through consumption. Indeed, a study of the evolution of the term popular is an essential analytical key to the understanding of the various confrontations class, race, gender, place that define contemporary power relations. The study of popular culture helps us to understand the contradictions in the contemporary sensibility. It gives us a more direct understanding of how we invent ourselves, how we imagine the possibilities of the world we live in, its ethical and moral dimensions and specific social practices.

The International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC) is a multi-disciplinary research unit, concerned not only with issues in contemporary popular culture but also in its history and transformations. The Institute places special emphasis on the questions of popular culture as heritage and the social role of popular culture. The Institute was developed during 2005 at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland, and was formally inaugurated in 2006 with an international conference under the title The History of Stardom Reconsidered. Apart from continuing regular conference activity the Institute maintains a refereed online publication series for monographs and conference proceedings ( http://iipcblog.wordpress.com/publications/ ) and presents its monthly IIPC Debates featuring international speakers, available online at http://iipcblog.wordpress.com/iipc-debates/ . IIPC facilitates international scholarly collaborations, offers its own doctoral programmes, and fosters engagements with private sector stakeholders in the culture industries. The series Studies on Popular Culture is a collaboration between IIPC and Intellect Books, presenting contributions to a critical understanding of popular culture and its history in all its forms. The series is particularly open to comparative and international approaches, and it places special emphasis on the transdisciplinary nature of popular culture studies. Its objective is to present leading research in the field, with a particular emphasis on work in and from what may be thought of as off-centre research areas.

Bruce Johnson and Hannu Salmi, Series Editors

International Institute for Popular Culture

University of Turku http://iipc.utu.fi

Death is but the doorway to new life. We live today. We shall live again. In many forms shall we return.

T hese are the words from the opening of The Mummy (1932), a classic horror film. The citation from the Scroll of Toth foretells the following scene of the ancient mummy returning to life to haunt the living. The words also open the door to a specific American horror film genre. As the mummies rise from their tombs, so the corpses of zombies walk the earth, and the vampires honour the dark nights. In these living dead films of undead monsters, death is not where the narration ends. In the words of a tagline of the mummy films of the 1990s and 2000s: Death is only the beginning.

In these films, by returning to life, the undead force a renegotiation of how life and death are understood. However, there is no singular phenomenon that could be defined as death. Death is more than just the biological processes of dying: it always has cultural, social, religious and philosophical dimensions. Even the medical definitions of death are culturally constructed in certain historical situations; for example, they have been changing from the lack of heartbeat to the permanent loss of brain function (for example, Kellehear 2009). Since the birth of the living dead films in the early twentieth century, the modern ideals of medicalized, institutionalized and marginalized death have been dominating the Western cultural sphere. Still, the practically compulsive repetition of death in the living dead films proclaims the continued cultural need to encounter death and dying. The cinematic undead figures connect with the complexity of death-related cultural attitudes and fears, articulating and addressing in medium-specific ways the biologically natural and inevitable fact of death, which is socially, culturally and personally disturbing.

Through the very repetition of death, the living dead films of different decades and generations create more or less as a by-product a picture of the changing values and attitudes related to death in American society. In this study, I will approach these films and discuss how they negotiate modern ideas of death, and how they articulate and address changing perceptions of death for and with their viewers.

A number of scholars, Philippe Aris, Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Bauman among them, have suggested that the role of death changed in Western societies with the onset of modernization, industrialization and medicalization. In the late eighteenth century, death and the dying began to be marginalized and removed from public space into hospitals and other specialized institutions to be dealt with by professionals. By the mid-twentieth century, the process had taken death away from the social sphere, replacing the public experience of death with experiences of the private (Aris 1977; Elias 2001; Bauman 1992). I will refer to the idea of death as marginalized, privatized, scientific and medicalized through the concept of modern death.

Tony Walter contrasts modern death with both traditional death and neo-modern death. Traditional death relates to the pre-modern era (such as the Middle Ages) when death was quick, frequent and tackled by religious authorities (Walter 1994: 10, 47). In the course of the eighteenth century, in the modern era, death began to retreat from the public gaze, and the medical staff now assumed final authority. In the first half of the twentieth century, the scientific apparatus of the West sought to explain and control death, which led to its further modernization in Western societies. By the mid-twentieth century, this process had come to its head: death and dying people had been taken away from homes to hospitals, and encounters with death and corpses had been handed over to professionals. However, in the late twentieth century, the extreme medicalization drew different responses, when dying people and their relatives started to demand specialist and dignified care for the dying. The hospice and palliative care movements, for example, concentrated on the privacy of death from a different perspective. This process is part of what Walter calls a neo-modern death, which gives more room to the personal experience on the public agenda, even when modern ideas are still part of these practices. He argues that the prolonged and personal dying processes have led to a slow revival of death (Walter 1994: 124, 3962).