One answer, oddly enough, lies in the cartoon series The Simpsons, and in the cartoon-within-a-cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy. Itchy and Scratchy are cat and mouse, a parody of Tom and Jerry and of its extremities of violence. In each episode Itchy the mouse kills Scratchy the cat in an imaginative and shocking act of murder—but the true appalling horror only starts after Scratchy’s death. For whatever Itchy then does to Scratchy, Scratchy’s eyes always remain present, watching the whole process. Whether the cat is liquefied in a milkshake and then drunk by the mouse, or whatever other cannibalistic or brutal act Itchy perpetrates, Scratchy’s eyes blink and widen in shock and horror as he watches. And it is this—that throughout whatever is happening after his death, Scratchy is a witness, conscious and aware of it—that is most deeply and horribly disturbing about this cartoon-within-a-cartoon. Horror films and literature disturb us so deeply because as the vampire drains us or the zombie eats us, as we are reduced to the blood and flesh and skin that make us, we are aware, we are watching, we are not yet really dead. Despite our death we continue to watch, our eyes wide and blinking in horror, as the cannibal Undead eat us; we are dead, but not dead, the Undead audience, being violently consumed by our malignantly evil pursuers. At the center of this disturbance is a problematic relationship, not so much with our own death, although this is ultimately implied, but with our own dead bodies.
Revulsion: Our Dead Bodies, Our Selves
Here, a psychoanalytic narrative, that of Julia Kristeva, can help us to understand the forces at work.136 For Kristeva the key idea is that of the abject, which has its source in the moment that the infant child separates itself conceptually from its mother—the infant experiences horror at its dependence on the mother’s body, and at the way in which its identity is consumed by that body, but it is also fascinated by it and clings onto it. This horrified fascination is what Kristeva calls abjection. The mother’s body, indeed anything to do with the physical body, has become abject. Our physical bodies embody death; we are already in the process of dying, and the dead bits of us (discarded hair, fingernails, skin, and shit and piss) are sources of revulsion and we flush them away in panic. But the abject has the power to disrupt the boundary of the body because it is both inside and outside of that boundary. However much we try to expel it and keep our borders secure, the abject undermines all such attempts. The abject is precisely that which connects us with death and shows us that death is already within the boundary, however much we try to expel it.
Barbara Creed uses this idea to psychoanalyze the horror film,137 and notes that all sorts of religious taboos, such as sexual perversion, physical decay and death, human sacrifice, murder, bodily wastes, the female body, incest, are things that threaten our identity as a member of humanity. We want to expel them behind a border which will protect us from them, but they are all part of who we are, so this process of expulsion has to be constant. Perverse sexual desires, our bodies themselves and their waste products, our own violence and ferocity, are all things we place beyond a border in order to preserve our humanity, but they constantly erupt inside that border.
These encounters with abjection are played out in horror fiction and film, and were also played out during the witch trials and the vampire epidemics. The woman as witch is abject because she represents human sacrifice, sexual perversion, perverted sexual relations with animals, and cannibalism (Monstrous-Feminine, pp. 74-76). The vampire too is such a disturbing figure. It is because the corpse is the ultimate representation of abjection (p. 9). The physical body is the site of the struggle between the subject and the abject, and the dead body is the representation of defeat. It is, in Kristeva’s words, “the most sickening of wastes” (Powers of Horror, pp. 3-4). The corpse is a body without a soul, and so the vampire is the ultimate form of body without a soul. Creed finds it significant that “such ancient figures of abjection as the vampire, the ghoul, the zombie and the witch . . . continue to provide some of the most compelling images of horror in the modern cinema” (Monstrous-Feminine, pp. 9-10).
The corpse, then, is the most powerful symbol of the abject, but even in this extreme form the abject both horrifies and fascinates. Émile Zola captures this perfectly in his novel Thérèse Raquin,138 in Laurent’s visits to the morgue to seek the corpse of Thérèse’s husband, Camille, whom they plotted to murder and whom Laurent pushed from a boat into the Seine and drowned. When there are no drowned corpses to see, “He then became a mere sightseer, and found a strange pleasure in looking violent death in the face, with its lugubriously weird and grotesque attitudes.” He sees the body of a young woman who had hanged herself: “He lingered over her for a long time, running his eyes up and down her body, lost in a sort of fearful desire” (Thérèse Raquin, p. 109). But the two lovers are doomed by the horror of Camille’s corpse, which is with them, haunting them, constituting an impossible boundary between them:When the two murderers were lying under the same sheet, with eyes closed, they seemed to feel the slimy body of their victim lying in the middle of the bed, and it turned their flesh to ice. It was like a loathsome obstacle, separating them. A feverish delusion came over them in which this obstacle turned into solid matter—they could touch the body, see it spread out like a greenish, putrefying lump of meat, breathe the horrible stench of this mass of human decomposition. . . . (Thérèse Raquin, pp. 175-76)
The theme of the corpse that won’t go away is a recurring one in the horror film, especially the drowned corpse returning from the depths. In The Fog and Pirates of the Caribbean these are literally corpses come to life. In What Lies Beneath Michelle Pfeiffer’s character is haunted by the ghost of a young woman her husband has drowned and dumped in a lake, but in the end it is the corpse itself that intervenes and drags the husband (Harrison Ford) down to his death in the depths.
Oceans of Time: The Romantic Vampire
In the end, our physical bodies are our source of fear because they are the site of the struggle between life and death, humanity and inhumanity. We can now see the special horror that the vampire epidemics represent, as corpses rose from their graves to destroy the living, transgressing the boundary between the living and the dead. But this connection with death and the inhuman is a source of both horror and fascination, for both death and inhumanity offer different forms of freedom. While death offers freedom from everyday life in the sense of peace, inhumanity offers freedom from the mundane moral constraints of everyday life, so that we can be powerful and ferocious monsters. This is a romantic freedom and vampires represent this as well, and contemporary vampire narratives have perhaps stressed this aspect over that of death. In Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), the Count is a romantic hero searching for his lost love, Elisabeta, and his pursuit of Mina is an expression of that love and devotion, as he has “crossed oceans of time” to find her. Anne Rice’s series of novels The Vampire Chronicles also pursue the romance of the vampire figure, and in Neil Jordan’s film version, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), the vampires are the romantic leads: Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt, Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe deLac, Antonio Banderas as Armand. The vampire therefore combines both the corpse and the “romantic” monster who defies morality. The point, however, is that we combine both. We are the living dead.
Alien Invasions: The Vampiric Immigrant
At the psychoanalytic level the vampire represents the threat of being consumed, and at the political level this is most often expressed by the fear of invasion—what is consumed is our territory, our culture, our identity. The invader here can take various forms but in contemporary political debate the most potent are the immigrant and the global terrorist. However, the connection between the vampire and the immigrant is an older one, going back to the late nineteenth century when Jewish migration from eastern Europe was thought to present particular problems of assimilation, and therefore a particular danger to the identity of the political community. Ken Gelder points to the figure of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s
novel, noting that Stoker represents the Count as “a tall, thin, man, with a beaky nose and a black moustache and pointed beard” who hoards riches and moves across borders evading regulation.139 The person who helps him escape from England is Immanuel Hildesheim, a Jew who arranges illegal entry and exit, “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez.” 140
So here the vampire is the unassimilated immigrant who threatens the identity of the nation. National identity is lost through unregulated movement across borders and growing diversity within them, as one’s nation “dissolves,” and in Stoker’s novel this becomes “the fear of dissolving into vampires” (Reading the Vampire, p. 12). The British Empire was going through an uncertain period with economic competition from the United States and from Germany, and Stoker’s novel, published in 1897, was just one reflecting this theme of vulnerability. H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was published in 1898, with alien invaders who live off human blood (Reading the Vampire, p. 12), and the central theme of another of Wells’s famous stories, The Time Machine, published in 1895, is cannibalism. The current trend in American popular culture for vampires, zombies and hostile alien invaders may also reflect this fear of degeneration, as the United States enters a similar phase of economic vulnerability. Both The Time Machine and War of the Worlds have been made into major Hollywood movies in recent years.
The Evil Enemy
At the center of the witch trials and the vampire craze, and our contemporary fascination with the Undead, is this fear of invasion by an evil enemy who will consume us—take our territory, our identity, our culture, our bodies. Politically, in Europe there is a growing hostility to immigration of any kind, and in the United States the evil enemy is the global terrorist. Both highlight the fragility of borders. What is fundamentally disturbing about the vampire and the witch is their ability to pass among us undetected, to appear to be one of us, but to be secretly scheming our destruction. The person sitting next to you now as you read this could be a witch or a vampire, and this possibility undermines the foundations of our world.
Vampires and other supernatural enemies have the power to render borders meaningless, and it is this that takes us to the beginning of a political philosophy of the Undead, because they draw our attention to the nature and importance of boundaries, political or otherwise. What they reveal is how important these boundaries are to us, and also how arbitrary and fragile they are. Political philosophy has had little to say about boundaries. It usually assumes that the limits of the political community are given, and that all political questions concern those who are already legitimately members of that community. This means the political philosophy has rarely addressed the question of the outsider, and it is this figure that the vampire represents in its most demonic form.
The immigrant is therefore a threatening figure, who will drain away our resources, destroy our identity, bring disorder and disease, or, in the shape of the terrorist, plot our murder. But just as the vampire is an imaginary monster, so is this figure of the immigrant. When we free ourselves from these nightmares we can see the outsider in different, non-threatening terms. The vampire should warn us against such demonization and the representation of those we fear as malignant monsters who only wish to destroy us.
We need to question how borders and boundaries are constructed and note their deeply arbitrary nature and so no longer mistake them for moral boundaries. We also need to question how those on the outside are constructed and so no longer mistake them for mortal enemies. What is at work here is a two-world picture of demonic evil—that here is an evil enemy intent on destroying us, and they enter from another world, distinct from our own so that all we have to explain is their journey, not their nature. In taking this view we draw a boundary between us and them, so that we are not infected with this kind of evil. Although this conception obviously has its place in the worlds of mythology and fiction, we see it erupt again and again as a representation of actual human agency—migrants, Jews, and those engaged in global terrorism, for example. Once these take on the dimension of the demonic, then there can be no negotiation, no understanding, and no possibility of redemption.
In the Borderlands of Buffy World
The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer plays with the fragility and fluidity of these boundaries, as the vampires and demons cannot be condemned as malignant enemies in any simplistic sense. Some of the demons Buffy and her friends battle against live in our world, but the most dangerous and potentially apocalyptic enter from a demon dimension through the hellmouth over which the Californian town of Sunnydale is situated. In the early episodes of the series, the demons that are found in Sunnydale are exterminated brutally and quickly, and there is something faintly disturbing about the way in which Buffy and her comrades perform this task with relish and very little evidence of what we might call thinking.
However, as the series progresses a more complex view is taken, and the vampires and demons take on other dimensions. They have their own underworld in the back streets of Sunnydale, where they lead their lives out of sight of humans for the most part, running businesses and performing services—in other words, a typical community of illegal immigrants. Angel, the vampire with a soul, is an ally in the struggle against evil, and Spike, a vampire without a soul, eventually joins that struggle and performs heroic acts of self-sacrifice in attempting to protect Buffy’s younger sister Dawn from a ferocious enemy that seeks her destruction. In the series finale he has acquired a soul and is the figure who saves the world from the ultimate apocalypse.
The most shocking moments in the series, however, are not demonic at all. The first is the killing by the slayer Faith of a human being who works for the demonic mayor of Sunnydale, and who is actually trying to assist the Buffy gang in their struggle against this latest apocalypse. She kills him by mistake, believing herself to be under attack by supernatural enemies. It is a moment of misjudgment in a battlefield, when a tragic mistake is made which has enormous consequences for all the characters in the series.
The second occurs when Warren, a human attempting to be a supervillain, shoots and kills a member of the Buffy gang, Tara. He is in a state of irrational rage, having had his masculinity humiliated. Warren takes a gun and, in his rage and humiliation, lets off a stream of bullets at Buffy, hitting her and wounding her—but a stray bullet kills Tara. This plunges the narrative into darkness, with the shock of the suddenness of death caused by irrational anger. Neither Faith nor Warren are demonic, and neither are their victims. Faith is eventually redeemed, but Warren never gets the chance, killed in an act of terrible revenge by Tara’s partner, Willow, an act for which Willow herself must seek redemption. And so within all the demonic and supernatural dangers, the most shocking moments are human, all too human. This is Freud’s uncanny in reverse. Here the supernatural world is disrupted and disturbed by the ordinary—what is most shocking is what ordinary people do. In the end, Buffy forces us to look away from the comforts of the demonic conception of evil, with its clear boundaries and sharp distinctions.
A Political Philosophy of Vampires
And so we should no longer take the boundaries of our political community as given, but recognize the extent to which they only become important to us because of fear of what is outside—and, of course, the alien inside. Political authorities seize upon these figures or create them through the language of abjection, in terms of pollution, of sexual perversion, of disease and death: the witch, the vampire, the Jew, or in contemporary times the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the terrorist. Driven by this horror, we join forces with the authorities in hunting down those who have found their way inside our community already, and in erecting more secure fortifications to prevent further invasions. This means they have to be policed more stringently and frantically when they are threatened; imaginary enemies are always the hardest to protect ourselves against. The border is constituted by fear of the abject, but the abject is such that it exposes that border as a fabr
ication, as no protection at all. The vampire, the witch, the terrorist, already pass among us. This is not because of the lack of secure borders, but because the enemy is always within us, in the form of our deepest fears and insecurities about who we are, fears that are exploited in the struggle for power and legitimacy. What Rousseau shows us in his perceptive analysis of the vampire epidemics is that the real subjects of the ever more elaborate and encroaching powers accumulated by the authorities in the name of protecting the “genuine” members of the community from their “enemies” are those members themselves. And he shows us that, if the task of political philosophy is to subject our political communities to reason and clear thinking, then a political philosophy of the Undead—of the vampire as the “demonized” outsider—reveals the extent to which political philosophers have, so far, failed us.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 21