Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  These new possibilities are becoming realities at the very roots of human consciousness in the study of our genetic code. The map of the human genome allows us to explore new territory, creating, shaping, and growing life in ways that Mary Shelley never imagined. The Dr. Frankensteins of the present have no need to go digging about in graveyards for body parts to reanimate in the lab. They can grow those parts in the lab, allowing them to develop in something that resembles an organic fashion. The modern geneticist’s model is not Prometheus, but rather the gods themselves.5

  New technologies of the body, as well as science fictions about the augmentation of the body, have created a scholarly and popular discussion about the meaning of the posthuman world. Steve Nichols’ 1988 Posthuman Manifesto suggested that a new phase in human experience had begin already. Elaine L. Graham argues that a belief in the “technological sublime” has led to a “re-enchantment” of the world in which the mythical representations of science fiction and fantasy (what she calls “the promise of monsters”) have become forums for discussion of the nature of posthuman experience. Other thinkers, often labeled “bioconservatives,” are less sanguine about the benefits of posthuman technology. Francis Fukuyama in Our Post-human Future argues for a stable, unchanging human nature that serves as the basis for “human rights and morality.” This stance leads Fukuyama to argue for legislation restricting biotechnological research.6

  American conservatism’s response to techno-human possibilities has been influenced by the religious Right. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCB), appointed by George W. Bush in 2001, published a number of controversial documents that made use of Jewish and Christian theological concepts to discuss cloning, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies. Author Michael J. Hyde, in his book on the cultural and philosophical history of the idea of perfection, describes how the language of “blessing” and “gift” made its way into PCB documents, as well as assertions of an “unalterable human nature.” The work of the commission tended to reflect concerns over religious strictures in relation to biotechnological change.7

  Anxieties about, and structured critiques of, posthuman possibilities do not always acknowledge how deeply embedded the desire for liberation from constricted human boundaries has been in literature, art, myth, and theology. These possibilities draw on very old human hopes. Literary theorist Myra Seaman, whose scholarship embraces both medieval and modern culture, has argued that visions of the posthuman have assumed aspects of the Christian hope for the glorified body. She reveals remarkable continuities between vastly different worldviews in her examination of medieval texts that express pious hopes for a transformation into “a new creation in Christ” alongside contemporary pop culture expressions of posthuman possibility, texts ranging from Frankenstein to The Matrix. At the same time, she shows that older, religious conceptions of the posthuman imagine it as a state of perfection, while modern imaginings tend toward dystopic fears about the loss of something essentially human.8

  Of course, other thinkers have argued that all the talk about terrors or utopian promises of the posthuman ignores some basic facts of human history. Jamais Cascio, a futurist theoretician selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the one hundred most important global thinkers of 2009, believes that “post human is a term with more weight than meaning.” He suggests that once any innovation leaves “the pages of science fiction” and becomes part of daily experience, it ceases to be “the advance forces of technoapocalypse” and becomes “normal, even banal.” Human history, beginning with the use of stone weapons and the discovery of fire, is the history of “augmentation.”9

  Cascio here assumes the standpoint of scientific objectivism, ignoring primal human fears of change and the role played by forces other than rational calculation in accepting new cultural premises. He seems to be arguing that we should all stop our whining, shut out a millennia of cultural and religious warnings about human hubris, and get on with the business of being posthuman with the recognition that artificial body parts and the cloning of living beings are really all quite banal. Not incidentally, Cascio’s worldview would make moral criticism of new technology impossible, effectively containing it with an exasperated “this is how it’s always been.” Cascio, though this is not his intention, suggests that the Neolithic spear is not so different from the nuclear missile. They are both simply stages in human augmentation and development.

  Cascio’s assurances aside, pop culture fantasies of the posthuman reveal how profoundly worried we are about the benefits of modern society and the cybernetic human body. The nightmares of the twenty-first century replicate older Victorian fears of premature burial. The mechanical, computerized, or cybernetically enhanced body threatens to become a tomb in which the human consciousness could become buried, a prisoner to artificial limbs and organs.10

  The manifestations of this fear in popular culture are too numerous to count. The burial of Anakin Skywalker in the metallic casing of Darth Vader in the 2005 Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is the most well-known representation of this anxiety. The Matrix (1999) imagines a world in which humans are encased in mechanoid shells like medical oddities, only free in their false, computer-generated consciousness. These anxieties even appear outside of horror and science fiction. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel (later an award-winning film) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a story of terrifying salvation by medical technology. Bauby, the editor of the fashion magazine Elle, suffered a stroke-induced “locked-in syndrome” in 1994 that left him totally paralyzed, only able to move his left eyelid. Breathing on life support, he became a prisoner of his body and the medical technology that kept him alive.11

  Fears of the posthuman are grounded in a terror of a cultural “locked-in syndrome” in which we become prisoners and victims of monstrous machines. Posthuman realities also raise questions about both what is monstrous and why we declare something monstrous. The meaning of the monster raises the question of the human. What we will define as the monster in a world where the category of the human has become elastic? New technologies may reshape the very morphology of the body, redefining the category of the monstrous out of existence and changing basic conceptions of human beauty.

  Aimee Mullins provides an example of how aesthetic choices can upset societal conceptions of disability, beauty, gender, and the role of sexuality while also raising questions about the liminality of human identity. Born without fibula bones, her legs were amputated from the knees down at the age of one. Mullins’ life since then has been a record of achievement rather than of tragedy. A graduate of Georgetown University, she competed in NCAA Division I sports using carbon-fiber Cheetah® leg prosthetics. Subsequently, she has become a model, actress, and lecturer. In her latter role she is an advocate for the convergence of form and function in prosthetics that she hopes will redefine notions of disability.12

  Mullins’ work as a runway model and sometime magazine cover girl has brought the image of a posthuman body to a broad audience. Mullins cultivates certain aspects of a fairly standard heterosexual fantasy aesthetic in these contexts. Her clothing, hair, and photographic presentations of her body to the viewer’s gaze replicate the highly sexualized imagery of traditional modeling standards. The addition of artificial limbs, especially the inclusion of the Cheetah limbs, both mocks and complicates those traditional standards.

  Mullins challenges the very notion of disability by explicitly comparing her experience to that of traditional celebrities seeking aesthetic enhancement. In a 2009 lecture, Mullins quipped that “Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do; nobody calls her disabled.” This leads her to reject the label of “disabled” and the effort to replicate humanness. Artificial limbs no longer represent “a need to replace loss.” The formerly disabled can become “architects of their own identity by designing their own bodies.”13

  Mullins seems to offer a vision of the posthuman that would liberate us all from the monster by freeing us
from a reductive definition of the human. Aspects of Mullins’ inarguably inspiring story become, however, highly problematic when examined in connection with social and economic realities. Prosthetics have been produced for her at great expense by admirers, obviously not an option available to most of the world’s disabled. Moreover, at least part of the fascination with her in the fashion industry has to do with how her body mostly conforms to standards of beauty universalized by that same industry. Slender and blonde with blemish-free skin, Mullins’ self-representation raises questions about whether or not people who do not conform to the standards of beauty promulgated by the film/fashion/cosmetic/plastic surgery industries would be viewed in the same light.

  Other technological efforts in the direction of a posthuman future raise similar questions. In 2006 Claudia Mitchell, who lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident, became the first person to receive a bionic arm controlled by her own thought patterns. This “myoelectric arm” receives electrical signals directly from her brain through electrodes that jump these signals to the prosthesis where an onboard computer transforms them into commands. The process is not perfect. Mitchell can sometimes feel her elbow being touched when a muscle on her torso is stimulated.14

  This extraordinary advance in biomedical technology came at a price tag of three million dollars for the surgery alone. The cost of such radical therapies, in a society in which there are already limitations on access to traditional types of medical care, suggests the possibility of a growing divide between the well-heeled who can afford various types of enhancements and those who cannot. Consider the fact that American states with high poverty rates and a high percentage of racial minorities have an infant mortality rate similar to developing nations and you get a sense of the gap between posthuman hopes and American realities.15

  These complexities suggest that the history of medicine and technology will be the history of the American monster for the foreseeable future, despite the efforts of futurists to praise technology’s benefits. The questions raised by life-enhancing technology are moral rather than pragmatic. They are questions that live in the intimate roots of the self, the same roots from which monsters grow. Dracula in his dinner jacket with tails may be so old-fashioned that he has lost his power. But we still believe that technology, computers, and genetic enhancements can suck the life out of us.16

  The terrors of our possible future grow in part from our fear of losing control of that future. If our most intimate physical self can yield to the power of the machine, certainly our society faces a similar threat. We have seen how the fears of apocalypse in the 1990s drew both from evangelical Christianity and the terror of technological catastrophe. The terror of what a posthuman social order might look like has become a persistent theme in American pop culture, fecund ground for images of complete social breakdown (the zombie genre) and for possible futures in which human beings play no role at all.

  James Cameron’s The Terminator has refracted these fears for almost three decades, providing modern America a forum to discuss the nature of humanity and its relationship to a techno-digital environment. A film trilogy that began in 1984 and continued into the 1990s, Cameron’s posthuman mythology has produced a television series, novels, comic books, and a 2009 follow-up film. This successful franchise imagines a future in which an artificial intelligence known as “Skynet” has unleashed a nuclear holocaust on humanity and mass-produced an army of predatory cyborgs to mop up the survivors. Humanity’s one hope is a man named John Connor, the founder and leader of the resistance. Mastering time travel technology, Skynet sends its agents, human-appearing assassins known as “Terminators,” into the past to kill Sarah Connor, John’s mother, before he is born. Failing at that in the first film, Skynet and its cyborg killers repeatedly try to kill the young Connor in the sequels.

  The Terminator series combines the American fascination with religion and its anxiety over technological promise. John Connor is something of a messianic figure, and the day on which the machines will trigger nuclear destruction is known as “Judgment Day.” Religious questions about the nature of time and the meaning of the soul are key to the mythology’s development (this is especially the case in the television series Sarah Connor Chronicles).

  The Terminator series suggests that our fear of posthuman possibilities may not be entirely related to a simple fear of technology. The Terminator mythos draws heavily on H. P. Lovecraft’s image of a universe full of beings devoid of human feeling and utterly indifferent to the human future. Rather than horrifying Cthulhu arising from his ancient sleep, the machines rise against humanity and seek to destroy them “without emotion, without pity, without remorse.”

  Destruction of the social order at the hands of uncaring machines taps into very old human fears of powerlessness and meaninglessness in the face of an uncaring universe. Cameron’s dark vision can be seen to be oddly hopeful in this light. The most well-wrought iterations of the franchise, T2: Judgment Day and television’s Sarah Connor Chronicles, focus on the possibility of the cyborg learning human feeling and becoming part of a community through willingness to change and sacrifice. More than the atavistic primitivism of religious conservatism or the uncritical optimism of the futurists, Cameron’s Terminator offers hope based on integrating the monster into the human community, perhaps even creating that community based on the rejection of notions of monstrosity and ultimate difference.17

  That posthuman terrors have to be added to our list of possible monsters, along with sea serpents and serial killers, underscores the elasticity of the monster’s identity, the tendency of monsters to absorb the characteristics of the historical moment in which they appear. This book has refused to give a concise definition of the monster, assuming that no abstract definition exists. The creature we are hunting looks different in each historical era. In essence, every historical period decides what its monster(s) will be and creates the monster it needs. In fact, each historic epoch has a multitude of monsters, many of them representing warring discourses and basic cultural conflicts. The terror tales of the slave trade become symbols of a people’s oppression, while stories of frontier monsters become metaphors of conquest for the master class. In the twenty-first century, vampires can serve as traditionalist cautionary tales or embodiments of alternative sexuality.

  Frankenstein

  Terminator

  Monsters in America has looked at stories of the monster, told in different eras and by voices with differing interests, class positions, and racialized, gendered, or sexual identities. In contradiction to Craven’s New Nightmare, this book has suggested that stories do not so much contain the monster as give it life. Story and event, narrative and social structure are never truly separated. The subtext is always looming like a shadow in the text while the text comes to unnatural life in the social order. The victims of these tales are everywhere in American history, a landscape of corpses.

  There is reason for hope. Greil Marcus writes that “cultural awakening comes not when one learns the contours of the master-narrative, but when one realizes … that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie.” Perhaps we can save the victims from the monster by calling into question the script. History is the work of human agency, and its mistakes can be corrected by human action. Understanding history will break its power, putting it in the grave where it belongs. Social justice can break the power of the monster, altering the structures of history and society so that the terror of history recedes.18

  Of course, they always come back. One of the conventions of modern horror is to portray the death of the monster and the restoration of the social order only to bring the thing horrifyingly back to life in the final frame. History is a bit like that. Despite the optimism of some posthuman theorists, there is no reason to see history as historical development, a narrative of upward ascent. A progressive vision of social justice can become a lie in much the same way that right-wing visions of American exceptionalism and innocence are nothing but ha
ppy bedtime stories for children rightfully afraid of the dark. There could be worse things waiting.

  FILMOGRAPHY

  Title

  Date

  Director

  28 Days Later

  2002

  Danny Boyle

  28 Weeks Later

  2007

  Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

  Abbott and Costello Meet

  Frankinstein 1948

  Charles T. Barton

  Alien

  1979

  Ridley Scott

  American Psycho

  2000

  Mary Harron

  American Werewolf in London, An

  1981

  John Landis

  Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The

  1953

  Eugène Lourié

  Birth of a Nation

  1915

  D. W. Griffith

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula

  1992

  Francis Ford Coppola

  Bride of Frankenstein

  1935

  James Whale

  Brood, The

  1979

  David Cronenberg

  Candyman

  1992

  Bernard Rose

  Carrie

  1976

  Brian De Palma

  Dawn of the Dead

  1978

  George Romero

  Day of the Dead

  1985

  George Romero

  Deathdream

  1974

  Bob Clarke, David Gregory

  “Deer Woman”

  2005

  John Landis