By Annalee Newitz
In Pretend We’re Dead, Annalee Newitz argues that the slimy zombies and gore-soaked murderers who've stormed via American movie and literature during the last century embrace the violent contradictions of capitalism. Ravaged by way of overwork, alienated by means of company conformity, and mutilated through the unfettered lust for revenue, fictional monsters act out the issues with an financial system that turns out designed to devour humans whole.
Newitz seems at representations of serial killers, mad medical professionals, the undead, cyborgs, and unfortunates mutated by way of their involvement with the mass media undefined. no matter if contemplating the serial killer who turns homicide right into a form of exertions through mass generating useless our bodies, or the hack writers and bloodthirsty actresses trapped inside of Hollywood’s profit-mad storytelling laptop, she finds that every creature has its personal story to inform approximately how a freewheeling marketplace financial system turns people into monstrosities.
Newitz tracks the monsters spawned via capitalism via B videos, Hollywood blockbusters, pulp fiction, and American literary classics, their manifestations in works reminiscent of Norman Mailer’s “true existence novel” The Executioner’s Song; the fast tales of Isaac Asimov and H. P. Lovecraft; the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and Marge Piercy; true-crime books concerning the serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; and flicks together with Modern Times (1936), Donovan’s Brain (1953), Night of the residing Dead (1968), RoboCop (1987), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001). Newitz exhibits that as literature and movie inform it, the tale of yankee capitalism because the past due 19th century is a story of body-mangling, soul-crushing horror.
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Extra resources for Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
Sample text
All postwar Western European countries have remained capitalist, even when socialist or social democratic parties have been elected, even when these parties have nationalized certain industries and/or instituted various public welfare programs. So long as most productive assets are privately owned, most economic exchanges take place through the market, and most people work for wages or a salary, a society is capitalist. (Sweden, for example, is very much a capitalist country. ) All three of these defining structures must be present for a society to be capitalist.
Have we indeed reached “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama has proclaimed? Even on the Left, many seem to think so. Jeffrey Isaac, writing in The New Left Review, endorses Anthony Giddens’s claim that “no one has any alternatives to capitalism:” Now we might not like this, but Giddens is alas correct. ” It is simply to remark that given the history we have inherited and the world that human beings have created, there exists no credible wholesale alternative to capitalism. The same could be said of water purification, modern medicine, electronic communication, industrial technology with all its wastes and hazards, and also civil liberties and representative government of some sort.
Nations are also divided as to rich and poor, those at the bottom having per capita incomes one-twentieth or even one-fiftieth of those at the top. Life expectancy in rich countries now exceeds eighty; in poor countries, it is often under fifty-five. Infant mortality, malnutrition, and literacy rates are comparably disparate. Even within rich countries, the inequalities are staggering. In the United States, the upper 1 percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. More than 43 million families live below the poverty line (the largest number since the census bureau began collecting such data fifty years ago), including some 20 percent of our children, whereas corporate CEOs often make $30 million or more per year, and successful hedge fund managers make thirty times that much.