Authors: Lorenzo Bernini
Categories: Article, Consumerist Society, Death Drive, Garbage Dump, Sexual Minority, Television Series
Source: Queer Apocalypses
Several of Edelman’s illustrious interlocutors have had some criticism for him that is similar to mine. De Lauretis (2010: 87), for example, took her distance from the prescriptive meaning of the death drive in No Future. While Dean has maintained that Edelman is conditioned by a restricted and static vision of the symbolic, which impedes him from imagining the kinds of relationality that challenge the Oedipal law of reproductive futurism. In his opinion, Hocquenghem and Bersani have instead shown themselves capable of a larger imaginative force^1^ and a greater contact with reality. In fact, in the concreteness of gay existences, the breaking of the Oedipal social tie generally follows the construction of a new relationality, of which barebacking is only one
Keywords: Sexual Minority, Television Series, Consumerist Society, Garbage Dump, Death Drive
Several of Edelman’s illustrious interlocutors have had some criticism for him that is similar to mine. De Lauretis (2010: 87), for example, took her distance from the prescriptive meaning of the death drive in No Future. While Dean has maintained that Edelman is conditioned by a restricted and static vision of the symbolic, which impedes him from imagining the kinds of relationality that challenge the Oedipal law of reproductive futurism. In his opinion, Hocquenghem and Bersani have instead shown themselves capable of a larger imaginative force^1^ and a greater contact with reality. In fact, in the concreteness of gay existences, the breaking of the Oedipal social tie generally follows the construction of a new relationality, of which barebacking is only one
Finally, Jack Halberstam (2006: 823–824), who perhaps more than any other has sought to link his own thought to “antisocial queer theory,”^2^ has contested Edelman and Bersani’s recourse to an elite “gay male archive,” limited to “a select group of antisocial queer aesthetes and camp icons and texts” that are far from the pop tastes of the queer community—not to mention his personal punk sensibility. Recalling that “Bersani’s work… has also been useful for the theorization of femme receptivities (Cvetkovich) and butch abjection and lesbian loneliness (Love),” Halberstam contrasts “Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland and Kiki and Herb” with “antisocial writers, artists, and texts, like Valerie Solanas, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Highsmith, Wallace and Gromit, Johnny Rotten, Nicole Eiseman, Eileen Myles, June Jordan, Linda Besemer, Hothead Paisan, Finding Nemo, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Deborah Cass, SpongeBob, Shulamith Firestone, Marga Gomez, Toni Morrison and Patti Smith.” The intentions of the two different archives correspond not only to two different levels of culture—the first to “high” culture and the second to popular culture—but also to different affective Halberstam prefers “dyke anger, anticolonial despair, racial rage, counterhegemonic violence, punk pugilism” to the boredom, indifference and irony that permeate the “comfort zone” of gay references. In Halberstam’s opinion, the former have more to do with “the undisciplined kinds of responses that Bersani at least seems to associate with sex and queer culture.”^3^
While in the previous chapter I formulated criticisms that had been put forth differently by de Lauretis and Dean, in this chapter I will draw on Halberstam’s polemic. It raises important questions, which, in addition to style, taste and emotional tone, interrogate the possible consequences of antisocial theories in queer life practices, and their ability to echo beyond what I have called the ivory tower of the university. I will not surreptitiously assume positions to which I do not belong, and I will remain within the archive that Edelman and Bersani seem to share more than Halberstam seems to recognize—which, furthermore, as Jose Esteban Muñoz notes, is not just gay, academic and snobbish, but also “white.”^4^ I will thus attempt to contaminate this archive with “less cultured” references that bring it closer to the contemporary gay community and to the new hybrid (mixed race) and postcolonial generations, in an effort to suggest that the present can, for them, be a time of political queer action. The choice could seem surprising, if not bizarre, but there is one figure in particular that seems capable of both joining this archive and reopening the the zombie, a creature that in the recent past more than any other time has represented, and not by chance, the nexus between death and jouissance, and to which, in the last few years, gay cinema has given a vital new ironic meaning.
The zombie is the most abject of the contemporary “monsters” of horror, not only because the zombie’s natural habitat is comprised of not-so-prestigious movies geared toward younger audiences—B-movies and low-budget productions of the splatter or gore subgenres^5^—but also because of its modest origins. Vampires, Frankenstein and werewolves can boast their noble genealogies, that date back to the gothic novels of the 1800, and even ancient Greece or ancient Egypt^6^; “zombie” instead is the Anglo-Saxon transliteration of the Creole-Haitian term “zonbi,” which derives from the Bantu “nzumbe” and designates a voodoo character easily read as a symbol of slavery. The Haitian zonbi is, in fact, a newly dead human that a wizard (or to be more precise, a bokor priest) exhumed and brought back to life, stealing parts of his soul, annihilating his will, increasing his physical resistance, and reducing him to blind obedience so as to essentially transform him into a docile and enhanced workforce for the plantations. This is the version of the myth that was initially cannibalized by popular US culture after making landfall there in 1929 through the travel stories of occultist journalist William Seabrook (who was actually a cannibal^7^). This version would shortly thereafter become a cinematic in 1932, in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, which takes place in Haiti, Bela Lugosi—who played Tod Browning’s Dracula just one year earlier—impersonates Murder Legendre, the colonialist wizard who, with the help of mysterious extracts and voodoo dolls, zombifies not only black slaves, but white settlers as well, to procure manual labor for his criminal undertakings, or simply for his mill.
For the US public, in addition to representing a fear of the metissage of the Creole culture (Moreman and Rushton 2011a; Phillips 2011), the metaphor lends itself to an initial slippage, from slavery in the fields to work in the factories.^8^ And that is only the a few years later, with the Second World War and then with the cold war, the figure of the zombie begins to reveal its extraordinary versatility.^9^ Other films that insert new fears are added to those that stem from the Caribbean tradition^10^: at times the role of the wizard is played by mad scientists or even Nazis,^11^ or ex-Nazis that bring the dead back to life with the help of nuclear radiation.^12^ At times in the place of zombies, there are alien-controlled human bodies^13^ which are easily read as a caricature of Soviet totalitarianism. But symptomatically, it was not until 1968—the year Martin Luther King was assassinated by a shot to the head, and youth protests popped up all over the West while the United States was busy with the war in Vietnam—that a very low-budget film with nearly unknown actors definitively revolutionized the zombie look, turning them into the partially decomposed, devoid of any intelligence, hungry for human flesh and, luckily, very slow moving cadavers that we all know. I am talking about The Night of the Living Dead, created by George Andrew Romero, a director born and raised in New York by a Cuban father (descendent of Spaniards) and an American mother of Lithuanian origin. Just like his genealogical makeup, Romero’s living dead are the product of a complex syncretism. They inherit very little from the zombies of the Hispaniola island, initially not even their name (they aren’t called zombies in the film), while they seem to draw from the folklore of the Arab world, where numerous myths tell of shape-shifting demons, known as ghouls, that wander through cemeteries in search of human flesh.^14^ Furthermore, the director declared that his inspiration was Richard Matheson’s novel I Am a Legend (1954), which was actually about a vampire epidemic, and his terrifying creatures gesticulate much like Frankenstein.^15^ Finally, there is no lack of science fiction a space probe returning from Venus reanimates cadavers and turns them into cannibals as it spreads mysterious radiation throughout America. The theme remains however only the background, giving the film the possibility of developing the topoi that will later mark the genre and make The Night of the Living Dead a film classic (of which at least two remakes were later produced, one official and one unauthorized,^16^ but of which many other films with different titles could also be considered remakes): a group of unknown people finds itself facing an invasion of living dead cannibals that can only be neutralized by a blow to the head, and who, for the duration of the film, enact disgusting performances, voluntarily displaying the signs of their decomposition as well as the insides of their victims to the camera. In this case, the protagonists barricade themselves in a farmhouse near the cemetery, and after having displayed the more noble and altruistic sides as well as the more wretched and selfish sides of their personalities, they all die. The last one, Duane Jones in the role of the heroic Ben, who, in the history of cinema, is the first “nonethnic” character played by a black actor, survives the nocturnal assault of the zombies only to be killed the next morning by a bullet to the head, fired by a policeman on the hunt for the living dead. Ben thus dies just like Martin Luther King, in a finale that makes the zombies’ fury the apocalyptic symbol of the uprising of the poor.
The global success of The Night of the Living Dead gives way to a great number of productions, in which horror is inserted in romantic, erotic or screwball stories, which at times replay the “hot themes” of timely political from the war in Vietnam to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, from black people’s claim to rights, to ecological threats, to the condemnation of the unequal distribution of wealth that are still present in advanced societies.^17^ Over the years, zombies not only infest B-movies (a large number of which, filmed in the eighties, are Italian^18^) and mainstream ones,^19^ they also infest videos by pop stars^20^ like Michael Jackson’s Thriller ^21^ and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way,^22^ extremely popular video games, successful television series, and finally, they become the object of a vast array of Their suspended lives inspire authors of novels and comics, and are the subject of serious philosophical analysis. Within this uncontrollable proliferation, some fundamental mutations make the voracious walking cadavers very fitting for a discourse on queerness, the death drive and pleasure.
The first, which is perhaps more of an evolution than a mutation, was enacted by Romero, who in 1978—always with a low budget and fairly unknown actors—filmed the sequel of his Dawn of the Dead. ^23^ This time, with the United States reduced to total collapse, four survivors, who escaped toward Canada in a helicopter, are forced because of lack of fuel, to land on the roof of a zombie-infested mall in Philadelphia. They manage to rid it of the living dead—two of them, Peter (David Emge) and Rover (Scott Reiniger), are members of a SWAT team, and know their way with weapons—and block all the entrances. They thus find themselves sheltered amidst the toys, and surrounded by life’s comforts. While the world is being devoured by chaos, they live out a lush existence, surrounded by fine wines and foods, elegant clothing, ice-skating and video games. After a while, it is a motorcycle gang wishing to ransack the mall, along with the protagonists’ efforts to protect what they now considered their property, that will reopen the doors to those terrible creatures for the final slaughter.
What links the living dead of Night of the Living Dead to those of Dawn of the Dead (and the many other films inspired by them), and separates them from the Haitian zombies, is that they are not subjected to anyone else’s will. In the former, the dead are awakened by a radiation that came from outer space, in the latter, the cause of their resurrection remains unknown, but there are no voodoo wizards, Nazi scientists or artificial intelligences to control Romero’s zombies don’t take orders from any authority. This does not mean they are endowed with free will (to the contrary, it is their almost total lack of consciousness that make them so interesting to philosophers of the mind^24^): rather, they are confined to their dulling spasmodic predatory activity of insatiable and meaningless hunger, and this is the only thing that keeps them united in a horde (in the recent television series The Walking Dead ^25^ the term “herd” is used) though they lack any relational or social competency almost completely. Their “impersonal intimacy” could perhaps appeal to Bersani, but what seems most noteworthy to me, keeping the aims of this discourse in mind, is that from night to dawn, from the cemetery to the mall, the metaphor undergoes a meaningful contortion. In the first film, the cannibalistic drive that pressures the living dead reignites the death drive that nests in all of the unfortunate ones barricaded in the farmhouse, leaving no salvation for any of their relationships or any of their Barbara (Judith O’Dea) enters a catatonic state after losing her brother Johnny (Russel Streiner), and when she finds him, having become a zombie, he wastes no time attacking her; Tom (Keith Wayne) causes his and his girlfriend Judy’s (Judith Ridley) death by accidentally setting fire to the pickup truck with which they, and the others, were supposed to flee; Ben, the protagonist, ends up being really skilled at finishing off zombies, even when they are his ex-comrades, but not skilled enough to prevent Karen (Kyra Schon) from devouring her parents (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) before he can break all three of their skulls.
The antisocial and antirelational function embodied by the zombies does not fade in Dawn of the Dead: not only because the struggle between the protagonists and motorcyclists clearly alludes to the end of civilization, but also because, more subtly, Romero turns his living dead into a threat to Oedipal planning time. In fact, when Stephen (David Emge), believing he is safe in the mall, gives his pregnant girlfriend Francine (Gayle Ross) a ring, she refuses him, maintaining that the presence of the living dead makes the promise poorly timed (“No, Stephen, not now…”). In retrospect, can you really say she’s wrong? In the last scene, Francine will escape in the low-fueled helicopter with Peter, far from Stephen, who has become one of the zombies, as she carries her unborn child toward an unknown future. What constitutes a significant innovation is that the setting of Dawn of the Dead makes the hungry zombies’ jouissance of human flesh seem like a warped reflection of the protagonists’ jouissance of all of them, the living and the dead, claim the mall as their own. This correlation evokes a what do the zombies do with all that bounty? As Peter observes in a line that hardly masks Romero’s disapproval of consumerist society, if they return to the mall it’s because “this was an important place in their lives”—an expert on TV explains in fact that the living dead preserve vague reminiscences of their past existence.^26^ Romero’s zombies do not, therefore, free themselves from the voodoo wizard to gain their freedom, but to subject themselves to the drive and to jouissance. To cite Lacan, they pass from the slavery of the master’s discourse to the slavery of the capitalist discourse, that is to say, “from the frying pan into the fire.”
It does not end there; the AIDS crisis arrives, and then September 11th, the anthrax threat, the fear of biological weapons being used by terrorists, and, as if that wasn’t enough, the ever-growing intensity of transportation and exchange that brings with it the risk of new SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu. The zombie is there, the sponge of the imaginary, ready to absorb the new anxieties of an increasingly globalized world, ready to acquire a viral nature after having already infected all the cinematic genres and all areas of cultural production. But let us proceed in an orderly fashion. In the first two films of Romero’s saga, whatever the cause of the return of the dead on Earth, every deceased person will shortly come to life hungry for human flesh. Both Karen in The Night of the Living Dead and Roger in Dawn of the Dead die because of an infection caused by a zombie bite, but do not become zombies because of they die because of the infection, and then, like all the other dead people, they transform into cannibalistic monsters. In a long series of other films, however, the zombie is produced by a virus that turns only the infected humans into In some cases the zombie still remains a living dead, in others the zombie becomes an infected and infectious living being. Already, in Apocalypse domani [Cannibal Apocalypse] directed by Anthony M. Dawson, aka Antonio Margheriti, in 1980—following the success of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980)—we see an epidemic of cannibalizing rabies transmitted through bites. A few Vietnam veterans initially start the epidemic, rendering it a symbol of posttraumatic stress, or even the war itself (or the death drive that Freud links to the origin of every war, reflecting on the symptoms of the veterans of the First World War), but in a short time the viral metaphor will be charged with additional meanings.
The next year, the first case of what would later be called “AIDS” is diagnosed in the United States: before 1982, the American press referred to it using the homophobic acronym “GRID” (Gay-related immune deficiency), while the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), more pluralistic in distributing the stigma, preferred the wording “the 4H disease” based on the initial letter common to the four communities that were predominantly struck with the not just homosexuals, but heroin users, hemophiliacs and… Haitians. HIV is identified in 1983, and in the following years its history is a mutation of an African monkey virus, which would reach the United States by first passing through the island of Hispaniola. Thus, it is perhaps not by chance that in what is considered the most successful example of a film about viral zombies,^27^ namely, in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), chimpanzees are the ones to start the Used as test subjects in an English laboratory, infected with modified rabies, the primates spread the virus to a group of animalists that rush to free them in the night. The first to be bitten is a girl who immediately begins to vomit blood and show signs of a deranged aggressiveness; one of her companions tries to help her, but a squirt of blood she spits out hits him in the eye and immediately triggers the monsterification process in him. The extremely aggressive virus that is probably contained in all the bodily fluids, but definitely in blood and saliva, has an incubation period of just 15 seconds, and in the span of a mere 28 days will throw England into total chaos.^28^
Another mutation finally occurs when the zombies begin to regain self-awareness. The process is activated once again by Romero—who, furthermore, has always given his creatures traces of the memory of who they once were. Already in Day of the Dead (1985), medical doctor Matthew Logan (Richard Liberty), called Dr. Frankenstein because of the truculent nature of his experiments on the living dead, has a certain amount of success domesticating and returning zombie Bub (Howard Sherman), who was a soldier in life, to humanity. Bub will in fact be able to utter the word “hallo,” and will remember the uses of a few objects (a razor, a book, a telephone, a cassette player… and a gun), and above all, at the end of the film, he will kill Logan’s assassin by shooting him with the precision of the well-trained soldier he once was—and not by chewing him up with the fury typical of the living dead creature he is now. Later, in Land of the Dead (2005), the zombies even organize a revolt against the survivors of the city of Pittsburg, who live barricaded in a militarized community governed by the corrupt and rapacious Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) and occasionally go on expeditions in the city in search of food and medicine and to hunt the living dead. Leading them is the zombie Big Daddy, played by the African American actor Eugene Clark, who we see at the beginning of the film loitering around a pump of what perhaps used to be his gas station, and throughout the film, aside from his memory, he develops the personality of a leader.^29^
Like many of Romero’s intuitions, even the “conscious zombie” theme will have its success, making a fundamental change in narrative perspective From anonymous and undifferentiated catastrophes, the living dead will acquire not just the dignity of their own names, but even the role of protagonist in a few films. For example in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2013), the narrating voice belongs to the young R. (Nicholas Hoult), whose name reflects his living name only in the first letter. The film, based on the homonymous novel by Isaac Marion and produced by the same produces of the Twilight saga, is a romantic comedy for teenagers that draws significantly from Land of the Dead (2005), while reversing its meaning. Instead of turning against the survivors, here the living dead join forces with them to fight the “boneys”; fleshless, voracious and super-fast zombies in their last stages. What will make then recuperate their sense of belonging to humanity, literally making their hearts beat, will be the love that blossoms between R. and Julie (Teresa Palmer), the daughter of the military leader General Grigio (John Malkovich). The new Romeo and Juliet meet when he eats her boyfriend’s brains, but, as we know, the young quickly forget, and in the end the two will live happily ever after^30^: Once the boneys are exterminated, the young couple looks at the horizon of a new future while the wall that protected the human community from the zombies is torn down.
When compared to the bleak ending of Dawn of the Dead in which a pregnant Francine, after refusing the engagement ring, flees from her zombie companion on a fuel-less and destination-less helicopter, Warm Bodies seems like an attempt to close the cinematic trajectory of the living dead with the triumph of Oedipal The zombies pass the death drive onto the boneys, contribute to their extermination and are definitively reintegrated into humanity through a love pact which is also a social pact. Even after returning human, the protagonist does not remember his original name and refuses to choose a new He decides to continue calling himself R., preserving for himself and for the others the memory of his zombie existence. But his difference is accepted by the human community not only following the neutralization of the threat that he represents (one can presume that R. and his companions will change their feeding habits), but also at the price of his normalization, aesthetically set forth by the acquisition of a decidedly more pleasing appearance, and symbolically by the “benediction” that the patriarch, General Grigio, gives the heterosexual couple, a price that not all zombies can afford to pay.
Recent gay cinema has used the new topos of impossible love between a conscious living dead being and a human in the opposite way, to denounce the excessive cost that current gay communities ask of their members.^31^ Poor zombie Miles (Brad Bilanin), the protagonist of Michael Simon’s Gay Zombie (2007), gets dejected by his psychotherapist (Robin MacDonald)—who at the beginning of the film encouraged him to live out his homosexuality by going to gay locales—just as, after various vicissitudes, his friendship with Todd (Ryan Carlberg) begins to take an amorous turn.^32^ The film seems to want to indicate that only by concealing the upsetting aspects of homosexuality (embodied by Miles, who, in one scene terrorizes Todd by flaunting his cannibalistic instinct against the homophobe Scorpio, aka Andrew Miller), and therefore renouncing what, in keeping with Bersani and Edelman, is his gay specificity, is it possible for a homosexual to be accepted into a gay community in a world dominated by hetero values, or better yet, by their redefinition as enacted by contemporary consumerism. In addition to showing clear signs of decomposition, Miles is in fact visibly “unfashionable” and must make himself presentable to go out with Todd: his promisingly large package and a thorough application of makeup are not enough, he must also dress like a metropolitan gay—taking on a style that the others choose for him after a fashion show in which we see him experiment with different looks (from the drag queen, to leather slave, to cowboy, to a seducer in a smoking jacket, to fashion victim, to good boy). This attempt at uniformity proves Todd displays a momentary willingness to question his own system of values for the sake of the feeling he develops for this new arrival, but when the object of his love is irreparably taken from him, he immediately comes to terms with it, accepting what happened as a necessary sacrifice in order to return to his future as a young ambitious gay.^33^
In its lightness, as Alessandro Grilli has shown, Gay Zombie can be read as a shrewd critique of the homonormativity of metropolitan gay sociality, and more generally “as a very general and very relevant paradigmatic representation of aporia born from the contrast between the individual and society as they each fight to safeguard their own needs” (2009: 172).^34^ The operation carried out by Bruce LaBruce (aka Justin Stewart) seems even more interesting to me. Bruce LaBruce used the zombie not only as a symbol of the negativity of homosexuality, of the parts within it that escape every hetero-homogenizing and homo-normativizing effort, but also as a figure representing the possibilities of its surprising resignification—a queer resignification that, far from passing through abstract symbolisms, remains anchored in the materiality of the sexual, without trying to ennoble it through amorous feeling or sublimate it in language. Both Simon’s Gay Zombie and LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie (2010) are aimed at gay audiences, but while the first can be considered a coming-out comedy, the second is a porno,^35^ or better yet, a post-porno almost entirely devoid of dialogue.^36^
The association between the zombie and the queer, while initially surprising, is justifiable on multiple argumentative levels. First and foremost, from a formal point of view, we are dealing with two “floating signifiers.”^37^ The former, as I have tried to show, evolving over the span of several decades from the Haitian legends to the latest cinematic productions, has at times symbolized a multitude of social fears, and the rebellion against different forms of oppression and homogenization. While the latter, as I illustrate in the first chapter of this book, was originally used as a qualitative adjective like “strange” to refer as much to people as to things, and then became a pejorative epithet to be used against sexual minorities, and was finally used as a political tool by these minorities themselves both in theory and in political practice. It is important to keep in mind that, since the early nineties, those who choose to use the word “queer” instead of “gay,” “lesbian” and “trans,” do it to enact a sort of dislocation of the categories with which modernity defines and regulates sexuality—and not to substitute them with a new concept endowed with semantic from de Lauretis to Butler, Bersani to Edelman, queer has been redefined nearly each time it has been used theoretically, to then be further reinterpreted by different movements, groups, collectives and individuals who, following Queer Nation’s example, have defined themselves as queer. The semantic mobility is thus a constitutive characteristic of zombies as well as of queers, and as such both can easily be used with irony, where irony is meant in the way I have previously attempted to define it, not à la de Man and à la Edelman, as a dissolution of signification, but as the possibility to plurivocally and even ambiguously signify and thus to fluidize signification.^38^
I have already discussed the ironic ambiguity of the queer. Now, instead, I would like to highlight how the zombie is a dual and paradoxical monster. First and foremost, in the zombie’s suspended condition in which life and death are co-present, instead of the usual reciprocal exclusion, structurally the living dead represents an oxymoron (Grilli 2009: 178, 175). This ambiguous position derives, furthermore, from the position that the zombie occupies in relation to liminal but potentially central, particular and yet universalizable. Like vampires, zombies are in fact originally human, but unlike vampires their monsterification process does not entail being a part of a restricted circle of noble elites: anyone can become a zombie, just like anyone can “discover” they are lesbian, gay, or trans, or can be suspected of being so by others—acquiring in this way not a superhuman status but a minority one; existing as both human and “less-than-human.” The zombie can therefore easily lend itself to substantialize the queer in a figural representation that emphasizes the ambiguous ontological status recognized by Hocquenghem and Kosofsky Sedgwick^39^ and that, however, emerges from the juxtaposition of Bersani and de Lauretis to Foucault and Butler. Their existence “questions again and again the certainty of existence” (Hocquenghem 53), not unlike what happens with the identities of gays, lesbians and trans people, at once both concrete in the urgency of sexual drives that characterize them and abstract because of their nature as constructed sociocultural products of the modern sexuality apparatus.
Indeterminacy is not the only characteristic common to the two categories in discussion. Other traits become evident if we move from the analysis of the form of signification to the analysis of the denotation and connotation of the contents. Like the queer theorized by Edelman, the zombie is also a creature of the real. Every step, every grunt, every bite of the living dead rips open the veil of Maya of our projections into the future, showcasing the cadaver that we will all soon if the zombie’s hunger for human flesh threatens our lives, his/her almost-life threatens our imaginary.^40^ In its evolution through time, however, the zombie has learned to do when the zombie develops fragments of consciousness after having been at the mercy of the death drive and pleasure, he/she shows that it is possible for the subject to rise up from dissolution and for meaning to reemerge from deconstruction. The conscious zombie, the “metamonster” to use Grilli’s term (2009: 154–155), squares the paradox; reacquiring speech and becoming gay addresses a question to antisocial queer theories that is at once both simple and “I gained awareness of the negativity that I represent, of the drive that operates in me, of the death that awaits now what do I do with these tragic truths?” The queer zombie essentially leads Cultural Studies to the limit where ontological psychoanalytic discourse gives over to ethical–political discourse, until theory gives way to practice. Consequently, the zombie can personify the dilemma of the LGBTQIA movements, perennially split between assimilation and contestation, between requesting social recognition and a refusal to recognize the values of sociality.
LaBruce exploits the rich aporetic potential of the conscious zombie to the maximum, leading our monster toward further paradoxical The protagonist of L.A. Zombie is starved not for human flesh (in one scene he drinks milk), but for gay sex, he does not belong to a herd, but is solitary—so much so that no one in the film utters his name and in the director’s notes he is simply referred to as “Zombie”—he doesn’t bring death, but reanimates people. He is played by François Sagat, one of the most popular gay porn actors, who can easily be considered the symbol of the commercialization of the body in advanced capitalist In addition to having made more than 30 hardcore films,^41^ and never hiding his use of anabolic steroids to sculpt his hyphertrophic muscles, Sagat has modeled for both a realistic dildo and a Ur3 ass equipped with a penetrable anus sold by TitanMen on the Internet and in sex shops all over the world. It would therefore be easy to “use him” to spread a moralistic condemnation of the commercialization of the body in the porn industry, but his function in LaBruce’s film is much more to show the possibility of an artistic and liberating use of pornography and resurrect subjectivity in societies of jouissance. In Sagat’s professional life, sex was an instrument to obtain fame and money^42^; the character he plays with his porn star body, meanwhile, offers his sexual partners as well as his spectators an opportunity to reawaken their dormant singularity. As LaBruce himself has declared, Zombie is a salvific figure, in a technical “Messianic” sense. And like the Jesus of the Christian tradition, and if possible even more so, he is an extremely ambivalent being. The Christians know for certain that Jesus mysteriously participates in the human and the divine; little, however, is understood about the nature of Zombie: Perhaps he is both human and zombie (and thus still human but alive and dead at the same time), or he is a mutant alien come from who knows where, or perhaps he is simply a misfit gay, a schizophrenic inventing it all.^43^
At the beginning of the film he emerges from the Pacific Ocean completely nude,^44^ in some scenes he appears as a defenseless homeless guy wandering with others through the streets of Los Angeles—pushing a shopping cart full of objects he has pulled out of the trash, bathing where he can, stealing clothes that are hung out to dry—in other scenes his skin is bruised, at times fangs poke out of his mouth, other times they poke right out of his face, disfiguring his features (makeup and special effects were done by Joe Castro). When he is a zombie/alien the most interesting, disturbing, macabre and off-color things happen. At the beginning of the film, the surfer who gives him a ride (Rocco Giovanni) dies in a serious car accident. We see him lying in the middle of the street with his thoracic cavity open, and his exposed heart slowly stops beating. Zombie then inserts his large hooked phallus in the the spurts of his black sperm reactivate the surfer’s heart, bringing him back to life. Analogous scenes then follow in which Zombie stumbles upon the bodies of attractive recently dead gay men and brings them back to life by penetrating their wounds or by spraying them with his black sperm. His partners are different kinds of humans who, in their complexity, paint a portrait of a gay community dominated by hedonism, lookism, money and the pleasure a yuppy killed by a shot to the back because he was involved in a scam (Wolf Hudson), a black man with a crushed skull who is thrown to the street from a van after having perhaps participated in an orgy (Eddie Diaz), an older homeless guy who died of an overdose in his cardboard shelter (Andrew James), four bondage S/M porno stars (Erik Rhodes, Matthew Rush, Francesco D’Macho and Adam Killian) massacred by their dealers. In the last sequence we see Zombie in a cemetery. He is moved as he is reminded of the victims he has saved and the disadvantages of his reject-life: his eyes, both human and monstrous, shed tears of blood. He begins to dig a hole in the dark ground. On the tombstone an enigmatic “LAW” is engraved.
The metaphor of gay-zombie sex in L.A. Zombie lends itself to multiple readings. First and foremost is the attempt to dismantle, but not destroy the association between homosexual sex, disease and death.^45^ In Unlimited Intimacy Dean (2009: 50, 55–56) shows how the bareback community produces a meaningful reversal of values, according to which being infected with HIV becomes desirable in that it is a mark, not of vulnerability but of strength, and anal passivity is associated with hyper-virility and not femininity. But LaBruce’s imagination in this film goes much Here the monster, who in cinema has represented the death drive and infection more than any other, radically reinvents itself, while remaining the same—a zombie, as its name indicates. Some kind of virus is evidently present in his black But it is a virus that resuscitates.^46^ What’s even more interesting is that he does not infect. What is striking about the characters of the film is that they meet but remain Zombie does not make his partners like him, and after each sexual act he distances himself. And his partners, once resurrected, greet him with astonished, surprised and grateful expressions, as if that unusual sex had ripped them away from their previous existence—which is most certainly zombie existence à la Romero, hypnotized by the capitalist discourse—and elevated it to a more authentic existential state, that even in the awareness of death, makes them feel alive, each one unique among other unique subjects. Because if it is true that, as Lacan said time and again, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” then experimenting with the impossibility of the encounter with the other in sexual jouissance can, paradoxically, provide the occasion to recognize having come up against the otherness of the other and one’s otherness to the other, other people’s and one’s own miraculous living singularity.^47^ As LaBruce has also declared in his way, L.A. Zombie enacts the critical, creative and relational potential (which he still calls “revolutionary”) of sex (to which antisocial queer theorists remain largely blind):
The metaphor of gay-zombie sex basically allows all the contradictory elements of the sexual, and thus even antisocial queer theories and Foucault’s thought, to be kept together; and at the same time it allows the imaginary to be freed from that obsession with anality that a certain psychoanalysis and a certain gay thought share with the most reactionary homophobia, without, however, releasing gay sex from the abjection that it assumes in a heteronormative context. Because if it is true that sex is the death drive that dissolves the subject, it is also true that it is an activity within which, to the contrary, the subject could prove his or her own consistency, creativity, and relational first and foremost by demanding awareness of their own desires and tastes, and then by inventing new forms of pleasure (and pain) for themselves and for others, eventually “inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization of the body” as Foucault writes about sadomasochism (1984c; Eng. trans. 165). LaBruce has also proven himself well aware of this when he “Zombie porn is you can create your own orifice” (2010: 3).
While Bersani and Edelman, in unidirectionally and dogmatically interpreting some fundamental psychoanalytic texts, remind us that the sexual is the tomb of subjectivity and relationality, the anarchic imagination of L.A. Zombie, which is irreverent toward any kind of truth about the sexual, reminds us that this tomb is also a cradle from which the renewed subject can be reborn, escaping from the forces that push for the subject’s narcissistic implosion, whether these forces come from drives or the imperatives of consumerism. Their encounter with Zombie returns his lost partners to the responsibility of their existence, to the search for a personal “law” that accounts for their antisocial needs in addition to their need for sociality.
The dialectic between solitude and relationality also dominates LaBruce’s previous film, which marks his entrance into the gay-zombie-hardcore genre. The film makes explicit the ideological perspective that orients his poetic and simultaneously allows one to look beyond this viewpoint.^48^ While L.A. Zombie (2010) is a guerilla film, produced very quickly, and with modest means, Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) instead enjoyed the benefits of greater financing, and consequently the film was conceived of, planned and filmed with relative ease. While in the former many scenes were improvised and the film almost totally lacks dialogue, the latter followed a detailed storyboard with words taking a leading role, often in the form of bulky political rhetoric that borders on didacticism.^49^ In the first scene, in black and white, we see Otto, played by Jey Crisfar, just 18 at the time, come out of a tomb; immediately afterward we see him in color, he wanders through a bright field of yellow flowers, reaches a German state highway, feeds off the carcass of a hare that has been hit by a car, and then hitchhikes.^50^ It will be revealed later in the film that Otto is afflicted by mental disorders. He left, perhaps fled, a psychiatric clinic, but does not remember Instead he believes that he is a zombie, and following the smell of human flesh he heads where the scent is most intense. He tries to get to Berlin (the city where the wall fell in 1989). When he reaches his destination, his scruffy appearance and the musky stench emanating from his body makes him an easy target for insults and In one sequence some children throw rocks at him, in another he escapes from a band of lowlives. He is then picked up by a synthetic drug-loving skinhead (in the credits the actors only appears with the pseudonym “Mo”) in front of the club Flesh, where a zombie-themed costume party is taking place—the boy, to dissuade Otto from entering the club and to invite him to his house, describes the party by saying “It’s dead.” The young clubber ends up partially gutted, his bedroom stained with blood like a slaughterhouse, but he doesn’t mind any of it (“That was amazing. Can I see you again sometime?”).
After this experience, Otto decides to abandon the dangerous and disturbing street life. To try to make some money, he answers an ad^51^ and does an audition with Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), a feminist, anticapitalist lesbian director who—with the “immoral support” of her girlfriend Hella Bent (Susanne Sachsse) and the physical help of her cinematographer brother Adolf (Guido Sommer)—has been perpetually filming “the politico-porno-zombie movie” Up with Dead People,^52^ in which a band of conscious gay zombies,^53^ led by actor Fritz Fritze (Marcel Schlutt), who plays the “gay Che Guevara of the undead,” plot a revolt against the packs of zombie exterminators.^54^ Medea is so enthused by Otto’s mental discomfort that, instead of casting him as an extra in Up with Dead People, she decides to shoot a film with him as the lead and sole actor (we find out later that the initial black and white scene in which Otto emerges from a tomb, is the first scene in Medea’s film). Considering him so valuable, but intuiting that he may be untrustworthy, Medea puts Otto in the care of Fritz who, despite fearing for his safety, agrees to watch out for and host him throughout the filming.
A certain anxiety, however, distracts Otto from his new Slowly memories of his past life surface, until he finds the phone number of his ex Rudolf (artist and singer Gio Black Peter) in his wallet and calls him and asks to meet. The two of them meet on the bench where they had met three years before, while Otto was reading Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, a book that he then lent to Rudolf who now returns it (“I didn’t get a chance to read it. Little too depressing for me”). With great superficiality, without (wanting to) realize his stupefied, amnesiac state, Rudolf reminds Otto that he left him right when Otto was beginning to feel bad, right before his admittance to the clinic for eating disorders, depression, schizophrenia and “disorders of the soul,” and he justifies himself with these
After this conversation, in a sequence whose dramatic tone is heightened by the warm and hypnotic voice of Anohni Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons as she sings The Atrocities,^55^ Otto wanders through the streets of Berlin hugging his book, with more of a lostness about him than ever. Again he meets a band of thugs, but he does not escape from them this time. He lets himself get beaten up without putting up a fight, until they leave him bloody on the asphalt. He goes back to Fritz who greets him with affection and care. They make love with sweetness, but the next morning he wakes up alone. Otto—who, as a zombie, never sleeps—sneaks out of the bed to go film the last scene of Medea’s we see him, in black and white, dose himself with gasoline and set fire to himself, though he actually sets fire to a mannequin dressed in his clothing. We then see him in the last scene of LaBruce’s film, hitchhiking on a state highway—just like in the beginning, but this time he is leaving Berlin and headed north.
Even more so than L.A. Zombie, Otto; or Up with Dead People lends itself to a multilayered reading. In Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Society (2011: 184–186), keeping the theoretics of Edelman’s No Future and Bersani’s Intimacies in mind, Shaka McGlotten interprets the film as a metaphor for the virtual intimacy of gay men on chat lines and their dependence not only on sex but on the Internet. In the essay, which takes an ethnographic approach, the author reports that many of the young gay men he contacted via chat have said they feel “dead” and that the predominant feeling in chat rooms is boredom, accompanied by hints of foolishness and uselessness. In McGlotten’s opinion, Otto, who has the appearance of a “chemically zoned out hipster,”^56^ represents “queer emptiness,” and LaBruce’s intention is to enact a “polyvalent critique” of “boredom and the boring”:
LaBruce’s generational critique of new metropolitan gay communities seems to me, in reality, to have a much farther-reaching range. Otto can easily represent a young man in an existential crisis—the director himself defines him as “a very sensitive, vulnerable and authentic gay teenager.”^57^ Coming from a small town he is attracted to the gay life of a big city like Berlin, but it ends up deluding and hurting him. He is caught up in the whirlwind of gay nightlife pleasure, in wild, drugged sex (represented by the skinhead clubber), he is deluded by a love that turns out to be superficial (Rudolf), and not even the comfort of a group of alternative youngsters (Medea & Co.) is able to keep him in the city. A narrative element that should not be overlooked is that through the course of his experiences in the city, this sensitive young gay discovers that he is ill, and that his illness in the story functions as a reagent that reveals the pathologies of the world around him. Medea’s first film, in fact, contains a double not only of the homophobia within heteronormative civilization, but also of the serophobia^58^ and the homonormativity of the gay community. In Up with Dead People, their viral nature and the stigma of their illness differentiate the gay zombies from the living gays. Rudolf more than any other character, in his inability to take care of Otto’s unease, the candor with which he admits to having never “been good with sick people,” and in his utter disinterest for the great works of literature, becomes a symbol of the emptiness of the new generations of metropolitan gays. Following the introduction of HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy), fortunately AIDS, while remaining a deadly syndrome, lost its primal identification with immediate death in the imaginary of advanced countries. This misled the mainstream gay community—certainly not the bareback one—which was busy affirming its own respectability and working to claim marital and parental rights, into thinking that it could definitively sever the association between AIDS and male homosexuality. In the late eighties and early nineties it was nearly impossible for a HIV-negative gay man not to feel an instinctive solidarity for those like him who had contracted the infection and would soon die from it; today, instead, associations working to fight AIDS and create solidarity with HIV-positive people have trouble finding volunteers, and gay associations no longer consider prevention campaigns a priority. The dramatic consequence is an increase in HIV infection among gay metropolitan populations.^59^ Thanks to advances in medicine, HIV-positive gays, who once carried clear marks of the relentless virus on their bodies, today have acquired a sacrosanct right to anonymity, but this brings with it a sentence of invisibility and an alienating isolation. In post-repressive, post-patriarchal societies where the uninhibited gay nightlife represents none other than the obscene double of the acquisition of gay respectability in Oedipal civilization, the HIV-positive people do not find support for their unease within the gay community, just as Otto does not find it in Rudolf, and only a few queer activists and theorists prefer to stay on their side instead of pursuing their own social affirmation.
This interpretation, however, does not exhaust the richness of the film. Otto’s illness has, in fact, a multifunctional character. We must not forget that, while it can legitimately be considered an AIDS metaphor—as the evolution of the theme in L.A. Zombie shows—there is a clear literal interpretation of this mental illness produced by the film. In two different scenes, Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) The zombie Maximilian reads it as he has breakfast with his partner Fritz, who is also a zombie,^60^ and Hella reads it during her birthday party picnic in the cemetery—a paradoxical scene that Edelman would enjoy, in which the repetition that most symbolizes “futurism” is neutralized by the awareness of mortality.^61^ As if that wasn’t enough, Medea makes no mystery of the anti-psychiatric ideology of Marcusian-Freudomarxist inspiration that motivates the film she is making about Otto:
Medea’s film about Otto is a critique of consumerist society, represented by its alienating, repressive and anti-ecological One scene, which Edelman would also appreciate, is filmed in a supermarket (as Otto steals and gnaws on raw meat, a little girl (Laura Berger), interferes with the scene and Medea shoves her^62^), one scene in a slaughterhouse where a team of workers debones an enormous quantity of chicken, and one scene in a garbage dump.^63^ After all, LaBruce (2011a) has never made a mystery of the fact that he considers himself an anticapitalist and “Marxist sympathizer.” He furthermore declared that even his film about Otto, like Medea’s, is inspired by Marcusian theory, which states that “the individual who functions healthily as a citizen of a sick society is sick himself,” and that the young “great” director must be considered his mouthpiece. The ironic tone of LaBruce’s interview, of his cinematic works in general, and of Otto; or Up with Dead People in particular, nevertheless legitimizes a reading that forces the filmmaker’s declared Freudomarxism to take a markedly queer direction.
There are, in fact, other markers of the distance that LaBruce takes from his “mouthpiece.” First and foremost, the narrative device of the film within the film creates various levels of reality and multiplies the possible points of view, fragmenting the identity of the director (does Medea’s point of view really coincide with LaBruce’s? And is it the same in the two movies that she films within LaBruce’s film?). Secondly, the young director’s very identity hides an In the scene of the macabre picnic, while Hella reads Marcuse, Medea leafs through a book with the evocative title, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. It is an ethnographic piece, considered a classic in Haitian voodoo studies, published in 1953 by Vanguard Press. Its author, who is of Russian origin, is called Eleanora Derenkowskaia (1917–1961), but assumed the nom de plume “Maya Deren,” which is an anagram of “Medea Yarn.” Like Medea, Maya was a versatile intellectual, an author but also a dancer, choreographer, photographer and avant-garde Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti is also the title of her documentary film—in black and white, just like Medea’s works—about dance and possession in voodoo rituals, filmed in Haiti between 1947 and 1954, as always with the help of her camerawomen whose last name was Heyman, and first name was… Hella. McGlotten suggests that Maya Deren can be considered the symbol of intellectual and boring cinema, without however emphasizing how this would make the cohesion between LaBruce and the contents of Medea’s films ambiguous. It also seems meaningful that Eleanora Derenkowskaia was born in Ukraine to Jewish parents the year of the Russian Revolution; that five years later fleeing the anti-Semitic pogroms they moved to the United States, where they abbreviated their last name to distance themselves from their origins; that once she became an adult Eleanora, chose a name that means illusion in Sanskrit (the veil of Maya, that has been evoked more than once in these pages) and became a radical socialist, even if her experimental style, heavily imbued with psychoanalysis and often surreal, would have been labeled “degenerate bourgeois art” in her homeland. LaBruce’s name choice for his alter ego is essentially a symbol that is rich with ambiguity and offers the public a variety of interpretations. It is not chance then if at a certain point in the film, in a game of Chinese boxes, Fritz plays the role of narrator for Medea and recounts his meeting with Otto in these
Thus, like the zombie and like the queer, for LaBruce, Otto occupies the position of the empty or floating signifier. And like “Medea,” his name reveals his narrative function. Its palindromic nature allows us to read it from left to right or right to left, looking at the future along with the past. It thus evokes a very particular temporality. Unlike what happens for Medea, in this case it isn’t the name “Otto” that carries out the function of floating signifier, it is Otto himself, in (foul-smelling) flesh and in a subjective sense he is a signifier, a signifier entrusted with the responsibility of renegotiating his signified with the context, in an ever-open and never definitive process. For too long, as Foucault and Butler teach us, queer existences have been categorized by others, but this does not stop them—after rebelling against the psycho-police that defined them, and after crossing the desert of the absence of meaning to which they were condemned by the capitalist discourse’s imperative of jouissance—from taking up speech in order to construct new narratives of as Italian trans men and women did when they united at Castiglione degli Ubertini in May of 2008, not to hide the “stubborn” nature of their drives (de Lauretis 2010), but to joyously celebrate it by singing together beneath the moon. If, as Lacan teaches (1978a), the symbolic order and the drive coincide, it is because the sexual is the psychic and bodily area where the social and the singular meet, what can most dispossess the subject and that which characterizes him as unique.^64^ Queer is thus that event that bursts into the Oedipal temporality in which the future is already written in the past and present, giving the subject back the responsibility of himself or herself even in the multiple determinations to which he or she is… subject. And, still, queer is the subject that straddles this event, that upsets its molds, that challenges the principle of non-contradiction, affirming itself as “an excrescence of logic” to use Butler’s words in The Psychic Life of Power (1997: 17). Queer, for example, is the opening here and now of the apocalyptic zombie temporality, in which death and life, Thanatos and Eros, are mysteriously kept together.
After becoming aware, through the violence of the thugs and Rudolf’s careless words, of the irreducible negativity that he embodies, Otto could give himself up to solitude and despair by setting fire to himself as his alter ego does in Medea’s film. Or he could try to neutralize his negativity by coupling himself with Fritz, who, unlike Rudolf seems willing to accept him for what he is, but who perhaps—not unlike the skinhead of the casual encounter—is attracted to him because of the transgression he represents. The queer, however, refuses to stabilize itself within a meaning (in this sense, Edelman’s thought is not queer enough), and resumes its trip, its floating. Otto prefers not to run the risk that Miles does in Gay Zombie. Once the shooting of the last scene is done, the following conversation occurs between him and Medea:
We then see Otto again, just as in the beginning, along the highway. Thumb raised. A rainbow behind him. We hear his last words conclude the
The finale does not exclude a communal solution that starts with the creation of new ways of life à la Foucault, but doesn’t coincide with a call for only the positive nature of pleasure either. Paradoxically, it is the cohesion of one’s negativity, the reaffirmed awareness of being dead, of occupying the position of the death drive within the social, that saves Otto from suicide. Like Lacan in Seminar XX, Otto seems aware that sexual jouissance does not need to coincide with deadly jouissance, nor with obedience to the injunctions of the capitalist discourse (injunctions to the jouissance of the thing, which is another name for deadly jouissance).^65^ The last word has not yet been said about jouissance, and it is thus possible here and now for us to enjoy ourselves for who we are, subjects that are continually renewed by the dissolution of drives which opens up the possibility for unplanned encounters. Perhaps the rainbow alludes to this cheerful awareness. Perhaps if Andrea, the 15-year-old from Rome who was made fun of by his classmates for wearing pink pants, had shared it, he wouldn’t have felt so overwhelmed by their insults; perhaps he wouldn’t have given those around him the right to judge his right to exist. Perhaps on the 22nd of November 2012, he wouldn’t have hung himself.^66^ And if Marco, the 16-year-old in Rome, had shared it, perhaps he wouldn’t have defenestrated himself.^67^
The conscious gay zombie reemerges from the society of jouissance and from the apnea of the drive by himself, capable of tolerating the marginalization and even of enjoying it, yet not resigned to a desperate isolation. After the slender Crisfar, it will be the hypertrophic Sagat to impersonate the messianic queer that translates himself into experimental casual encounters.^68^ And if a porn star can sit on Christ’s throne, if it is possible to use the porno industry to attempt to revolutionize the sexual-political imaginary of the gays, then it is also possible to continue making queer theory after Edelman likened the queer to the imperative of jouissance and the death drive, and after the consumerist society turned queer into a marketing product.
After the close of SeriesQ in the United States, new book series have been created,^69^ even in Italy, which trails Europe in terms of rights for sexual minorities, where the recent blossoming of queer initiatives seems to attest that there is a certain desire for “resurrection.” It is not, after all, about a cultural colonization, if anything it is an interesting return that is full of around the mid-seventies, thanks to Bersani’s invitation, Foucault’s philosophy made its way from the old continent to the French Literature Department of California universities, beginning, among other things, that passionate debate about the foundations of psychoanalytic knowledge in Cultural Studies, which I briefly summarized earlier. In a rebound move, antisocial queer theories have crossed into Europe, and in France and Italy as well, mainly by Anglo-American Literature and Film professors, awakening interest in the subject among scholars of psychoanalysis, to then find a place within the philosophical debate from which they originally arose. Thus far, this study has sketched out a brief survey of these theories and attempted to respond to them on their terms through the examination a body of “popular” genre films in an effort to follow Halberstam’s directions. Now it will abandon psychoanalytic metapsychology and turn to the instruments of political philosophy.
Collaborators: [Julia Heim]("Heim J"[Author])