Death in the Digital Age

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In Isabel Pinedo’s essay on postmodern horror, she asserts that violence in the horror genre “must be situated in the context of monstrosity, culturally defined as an unnatural force” (21). In several of my past and current English courses, we’ve analyzed various literature through the lens of monster literary theory, and I want to add this framework to the discussion started in the previous blog posts. Both Jasmine and Elise’s posts examined robot Ash from Black Mirror in relation to the idea of the postmodern monster (or zombie), discussing how Ash blurs the lines between the human and the nonhuman. Anxiety surrounding technological advances in modern society, especially those pertaining to artificial intelligence, has become a popular theme in science fiction, to the point where it has created somewhat of a subgenre (i.e. robots taking over the world). Stephen Hawking even said that advanced artificial intelligence could potentially bring about the end of human civilization. Could AI be the epitome of the postmodern monster? Why do we fear it so? Much of monster literary theory suggests that monsters are so terrifying to us because we see ourselves in them. This idea ties back to the concept of the uncanny, or the strangely familiar, that we talked about in class the other day. In his essay, “Monster Culture,” Jeffrey Cohen writes that “monsters are our children”(20). He discusses several distinguishing characteristics of what makes a monster, but one of these particularly struck me in light of AI. Cohen explains how monsters are “disturbing hybrids,” dangerous because they are “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions”(6). We often ask, what makes a human distinctly a human? Is there such thing as a “soul”? If AI can reason and even experience emotion, traits that have been considered uniquely human throughout the history of mankind, do the lines become blurred? Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of AI is that it transcends humanity. It takes away human error. It doesn’t require basic needs like food and sleep. Could it potentially be immortal? On a closing note, as I thought about these questions, I realized that despite his many unsettling components, I found robot Ash from Black Mirror oddly refreshing because he demonstrated the ways in which artificial intelligence falls short of humanity.

 

Cohen, Jeffrey J. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Web.

Pinedo’s in her essay references the role which reason plays in both classical and postmodern horror. She explains how rationality is defined through classical horror as a distinctly male trait, where irrationality and disorder are distinctly feminine. In many classical horror films, those who exercised logic and reason were members of fields which were dominated by men, which assisted in creating a skewed definition of what reason really is. However, within the demented universe of postmodern horror films, much of the horror comes from the inability to apply reason to a given situation. The limited definition of “reason” created by classical horror is shattered by postmodern horror. Since this essay was written, I feel that postmodern horror has done much to remove the limitations on feminism which the article cites.

The film that comes to mind is The Babadook (2014). The Babadook fulfills all the requirements for postmodern horror presented in the article.  There is violent disruption of the normal world caused by a creature from a book gaining consciousness. There are transgressions of boundaries in the way the protagonist abuses her child who has a behavioral disorder, which is a transgression that would not be tolerated of a protagonist in classical horror. There is a violation of rationality in the ways which the creature manifests itself throughout the film. There is no plot resolution, as the protagonist at the end of the film can only defeat the Babadook by keeping it locked in her basement. The film puts an ironic spin on the victim-role which female lead characters often fall into. It is ultimately about the female protagonist dealing with the terrifying thoughts and feelings that accompany mental illness, but it’s post modern bent allows the female protagonist to display her flaws without receiving the seal of moral degeneracy that classical horror would award their female protagonists for similar behavior.

Pictured below is The Babadook’s horrifying monster.

While the most recent films which could fall into the postmodern horror genre could not explicitly be called feminist, films such as The Babadook set up interesting character roles within the genre which prevents the limited social power Pinedo cites. The role of the protagonist herself as a non-sexualized, flawed mother shows the evolution of the female role in postmodern horror since the time this essay was written.

Of the films that Isabel Pinedo uses to help illustrate the characteristics of the contemporary horror film, I found the most compelling to be Night of the Living Dead, in particular because of the way in which zombies seem to easily fit within her definitions of postmodern horror. Pinedo describes that in contemporary horror, the margins between living and dead and good and evil are sometimes indistinguishable (20) and that uniquely, “the postmodern horror film locates the horror in the contemporary everyday world (20).”

It is clear that a zombie disrupts the boundaries between what is living and what is dead, but perhaps more strikingly the idea of a zombie brings into question what is human and what is not. The zombies of Night of the Living Dead clearly have no recollection of who they were, nor do they seem to have any complex motivations beyond to kill and destroy whatever they come across. Yet, when they have the same bodies as the people that they were when they were alive, it becomes hard to distinguish whether they are victim or villain. For me, as a viewer, this makes the zombies’ deaths feel not so much like a wholesome victory, but rather creates further horror at the violence the protagonist must participate in to survive. Pinedo writes that this is another distinguishing characteristic of the horror film (20).

Moreover, when the people who became zombies were previously known to the remaining human characters in the film, it adds a further element of the breakdown of traditional roles. For example, the young girl who becomes a zombie in Night of the Living Dead is depicted as eating her father and slaughtering her mother. This speaks to Pinedo’s description of postmodern horror occurring in the everyday. There is nothing more mundane than family and friends, and so when the little girl becomes the monster, it feels almost more horrifyingly possible than a mysterious monster might. Moreover, while the zombie girl’s fate is never specifically addressed, the protagonist of the film is forced to kill the girl’s parents as they begin to reanimate as zombies. Here, again it is hard to stomach because the zombies are in many ways inseparable from the devoted, if stubborn, parents they were before they were killed.

Below is the clip of the young girl as a zombie eating her father from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead:

[Movieclips]. (2016, Oct. 27). Night of the Living Dead (9/10) Movie CLIP – Get in the Cellar (1968) HD. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=komxaWgJ8O4.

Finally, in considering the zombie as an excellent example of postmodern horror, I could not help but notice that in many ways, robot Ash from Black Mirror fits several of these characteristics. First, he is particularly unsettling specifically because he retains many of the superficial aspects of what Ash was like, but clearly is not Ash, just as the zombies in Night of the Living Dead appear superficially the same before and after reanimation. Additionally, robot Ash is not some foreign entity, but rather a conglomeration of something so familiar to Martha and something that is distinctly not human. While he appears strikingly similar to Ash, just as the zombies lost their human motivations and memories, robot Ash reveals himself to be creepily single minded in his desire to keep Martha happy. Also, in the same way that killing off the zombies in Night of the Living Dead is bit morally murky, Martha struggles to order robot Ash off the edge of the cliff because he retains just enough of the real Ash to remove the moral and emotional clarity of the situation.

While Episode 1, Season 2 of Black Mirror explores the desire to fill the emotional void associated with the death of a loved one, it more deeply examines how the process of grieving has changed due to advances in technology. As someone who has witnessed a lot of death in her life, I tried to connect Martha’s grieving process to Elisabeth Kübler Ross’ five stages of grief model: shock, denial, anger and guilt, despair and depression, and acceptance. Although I could easily identify some signs of grief in Martha’s behavior, I had trouble determining whether she arrived at the final stage, acceptance. It appears as if Martha is unable to accept Ash’s death because she never really let him die. This raises the question: how does the process of “mourning,” or “lamenting for the dead” occur when the person who died isn’t actually gone (OED)? Technology’s ability to keep Ash “alive” obstructed the grieving process for Martha, thereby bringing her more suffering and pain in the end.

When the police officers arrive to inform Martha of Ash’s passing, there is no dialogue; all we see is Martha open the door, look at the officers and the flashing lights outside, and close the door in their faces. These actions make it seem as if the audience is in Martha’s head. Just as she slams the door before the officers can inform her of Ash’s death, her mind simultaneously slams the door on the possibility that he is gone. This is a clear indication of denial, one of the stages of grief. Additionally, when Sarah informs Martha of a technology that would enable her to speak with Ash, Martha screams, “Shut up!” which brings her emotions to a public level. The anger present in this instance also represents yet another stage of grief. At first, Martha grieves in “normal” ways, but it is not until she develops an unhealthy attachment to the technological replica of Ash that her grieving process truly goes astray.

One especially poignant moment in the episode occurs after Martha’s ultrasound when she drops her phone containing Ash’s voice on the ground. We see that the phone shatters and his voice disappears, leading Martha to believe that she has lost him forever. Immediately after she hears from Ash on her newly purchased device, she apologizes profusely for “breaking him.” It is almost as if watching the phone crack and die was like experiencing Ash’s death all over again, which does not help Martha progress in terms of her grieving process. This moment exemplifies how technology can intervene and intrude in the grieving process in ways that make it even harder to let go. Ash’s statement, “Calm down. I’m not going anywhere,” also masks the possibility that he could very well be lost again due to the fragility of technology.  

Martha’s unwillingness to accept Ash’s passing becomes more apparent as she explores her relationship with his replica. She rejects many of his actions and identifies flaws in his behavior, claiming that the real Ash would not behave in ways the replica did. Although at times she wants to get rid of the replica, she is unable to because she is to some extent addicted to it. The addictive nature of this technology makes the acceptance stage of grief unattainable. Confining Ash to her attic confronts the idea that her grieving process will never be complete and more broadly hints at the implications technology has on grief in society today.

In today’s world it has almost become ritualistic to grieve publicly. For instance, funeralOne, a technology company, provides funeral homes with webcasting services and streams videos of funerals online for people to watch wherever and whenever. Watching a funeral on one’s cellular device has now become a common occurrence which poses a threat to the traditional funeral industry. You can now light virtual candles for loved ones on memorial websites, utilize online funeral home guest books, and address the dead in Facebook comments. With the amount of technology increasing within the realms of death and loss, we can put a hold on our grief and mourning processes because we are able to interact with the deceased in unprecedented ways. Will we ever be able to move on after a loved one passes? This episode of Black Mirror and advances in technology surrounding death reaffirm the need to reassess the stages of grief and the places we mourn as we enter a rapidly evolving digital climate.

In one of the opening paragraphs of the article, Pinedo defines contemporary horror films as those produced after 1968, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rosemary’s Baby was released June 12 of that very year.  I watched the film last semester with a friend who’s an avid horror fan, and as I was reading the article, I was struck by how many qualities of postmodern horror the film embodies.

Pinedo claims that postmodern horror often supplants the male expert protagonist with “an ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if the victim is female” (20).  Rosemary is that victim.  She is an ordinary, sweet housewife who is drugged and restrained by her neighbors and husband and raped and impregnated by the devil.  The scene is not necessarily explicit – it occurs in a half-drugged dream sequence – but the violence is blatantly sexual.

Embodying another aspect of postmodern female horror protagonists, Rosemary relies on intuition as opposed to facts and expert opinions.  While her husband, neighbors, and doctor assure her nothing is wrong, she instinctually knows that her pregnancy is not a normal one.  At a dinner party, female friends hear about the symptoms she is experiencing and immediately agree that something is amiss.  As Pinedo explains, the Cartesian philosophy suggests that rationality is male and intuition is female.  It is her intuitive female friends rather than male doctors who see through the facade.

Ultimately, I believe Rosemary’s Baby most strongly embodies Pinedo’s category of “Lack of Narrative Closure” (24).   Below is the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby.  Rosemary finally lays eyes upon her child, realizes he is the antichrist, and is left with the decision either to reject or accept him.  Initially she rejects the child, claiming that it isn’t her baby.  However, the final sequence of the film involves her soothing the crying baby, staring contemplatively into the distance while eerie music begins to play.  It is unclear whether Rosemary accepts her child or not at the end of the film.  The conclusion is left ambiguous and the antichrist remains in the world.

(The clip was accessed from the Youtube channel Movieclips and depicts the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby).

While Rosemary’s Baby lacks certain aspects of the genre, such as graphic violence, it departs so significantly from classical horror that I argue it may be one of the first instances of postmodern horror.