Last House on the Left

MFA Thesis, as presented to the graduate faculty of California College of the Arts.  2007.

Tom Wiehl

(numbers refer to footnotes at the bottom of this page)

 

 

The Black Window

 

    In the Northeast, and probably other parts of the country, the cities are expanding beyond their physical limits, constantly pushing the boundaries of the suburban further into the rural.  (“Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.”1)  Suburbanites find themselves trading in garage door opener and vinyl siding for hayfields and old red tobacco barns, as architectural changes typically take place years after an initial migration.  Some choose to replace their archaic saltbox with a sensible single story ranch, complete with a two-car garage.  Others, confronted with ancient timbers and axe-split beams, find themselves drunk with nostalgia and heroically choose to preserve the integrity of their newfound heritage, with only minor alterations.  In such cases the previous residents, who have since fled further from the expanding stomach of the metropolis, had heavily subscribed to the function of the landscape during their occupancy, more or less ignoring aesthetic considerations.  Now the fences have to be painted, the weeds tamed, and something must be done about the broad and towering barn walls, particularly if they are obstructing some natural scenery.  

    One option is to demolish the barn altogether, and while its demise would seem practical, it would somehow signify a murder, or at least a kind of violation of history.  The more refined option is to break up the space of that behemothic wall, to convert its form to scenery.  Often, residents will paint certain crossbeams so gleaming stripes of white arch across the red basecoat, converting what was once a wall into a composition.  However this technique almost always exposes the new owners as aesthetically concerned city slickers, revoking their right to complain about the poor taste of those who choose to demolish their barn altogether.   A newer option exists, one much more elegant and thoughtful.  The barns can be adorned with windows.

    While this concept works without complication on the first story, the second floor is a little trickier.  See, a barn usually uses the upstairs as a hayloft; a place where wet grass can dry evenly so that it will eventually provide lunch for useless, miniature donkeys.  Haylofts are specifically built for this purpose and a deviation from the original design will alter the specific drying environment, surely resulting in spoiled hay.  Extra windows will screw the whole thing up, unless they aren’t actually windows at all.  The final solution is to emboss false windows into the surface of the wall and paint the glass panes black, an illusion of depth.  

    And what if you were to look into one of those black windows, maybe while you where hanging a Christmas wreath on the side of the barn?  Suppose you didn’t realize it was fake, and you expected to see a rustic interior with those miniature donkeys prancing and pooping.  At first you would see only your reflection, a common occurrence in the field of window snooping.  But imagine your frustration at being unable to see past that image.  It wouldn’t be agonizing, or even inconvenient, and within seconds you would realize the reality of the black window, but for one moment your perception would be obscured.  The flatness of it would swallow your expectation, and maybe within that split second your reflection would be as depthless as the glass; a compacted image of yourself and your world, consumed and altered by that blackness, and fully infused within it.  

 

Last House on the Left

 

    This place used to be a place, and something deceivingly simple, like a farm. It has been compromised; infected and mutated at a speed too slow to notice. There wasn’t enough space for everything, and when all of the pieces individually tried to define the gaps between themselves they began pushing against each other and becoming one mass.  The spread is difficult to compress. It flattens out against itself, slow drainage from a massive extruder.  Sludge. The place is being taken apart by the agonizing pressure.  Wood is warping, splintered from the swelling of water, time, and heat.  Condensation.  Creaking, labored metal absorbs the energy and bends, drooling, not exploding.  Massive build up, retarded release. Obese weight in a lazy gravity oozes out of weak restraint.  Pushing through like roaches falling out of saturated drywall- a lanced blister.  It’s a slow and steady and single-minded zombie horde of force.  Reeking like a beetle-belching fish carcass smeared across an Iowa creek bed in June humidity.  Warm like the inside of compost, not like skin.  Warm like that wet blackness.  Sweating.  A plastic soft enough that’s lost its rigidity, but desperately refuses to melt, and always will.  Crumbling, pasty iron.  Slow collapse.

All matter in the known universe, regardless of its apparent vibrant variation and individuality, will eventually homogenize into a monochromatic mound of dead poop.  In thermodynamic theory, the condition is referred to as Heat Death.  When energy has been exhausted and can no longer power the work it’s a slow, grinding halt.  Energy languidly seeps from the space, molding it to a delicate, crystallized fragment with a gaping slice in its thorax where the meat went through.  Hemorrhaging deep black.  The acceleration (responsible for expelling all particles from a central point) gently decays, degenerating into a dark, motionless shell, like the remnants of a nuclear blast but without the fabricated dramatics of an explosion.  Every thing creaks with the expanding pressure of moisture coming to the surface and slowly freezing- the heat generated by the particular deceleration; by the dissipation of the electricity, definitely spews a horrifying scent.  It reeks like a warm fart after eating lukewarm garlic-encrusted microwaveable lobster bisque.  The entire world wheezes.  

    But again, the process must be slow and unsteady.  It won’t happen in a single defining moment.  The spaces between logic, the indefinite discrepancies, natural anomalies, and emotional breakdowns, are the first plague.  The sections of this place that aren’t solidly constructed are the first to fall apart. The seams busted under the pressure of bulbous manifested homogeneity, where specific modes of recognition begin to come undone, and dimensionality, perspective, and depth all suffer.  The earth is flat.  Depth becomes surface.

    The monstrosity of this decelerating event gently constricts resistance through the unraveling of its importance- its purposelessness rendered.  Recognizable entities are beginning to negate themselves.  Resistance is as futile as anything else.  

    So, this monochromatic mishmash of hollow skeletons becomes, if only for a moment, a kind of meta-organism.  It drags like lava, rapidly cooling at the front line yet constantly pushed from behind by heat and residual motion. It can only be an organism as long as the rapidly escaping energy can still fuel it.  It is fleeting and impermanent and terribly laborious.

 

 

Heat Death

 

    In the event of an explosion, energy is directed violently outward from a single generative point in space.  Eventually that energy must decelerate and dissipate, coming into equilibrium to everything around it.  When a cup of coffee is really hot it radiates the space around it, but only to a certain point.  That particular location in space is where the heat has confronted a place of less energy.  Now, imagine that that cup of coffee is the beginning of the universe, and the steam flowing from the mug is representative of life, light, gravity, all of existence.  What happens when the coffee gets cold?

  Nothing.  The biggest nothing you can imagine.  When the heat stops flowing, no more work can result from heat transfer.  Basically, the big bang will begin to run out of gas, and as molecular entropy constantly increases, all of the energy is converted to heat; the temperatures of everything reach equilibrium, until it all just stops.  

This theory is equally applicable to social systems.  The genesis of a new system is organized, ordered, or understandable.  That is, a new situation can usually be understood in the context of its predecessors, as in the idea of influence.  Here, influence acts as the energy flowing from the explosion.  As the influence spreads, entropy increases.  The greater the theoretical distance from the origin, the more possibility for disorder, because the level of misunderstanding and symbolic appropriation increases. Waves of influence from separate explosions collide with each other, until the level of disorder is absolute.   For instance, in a typical game of telephone, the greater the distance from the origin, the more disordered the message becomes, until it is unintelligible.  In this example, the game system depends upon a coherent message, but the purpose of the system is to gnaw away at the coherence until there’s nothing left, until the message and the system itself have died.

 

Norwegian Black Metal

    On June 6th, 1992, the Fantoft Church in Bergen, Norway, burned to the ground.  The same fate befell the Revheim Church in southern Norway on August 1st, the Holmenkollen Chapel in Oslo on the 21st, the Ormoya Church on September 1st, the Skjold Church on the 13th, the Hauketo Church in October, the Asane Church, and the Sarpsborg Church.  All in all, forty-five to sixty church arson attempts, whether successful or not, have occurred in Norway since the burning of the Fantoft.  A man named Varg Vikernes was accused of being involved in many of the fires.  A few months earlier his friend Per Yngve Ohlin blew his head off with a shotgun, which was loaded with shells Vikernes had given him for Christmas.  In 1993, Øystein Aarseth was found dead from twenty-three stab wounds.  Varg Vikernes was convicted of his murder, and metal lore dictates that his motive was to arrogate Aarseth’s evilness.  All of these men were members of one of the first bands to be associated with the “Norwegian Black Metal” scene, called Mayhem.

The suicide, murder, and particularly the church burnings have become synonymous with their music, to the extent that it is difficult to discern whether the music itself was ever actually of any central significance.  A historical lineage of influence could easily be constructed for the formation of black metal as a musical genre, like the developmental timelines in rock history books.  More intriguing is the consideration of the seemingly random set of circumstances that collided with the social scene.

    Probably beginning somewhere in the 1970s, rock bands have used references to the devil, chaos, and violence for shock effect.  In the U.S.A. and Britain it was more or less collectively understood that these references were performance.  Venom, a band from England in the early 80s became well known for their satanic imagery, though it was usually in the form of kitschy outfits and lame stage antics.  “Early Black Metal bands like Venom might not have been very serious about their image, but many young Norwegians may have been unable to realize this.  So when Venom were tongue-in-cheek, Norwegian kids took them dead seriously.”2

Embracing Satan was a function of their environment.  Norway is a predominantly Protestant nation, but religion is not necessarily taken seriously.   Only about 2% of the population attends church regularly.3  Perhaps it was precisely this condition that inspired the young metal heads to rebel; Christianity was seen as an empty yet totalitarian figurehead, powered by a sense of obligation rather than faith.

     Like our reception of a horror movie, the Norwegian youth culture was simultaneously excited and perturbed by a situation composed of familiar elements, yet wholly unclassifiable.  That is, the popular imagery of Satanism, the sound of heavy metal, a mythological understanding of an inherited national history, violence, angst, and boredom were all building blocks that homogenized, without hierarchy, into a kind of nebulous social sphere.  Each of these elements had also come to an end in their social trajectory.  Each had been stripped down throughout its path; meaning and origin experienced a kind of slow death and the corpse arrived at that point in Norway as a naked, empty symbol.  Mainstream heavy metal culture was worn down to what can only be described as evil, but an evil so purposeless that it ignored even its own moral context.  Mayhem’s lyrics were certainly indicative of this condition.  Their earlier songs were written in English, an obvious contradiction with their longing for Viking culture, and a language they probably didn’t really understand.    The song “Pure Fucking Armageddon,” from their 1987 EP Deathcrush is a typical example.

 

Violent torture,

Death has arrived,

Armageddon,

Terror and fright,

Bleeding corpses,

Rotting decay

 Anarchy,

Violent torture,

Antichrist,

Lucifer,

Son of Satan

Pure Fucking Armageddon 4

 

    Even the lyrics are just representational fragments, symbols gurgled out in a foreign language with intense devotion and a disregard for coherent reception. Black Sabbath evoked the name of Satan 5 in 1970 on Paranoid, and the word ended up in Norway,  barren and almost meaningless.  The word itself, perhaps even just the sound of it, was all that remained.

    Such intensity is bound to affect a neutral environment more thoroughly than a charged one.  Bored, disillusioned youths are more likely to appropriate the extreme without much pause for questioning or consideration if they aren’t offered any other causes for passionate attachment.  Satanism quickly grew from teenage rebellion to an unorganized ideology, fueled by the idea that the church had stolen Norway’s original Viking culture. The looseness of this ideology made it all the more powerful, and even more dangerous, resulting in adjustable interpretation and power struggles.  Heat had confronted the cold, and music transmuted into shock, shock into fire, and fire into death.

 

Enlightenment as Mass Deception    

 

    Appalled by the rise of Nazi fascism and capitalist consumer culture, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two German social theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, developed a system of Marxist critical theory to define and examine what they believed to be a totally administered and inescapable world.   In the model they presented the power of capitalism had exploded well beyond the limits of any financial sector and had become a totalizing force that actively controlled every aspect of life.  They sought to describe a system that promotes a code of uniformity for the purpose of efficiency in the generation of capital.  To them, culture had become a marketing technique, a device that implements and reinforces manufactured desire.  A product of this system is ultimately the dissolution of the notion of the individual, which once was inherently distinct and without restriction, capable of unadulterated thought, which could lead to free choice.  The death of individuality is our participatory preference, as noted in the analysis of the hero.  “The popularity of the hero models comes partly from a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has at last been replaced by the effort to imitate, which is admittedly more breathless.” 6  The convenience and efficiency of conformity has become more attractive than a struggle for the unique.  

    In the context of contemporary art, this idea should be presupposed as unavoidable fact.  Warhol sealed the deal decades ago, surrendering his claim to individuality by evoking the omnipotence of mass production, leaving behind the traditional notion of artistic genius in exchange for the silver plated spectacle of the art star.  Adorno and Horkheimer’s scathing manifesto became prophetic in 1964, when Warhol showed his sculptures at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery.  The negative response to that show was supposedly heartbreaking to Warhol at the time, but in retrospect the sharp controversy couldn’t have been more indicative of the artist’s absolute success.  People were uncomfortable, or at least confused, at confronting the objects, not only because they didn’t follow the rules of what art was supposed to be, but also because they took the form of something so obvious and banal, and that someone had taken the time to make them by hand.   It is possible, albeit simplistic, to remember Warhol as a playful pop artist, who at the very most suggested that art can be anything.  The flaw in this reading resides in the suggestion that Warhol was really merging art and life, while the importance of his work was actually in exposing the failure of that fusion. It’s important to remember that Warhol didn’t point to Brillo boxes in a supermarket display and proclaim them as art- he plucked them from the real world, systematically reproduced them, and positioned them in an art gallery.   “That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.” 7

 

Quarry

 

    Graining a lithography stone erases both history and future.  Any given stone has the capacity to yield hundreds of different images; when the printing for one picture is finished, it must be ground down in order to use the stone again.  The surface of the stone itself is chewed away very slowly until, after dozens of years, there’s nothing left at all. The only kind of rock that really works for the lithographic process comes from a single quarry in Austria, the same place Alois Senefelder got his stones from at the end of the 18th century.  This particular quarry will inevitably run dry.  The immanent death of traditional lithography is thus ensured by its practice.  Thousands of lithographs all across the world will become a kind of forensic paper trail, testifying to the end of a medium.  

    Lithography participates in another kind of assassination: that of the aura.  Walter Benjamin lists it as a culprit in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he describes cultural ways of seeing as being dictated by technological innovation.  To Benjamin, reproduction frees art from its ritualistic dependence upon uniqueness, a cult of beauty, and an illogical obsession with tradition.  “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.  By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence,” 8  Benjamin only mentions lithography briefly, mostly because it was quickly surpassed by photography, and then film.  It is worth noting however that lithography is the last method in Benjamin’s history of reproduction that engaged with replicating traditional art mediums directly.  To be sure, photography and film both tried at first to abide by the formal constructs of painting, but lithography had the ability to actually absorb the mark of an artist, and then immediately negate it through reproduction.  Roy Lichtenstein addressed this concept directly, albeit primarily through screen printing, with his brushstroke pieces.  Pop Art’s feverish use of printmaking exposed what had been true since the medium’s inception- that a print can never be anything but a forced echo of reality.

Seriality is the most obvious quality that sets printmaking apart from other traditional art making processes.  Its financial benefit, and therefore its uncomfortable proximity to mass production, is clear.  There have been attempts to control the integrity and value of the print, most notably the institution of the limited edition, popularly attributed to James McNeil Whistler.  A masterful printer is expected to produce a specific number of prints, all to a perfect standard of monotony.  Students in undergraduate printmaking classes are expected to make identical copies of their prints in order to pass the course.  Maybe this is what has led to a mass fetishization of a printer’s technique being pushed towards perfection, which can seem so antiquated and draconian in contemporary art practice.  Regardless, seriality and the social history of printmaking are intertwined, rendering the medium entirely useful with regard to discussing contemporary issues of simulacra, originality, representation and entropy.

    Jean Beaudrillard’s writings about simulacra suggest that the value of originality has begun to decay, replaced by copies of copies.  That is, a copy can exist without an original if it simulates a copy to begin with, or simulates an original that never existed in the first place.  Today this condition is omnipresent.  The American diner nostalgically replicates an eatery from the 1950s that we all recognize, but never really existed in the first place.  The Mona Lisa is so easily reproduced in our mass consciousness, regardless of whether we have seen the actual painting, that the value of the original’s need for existence of that original necessarily comes into question.   Printmaking has these issues encoded within it.   Thanks mostly to old printmaking standards it doesn’t make sense to think of a particular print as an original; it is one of a specified number of exact copies of something other than itself- the printing matrix. An etching, for instance, is certainly a copy because of its encoded potential for seriality, but it is a piece of paper made from a piece of metal.  The etching plate is also invisible in the philosophical context of the print, as stretcher bars to a painting. Even the images that are etched into the plates are the horizontal reverse of what is seen on the paper.  Hence, the etching is a copy without an original.  

    The popular opinion that prints are subservient to other art media also places it in an interesting position from which to consider the notion of representation.  Art constantly struggles with the concept of representation, especially complicated by the advent of photography and surely even more so by the digital resources of today.  Rosalind Krauss outlines the difference between perception and representation:

 

…representation must always remain suspect because it is never anything but a copy, a re-creation in another form, a set of signs for experience.  Perception gives directly onto the real, while representation is set at an unbridgeable distance from it, making reality present only in the form of substitutes, that is, through the proxies of signs.  Because of its distance from the real, representation can thus be suspect of fraud. 9

 

 Printmaking, unlike many other techniques, doesn’t inherently resist Krauss’s view of representation.   A print by its nature proclaims that it is a copy, and while its imagery may engage in modes of representation, its form is encoded with their failure.  A painting of a landscape or figure often strives to be as realistic as possible, in a sense attempting to camouflage the fact that it is representational.   A traditional print of the same image automatically exposes itself as representation through its margined format and serial nature, thereby empowered to expose the fallacy and futility of representation.   Something that admits its own falsehood can’t commit fraud.

The aspect of printmaking that should appeal most to contemporary artists is precisely that which repels them- its position in the art world.  Printmaking is often regarded, as previously mentioned, as a kind of archaic fringe element that refuses to pay attention to progressive trends.  It garners some respect for its perceived resplendence and value- it’s somehow more noteworthy than the myriad inexpensive and convenient processes for image duplication in the digital age.  Many contemporary artists are grossed out by that condition, seeing it as indicative of a bourgeois antique-collector society.  This attitude is itself an artifact left over from a time when it made sense to judge a work based upon medium.  Painting has been declared dead many times, only to claw itself up from the grave, reformulating itself as a kind of tool used for detournement against, in many cases, the few remaining bastions of its former self.  If printmaking has reached the end of its path, if all of its energy has run out, it must be in a position to similarly mutate.

 

 

They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara

 

    George A. Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead opens with a scene in a cemetery.  Siblings Johnny and Barbara begrudgingly visit a grave at their mother’s insistence.  The shot cuts to a man slowly stumbling toward them, as Johnny mocks his sister’s fear of the graveyard.  Grimacing, Johnny taunts, “They’re coming to get you Barbara.  They’re coming for you, Barbara.  They’re coming for you,” and then, glancing toward the ever-approaching stranger, “Look!  There comes one of them now!”   His sister tells him to stop, embarrassed that the man will hear his taunting and become offended.  Eerie music cuts in.  The camera is suddenly behind the man, who is much closer now, exposing only the back of his tattered coat and Barbara, nervously pretending to stroll toward her brother.  Suddenly the man snatches her neck, his face contorts like a constipated frog, the music swells, she screams, and the movie has begun.  It becomes apparent that this man is no average graveyard mugger, that he is something different, perhaps something that is not a man at all. 10

    Hundreds of films have used the same system, from Bela Lugosi slowly revealing that he is king of the vampires in the original 1931 version of Dracula, to the grotesque chest explosion in Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, Alien.  A classic horror movie formula is to disclose that things, particularly people, are somehow very different than their initial appearance suggests.  Zombie movies in particular use this motif, almost always in the beginning of the film to imply a creepy, uncomfortable world wherein something has gone dreadfully awry.  The formula is just as effective 34 years after Romero’s classic.  Released in 2002, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later opens with Jim finding himself in what appears to be a completely empty post-apocalyptic wasteland.  He wanders the streets of the abandoned city searching for some sign of life, other than the various deserted cars and free-floating trash, and ends up in a church filled with inanimate corpses.  He nervously yelps, “hello?” and a man jumps to attention from amidst the staggering pile of rotting cadavers, staring at him like a freaky maniac, but stands there frozen, blending in with the carrion Jim, who apparently didn’t notice the psycho, continues through the church, continually muttering, “hello?” with increasing desperation.  Suddenly, a door down the hall bursts open and the figure of a priest stumbles into the room, choking and gasping.  “Father,” Jim says, cautiously approaching.  The priest, convulsing, runs toward him.  Jim backs up, “Are you okay?”  The priest shuffles closer still, and it becomes sickeningly clear that he is awkwardly attacking.  Again, the scene is uncomfortable because of its particular ambiguity.  We’re at first unsure whether the priest is hurt, a threat, or even human.  11

    Zombie flicks always bring the notion of humanity into question this way.  Zombies are almost always human in form, (sometimes they’re dogs) but are always silent, mindless, and relentless.  Their form is ultimately recognizable; they’re made up of physical elements we definitely understand, but it is the shift in what could be called their content that makes them somehow inhuman, and therefore frightening.  We are uneasy with being presented with a form that seems to make sense, but its action, content, or context dissolves our initial identification.  The Surrealists played with similar ideas.  Max Ernst’s paintings of distorted exteriors, those made from his grattage technique, function both as landscape and un-landscape.  The horizontal composition, the dark forms at the bottom half of the canvas accompanied by a lighter field at the top, and the modeled texture of the forms all fall into a formula of traditional landscape painting.  It is the grattage technique that makes the images essentially vexing.  Ernst scraped paint onto canvases while pressing objects against the underside.  The result is a texture that immediately implies the language of representational dimensionality, but the images themselves don’t usually directly represent anything.  The effect is what appears to be a landscape with amazingly detailed trees or buildings, but the detail is actually unrecognizable.  

    The other usual formula for zombie movies is multiplicity.  There is rarely only one zombie.  In fact, the more zombies there are, the scarier the situation, and if the ratio of zombies to regular people heavily favors the former, the environment is downright terrifying.  Zombies follow a similar trajectory to Benjamin’s concept of reproduction.  They are aesthetic copies of humans, but are definitely not the original, separated by their loss of individuality, or aura.  The other threat, of course, comes from their only thought and desire- to kill humans.  But, what makes this proposition really scary isn’t just the idea of losing a life- when a zombie kills someone they always, always become a zombie too.   There are countless zombie film scenes involving a kind of pact between the few remaining mortals that they would rather die as a human than become one of those… things.  The anxiety spawned by multiple, soulless copies and a rigid devotion to retaining the purity of humanity is the primary element that makes up the core of a zombie film.  A T.V. announcer’s line from Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, from 1977, says it all:  “These creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct.  We must not be lulled by the concept that these are our family members or our friends.  They are not.  They will not respond to such emotions.  They must be destroyed on sight!” 12

    Romero’s zombie tetralogy spans 37 years, from black and white celluloid with gore made of corn syrup and pancake batter all the way to full color digital surround sound computer animated mutilation.  However, a subversive secondary plot grows throughout the series- we have found ourselves cheering for the away team, taking the side of the zombies. In the first film the zombies unquestionably played the part of the evil enemy, but halfway through the second film the undead appear almost as puppies that don’t know any better.  The third film, Day of the Dead (1985) introduces one who doesn’t attack the good guys, and the fourth depicts them like proletariat underdogs.  

    Romero accomplishes this goal by manipulating our collective desire to adhere an aura onto the spiritless replica.  Benjamin describes this condition in terms of the changing attitude toward technology through generations. “Of course, initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that, but in the next childhood memory, its traits are already altered.  Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity.  By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol.” 13  Romero’s audience naturally undergoes the same process.  The image of the zombie is at first a cold corpse, vibrant individuality muffled and nullified through equalization, stripped down to the most fundamental instinctual need, tediously dragging itself along toward an absolute oblivion.  But, to our affected surprise, it twists in the opposite direction, refueled by our collective determination to deny a fatal reality, and develops a character, a name, and a value.  That thing is anthropomorphized, symbolically regurgitating its stomach-load of warm meat in exchange for self-awareness.  The zombie abandons that gruesome heap of puke to marinate and decay in the glorious sunshine of his enlightenment, until inevitably the reek of dissent becomes irresistible to some unforeseen horror and we are forced again, like Barbara in the graveyard, to encounter an awkward, passive anxiety, like squinting into a black window.

 

Footnotes:

 

1: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment.  New York: Continuum, 1999.  p.120.

 

2: Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003, p.41.

 

3: Moynihan and Soderline, p.40.

 

4: Mayhem, “Pure Fucking Armageddon.”  Deathcrush. Deathlike Silence, 1987.

 

5:  Black Sabbath, “War Pigs/Luke’s Wall.” Paranoid Warner Brothers, 1970.

 

6: Horkheimer and Adorno,p.155-156.

 

7:  Horkheimer and Adorno, p.131.

 

8: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations  New York: Schocken Books, 1968.  p.221.

 

9: Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.  p.94.

 

10: Night of the Living Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perfs. Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea. DVD. Goodtimes Home Video Corp., 2000.

 

11: 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perfs. Cillian Murphy, Brendon Gleeson. DVD. 20th Century Fox, 2003.

 

12: Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero.  Perfs. David Emge, Ken Foree. DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004

 

13:  Walter Benjamin. “On the theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.”  The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999