In case you haven’t noticed, film book publishing is at its peak right now. There are more new books on cinematic subjects now then there were at it’s peak, which was from about 1968 to 1973 when all the (still) great film books were published. It all went to shit shortly thereafter, and throughout the 1980s, film topics couldn’t find a publisher. Fortunately, things have changed, and there are new books by the old guys, such as Robin Wood and David Bordwell, and great new books on diverse topics from writers as diverse as Linda Ruth Williams and Chris Fujiwara. 

And if there is one vein of publishing that has proved to be the most fruitful, it is in genre and especially horror. FAB Press is doing a fantastic job, as are Reynolds and Hearn and numerous other independent presses. But mostly it’s been academic and university presses that have exploded in a wealth of books on horror films and other genres.

Into this mix comes Annalee Newitz’s Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press, 224 pages, $21.95, ISBN 0 8223 3745 2). It’s a terrific survey of “monster” movies of the last 20 or so years and pop culture well before that, and focusing on cannibals, robots, and serial killers.

Now, Newitz isn’t the typical college prof who has been mining the same narrow topic for a lifetime. She has written for The Believer and Salon.com, and has published two previous books on quasi sociological or American Studies topics. And she brings zest and wide ranging cultural references to her topic, plus a knack for presenting complex ideas out of Marx, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Horkheimer, explaining them clearly and using them to illustrate how cinema has become a canvas upon which the culture has been grappling in fantasy with overwork, bad bosses, and meager returns. What she’s talking about is the horrific complement to what I called “Heroic Alienation,” films such as Clockwatchers, American Beauty, Office Space, and Fight Club, that take on the boredom and injustice of the workplace.

For me, the most interesting part of the book is chapter 5, which, after chapters on serial killers, mad scientists, the undead, and robots in that order, focuses on “media” monsters. This is a wholly original contribution to film studies, in which Newitz collates together disparate tangents of the culture to show us in unified form what has been there the whole time. The other chapters are fine, and Newitz has new and interesting things to say about robot love and serial killers in films, but it is essentially old if still interesting ground, covered by many other books, including Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths, Joan Hawkins’s Cutting Edge, Mikita Brottman’s Offensive Films, and Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representations. The chapter starts off with a placement of the audience in relation to the screen by some aspects of George Lucas’s THX Sound adverts in theaters. The catch phrase “The Audience is Listening” strikes Newitz as rather ominous, although I have to say that her argument didn’t really convince me, as the phrase can be interpreted in multiple ways with the context she gives in her book. She then goes on to provide an operating definition of what type of film she is trying to define here, i.e., “monsters of the culture industry,” narratives about people who use and consume or are used by mass media. These films have no consistent genre attributes as do mad scientist films (or women in prison films, for that matter), but there are recurrent themes or situations, such as how stars and directors are portrayed and how consumers are often reduced to muttering zombies by overuse.

This chapter is then sub-divided into four mini sections, each addressing different facts of “media horror” movies. Under consideration first are films set in Hollywood (that site of “crazed but meaningless productivity”) or in the movie business, including Day of the Locust (in which Homer Simpson, played by Donald Sutherland, is torn to pieces by a frenzied crowd outside the premiere of The Buccaneer), The Bad and the Beautiful, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard (which suddenly makes sense if one views it as a gothic or a horror story), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, tales of people driven made by lust for fame or other inconveniences of show biz. Next she takes on films that play with ideas of the effects of pervasive media culture on citizens, including Logan’s Run, Videodrome, Scream, and Nurse Betty. Fantasies about people who drop into media productions follows: Pleasantville, The Truman Show, Tron, and The Matrix (films where the characters here are “eaten by a giant narrative”). Finally films such as The Last Starfighter, Galaxy Quest, and The Ring play with notions of belief in fantasy constructions that turn out to be real.

This is all fascinating stuff, a new way of seeing films about films and other media, as horror films. But because it is groundbreaking material, some of the connective tissue is a little tenuous. I found myself not entirely clear on just what the genre she is talking about, and the genres within it, really had to do with horror. At the same time, I could also come up with additional titles that seemed to fit into her descriptions and thesis that she doesn’t mention — not that a book has to mention everything, but these films might have buttressed her definition. For example, there’s Hollywood Boulevard, which is an actual horror film, and The Big Knife, another Hollywood tale about horrific people. In terms of the horror of media, I can also think of The China Syndrome, Rollerball, The Running Man, Freejack, and Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. In the media business realm, demonlover comes to mind, and in alternate realities and games, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, eXistenZe, Shocker, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare seem pertinent.

And there is the occasional error. She has Margo Channing’s boyfriend in All About Eve, played by Gary Merrill, as a writer, rather than a director (Hugh Marlowe is the writer), and in general tends to credit the director with everything good in a movie. But Nurse Betty is anomalous in Neil LaBute’s work for being written by others, in this case, John C. Richards and James Flamberg, and The Truman Show was written by the interesting Andrew Niccol who went on to write and direct Gattaca.

But as I say it’s new territory. To make up for lapses and the odd mistake Newitz more than makes up in insight and wit. On Baby Jane: “When nobody wants to look at an actress anymore, she deliberately makes herself more or less deliberately hideous.” And, “The idea that audiences take pleasure in the degradation of their screen idols is one of the most disquieting parts of the horror narrative known as mass culture.”

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