Description
Book SynopsisArgues that zombies and murderers in American film and literature embody the violent contradictions of capitalism. This book reveals that each creature has its tale to tell about how a free-wheeling market economy turns human beings into monstrosities. It tracks the monsters spawned by capitalism through pulp fiction and Hollywood blockbusters.
Trade Review“
Pretend We're Dead sets our monsters free of the dank laboratory of psychosexual studies and sends them rampaging across the landscape of economic reality. A sweeping, liberating, and wonderfully readable book.”—Gerard Jones, author of
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book“Of all the modern (and postmodern) culture commentators, Annalee Newitz has the perfect blend of a fan’s unabashed enthusiasm and a true critic’s engaged, iconoclastic insights and questions. Casual and smart, bold yet breezy,
Pretend We’re Dead won’t just make you take a second look at the landscape of modern horror—it’ll make you look at modern consumerist life (and death) with fresh eyes.”—James Rocchi, editor in chief of cinematical.com and film critic for cbs-5 San Francisco
“
Pretend We’re Dead is a convincing, accessible work that will interest everyone from academics and media analysts who like offbeat criticism to horror lovers who like to watch zombies eat brains.” -- D. Harlan Wilson, * Science Fiction Studies *
“[A] sophisticated and rewarding Marxist analysis of the horror movie. . . . Where Newitz differs from any other writer on horror that I’ve read is in her insistence that her distinctively American, anti-capitalist tradition of horror begins not with the Enlightenment and its discontents, which find form in the European Gothic novel of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather with the naturalist novel of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is a startling and, at first sight, highly contentious position, but it’s one that Newitz argues rather brilliantly.” -- Darryl Jones * Modernism/modernity *
"[Newitz's] vast knowledge of cultural criticism, which she incorporates without a hint of ego, makes it work. Shifting seamlessly from a blow-by-blow account of
Videodrome to a discussion of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin,
Pretend We’re Dead is like an extended conversation with that U. of C. friend who, despite being frighteningly comfortable breathing the rarefied air of high theory, will still go see
Snakes on a Plane with you." -- Phoebe Connelly * Chicago Reader *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Capitalist Monsters 1
1. Serial Killers: Murder Can Be Work 13
2. Mad Doctors: Professional Middle-Class Jobs Make You Loose Your Mind 53
3. The Undead: A Haunted Whiteness 89
4. Robots: Love Machines of the World Unite 123
5. Mass Media: Monsters of the Culture Industry 151
Notes 185
Bibliography 199
Filmography 207
Index 211
