Category: Popular culture

Where they belong

Colson Whitehead, in the clip above, namechecks a useful list of zombie flicks and post-apocalyptic scenarios set in New York that hover in the margins of his novel Zone One. But his zombies have more mundane counterparts in the contemporary city. “It’s not hard for New Yorkers to picture zombies,” Whitehead is quoted in the Time post that accompanies the video. “You take the subway, you go to Whole Foods, and you’ve got a series of stock characters to draw from.”

The novel opens with a 21-page sequence that toggles between Mark Spitz’s memories of just such a pre-apocalypse Manhattan, flashbacks to “Last Night” and the early days of “the ruin,” and a present-day scenario in which Spitz and his crew battle four zombies inhabiting the Human Resources department of what had been a law firm in lower Manhattan. The action sequence at this stage is a little hum-drum for a zombie novel and only crops up intermittently between Spitz’s lyrical longing for a bygone era that, somewhat paradoxically, he seems to have loathed. (Maybe this is why the novel begins with an even earlier memory of an innocent childhood longing to live in Manhattan; in any case, Spitz’s thoughts seem to drift regularly. “The man gets distracted,” his co-worker Gary comments [26].) We learn early in this opening sequence that post-apocalyptic “reconstruction,” with a government centered in Buffalo, has already “progressed so far that clock-watching ha[s] returned,” and Spitz, who works as a zombie “sweeper” reclaiming city blocks one by one, finds the work a little boring. The pun on zombies working in Human Resources is only half the joke; Spitz — now a janitor of the undead — was destined to be a lawyer, and here he is, practically punching the clock.

Whitehead’s zombies are a special sort. Sure, there are some fierce ones — the skels — who’ll gladly pin you down and suck your brains out. But the more common kind, the “stragglers,” are the ones who resemble the folks in the Whole Foods lines, or maybe their country cousins at Walmart. These are the ones who just keep going to work, stuck in daily rituals of workplace productivity: “The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur” (49).

As Gary also points out, the line between those “killed in the disaster” and “those who had been turned into vehicles of the plague” is thin at best. Either way the went, “they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one” (25). They were already zombies, in other words.

I’m reminded whenever I think about Zone One of an op-ed, written by Amy Wilentz, a UC-Irvine journalism prof, that ran in the New York Times around Halloween a few years ago. It had to do with the origins of zombies in the context of New World slavery — a different, but related, kind of zombie economy. Some highlights:

Most people think of [zombies] as the walking dead, a being without a soul or someone with no free will. This is true. But the zombie is not an alien enemy who’s been CGI-ed by Hollywood. He is a New World phenomenon that arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery.

Wilentz asks, near the end of her piece, why we see such a resurgence of zombies in popular culture in recent years (at least in Europe and the US) and offers this explanation:

Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.

It would be interesting to put Wilentz’s argument in conversation with the sense we get from Whitehead’s novel that corporate capitalism — the legacy and perpetuator, in many ways, of the slave trade that fueled the first global economy — can’t help but be a zombie-making machine.

How does Zone One‘s social satire of our own post-Fordist economy stack up against earlier plague narratives we’ve read? In certainly seems related to Camus’ indictment of bureaucracy. You might also be interested in this essay on Defoe and zombie films.

I also posted a link to this piece from Lapham’s Quarterly earlier in the semester that should be newly meaningful to you this week; it argues that Zone One‘s version of zombie apocalypse owes as much to Defoe as it does to Dawn of the Dead:

What A Journal of the Plague Year doesn’t have is zombies—at least not explicitly. Still, the numberless, suppurating victims are apt to behave like the undead at every turn, crowding the novel with “walking putrefied carcasses, whose breath was infectious and sweat poison.” These abject and degenerating bodies, disfigured by the “tokens” of disease that look like “small Knobs…of callous or Horn,” can turn on others, even running through the streets actively seeking to infect people impressed “with a kind of Rage, and a hatred against their own Kind,” as if the sickness itself were filled with an “evil Will” determined “to communicate it self.” Thus babies kill their mothers, and men tackle women in the street hoping to infect them with a deadly kiss. Others manage to dodge the disease, only to be disfigured by the weight of madness or grief.

Granted, there is none of the urgent panic attendant on hacking one’s way through a shambling horde only to turn around and see the second wave. This lends the novel a kind of studious detachment as H.F. traverses the city in an effort to comprehend the scope of the visitation through a process of quantification and statistical computation—tallying the bills of mortality, measuring the size of the municipal grave pits, and delineating the necrotic geography of ravaged neighborhoods. …

Ultimately, as with all these narratives, the real plague is modern life. Physicians trace the disease to a package of silks imported from Holland that originated in the Levant, spreading the infection through the ports, mills, marketplaces and manufactories that form the early-modern economy. Quarantines and barricades prove useless against the commodity’s voyage; but while the products themselves may be infectious, it’s the appetite to possess them that truly kills. In this, A Journal of the Plague Year presages the lurching mallrats of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, who continue the puppetry of consumption into the undead afterlife, a theme that is similarly taken up in … Zone One, where the post-apocalyptic reconstruction of New York provides opportunities for branding and product placement, and where the “Ambassadors of nil” evoke nothing so hellish as Times Square tourists, boring girlfriends, and the hollow communications of sitcoms and social media.

What’s left out of this analysis? You might be interested in this longish review of Zone One, which places the novel indirectly in the kind of context Wilentz invokes by addressing what the novel does — and doesn’t — say about the history of race in America. But we shouldn’t overlook the novel’s commentary on nostalgia as a driver of capitalist consumption. Spitz had “always wanted to live in New York” because of romantic attachments borne of movies and other media, and when one character asks him his post-plague plans are, he answers: “Move to the city.” How different is he from the hordes he’s hired to clean up?

Captain America’s Nemesis

I stumbled upon a review of Nemesis that makes a brief connection to Captain America, as we had done in class last week.

Bucky’s nickname, intentionally or not, alludes to the costumed sidekick of Captain America who appeared in the super-patriot’s 1941 debut as a teenage boy wonder fighting Nazis. Like his adventurer namesake, whose parents were also absent, Bucky Cantor lives in the shadow of greater men but has an important role to play in keeping the children of Weequahic calm and hopeful. He may seem doomed to a life of playing second-fiddle, but he can live with that, relying on what the narrator of the novel—not Bucky—describes as “an exacerbated sense of duty” though he is “endowed with little force of mind” (Loss, 1).

While this may or may not help us wrap up our discussion, I thought that some of you may like to give it a quick read.

The Yes Men – Dow Chemicals Give Additonal Compensation to Bhopal Victims SCAM

This video is about a duo of activists, who describe their mission as ‘Identity Correction:’ Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues. Among other things, they impersonated Dow Chemical (the owner of Union Carbide, which ran the factory in Bhopal) spokespeople on BBC. You can see how it turned out at this link.

Morrissey narrates.

Considering how much Bryan mentions The Smiths in class, I figure they might as well be another source to consider in our class. And I didn’t feel like people appreciated my comparison between Morrissey and Animal enough today in class… (created by yours truly)

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hehe, okay, sorry for all the references — by uploading these quotes, I would like all of us to think about Animal’s character, not just as a question of his struggles but in the context of his personality. For me, personally, I think the fact that I find him sympathetic means something, more about me than really about him. And I think this novel has a way of making you choose a side and then making you think about your place as a reader. When you read the tapes, you think about whether it is genuine, whether it is believable. When you read the conflicts of misunderstanding between Elli and Somraj, you think and consider each side’s points and weigh them. You are implicated in the story, and you are not allowed to be passive. When Animal says these Morrissey-like quotes, I see him as an honest-to-self expression of alienation and human struggle, not just isolated in the incident of the Bhopal disaster, but as a participant in a universal dialogue that we find in 1980s England (The Smiths), 1880s Switzerland (Friedrich Nietzsche), 1950s US (Catcher in the Rye), and other times and places that have not the fortune of such widespread attention (or simply my knowledge) but carry likewise in themselves the same sentiment.

EDIT/NOTE: Afterwards, I thought about this comparison between Animal and Morrissey/Holden Caulfield/etc and I don’t want to ignore one big fact. Animal has suffered from a man-made disaster, is disabled, and lives in poverty. His hope for the rest of his life was mostly stripped from him since the incident. I think there is merit in comparing the sentiments, but I don’t want to put them on the same level too simply.

 

Bethesda

Even with all of Prior’s encounters with the Angel, an active character in the play, his favorite stands as a statue in Central Park: the angel Bethesda.

Two scenes take place at Bethesda Fountain, and in each we are given some background on the fountain itself and the angel Bethesda. During the scene where Louis and Belize meet at the fountain, we learn that the statue was built to commemorate the Naval dead of the Civil War. Its connection to the past is a painful one – one of death and destruction. 

Later, in the play’s epilogue, more is said about the angel herself. Prior, Louis, Belize, and Hannah all describe Bethesda story: Bethesda landed in the Temple square of Jerusalem, and where her foot touched the ground, a fountain sprung. The flow eventually stopped when the Romans destroyed the Temple, but before its end, it was said that anyone who bathed in its water would be “washed clean of pain” (279). Legend has it, the fountain will flow again when the Millennium comes. Hannah promises Prior that once it flows again, they’ll all go and bathe themselves clean. This remark seems to transform the dark and painful past of the statue to a symbol of hope, promising a new beginning for the unfortunate quad.

The contradictory symbolism of a painful past and a hopeful future is reconciled by Prior description of the Angel:

PRIOR (Turning the sound off again): This angel. She’s my favorite angel.

I like them best when they’re statuary. They commemorate death but they suggest a world without dying. They are made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, they weigh tons but they’re winged, they are engines and instruments of flight.

(279)

In a sense, Prior identifies with the statuary form of the angel, or at least aspires to become what it symbolizes. Prior, as every other human being, walks with an expiration date, but even with his predicament, he is brimming with life. And even with the weight of his disease and other burdens of life, he believes in hope and change. It could even be said that it symbolizes humanity.

Queue pop culture reference: Analyzing Bethesda’s symbolism actually made me reevaluate one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who. In the episode, titled The Angels Take Manhattan, the main character, a time traveler called the Doctor, loses his companion in the past. As it turns out, however, the loss of the companion was actually the event that allowed the Doctor to meet her in the first place. Her ending was her beginning. Lost in the past, the time she had spend with the Doctor had technically not yet begun.

Many of the episode’s scenes were actually filmed at the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. I feel like the symbolism of Bethesda applies here as well: an unfortunate and painful event in the past is eventually transformed into a hopeful future.

Meh, time travel can be hard to explain, but then again, so can literature!

– Sarah

How has there not been a Freddy Mercury reference yet…

Freddy Mercury, lead singer of the band ‘Queen’, found himself getting weaker and weaker after being diagnosed with AIDS. This, however, had not been made public. His denial allowed him to ignore the shadow of death that threatened to swallow him and avoid media speculation. Despite growing extremely ill, Mercury continued to perform for his fans. In 1990, 1 year before his death, he recorded the song ‘The Show Must Go On’ which fits the themes and characters of this play perfectly. Much like some of the characters of the play, the disease had completely invaded Mercury’s body such that he was barely able to walk. Even so, he continued to perform. His story and ‘shows’ are not very different to those of the characters in ‘Angels in America’.

Watch either the Music + Lyrical video or the Angels In America Version

 The song, when heard in the context of the play, gets us thinking about AIDS, the implications of the disease, what it means to be a homosexual in our society, etc. Moreover, it asks us questions about performance. Despite the fact that this is a play, to what extent are the characters performing even within the play?

“Behind the curtain, in the pantomime

Hold the line. Does anybody want to take it anymore?

The show must go on,

The show must go on.”

AIDS in Teen Subculture

In looking at the theme of Contagion in Angels in America, perhaps we can be aided by also looking at this same theme in pop culture. The first movie that came to mind for me when I thought about the AIDS epidemic was Kids by Larry Clark (1995). In its day, this movie rose to infamy due to its graphic nature and the age of its cast/subjects, most of whom were young skaters hanging around Washington Square Park. The movie was also Harmony Korine’s screenwriting debut, an opportunity created after Clark asked Korine, a 19-year-old skater, to capture the crazy haphazard modern life of teens in New York City.

The story of the movie revolves a few 16 and 17-year-old characters, namely Telly, Caspar, Jennie, and Ruby. Telly, obsessed with having sex with virginal girls sometimes as young as 12 and 13, is infected with HIV but doesn’t know it. The summer before, he had sex with Jennie, and Jennie finds out she is also infected (by Telly) after she goes into the clinic for STD testing. Throughout the movie, Jennie tries to stop Telly from infecting his next victim, who is, in this case, Darcy, a 13- year-old virgin and younger sister of a friend.

(src)

Darcy and Telly at the swimming pool.

(points to lesion) “What’s that?”

“That’s my triple nipple.”

They giggle.

Earlier in the movie, the attitude towards the disease can be seen in a speech from a boy in Telly’s gang. In this scene, they’re all sitting around, getting high, and bragging about their sexual conquests and proving their superior knowledge about women. When they get onto the topic of condoms, the boy starts ranting,

“That’s the whole thing though, you know what I’m saying?  All you hear about is disease this and disease that. Fucking everyone’s dying and shit. Yo, fucking, that shit is made up. I don’t know no kids with AIDS. Y’no what I’m saying. Ain’t no one I know that died from that shit. It’s like some weird make-believe story that the whole world believes.

Very ironic. He’s going to have a lot of dead friends soon. After the speech, the boys at the roundtable yell out in delight that they don’t care about condoms, they just want to “fuck.” The attitude towards AIDS is drastically different from Angels in America in one aspect. No human in AIA dares to laugh in the face of the disease. Some deny it, some run away from it, some fight it with all their might, but no one tries to provoke it.

This film is placed and was shot in the 90s, a decade or so after Angels in America. America is far gone from Reagan and at this time under President Bill Clinton from the Democratic Party. In New York City, a group of teenagers are unruly and ruling this turf, where we may have, a decade ago, seen Joe and Louis talking together on a bench and Harper camping out with her insanity as company. Kids, like Angels in America, also brings under scrutiny the moral situation and degradation of the United States, the theme of contagion and how one deals with death, and the life and struggles of a subculture. When it comes down to how they all deal with the disease, the film does not give much insight into their lives. Throughout the entire movie, Telly never realizes he has AIDS and continues to have sex with other people.  Jennie’s identity as a HIV-infected individual is never really shared with many people other than the audience and the doctor. Caspar unknowingly infects himself. Perhaps the entire film can be encapsulated in the last four words of the film.

“Jesus Christ, what happened?”

A Feast During the Plague as a global text

When thinking about the relationship between Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague and Wilson’s The City of the Plague, from which it was adapted, we are on the wrong track if we are preoccupied with labeling it as a “translation” or an “adaptation” or something else entirely. The set of questions we should be asking is related to the effects it has as a work of world literature and the language used to transport it across time and cultures.

David Damrosch, a scholar of Comparative Literature and a researcher in the field of world literature, writes in his book What is World Literature? (2003) that it is “not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading” (5) “encompass[ing] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). The key means of enabling a text’s circulation is translation, which Damrosch does not renounce as a destroyer of meaning but sees as a tool to help a work of world literature gain additional meanings. In another book, How to Read World Literature (2008), Damrosch describes translation as “an expansive transformation of the original, a concrete manifestation of cultural exchange and a new stage in a work’s life as it moves from its first home out into the world” (66), focusing less on specific cultures in which the texts of world literature originate and more on the ideas they communicate. It is therefore important to read in translation and be critically aware of the translators’ choices, both linguistic and social.

The subtitle in English (“From Wilson’s Tragedy The City of the Plague“) is a word-for-word translation of the original (“Из Вильсоновой трагедии: The City of the Plague”), where the word “from” or “из” does not shed any light on how Pushkin saw his play against Wilson’s. When thinking about translation and the use of language, it is noteworthy that we are reading a Russian adaptation of an English play – in English. What is even more interesting is how Pushkin’s translation choices (intended or not) used language as well as the element of language to alter the meanings constructed in his play. Nancy K. Anderson points out in her critical essay Survival and Memory that in Wilson’s play the driver is the one who mutters in an unknown language while in Pushkin’s it is the dead; according to Anderson, this “inspired misunderstanding,” as she sees it, helps reaffirm the disconnect between two separate communities, the living and the dead. Perhaps this was a conscious decision on Pushkin’s part to convey a specific cultural message through the use of the motif of language, a metafictional device referring to the reality where translation loses some of the original meanings, but at the same time gains new ones.

Damrosch also discusses the idea that literature has expanded beyond its fundamental meaning of “written with letters” to include a wide range of cultural productions, from oral texts to movies as works of cinematic narrative. There is no doubt Wilson’s The City of the Plague entered into world literature. One of its occurrences is Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague, but plenty more iterations of Pushkin’s play have appeared since its publishing: including but not limited to several translations into other languages, Russian stagings of the play (Пир во время чумы, see parts 1 and 2), numerous English renditions (see here and here), a 1990 Russian opera Feast in Time of Plague by César Cui (Anatoly Moksyakov’s performance of the Chairman’s Hymn to the Plague is available here) etc. A Russian rock band took its name and inspiration from the title of the Pushkin’s play, and a Russian stand-up comedian Mikhail Nikolayevich Zadornov used the title for one of his books as well as played a pun on it in one of his performances.

Without looking further into the constellation of themes and messages revealed to us through a close reading and focusing only on the abovementioned aspects of it, A Feast During the Plague already proves to be a global text, migrating not only through different cultures and languages but across the domains of literature and art as well.

Fortune’s wheel

Thinking about our discussion of Fortune today, both as it informs The Decameron and butts heads with Protestant reformers later on, I was reminded of this piece by the cultural historian Jackson Lears about the concept’s history (especially in Western thought). A few relevant excerpts:

In ancient Rome, Fortuna began as a fertility goddess but soon came to embody prosperity in general, as well as a basic principle of potentiality. She merged with the older Greek divinity Tyche, whose devotee Palamedes, the mortal grandson of Poseidon, supposedly invented dice and dedicated the first pair, made from the ankle bones of hoofed animals, to her. The iconography of Fortuna linked her with emblems of abundance but also with uncertainty and ceaseless change: she carried a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables yet stood on a ball or turned a wheel that rotated her beneficiaries. “Changeable Fortune wanders abroad with aimless steps, abiding firm in no place; now she beams with joy, now she puts on a harsh mien, steadfast in her own fickleness,” Ovid wrote in his Tristia, after he had been forced into exile. “I, too, had my day, but that day was fleeting; my fire was but a straw, and short-lived.”

But Fortune did not fit well with Christian ideas of Providence. To early Christians, the divine plan unfolded as mysteriously as the fluctuations of luck, but however remote the planner or apparently perverse his decrees, his purpose was ultimately benign. Boethius, unjustly imprisoned in the sixth century after a distinguished public service career, endorsed this idea in the Consolation of Philosophy. “Well, here am I, stripped of my possessions and honors, my reputation ruined, punished because I tried to do good.… Why should uncertain Fortune control our lives?” Lady Philosophy appeared in Boethius’s story to explain that behind the apparent caprices of Fortune, divine Providence governs all things with “the rudder of goodness.” Chance was “an empty word,” Lady Philosophy said. After all, “what room can there be for random events since God keeps all things in order?”

This was the traditional Christian argument that would be repeated for centuries.

It’s worth paying attention to how language of fate, chance, and Providence work their way into Defoe’s narrative. What was the relationship between Fortuna and storytelling in The Decameron? What does it seem to be in this text?

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