rhetoric of death and generic addressing of viewers in american living dead films

297 Pages·2011·4.01 MB·English

TURUN YLIOPISTON JULKAISUJA
ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS TURKUENSIS
__________________________________________________________________

SARJA - SER. B OSA - TOM. 332
HUMANIORA

RHETORIC OF DEATH AND
GENERIC ADDRESSING OF VIEWERS
IN AMERICAN LIVING DEAD FILMS

by
Outi Hakola

TURUN YLIOPISTO
UNIVERSITY OF TURKU
TURKU 2011
School of History, Culture and Arts Studies
Department of Media Studies
University of Turku
FIN-20014 Turku
Finland

Supervisors:

Docent Veijo Hietala
School of History, Culture and Arts Studies
University of Turku, Finland

Professor Seija Ridell
School of Communication, Media and Theatre
University of Tampere, Finland

Reviewers:

Professor Kendall Phillips
College of Visual and Performing Arts
Syracuse University, USA

Professor Frans Mäyrä
Department of Information Studies and Interactive Media
University of Tampere, Finland

Opponent:

Professor Kendall Phillips
College of Visual and Performing Arts
Syracuse University
USA

ISBN 978-951-29-4600-6 (PRINT)
ISBN 978-951-29-4601-3 (PDF)
ISSN 0082-6987
UNIPRINT - Turku, Finland 2011
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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................ 4

1 FRAMING RHETORIC OF DEATH......................................................... 7
1.1. Approaching Death in Living Dead Films .............................................. 9
1.2. Generic Addressing and Positioning of Viewer..................................... 38

2 EMBODYING DEATH ........................................................................... 59
2.1. Character Engagements as Encounters with Death ................................ 61
2.2. Recognizing Death: The Living Dead as Embodiments of Death .......... 68
2.3. Aligning with Characters: Changing Reactions to Death ....................... 91
2.4. Allegiance with Characters: Moral Affects of Death ........................... 109

3 NARRATING DEATH.......................................................................... 124
3.1. Cinematic Narration of Death ............................................................. 127
3.2. Restricted Images of Death in Classical Films .................................... 143
3.3. Revealing Images of Death in Transition Era. ..................................... 159
3.4. Excessive Death in Postclassical Films ............................................... 173

4 SYMBOLIZING DEATH ...................................................................... 189
4.1. Symbolic and Allegoric References in Living Dead Films .................. 193
4.2. Rituals of Death: Ancient Mummies in Modern World ....................... 201
4.3. Eroticized Death: Vampires and Sexuality .......................................... 217
4.4. Chaotic Death: Zombies and Breakdown of Social Structures ............. 238

5 TRANSFORMING TRADITIONS OF RHETORIC OF DEATH .......... 261

LITERATURE ......................................................................................... 279
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing can sometimes be a lonely routine. Many days have passed in the solitary
company of computers worn out during this project. I am therefore more than grateful
for counterbalance and moments of interaction with people who have commented my
work, supported my thinking processes or who have been there for me when I have felt
like complaining or celebrating at different phases of my work. I owe many thanks to
those of you who have shared these past six years of my life.
First, I want to thank my academic home, Media Studies at the University of
Turku. The very first courses of Cinema and Television Studies already made me feel
that I had found my place in the academic world. The Media Studies people then became
my colleagues and friends. I want to thank my supervisor, docent Veijo Hietala, who has
seen my whole journey from the first film course to the finishing of my doctoral thesis. I
am also truly grateful to Professor Seija Ridell, who took me under her wings when I felt
lost in my writing. Even today I feel that without our shared theoretical discussions and
without her sharp and to–the–point comments, I would still be entangled in the multitude
of different available possibilities. Seija and Veijo, thank you for helping me to find
structure to my work, for sticking with me all the way to the end, and for all the
discussions we shared.
I am also grateful to our Professor Jukka Sihvonen, who at the final stages of my
work helped me with all the practical issues of the examination. Furthermore, during the
years I have learned to appreciate his way of thinking, theoretical approaches to the
media, and inspiring ideas concerning my research. Similarly, our research seminar,
which I have now attended for six years, has been a place of intellectual challenge and
interaction, friendship and shared projects. I want to thank all postgraduate students and
teaching staff for sharing your work with me and commenting my writings. In particular,
I wish to thank Ilona Hongisto, Tommi Römpötti, Tero Karppi, Tanja Sihvonen, Mari
Pajala, Jukka-Pekka Puro, Katariina Kyrölä, Pasi Väliaho and Sanna Härmä.
Several people helped to put finishing touches to this work. I want to thank
Professor Kendall Phillips, who acted as my pre-examiner and as my opponent. His
comments improved the manuscript, and I’m grateful that he found time to help me and
fly to Finland to discuss my work. I also want to thank my pre-examiner Frans Mäyrä,
whose ideas helped me to see the possibilities in my work.
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Furthermore, I am grateful to Professor Pirjo Ahokas, representative of the
Faculty of Arts, for participating in the evaluation of my doctoral thesis. Pirjo has also
had a huge role in shaping my academic identity. She supervised my literature studies,
we have organized conferences together, and shared memorable moments in the
meetings of the Finnish Graduate School for North and Latin American Studies. I am
grateful for her support and friendship over the years and I hope that our paths keep
crossing in the future.
Many thanks are due to my proofreader and colleague Pirkko Hautamäki for
making me sound smarter than I actually am and for the feline images and stories which
have lightened up my writing days.
Besides Media Studies, I have been fortunate to have several academic networks
to support me. The Finnish Graduate School for North and Latin American Studies is
one of these. In our seminars, my writings were discussed from so many angles that I
started to see my work as more of a multidisciplinary project than in the beginning. We
shared hard work, but also great moments and lots of laughter. I am grateful for your
companionship. Thank you all, especially Markku Henriksson, Daniel Blackie, Elina
Valovirta, Rani-Henrik Andersson, Sami Lakomäki, Sarri Vuorisalo-Tiitinen, Hanna
Laako, Janne Immonen, Markus Kröger, Pekka Kilpeläinen, Katri Sieberg, Elina Vuola,
Mikko Saikku, and Phillips Brooks.
The seminars of the Graduate School for Gender Studies made me more sensitive
to issues of gender in my work, and I want to thank you for delightful years of co-
operation. I want to thank Professor Kirsi Saarikangas in particular for her support.
Besides graduate schools I have had a pleasure to participate in different academic
networks. I wish to thank everyone for collaboration in the Finnish Society for Cinema
Studies, the Wider Screen magazine and Filmiverkko, the Lähikuva Journal and the
International Institute for Popular Culture. I would also like to thank the following
organizations for funding my work: Kordelin Foundation, Turun yliopistosäätiö and
Turun Suomalainen Yliopistoseura.
During the past years I have funded my research by working as well. At times the
combination of a day job and research has been overwhelming, but I still would not
choose differently. I have gained not only valuable experience, but have made great
friends and colleagues. During the course of this dissertation I have worked for
Molecular Plant Biology at the University of Turku, the Finnish Literature Society, the
Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies, the Christina Institute for Gender Studies
6

and the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki. I would like to
thank Tuomas Lehtonen in particular from the Finnish Literature Society, and Annukka
Jamisto, Outi Pajala, Leena-Maija Rossi, Aino-Maija Hiltunen, Maija Urponen, Anna
Moring, Eva Maria Korsisaari, and Venla Oikkonen from the former Christina Institute.
The former Renvall Institute, now part of the Department of World Cultures, has
served as my second home over many phases of my life. I want to thank all Renvallians
for our times together and for the multidisciplinary atmosphere. Now that I work
elsewhere again, I miss the morning coffee and lunch breaks that made my days, and I
want to give my special thanks to those people who made me smile on my way to work:
Jani Penttilä, Lars-Folke Landgrén, Saara Rautanen-Uunila, Tiina Airaksinen, Varpu
Myllyniemi, Maria Colliander, Peter Stadius, and Marjaana Hakala.
Finally, my dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my
friends and family. Although I have often been working long hours, you have always
stood by my side and supported me. Sometimes you seemed to believe in me more than I
did and I want to thank you for that. I want to thank Susanne Uusitalo and Minna
Valjakka for spending hours and hours talking about different aspects of postgraduate
work and life; and I wish to thank Maija-Liisa Nyman for being there for me and always
finding the right words of encouragement.
A big thank you goes to my family. My parents, Esa and Kaija Hakola, made me
feel that there was no reason why I could not do this, or anything else I wanted. I wish
my mother could be here today to see my dream come true. I am also grateful to Jani,
Piia, Sini and Jeremy for being part of my family. Sini, I want you to know that you are
not only my little sister; you are also one of my best friends. You may be far away, but
you are always close to my heart.
And last, I want to thank Tatu Haataja for his love and support. When I signed up
for postgraduate studies, he probably did not know how long and sometimes annoying
this journey would be, but he is the one who kept me sane throughout these years. When
I was too tired and stressed, he made sure we would have some time off, whether for
eating tapas and swimming in Spain, watching football and musicals at London,
crawling through rock festivals or watching bands at smaller and bigger venues. Thank
you for being there for me and thank you for making our lives together special and fun.
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1 FRAMING RHETORIC OF DEATH

‘Death is but the doorway to new life—We live today—We shall live again—In many
forms shall we return.’

These are the words from the opening of a classic horror film, The Mummy (1932). The
citation from the Scroll of Toth foretells the following scene of an ancient mummy
returning to life to haunt the living. The words also open the door to a specific American
horror film genre. As the mummy rises from his tomb, so the corpses of zombies walk
the earth and vampires honor the dark nights. In these living dead films of undead
monsters, death is not where the narration ends. In the words of a tagline of the
postclassical mummy films of the 1990s and 2000s: ‘Death is only the beginning.’
In all these films, the dead return to life. Van Helsing famously states in the
definitive Dracula (1931), ‘A Vampire, Mr. Harker, is a being that lives after its death’.
By returning to life, the undead have the power to bear upon the society and the personal
lives of the living, forcing the living to renegotiate their understandings of life and death.
This is what happens, for example, in the Night of the Living Dead (1968), where the
characters are advised to set their existing cultural modes aside once ordinary funeral
practices have proved futile. Instead of burying their dead, the characters ought to burn
them, because the dead are ‘dead flesh and dangerous’. In this sense, the focus of such
films is on the re-evaluation and redefinition of existing rituals and understandings of
death.
Death remains a mysterious event and experience. The vampire sums up our awe
of death in The Return of Dracula (1958): ‘You only fear the unknown. Only this casing,
this clumsy flesh stands between you and me. You are already balanced between two
worlds. Eternity awaits you now.’ The dual relationship to death—of endlessly escaping
control and thus intensifying the desire to master death—is evident in the living dead
films whose explicit encounters with death grow both to re-mystify and de-mystify
death. Dead, well and truly, entices imagination. These films are one way of trying to
imagine that which is unknown. It is therefore fascinating to study how these films
encounter, construct and articulate death.
The practically compulsive repetition of death in the living dead films proclaims
the continued cultural need to negotiate with and manage death. The allure of death in
the living dead films is apparent in the vampire’s recitation of a poem in Dracula:
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‘Above, lofty timbers, the Walls around are bare, echoing to our laughter, As though the
dead were there. Quaff a cup to the dead already, Hurrah for the next to die.’ Also, it is
through the very repetition of death that the films of different decades and generations
create—more or less as a by-product—a picture of the changing values and attitudes
related to death in American society. This study assigns a leading role to the living dead
characters in American horror films not because I wish to suggest the originality or
superiority of Hollywood films, but because of their dominating international position in
the mainstream of the horror genre. Death represented in American living dead films
clearly participates in the negotiation over death not only in the United States, but
elsewhere, too.
Furthermore, and importantly, by addressing the themes of death and dying, the
films invite the viewer to participate in the negotiation process. Take the final scene of
Resident Evil (2002): the main character recovers consciousness in hospital, facing the
camera and demanding to know ‘Who is in there, come out.’ By establishing eye contact
with the viewers, the character challenges us to become aware of our active role as
spectators, to reflect upon our experiencing and interpreting process of cinematic horror
and cinematic death. Presentational strategies and solutions always include
communicative—rhetorical—dimensions, and I argue that it is crucially important to
analyze the ways in which films invite their viewers to experience and conceptualize
death.
Throughout this study I will maintain that the articulation of death in the living
dead films invites the viewers to interpret death in relation to the films’ socio-cultural
background and predominant understanding of death and dying. Through addressing
strategies, these films participate in negotiating contemporary death-related meanings
and attitudes. The American living dead films not only reflect but also take part in the
changing meanings and attitudes. I will therefore focus on how the American living dead
films articulate, address, and negotiate cultural understandings of death for and with their
viewers.
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1.1. Approaching Death in Living Dead Films

Aims of the Study: Multiple and Changing Dimensions of Death

A number of scholars, such as Philippe Ariés, Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Bauman, have
suggested that the role of death changed in Western societies with the onset of
modernization, industrialization, and medicalization. Since the late eighteenth century,
death and the dying started to be marginalized and removed from public space into
hospitals and other specialized institutions, to be dealt with by professionals. By the mid-
twentieth century, the process had taken death away from the social sphere, replacing the
1
public experience of death with experiences of the private.
While modern medicine and society seek to explain death away, the desire to
understand death perseveres. Vicki Goldberg argues that the birth of new reproductive
media (the press first, to be followed by cinema and television), created alternative
public images of death and dying, exaggerated and visual. Deaths in the media served as
2
‘a substitute for experience’. Charlton D. McIlwain, who has studied the cultural role of
death in the United States, takes this argument a step further by claiming that the mass
media and entertainment function as the missing link between the periods which openly
embrace death as part of the public sphere. According to him, the media have actively
forced death back in the public by allowing people to communally discuss and give
3
meanings to death.
The mass media encompass different approaches to portrayals of death. Folker
Hanusch feels that it is important to separate between documentary (news) and fictional
approaches. Whereas they both participate in the ‘reflecting and shaping’ of death-
4
related attitudes, these modes have different relationships to the construction of reality.
I argue that the fantasizing potential of the cinema makes it possible to play more freely
with our understanding of death. Furthermore, as Goldberg maintains, the cinema’s
audiovisual and dramatizing possibilities highlight the ‘extensive and intimate view of

1
Ariés 1977 (1974); Elias 1993 (1982), 12, 17–18; Bauman 1992, 92–97, 104–136. See also Walter
1994, 1–2, 9–13; Goldberg 1998, 28–29, 33, 37; Staudt 2009, 3.
2
Goldberg 1998, 29–30, 38, 42, 48. See also Hanusch 2010, 2–3. Moreover, Goldberg reminds us that
death was by no means the only experience that became more mediated than immediate. Modernization
affected several corporeal processes, such as sexuality, in a similar way. (Goldberg 1998, 31.)
3
McIlwain 2005, 3, 8–10, 19–20, 39.
4
Hanusch 2010, 5.
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death’. The cinema thus moves close to death, not only through images, but through
5
emotional engagement and narrative structures.
The cinema’s medium-specific features enable us to fantasize and experience
death in effective ways; films imagine, define and give a visible and audible form or
6
shape to death. In particular, when the modernization of death led to emphasizing the
personal level of experience (one’s own death and the death of beloved ones), the
cinema provided a place for personal experiences and public images to meet. As James
Donald and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald claim, cinema is a public form of
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communication, engaging filmed deaths with social, political and cultural processes. On
a more general level, then, films are not only a place of negotiating death-related
meanings as part of one’s personal experience, but the shared nature of these experiences
force the negotiation back into the public space as well. In this manner, cinema has
participated in a process where the individualization of death has turned into a personal
and public awareness of death. This revival of death has been particularly visible in the
8
latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century.
Because of the media’s active role in the revival process, McIlwain demands that
it is not enough to recognize the media as an alternative public or refuge for death.
Rather, we should study how the restoration has been embedded through mass-mediated
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articulations of death. This indeed is my goal in this study. I suggest that by looking into
the ways in which films such as American living dead films fantasize and address death
we can gain a more comprehensive picture of death’s role in Western societies. My
hypothesis is that the change from modern and alienated death to the revival of death is
evident in the American living dead films, and even more so, I argue that these films
have both reacted to the socio-cultural change in death-related attitudes and values. The
films’ repetitive structures of producing death-related experiences and the ways in which
the films have continuously challenged the possibilities and limits of modern death have
foretold and even encouraged this change.
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Death has obviously been one of the key themes in horror films , and because
horror films intend to cause fear, death is most often constructed as monstrous and
horrifying. The Latin verb horrere means ‘to bristle’ or ‘to shudder’, and this, as Anna

5
Goldberg 1998, 49–51.
6
See also Grønstad 2003, 108; Gorer 1960, 404–405.
7
Donald & Hemelryk Donald 2000, 114–115.
8
See, for example, Staudt 2009, 14; Walter 1994, 1–2, 17, 22, 24, 39.
9
McIlwain 2005, 49.
10
See, for instance, Grixti 1989, 15–16.