Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture Annalee Newitz (Duke University Press)
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Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, is the culmination of a project that started as her Berkeley dissertation in the 90s. A slim survey of horror in American film and literature, it’s the sort of book that makes you want to both storm the nearest video store in search of Demon Seed and dig out that copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment you never quite made it through.
Monster stories, says Newitz, portray the destructive effects of capitalism. Such tales reveal our anxieties about the ways capitalism alienates workers from their labor and alters social relationships. Regardless of whether they appear in literary novels or B movies, “capitalist monsters embody the contradictions of a culture where making a living often feels like dying.”
At times like this Newitz can’t help but show her academic roots. And given that she herself notes how the fears these monsters embody change over time, it would have been useful if she had consistently referenced every movie with the date that it was released. But overall her 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.
