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Sympathetic Vampires and Zombies with Brains: The Modern Monster as a Master of Self‐Control

2021; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.13024

1540-5931

Irina Erman,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Well-behaved monsters are making history. In the twenty-first century, the most popular vampires do not want to drink human blood, and zombies try to abstain from eating brains. The Cullens in the Twilight saga (2005–08, 2020) and Melanie, the zombie protagonist of The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), exhibit far more self-control than the humans whom they are ostensibly emulating. The blockbuster zomromcom Warm Bodies (2010) is narrated by the angsty zombie, R, who demonstrates greater self-consciousness and self-awareness than most of the humans he meets. If, as Nina Auerbach has suggested, every age gets the monsters it deserves, then what does the popularity of the reformed monster say about contemporary culture? The undead who refuse to stay buried often represent the return of the repressed. The figure of the vampire, for example, has been interpreted as signaling, among other things, anxieties about homosexuality, female sexual agency, and fears of reverse colonization by the empire’s Others. In a remarkable turn, however, some of the most popular recent vampire and zombie characters have instead begun to repress their monstrous appetites through rigid self-control. In Julia Kristeva’s formulation, the monstrous aligns with the abject, which she defines as discarded excess—in other words, that which does not fit in. But Twilight’s Cullens and the zombie protagonists of Warm Bodies and The Girl with All the Gifts are dying to fit in, so to speak. They do this by enacting extreme forms of self-discipline, repressing, and ultimately reconfiguring their monstrosity into posthumanity in the process. The rise of undead monsters as masters of self-control is predicated in large part on their embrace of self-surveillance. They have internalized the surveilling gaze of the punitive social apparatus, which is described by Michel Foucault via his account of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. According to Foucault, Bentham’s design of the Panopticon prison aims “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). Because it habituates its inmates to the idea that they can be observed at any point, the panoptical regime creates self-disciplining subjects, whose behavior and identity are shaped by their internalization of the warden’s watchful eye. Foucault’s theorization of this disciplinary apparatus emphasizes that this eye need not actually be present, anticipating developments in surveillance, such as data and digital surveillance, and their impacts on individuals’ self-monitoring. Bauman and Lyon have termed the outcome of these developments “liquid surveillance,” in that it is diffuse and pervasive. However, even now certain physical spaces still reiterate panoptical design and train individuals to accede to monitoring. Foucault underlines the function of such spaces when he points out that given the pervasiveness of the panoptical regime, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228). All of the protagonists in the three novels examined in this article reside in such panoptical spaces. Rather than hide in coffins, the Cullens of Twilight perpetually attend high school and live in a transparent, glass house. In Warm Bodies, R and the other zombies make their home in an airport, a space that epitomizes the modern surveillance state. The Girl with All the Gifts makes its portrayal of the disciplinary apparatus even more overt when it opens in a prison school for zombie children, who have internalized the effects of their upbringing and perceive their subjection to constant observation and disciplinary control as normal. Even before they became cinema darlings, vampires have been particularly associated with the power of the surveilling gaze. As Simon Bacon points out, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) reveals an intense interest in observation and recording technologies, while also foreshadowing the development of the contemporary self-surveilling subject (105–09). Dracula was not able to tell his side of the story, but his successors in the mid-twentieth century were granted the power to narrate and to reflect on their experiences. This shift in perspective coincided and most likely contributed to the rise of the figure of the sympathetic vampire. For zombies, however, self-reflection is a much more recent phenomenon, and certainly more surprising when we consider the fact that they are supposed to lack sentience by definition. This striking confluence in popular portrayals of two otherwise distinct monsters invites an examination of the way that young adult monster literature deals with the omnipresence of surveillance in contemporary society. This examination will begin with a discussion of Twilight in the context of the trend toward increasingly sympathetic vampires, necessarily touching on other examples of self-controlling monsters, such as Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It will subsequently move on to the zombie bestsellers Warm Bodies and The Girl with All the Gifts to analyze how their protagonists’ mode of internalized surveillance reflects on the modern experience and demonstrates our evolving conceptions of discipline, monstrosity, and humanity. Through the protagonists' gradual enlightenment about the true nature of vampirism in such stories as “The Antimacassar,” “She Only Goes Out at Night,” and “Share Alike” … or the sharing of the “monster’s” viewpoint as in “The Cloak” and “The Traitor,” the reader comes to view the vampire as a victim of persecution, the involuntary object of a disease or curse, or a member of the natural order capable of moral choice. Direct access to the vampire's thoughts and motives invites the reader to share, if only temporarily, the “monstrous” point of view. (190) Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) makes an even more radical shift when the human protagonist turns out to have been the one behaving monstrously toward the vampire Others. “Works such as these,” Carter contends, “prepared the way for the sympathetic vampire-viewpoint fiction that has come to dominate the field since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hotel Transylvania (1978)” (192). In their study of “Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts,” Tenga and Zimmerman argue that, “Of the many cultural changes of the late twentieth century, perhaps none has shaped vampire evolution more than the growing belief in understanding and accepting difference” (84). Understanding difference means listening to the perspective of the Other. Thus, this ethical imperative to listen to Others’ voices is irrevocably tied with issues of narration, for it matters who is allowed to tell the story and how they choose to tell it. The Novel and the Police, D. A. Miller’s Foucauldian analysis of the nineteenth-century novel’s imbrication in forms of discipline and surveillance, astutely highlights the power of the narrative voice that lies both in the way it models observation for the reader and in what it chooses to obscure. Miller identifies the panoptic vision of the omniscient third-person narrator, who sees all but remains invisible, as the novel’s paradigm of the disciplinary apparatus (23–24). He particularly highlights the problematic power of the indirect libre mode of narration in which the third-person narrator enters the characters’ thoughts as a demonstration of the narrator’s surveilling power (25). Miller does not analyze first-person narrative voices in his study, but I would suggest that the shift toward first-person narrators is also accompanied by a shift in paradigms of surveillance. Thus, if the omniscient third-person narrator doubles for the panoptic eye of the disciplinary regime, a first-person narrator who tells his own story inevitably relies on acts of self-surveillance. With narration comes self-reflection and, eventually, self-control. Some critics have bemoaned the domestication, or defanging, of the vampire in Meyer’s Twilight series and other contemporary fiction. However, I would argue that instead of domestication, we should look at the Cullens’ attainment of the vampire version of vegetarianism as a process of rehabilitation. It is not that vampires lost their appetites for blood during the course of the twentieth century. It is that they started to control those appetites. We are now faced with monster narratives, which present appealing, reformed monsters whose main characteristic is the fact that they fight against their carnal appetites. Part of their appeal is the difficulty of their self-denial. Thus, they struggle and even slip up, tormented by pangs of conscience, like Louis in Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Or, like Angel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (1997–2003), they remain forever haunted by memories of their past wrongdoings. Rehabilitated monsters like Angel have increasingly started to find ways to channel their appetites and powers toward more socially “productive” ends. Angel assuages his guilt by becoming a private detective who helps society’s most marginalized in the spinoff series Angel (1999–2004). In Midnight Sun (2020), Meyer’s reworking of Twilight from Edward’s point of view, Edward reveals that he used to hunt “bad” men when he was unable to control his thirst. Like the serial killer Dexter from Jeff Lindsay’s novels and the eponymous Showtime series, Edward decides that if he must kill, he should kill men he deems deserving of capital punishment. Dexter presents himself as a necessary monster who kills worse creatures and thus protects society. In Midnight Sun, Edward also frequently refers to himself as a monster and narrates his intense efforts to control his urges. His emphasis on self-disciplining is often quite overt, as in the following passage that describes his first encounter with Bella: “I’d tried to focus on the face I’d seen in her eyes, a face I recognized with revulsion. The face of the monster inside me—the face I’d beaten back with decades of effort and uncompromising discipline” (11). Rather than a defining feature of their monstrous identity, the modern vampire’s need for human blood is reconfigured into a condition to be managed through strict dieting, or an addiction to be overcome. The dieting Cullens are especially virtuous consumers who are rewarded with eternal youth, beauty, wealth, and superhuman powers. According to Latham’s Consuming Youth, the figure of the alluring vampire has come to “metaphorically embody the libidinal-political dynamics of the consumerist ethos to which young people have been systematically habituated during the contemporary period” (1). Since George A. Romero’s brilliant contributions to the genre, zombie films have tended to thematize consumption and particularly to problematize mindless consumerism. Today, that portrayal is shifting toward narratives that are increasingly ironic towards the culture’s obsession with virtuous consumption and consumer-based identity formation. For example, Netflix’s suggestively titled Santa Clarita Diet (2017–19) playfully literalizes the ethos of virtuous consumption via its portrayal of zombie “dieting.” The show’s protagonist, Sheila Hammond, wakes up one morning to realize she has been transformed into a zombie. But, aside from the threat of decomposition and the intense hunger for flesh, she remains the same person as before. Instead of immediately turning on those closest to her, like the creatures in classic zombie apocalypse films, she tries hard to preserve her relationship with her family and her status in the community. While she cannot deny herself human flesh altogether, she eventually settles on a version of “dieting”—eating “bad” guys and Nazis. It may be worth noting that Sheila’s Nazi-heavy diet makes for an interesting redevelopment of a theme from a number of films and video games that revel in the killing of Nazi zombies as an outlet for violence without guilt. For, in the logic of Dead Snow (2009) and Call of Duty: WWII (2017), who could be less human than Nazi zombies?! Santa Clarita Diet instead presents a sympathetic and extremely likeable zombie who eats human Nazis, suggesting that humans possessed by murderous ideologies represent today’s monstrous threat. the discretion of social discipline in the Novel seems to rely on a strategy of disavowing the police: acknowledging its affinity with police practices by way of insisting on a fantasy of its otherness. Rendered discreet by disavowal, discipline is also thereby rendered more effective—including among its effects that “freedom” or “lawlessness” for which critics of the Novel (perpetuating the ruse) have often mistaken it. Inobtrusively supplying the place of the police in places where the police cannot be, the mechanisms of discipline seem to entail a relative relaxation of policing power. No doubt this manner of passing off the regulation of everyday life is the best manner of passing it on. (16) Miller’s analysis suggests that a rigid and overbearing disciplinary apparatus might breed rebellion, but less overt strategies better train the regime’s subjects to police themselves. Lyon’s overview of new developments in Theorizing Surveillance suggests that recent work in the field of surveillance studies supports Miller’s earlier conclusions (4). In Twilight, Bella’s father is the town police chief. He is understandably stumped by the supernatural creatures that roam the town, but he is also notable for his lack of authority over his teenage daughter. Chief Swan’s inability to guard Bella gives Edward the opportunity to present himself as her protector. Edward sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep while her father watches TV downstairs. Further, the narrative attempts to justify Edward’s “role in the constant control and monitoring of the female body” by making the young woman farcically unable to watch over herself (Grandena 37). Bella and everyone around her constantly comment on her clumsiness. She cannot seem to walk without tripping and, as Edward frequently points out, she manages to court danger everywhere she goes. In response to Bella’s alleged helplessness, Edward reports in Midnight Sun: “I automatically planned my own surveillance” (161). Florian Grandena analyzes this feature of the Twilight vampire as a “surveillance metaphor” and notes that “Edward’s physical ubiquity suggests a parallel with ever-present new media and surveillance technologies” (42). In fact, Edward’s vampiric gift allows him to penetrate people’s minds and to monitor their thoughts (everyone’s but Bella’s, of course). Grandena ultimately suggests that Edward’s all-seeing eye makes him a figurative stand-in for the Panopticon (45). But, even as we acknowledge Edward’s surveillance of Bella and others around her, we cannot lose sight of the vampire’s internalization of the panoptical regime when it comes to his own behavior. The Cullens accede to being watched in order to be part of human society, and they become very good at watching themselves in order not to stand out too much. That is to say, they stand out in all of the ways that prove socially valuable: their appearance, clothes, expensive cars, and house. The design of the Cullens’ well-appointed house emphasizes their priorities. In the novel, Bella notes that the Cullen house is a far cry from a crypt. In the Twilight film adaptation, the house is almost entirely glass, allowing for panoramic views of the inside. In fact, the façade even curves inward, recalling the circular design of the Panopticon, and placing the film viewer in the position of the all-seeing eye. McClelland’s Slayers and Their Vampires pointed out the parallels between vampires and their hunters, and recent vampire fiction has been further blurring that line. Previously subversive characters have instead “come out of the coffin,” as True Blood (2008–14) puts it, and have started to police themselves. Instead of following their carnal urges, vampires seem to be acceding to greater and greater discipline for the sake of fitting in. As Erik Butler explains, “Among recent fictions, True Blood stands out for the way it showcases the maddening number of rules and regulations the undead must obey” (95). The vampires of True Blood have to obey their “makers,” as well as a long list of supervisory figures, starting with vampire “sheriffs” who watch over appointed territories. According to Butler, True Blood suggests that “A vampiric existence is first and foremost an exercise in power visited on the undead themselves and the discipline never ends” (94). To cap off this trend, Matt Haig’s The Radleys (2010) portrays a family of suburban vampires living in plain sight. In order to remain undiscovered, “The Radleys constantly monitor their behavior, measured against that of their friends and neighbours, to create an image of human-ness” (Mutch 177). The question remains: What does it mean to be human? If it is to accede to eternal surveillance (for, even after death, our digital footprints remain), then the self-disciplining vampires are considerably better evolved than the humans portrayed in the same texts. In recent vampire fiction, it seems that the human characters struggle to control themselves considerably more than their vampire counterparts. Some of the humans in True Blood, for instance, start to use vampire blood as a drug, spiraling into addiction and violent behavior. In contrast, Haig’s Radleys can choose to abstain through self-discipline. Rather than subhuman, the monsters in recent vampire fiction seem to be better adapted to survive in the modern world than their human counterparts, suggesting that they are becoming posthuman. This trend emerges in zombie literature as well: from the monster’s “revivification” in Warm Bodies to its evolutionary adaptation in The Girl with All the Gifts. While vampires have eternity to contemplate their undeath and possibly change their ways, zombies have tended to be harder to rehabilitate. Firstly, zombies decompose. It is hard to come back from that. Secondly, unlike vampires, zombies have historically been defined by a lack of consciousness and self-control. This characterization held whether one considered early folkloric zombies, devoid of will and controlled by another, Romero’s mindless consumers swarming the mall, or even more recent portrayals like The Walking Dead (2010-), which parallels the decay of human relationships in a fallen world with unparalleled imagery of bodily dissolution. But it now appears that zombies, too, can change. Not only have we started to see sentient zombie characters, but ones that are increasingly more sympathetic and complex, fulfilling Kyle Bishop’s prediction that zombies would develop to “tell their own stories, acting as true protagonists and even heroes” (196). Warm Bodies became a bestselling novel by introducing just such a zombie narrator. R is able to reverse his decomposition process through rehabilitation or, as he puts it, “revivification.” At the beginning of the novel, R is already introspective and self-conscious to the point of restlessness. “I am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it,” he claims wryly (Marion 3). But he is angsty and dissatisfied. He does not feel like he fits in within the world of the lumbering dead. Of course, if he were not a zombie, he would be an adolescent cliché. All of the undead, including R, have forgotten their names and previous identities. They communicate through short grunts, but the narrative channels R’s surprisingly sophisticated inner monologue, which offers detailed observations about himself and the other zombies. His difference is perceived by the other undead, as R says, “I’ve noticed I make some people nervous, though I can’t guess why” (13). When we first meet R, he is still hunting humans, but he is already troubled by this aspect of zombie existence: “I chew off a man’s arm and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don’t like pain, I don’t like hurting people, but this is the world now” (7). Indeed, he is already contemplating restraint when he sees Julie during one of their raids. Their ensuing relationship inspires R to finally stop killing humans, and his transformation does not go unnoticed. He reports, “I was always a bit of an outsider here in the airport, but now my mystique has thickened like port wine. When I enter a room, everyone stops moving and watches me” (75). The issue of watching and being watched is central to Warm Bodies and its self-conscious narrator. R does not know how to explain why all of the zombies settled in an airport, but the location is quite instructive. In 1970, Baudrillard described airports as “the consumer cities of the future” (29). In the post-9/11 era, however, they are more than just international malls. They are also centers of modern surveillance, where the trade-off between privacy and safety is felt most acutely, and consent to searches is not optional. In Warm Bodies, R and the other zombies take on the role of the surveilling apparatus. R captures Julie and smuggles her into the airport in the guise of a newly made zombie. When she tries to escape, R tells her that “They’ll notice” she is not one of them (46). He insists that he is holding her captive for her safety: “‘Safe,’ I tell her, letting out a sigh. ‘Keep … you safe’” (22). In this, R’s explanation for his careful watch over his human companion echoes Edward’s explanation from Twilight. But R is even less subtle than Edward in revealing his underlying motivations. As he repeats his insistence on protecting Julie, he alters the pause in the phrase to “Keep you … safe,” suggesting that “keep you” better describes his priorities (23, 37). Julie’s kidnapping and imprisonment by R evokes the “Cupid and Psyche” and “Beauty and the Beast” plotline: of a woman forcibly entrapped but ultimately seduced by her beastly suitor. The novel also alludes to a less coercive forbidden love story through its emphasis on names and naming. After he lets Julie go, R realizes that he does not want to live without her and sneaks into the fortified football stadium inhabited by the humans. He finds Julie’s house, which to his eyes “looks like a cross between a town house and a prison watchtower” (126). The design of the house recalls the Panopticon, while at the same time alluding to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, since it features a balcony for R to climb. To R, “The balcony seems incongruously romantic on this austere structure, until I notice the swivel-mounted sniper rifles on each corner” (126). R takes a moment to stand underneath the balcony and eavesdrop as Julie records a diary entry on her tape recorder. Julie is contemplating whether “zombie” is not “just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don’t understand? What’s in a name, right?” (127) The name that R has forgotten is thus quite likely Romeo, whereas Julie stands for Juliet. R even has his own zombie Mercutio in the figure of his best friend M. Warm Bodies’ necrophiliac romance is more than just a tongue-in-cheek homage to Shakespeare’s undying story of forbidden love. It also invites us to consider the possibility of reconciliation in a fallen world. Similarly to the world of Romeo and Juliet, in Warm Bodies the strife that the two lovers must traverse stems from the previous generation. For the zombies, the “boneys” exert authority as elders and cannot abide by change. On the human side, Julie’s father, Colonel Russo, represents the failure of the older generation. His behavior and treatment in the narrative once again echo the mistrust toward representatives of regular policing authority discussed in the previous section. Colonel Russo tells Julie that, “The Dead have never shown any signs of self-awareness or emotional response.” She retorts, “Neither have you, Dad!” (198). R’s narrative presents both Julie’s father and the “boneys” as being past the point of no return. They cannot be rehabilitated. But, the rest of the zombies are starting to change together with R. First, they start to feel guilty about killing. R notices that “M avoids [his] gaze” after eating his last victim (116). “The others are not quite there yet, not even to M’s level of conscience, but there is something a little different about them, too. They take no leftovers. They dry their uneasy hands on their pants and walk in uneasy silence. It’s a start” (116). R’s self-discipline becomes infectious. His decomposition stops and begins to reverse. He acquires more sophisticated speech, and the zombies who follow his model of self-control start showing the same signs of “revivification.” The zombies’ redemption is made possible through R’s self-observation and, on a more formal level, through his narration, which both describes and furthers the development of his self-consciousness. M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts makes the model of internalized surveillance even more explicit than Midnight Sun and Warm Bodies. The novel opens in a prison on a military installation, several years after a zombie plague caused by a parasitic fungus has nearly decimated the earth’s population. This prison has been specially designed to contain a group of hybrid zombie children, whose uniqueness comes from the fact that they were born zombies rather than infected through a bite. Being infected in the womb has allowed their bodies to co-adapt with the fungus to retain capacities for thought and language, while keeping their zombie appetites unabated. The prison complex includes a laboratory and a makeshift school, where the children can be observed and tested in the hopes of finding a cure for the epidemic. It takes a number of pages for the reader to realize the truth about the children, because the novel’s beginning is narrated from Melanie’s perspective in indirect libre mode. Melanie does not know any other life outside of the cell block and does not recognize her surroundings as abnormal or problematic. In that the children initially have no idea they are zombies, The Girl with All the Gifts recalls The Radleys, in which two vampire parents are so eager to blend in with humans that they raise their kids without telling them about their vampiric identity. In The Girl with All the Gifts, the children are likewise not told who they are, and their appetites are suppressed by strict physical containment and trigger avoidance. The children are restrained in wheelchairs at all times, transported by two armed soldiers from their cells to the classroom or to their once-weekly shower and maggot feeding. The shocking scene of the maggot feeding, once again narrated from Melanie’s point of view, provides the readers with the first opportunity to realize that Melanie and her classmates are not quite regular girls and boys. However, Melanie is hardly the stereotypical zombie either. She is, in fact, extraordinary by any measure. Unfailingly polite, docile, and obedient, Melanie is a model prisoner. But she stands out due to her extreme intelligence and her childish crush on her teacher, Ms. Justineau. Melanie knows all of the prison routines by heart and, in her eagerness to please Justineau and the other staff, she works to preempt their commands and requests. She even buckles herself into her wheelchair before transport. The qualities that make her the perfect prisoner also make for a great student, especially when combined with her love of learning. Melanie is very much Ms. Justineau’s favorite. In contrast, Sergeant Parks, the leader of the military unit that guards the prisoners, sees Melanie’s cleverness as a threat. Parks is wary of all of the zombies, but he singles out Melanie’s capacity for observation, noting that she “has got way too many eyes on her” (Carey 2). Even so, when Parks breaks protocol and goes to transport Melanie from her cell by himself, without a second guard to watch her at gunpoint, “He’s assuming that the habit of countless mornings will kick in automatically” (87). In other words, Parks intuits that Melanie’s identity has been shaped by the prison’s panoptical system, resulting in her internalization of the surveilling gaze. It’s still scary—a rebellion of her body against her mind, as though she’s Pandora wanting to open the box and it doesn’t matter how many times she’s been told not to, she’s just been built so she has to, and she can’t make herself stop. But finally Melanie gets used to the smell … It doesn’t go away exactly, but it doesn’t torment her in quite the same way; it becomes kind of invisible, just because it doesn’t change. The hunger gets less and less, and when it’s all gone, Melanie is still there. (83) This self-disciplining recalls a similar scenario in Midnight Sun, in which Edward explains how he managed to train himself to resist the urge to bite Bella by lending her his jacket so that he could slowly get used to her scent. Edward reports: “I put the jacket on when I got to class, letting her fragrance swim thick around me. I would burn now—let the scent desensitize me—and then it would be easier to ignore it later, when I was with her again at lunch” (Meyer, Midnight Sun 226). Like Melanie, Edward practices self-denial by inoculating himself with smaller doses of the desired object. Eventually, both Edward and Melanie get used to the exposure. But even as their hunger grows easier to control, both continue to remind their potential prey to maintain their vigilance. It is striking to what extent Melanie remains the model prisoner, even when she is outside of the cell block. When the military compound falls, Melanie escapes together with Justineau, Sergeant Parks, several soldiers, and the prison’s head researcher, Dr. Caldwell. To stay with the group, Melanie readily agrees to wear shackles and a face mask. She says, “It’s a good idea … to make sure I don’t hurt an