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Aviva Briefel & Sam J. Miller, eds., Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema
of Terror.
Thomas Van Parys
Résumé
Compte rendu d’ Aviva Briefel & Sam J. Miller, eds., Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror. Abstract
Review of Aviva Briefel & Sam J. Miller, eds., Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror.
Austin, University of Texas Press 2011. ISBN: 978-0-292-72662-8
If there was one film genre that deserved more serious critical scrutiny after the traumatic events of 11 September 2001 and their global consequences – especially given the disturbing overlaps between reality and cinema on that day – it would surely be horror. While the objective of editors Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller’s timely volume of essays Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror “is not to create a homogeneous narrative about the genre, suggesting that ‘post-9/11 horror’ is a cohesive category, but rather to appreciate the multiplicity of forms it has taken, and the complexity of stories it has generated about a date that has become coterminous with terror itself” (4), there are a number of threads running through many of the essays that manage to provide us with a deeper and detailed understanding of horror cinema of the past decade. With each of the authors illuminating their case studies from their own angles, this collection also testifies to the notion that an examination of such a topic does not always need a typically structured monograph to get a grasp of its significance and evolution, which rhymes well with contemporary views on genre as a fluid and discursive formation.
Rather than follow Briefel & Miller’s (perfectly adequate) threefold structure (“Why Horror?”; “Horror Looks at Itself”; “Horror in Action”), I would briefly like to summarize the contents of Horror
after 9/11 on the basis of three key facets of the contemporary horror film, which I have drawn from my
reading of this book. The first is the shift in concerns of post-9/11 horror films. September 11 is indeed convincingly presented as a turning point in the genre, since it has necessarily had to rethink itself, which is of course not to say that there is no continuity. In “Transforming Horror: David Cronenberg’s Cinematic Gestures after 9/11”, Adam Lowenstein focuses on the transformations in Cronenberg’s cinema in the twenty-first century, more specifically on how his films’ concerns have shifted towards a critique of globalized geopolitics. At the same time Lowenstein’s analysis also shows how Cronenberg’s recent films – “closer in tone and reception to art cinema than the horror genre” (62) – still borrow from the horror genre’s vocabulary and the themes from his earlier films. In order “to think through the relations
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of surveillance and torture” (84), Catherine Zimmer (in “Caught on Tape? The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film”) explores the narrative and political implications of the use of video technologies in the subgenre of ‘torture porn’, by juxtaposing American torture films with its European counterpart, the cinema of Michael Haneke. In the former case, the association between the surveillance models and violence ultimately leads to narrative stability, whereas, in the latter case, it “undoes rather than reintroduces the conceit of a stable and deterministic visual field” (103). This book makes it clear quickly that there is not only a multiplicity of themes to be found, but they are also layered and heterogeneous. Analysing “The Host versus Cloverfield”, Homay King observes how these films “engage with the post-9/11 era of history in a more complex way than is evident at first glance”, condensing “images and affects from multiple historical traumas into aggregate, globally resonant visual forms” (124) in their search for “allegorical images that can give concrete, visible, and localized form to situations that are abstract, camera-shy, and de-centered” (127).
This leads me to the second facet, namely the ability or preoccupation of horror cinema, as a site of allegory, to expose problems of representation and of the relation to the real. For instance, in “Black Screens, Lost Bodies: The Cinematic Apparatus of 9/11 Horror”, Laura Frost investigates the relationship between “the manner in which the events of 9/11 were disseminated and represented in mainstream media and horror film’s way of approaching the spectacle” (16). Her analysis, in which films such as United 93, Fahrenheit 9/11 and 9/11 are pitted against Cloverfield and Mulberry Street, indicates that horror cinema uncovers “the strategies of mainstream representation of 9/11 that are meant to protect the audience but which, in fact, present cognitive problems that have not yet been solved” (16). Horror cinema, though, is “not the antidote or the solution” (33) to those problems of representation; rather, it calls “attention to the limits of how 9/11 is currently represented, the way in which narrative possibilities have been strategically narrowed” (34). Questioning United 93 for seeking “to downplay its status as fiction” (41), Elisabeth Ford (in “Let’s Roll: Hollywood Takes on 9/11”) analyses this film much more elaborately, among other things looking at how it relates to horror and porn in the effect it has on the spectators’ bodies. She further makes the convincing argument that Snakes on a Plane makes “a higher-level critique of enterprises like Greengrass’s” (53), in the sense that it is a “critique of the fantastic tropes within the supposedly ‘documentary’ impulse of a film like United 93” (55) and that it challenges “its audience to consider not just what the attacks themselves might mean to us, but also what it means that we recognized them immediately as cinema” (41). To categorize or to interpret “the horror film as an allegorical genre” (2) is itself problematic, too. In what is perhaps the most valuable contribution, “Cutting into Concepts of ‘Reflectionist’ Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post-9/11 Horror”, Matt Hills questions the simplistic division between the reception of horror films either as allegory or as commercial exploitation, calling for “a more liminal, nuanced approach to text/context ‘reflectionism,’ which can move beyond alternatively dismissing specific horror texts as mere fantasy, or concretely revalorizing them as ‘serious’ political commentary” (108). Drawing attention to the complexities and instabilities of horror cinema, Hills illustrates this approach by pointing out the ambiguity of his case study:
the Saw franchise’s focus on narrative puzzles and problematics of “righteous torture” allow it to resonate with post-9/11 U.S. culture, while its incoherence and self/other doubling allow for highly
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diverse political and apolitical perspectives to be incorporated. Rather than viewing this franchise as either carrying a “message” about post-9/11 America or as being dangerously apolitical and “not … ‘about’ anything,” its greatest trick is to be denotatively apolitical and, at one and the same time, connotatively hooked into a multiplicity of post-9/11 cultural-political anxieties surrounding the United States’ imputed decadence, the spread of threatening or “monstrous” belief systems, and the “justifiable” use of torture.
Such a negotiation between the different layers of the text/context relation recurs on the level of the horror film’s ideology as well.
The third facet, then, is the ideological struggle within horror cinema, and more precisely the instability of either the affirmation or the critique of the post-9/11 political and ideological climate. On the one hand, there are lots of horror films that can be said to affirm a certain return to conservative ideology. Travis Sutton and Harry M. Benshoff’s analysis of “‘Forever Family’ Values: Twilight and the Modern Mormon Vampire” dissects Twilight’s variation – through the prism of Mormon culture – on vampire mythology, showing how by assimilating the vampire the texts actually reaffirm reactionary heteronormative values and the dominant white’s suppression of the other. Sam J. Miller claims that the queer monster has disappeared in post-9/11 horror cinema, and that this is analogous to and simultaneous with the assimilation of queer liberation activism and the “normalization of queer identity” (222). (Although Miller raises and addresses key issues in both popular culture and social reality, his argument suffers a bit from generalizations about horror films and the correlation between the homeless problem and the queer community.) On the other hand, horror cinema has traditionally been known to imagine radical subversion. In “‘I Am the Devil and I’m Here to Do the Devil’s Work’: Rob Zombie, George W. Bush, and the Limits of American Freedom”, Linnie Blake demonstrates that the subgenre of hillbilly horror undermines the post-9/11 ideological formulation of national identity in the United States. This tension between affirmation and subversion, however, can become apparent within the same text. For instance, Steffen Hantke, in “Historicizing the Bush Years: Politics, Horror Film, and Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend”, uncovers the “oppositional information” (178) in what is otherwise a film with “one strong and single-minded ideological thrust, which establishes and unpacks the core ideology most viewers will take away from it” (166). This “complexity in the margins” (183) – the “layers of visual details and kernels of un-, or under-, developed ideals that provide points of departure for viewers unable or unwilling to invest themselves in the film’s core ideology” (166) – comes to light when this most recent film version is compared to previous adaptations of Matheson’s novel. Conversely, in “‘Shop ’Til You Drop!’ Consumerism and Horror”, Aviva Briefel goes into a highly interesting in-depth discussion of the tension between the ideological agendas of contemporary horror films and their own position as a consumer product, analysing “a group of films that self-consciously try to come to terms with their own dual status as sites of social critique and potentially lucrative commodities” (142). It is in other words necessary to take critical distance from horror cinema’s adversarial potential, but at the same time, as Briefel concludes, it “would be a very scary thing” if we just accepted “its paradoxical status as a consumer product that may sustain (willingly or not) the very structures it critiques” (159).
Instead of indicating what Horror after 9/11 fails to address – since a specific focus on certain themes and texts is actually the strength of such an anthology – it should make more sense to consider
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whatever lacunae it has as a testament to the diversity of the horror film genre after 9/11, a variety which this book mirrors in its approaches and case studies. Most importantly, it shows that horror films, even if they appear to offer nothing more than escapist entertainment and/or a clear ideological message, are certainly worth a second look.
Thomas Van Parys is postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the University of Leuven.
