Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (42 page)

This has been a book about stories that a culture tells itself and how the line between “story” and “history” is highly permeable. Our creepy little survey has looked at how monster tales have been used as exhibitions of power over the oppressed. Yet we have also seen how they can be used by the oppressed and socially marginalized to unsettle and challenge the powerful. For almost every social group in American society, the monster has embodied the terrors of history and been part of a history of terror.

We have witnessed something even more disturbing. The monster in America has come to life. Metaphors of death, blood, and sex have had living analogues in the history of the United States. These metaphors are something more than reflections of anxiety;
they are interstitially connected to events of American history and the structure of American society. Analyze the terrors of the colonial era, and the complexity of nostalgia for that era, and you will meet the shapeshifter and the witch. Ask the victims of the American pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry at Holmesburg Prison if they believe in Frankenstein. Consider the experience of Vietnam through the eyes of Tom Savini and you will better grasp the gory monsters he created. Hear the rhetoric of religious conservatives and how it shaped the politics of the AIDS epidemic and you will know the power of the vampire.

The American monster will not disappear. The Enlightenment bred hideous night things while Jefferson slept and, as cultural critic Mark Edmunds has argued, America entered a deeply gothic phase in the final years of the twentieth century that shows no sign of abating. The vampire
and the zombie are likely to continue their reign in the American consciousness for some time. The themes that make them a current cultural obsession will create, and have already created, new monsters for Americans to see in their nightmares and embody in their history.

At least one future of the American monster can be discerned in the related anxieties over medicine, disease, death, and the body that influenced the vampire and zombie craze. Technology has lengthened life, made possible miraculous bodily renovations, increased sexual fulfillment for aging Americans, and linked society together in the new social and cultural arena of cyberspace. Embryonic cloning and medicine grounded in the idea of cell and tissue regeneration has raised the possibility of what author and futurist John Harris has called “a new phase in Darwinian evolution” in which “our descendants will cease to be human in the sense in which we now understand this idea.” We are wired, both as a society and, increasingly, in our bodies.
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These new possibilities are becoming realities at the very roots of human consciousness in the study of our genetic code. The map of the human genome allows us to explore new territory, creating, shaping, and growing life in ways that Mary Shelley never imagined. The Dr. Frankensteins of the present have no need to go digging about in graveyards for body parts to reanimate in the lab. They can grow those parts in the lab, allowing them to develop in something that resembles an organic fashion. The modern geneticist’s model is not Prometheus, but rather the gods themselves.
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New technologies of the body, as well as science fictions about the augmentation of the body, have created a scholarly and popular discussion about the meaning of the posthuman world. Steve Nichols’ 1988
Posthuman Manifesto
suggested that a new phase in human experience had begin already. Elaine L. Graham argues that a belief in the “technological sublime” has led to a “re-enchantment” of the world in which the mythical representations of science fiction and fantasy (what she calls “the promise of monsters”) have become forums for discussion of the nature of posthuman experience. Other thinkers, often labeled “bioconservatives,” are less sanguine about the benefits of posthuman technology. Francis Fukuyama in
Our Post-human Future
argues for a stable, unchanging human nature that serves as the basis for “human rights and morality.” This stance leads Fukuyama to argue for legislation restricting biotechnological research.
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American conservatism’s response to techno-human possibilities has been influenced by the religious Right. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCB), appointed by George W. Bush in
2001, published a number of controversial documents that made use of Jewish and Christian theological concepts to discuss cloning, stem cell research, and new reproductive technologies. Author Michael J. Hyde, in his book on the cultural and philosophical history of the idea of perfection, describes how the language of “blessing” and “gift” made its way into PCB documents, as well as assertions of an “unalterable human nature.” The work of the commission tended to reflect concerns over religious strictures in relation to biotechnological change.
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Anxieties about, and structured critiques of, posthuman possibilities do not always acknowledge how deeply embedded the desire for liberation from constricted human boundaries has been in literature, art, myth, and theology. These possibilities draw on very old human hopes. Literary theorist Myra Seaman, whose scholarship embraces both medieval and modern culture, has argued that visions of the posthuman have assumed aspects of the Christian hope for the glorified body. She reveals remarkable continuities between vastly different worldviews in her examination of medieval texts that express pious hopes for a transformation into “a new creation in Christ” alongside contemporary pop culture expressions of posthuman possibility, texts ranging from Frankenstein to
The Matrix
. At the same time, she shows that older, religious conceptions of the posthuman imagine it as a state of perfection, while modern imaginings tend toward dystopic fears about the loss of something essentially human.
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Of course, other thinkers have argued that all the talk about terrors or utopian promises of the posthuman ignores some basic facts of human history. Jamais Cascio, a futurist theoretician selected by
Foreign Policy
magazine as one of the one hundred most important global thinkers of 2009, believes that “post human is a term with more weight than meaning.” He suggests that once any innovation leaves “the pages of science fiction” and becomes part of daily experience, it ceases to be “the advance forces of technoapocalypse” and becomes “normal, even banal.” Human history, beginning with the use of stone weapons and the discovery of fire, is the history of “augmentation.”
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Cascio here assumes the standpoint of scientific objectivism, ignoring primal human fears of change and the role played by forces other than rational calculation in accepting new cultural premises. He seems to be arguing that we should all stop our whining, shut out a millennia of cultural and religious warnings about human hubris, and get on with the business of being posthuman with the recognition that artificial body parts and the cloning of living beings are really all quite banal. Not incidentally, Cascio’s worldview would make moral criticism of new
technology impossible, effectively containing it with an exasperated “this is how it’s always been.” Cascio, though this is not his intention, suggests that the Neolithic spear is not so different from the nuclear missile. They are both simply stages in human augmentation and development.

Cascio’s assurances aside, pop culture fantasies of the posthuman reveal how profoundly worried we are about the benefits of modern society and the cybernetic human body. The nightmares of the twenty-first century replicate older Victorian fears of premature burial. The mechanical, computerized, or cybernetically enhanced body threatens to become a tomb in which the human consciousness could become buried, a prisoner to artificial limbs and organs.
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The manifestations of this fear in popular culture are too numerous to count. The burial of Anakin Skywalker in the metallic casing of Darth Vader in the 2005
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
is the most well-known representation of this anxiety.
The Matrix
(1999) imagines a world in which humans are encased in mechanoid shells like medical oddities, only free in their false, computer-generated consciousness. These anxieties even appear outside of horror and science fiction. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s novel (later an award-winning film)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
tells a story of terrifying salvation by medical technology. Bauby, the editor of the fashion magazine
Elle,
suffered a stroke-induced “locked-in syndrome” in 1994 that left him totally paralyzed, only able to move his left eyelid. Breathing on life support, he became a prisoner of his body and the medical technology that kept him alive.
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Fears of the posthuman are grounded in a terror of a cultural “locked-in syndrome” in which we become prisoners and victims of monstrous machines. Posthuman realities also raise questions about both what is monstrous and why we declare something monstrous. The meaning of the monster raises the question of the human. What we will define as the monster in a world where the category of the human has become elastic? New technologies may reshape the very morphology of the body, redefining the category of the monstrous out of existence and changing basic conceptions of human beauty.

Aimee Mullins provides an example of how aesthetic choices can upset societal conceptions of disability, beauty, gender, and the role of sexuality while also raising questions about the liminality of human identity. Born without fibula bones, her legs were amputated from the knees down at the age of one. Mullins’ life since then has been a record of achievement rather than of tragedy. A graduate of Georgetown University, she competed in NCAA Division I sports using carbon-fiber Cheetah® leg prosthetics. Subsequently, she has become a model, actress,
and lecturer. In her latter role she is an advocate for the convergence of form and function in prosthetics that she hopes will redefine notions of disability.
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Mullins’ work as a runway model and sometime magazine cover girl has brought the image of a posthuman body to a broad audience. Mullins cultivates certain aspects of a fairly standard heterosexual fantasy aesthetic in these contexts. Her clothing, hair, and photographic presentations of her body to the viewer’s gaze replicate the highly sexualized imagery of traditional modeling standards. The addition of artificial limbs, especially the inclusion of the Cheetah limbs, both mocks and complicates those traditional standards.

Mullins challenges the very notion of disability by explicitly comparing her experience to that of traditional celebrities seeking aesthetic enhancement. In a 2009 lecture, Mullins quipped that “Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do; nobody calls her disabled.” This leads her to reject the label of “disabled” and the effort to replicate humanness. Artificial limbs no longer represent “a need to replace loss.” The formerly disabled can become “architects of their own identity by designing their own bodies.”
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Mullins seems to offer a vision of the posthuman that would liberate us all from the monster by freeing us from a reductive definition of the human. Aspects of Mullins’ inarguably inspiring story become, however, highly problematic when examined in connection with social and economic realities. Prosthetics have been produced for her at great expense by admirers, obviously not an option available to most of the world’s disabled. Moreover, at least part of the fascination with her in the fashion industry has to do with how her body mostly conforms to standards of beauty universalized by that same industry. Slender and blonde with blemish-free skin, Mullins’ self-representation raises questions about whether or not people who do not conform to the standards of beauty promulgated by the film/fashion/cosmetic/plastic surgery industries would be viewed in the same light.

Other technological efforts in the direction of a posthuman future raise similar questions. In 2006 Claudia Mitchell, who lost her left arm in a motorcycle accident, became the first person to receive a bionic arm controlled by her own thought patterns. This “myoelectric arm” receives electrical signals directly from her brain through electrodes that jump these signals to the prosthesis where an onboard computer transforms them into commands. The process is not perfect. Mitchell can sometimes feel her elbow being touched when a muscle on her torso is stimulated.
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This extraordinary advance in biomedical technology came at a price tag of three million dollars for the surgery alone. The cost of such radical therapies, in a society in which there are already limitations on access to traditional types of medical care, suggests the possibility of a growing divide between the well-heeled who can afford various types of enhancements and those who cannot. Consider the fact that American states with high poverty rates and a high percentage of racial minorities have an infant mortality rate similar to developing nations and you get a sense of the gap between posthuman hopes and American realities.
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These complexities suggest that the history of medicine and technology will be the history of the American monster for the foreseeable future, despite the efforts of futurists to praise technology’s benefits. The questions raised by life-enhancing technology are moral rather than pragmatic. They are questions that live in the intimate roots of the self, the same roots from which monsters grow. Dracula in his dinner jacket with tails may be so old-fashioned that he has lost his power. But we still believe that technology, computers, and genetic enhancements can suck the life out of us.
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The terrors of our possible future grow in part from our fear of losing control of that future. If our most intimate physical self can yield to the power of the machine, certainly our society faces a similar threat. We have seen how the fears of apocalypse in the 1990s drew both from evangelical Christianity and the terror of technological catastrophe. The terror of what a posthuman social order might look like has become a persistent theme in American pop culture, fecund ground for images of complete social breakdown (the zombie genre) and for possible futures in which human beings play no role at all.