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1.5 City of the Living Dead - A Practical Application

Lucio Fulci’s Paura Nel Citta Dei Morti Viventi (Italy, 1980), released in the U.S. as ‘Gates of Hell’ and in Australia as ‘City of the Living Dead’ loses, in translation, the premier word ‘fear’. It is, however, marketed as a horror film and hence precludes itself as film by first being abject object. The relationship between a film whose title starts with fear, and whose packaging is designed possibly to repel rather than attract [92] immediately raises the question of what  (or who) is attracted to it. After the imaginary subjectivity of the film (cover art, synopsis, infamy) has been replaced by the images of the film, what pleasure is found in it? Or, what pleasurable affect has the film caused without ever depicting an image of pleasure or a scenario that could be defined as pleasurable? Fear can be figured as that which places the body at risk but which continues to embed in language the condition of not being vulnerable because of the body. The fear of horror is simultaneously the pleasure of horror because it demands the body be dominant while pointing explicitly to the non-corporeal part of subjectivity, mind or cogito, being completely at the mercy of the condition of the body. [93] Fear in Fulci’s city of the living dead is not necessarily fear of the living dead (which would be stating the obvious) but simultaneously fear of the vulnerability of the body when faced with the cannibalistic living dead, fear of the failure of cogito to ensure existence and fear of the inability to rationalize what is happening in direct relation to the ways in which the events threaten the self (as mind but through body). This film is embedded within a Cartesian model in order to make extreme its effect, which begins by enhancing the vulnerability of the self (mind) through the body but eventually represents the Cartesian binary upside down - the body continues to exist (‘live’ so that death is not what is feared) while the mind is eaten away.

Paura concerns the small Midwestern American village of Dunwich. After the Dunwich parish priest Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself, one of the gates of Hell is opened and the dead return to ‘life’, populating Dunwich with the living dead. The film does not have any more explicit reasons for the re-animation of the dead, nor does it apologize for this. It is a film in which rationality must be suspended. There is no supernatural event, or elongated explanations for such an event. The entire film is irrational in plot and for this reason, rather than estranging an unbelieving audience it demands a strange look, a look of belief just for its two hours. Where many films such as The Exorcist or Paul Schrader’s Cat People (US, 1982) attempt to rationalize and historicize the supernatural rupture in the narrative, Paura gives its phantasmatic world not as rupture but as reality. This places the audience in a different position from the outset of the film and hence perhaps shifts their expectations of pleasure as coming from rational, identifiable sources, or even their expectation of an identifiable pleasure.

The tension between pleasure and unpleasure is emphatic when thinking the pleasure of a horror film that concerns itself, not with psychology or supernaturality, but with the flesh, and various hyperactive states of the internal body. In Paura we are witnesses to the body in pain, a seeming synonym or at least relative of the term unpleasure. Both the bodies in the film and our watching bodies become strange. They lose any easy form of empathy or identification that traditional film theorists (and censors) maintain film encourages. They do not defy all identification however. The strange body in deranged [94] rupture elicits response, but the nature of this response is processual rather than an object to be mirrored. The body as subject (character) becomes unrecognizable. It is important to point out the delineation from subject to body here. The subject becomes almost absented as the body is taken further from a recognizable state.  So subjectivity becomes arbitrary at best and completely absent at the extreme. For my purposes this is exactly what a transformative theorization of the body requires. As long as the body is subject(ivied), alteration is from object to object and not a process. When bodies for identification are deranged, identification shifts. If the concept of simple comprehension of the bodies on screen is preferred over the traditional identification book of film theory then this also is disrupted. The bodies of the characters are no longer comprehensible. Any subjectivity present that allows the bodies of the characters their subjective signification becomes defunct. That is, the bodies of the film’s characters are not mutilated specifically according to the matter of their flesh. The gender of the victims is equally distributed, unlike film’s such as I Corpi Presentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale (‘Torso’, Sergio Martino, Italy, 1973) or Terror Circus (Alan Rudolph, US, 1973) and all women-as-victim films. (Indeed one of the most graphic and fetishistic violent deaths ever filmed is when town scapegoat Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) is bent backwards over an enormous drill and we see in loving close-up the drill enter and exit the temples of the screaming victim, and continue to rotate in the victim’s head after he has ceased moving. Was the victim female the symbolism could not be more blatant. Because Bob is a young white male the scene is surprising and the meaning and effect ambiguous.

The race of the zombies, also, is irrelevant, differing them from the invariably black Haitian zombies of older, more traditional zombie films. The bodies in Paura are not monstrous, a frequent device in order to vindicate gory deaths in films such as Humongous (Paul Lynch, US, 1981). Nor are the bodies ‘perverted’ by abject sexuality, like the body of the necrophiliac in Lucker the Necrophagous (Johan Vandewoestijne, Belgium, 1986) or the cannibal sex-crim in Anthropophagus (Joe D’Amato a.k.a. Aristede Massaccesi, Italy, 1980). Hence the murders in Paura are aimed at no one in particular and are perpetrated by zombies, who have no moral or pathological agenda, except perhaps the living are alive and the zombies are dead.

The most elaborate of the deaths in Paura are those of Tommy (Michele Soavi) and Rose (Daniela Doria), [95] a teenage couple making out in their car. [96] Father Thomas, now a zombie, converges upon their Jeep and stares intently at Rose. As a result of the stare she begins to bleed from the eye sockets and suddenly entrails pour from her mouth. Not for a moment but for a good two minutes the audience sees a myriad of wet, red entrails pour over Rose’s lips. [97] Questions such as how? Why? Are displaced in favor of the wide-eyed grimacing stare this scene elicits from the viewer. Character empathy may be felt, if the audience feel nauseous at the scene mirroring the nausea incarnate in Rose’s performance (an unusual kind of empathy, but probably a common one in horror films nonetheless). But this scene essentially has no meaning and nothing to say – its sole purpose is the (special) effect and audience affect, representing something we have never seen before. Following Rose’s projectile is the death of Tommy. The back of his head, brains included, is squelched between the fingers of the priest and ripped away. A pleasurable scene? Is there pleasure in seeing the secrets of the body, because after the violent act we want to see what lies beneath the removed skull? What is the matter with and of these bodies? Are they interior? Are they entrails? Are they inside out? Or are we just looking at them differently?

Judith Butler writes of bodies and their formation through discourse;

The task is to re-figure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome... illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. [98]

It seems that in this particular scene of Paura it is the violence of inclusion that causes offence and pleasure. Hermeneutic bodies, sealed both in flesh and signification, juxtapose their apparent non-violence, a feature feminism would argue against, with the violence of the body’s interior becoming visible. The necessary outside of raw flesh without signification is here performed by the priest, as in other ‘meat movies’ but our inability to ever see bodies without (violent) signification is evinced through our horror. These bodies presented in torn apart-edness express in image a language only our eyes can hear, which causes the eyes to spread, and our silenced mouths to gape, or to alter their discursive mechanics into a scream. The inside, that fundamental threat to the continuity of the sealed subject, is made linguistic, made expressive. Rather than take Butler’s assertion that there is a level zero truthful flesh that exists outside of culture and discourse, Paura exhibits an already-there flesh that is pre-discursive for non-medical viewers especially but effective to all viewers. Despite the language available to talk about the ‘necessary inside’, it is still a terrain that seems to have indelible power to cause offence, which shatters our demarcations of outside signified stable subjectivity. Necessary not because the inside exists prior to language but because it exceeds language, especially in relation to pleasure rather than anatomy or physiology. The new bodies formed are sites of gruesome pleasure, of fascination and repulsion. Because the bodies are held static upon the screen, the subject can both expel them (the tension of unpleasure) and ingest them (the light image penetrating the eye, the brain, the wide eye/mouth/nostril expressing not a desire to seal but to open the body to the image); both repudiate them (it’s only a movie) and desire them (the fascination of ‘look at them’). The matter of these bodies is the flesh of their visible interior and exterior, the glass of the sealing screen, the vulnerable jelly of our wide eyes, the gall our nauseated stomachs make. New bodies, polyphonous layers are created from the rupturing of a singular subject’s body on screen and the connections of affection these new bodies make with our own shocked and deterritorialized viewing body. If naming the pleasure of such a sight eludes us it is because we are not so much seeing Butler’s future horizon of a subversive body but the body as multiple horizons in itself, some of which matter less or more than others. The future is immanent. The body watching a body already calls into action more than one body in terms of defining one acting body (the screen character). When this body’s limits are compromised and altered, the viewing body must necessarily be involved - the necessary outside of the screen (us) is necessarily complicit with the inside of the television.

Rose and Tommy’s transformation scene is obviously meant to elicit something that exceeds and compromises the pleasure of cinematic viewing. Is it simply offering unpleasure, where the end of the scene heralds the arrival of pleasure? This is a scenario which does not really hold in terms of the film’s title - Paura/fear - whereby the audience is in constant fear of the next visceral scene and hence the pleasure of the absence of such a scene is sullied by the lack of knowledge as to when the next gory scene will arrive, contingent to the certainty that it surely will arrive. Freud claims “Our consciousness communicates to us feelings from within not only of pleasure and unpleasure but also of a peculiar tension which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable.” [99] The constant tension of fear and expectation of gore may be where pleasure lies. And it may also be where the division between the pleasure/unpleasure equation fails. The pleasure of awaiting that which causes unpleasure (though the unpleasure of unpleasure is yet to be explored in terms of the film) is a deterritorialization of the standard psychoanalytic terminology of the subject in unpleasure awaiting pleasure. This idea enables a revision of the ‘equation’ thinking of pleasure through the visceral. Equations of pleasure are not reversed so that pleasure is exchanged for unpleasure and vice versa but re-theorized. The rigid binary, which defines pleasure and unpleasure as positive and negative terms, is constituted differently, the terms retain their meaning, but the potentials of the meanings are expanded beyond their positive/negative scope. Watching film enables a reterritorialization of equations of pleasure, which are workable, yet unbound and unpredictable. New equations of pleasure are set up in order to deterritorialize at every application. Where pleasure awaited causes, according to Jean Laplanche, a return to a neutral state (zero) [100] what would be the outcome of the equation if the subject is in ‘pleasure’ (i.e. not being horrified) awaiting unpleasure? Pleasure according to the pleasure/unpleasure equation is a negative term, which brings the hyper-positive term, unpleasure back to zero. By beginning with a negative in subjectivity (the pleasure of not being horrified) and awaiting the hyper-positive unpleasure to attain zero, would not the subject be in unpleasure by being in a negative realm, by being in absence, in minus? Is the condition of wanting to watch, even that which is horrific, a condition driven by a feeling of negativity in subjectivity? Is it a condition of being too happy with the banality of pleasure and, especially in the case of horror films, striving for some unpleasure to either, in psychoanalytic terms, bring the subject back to zero, or cause an affect on a state of neutrality or apathy which may be(come) pathological? Laplanche is correct to point out that Freud underestimates drives towards excitation rather than drives only concerned with evacuation of tension. He states:

In relating to this level of the homeostasis of an organism we encounter the experimental evidence that a living being does not seek - as Freud would have it - only to evacuate excitations which would be perpetually brought to it from the outside: that organism depending on circumstances and on its internal energy level, can just as well be in quest of ‘excitation’ as desirous of avoiding it or evacuating it. [101]

Laplanche points to an element of drive that would seem clear but which both Freud and Lacan claim is the reverse. Psychoanalytically, drive is towards an unattainable something in order to unleash or reduce tension, rather than drive as an active force which unleashes transformation or unpredictable levels of pleasure that attain, not zero, but what is sufficient for now to call ‘something else’. The capitalist desire for balancing payments is discarded for a force, which has no measurable volume. The drive for unpleasure in horror, that translates as pleasurable, ironically fits well with Freud’s concept of pleasure attainment. Freud makes clear that drive is to get rid of excitation, drive is for a letting-go of something rather than an attainment or change. Drive, then, is to get rid of trauma, and Laplanche points out that in our drives we exhibit the “essentially traumatic nature of human sexuality.” [102] Sexuality is trauma and pleasure is a return to ‘nothing’ or a lessening of tension/trauma. Drive for terror and other ‘unpleasure’ may well differ very little from the supposed state of trauma we are already in by being sexual subjects. The quality of pleasure may have nothing to do with the focus on getting rid of excitation that Freud prefers. Which is why Freud is so unsatisfactory here. Pleasure in Freud is purely quantitative whereas my aim is to point out a specific qualitative aspect of a kind of pleasure that seems an oxymoron. In order to theorize positive transformations of the subject, a non-quantitative attitude towards pleasure and its relationship with ‘balanced’ embodied subjectivity should be aimed toward. For playful purposes I shall stay with Freud a little longer in order to see the potentialities of a positive reading of his concept of pleasure.

Ironically the attainment of pleasure to negate unpleasure is meant to result in this apathetic absence of feeling, as Laplanche quotes Freud;

Since we have certain knowledge of a trend in psychical life towards avoiding unpleasure, we are tempted to identify that trend with the primary trend towards inertia. [103] In that case unpleasure would coincide with a rise in the level of quantity or with a quantitative increase of pressure... Pleasure would be the sensation of discharge. [104]

So to begin with a state of pleasure is (negative) apathy, to achieve pleasure in order to discharge unpleasure too is (level zero) apathy. In the film, to achieve pleasure is to achieve unpleasure upon a state of pleasure, presumably resulting in zero. If we give up the concept of pleasure and unpleasure being measured in precisely equal doses, as well as the idea that the terms are opposite, an idea, which becomes increasingly suspicious in light of the affect of horror films, what happens to the equation? If the viewer begins to watch Paura in a state of ‘pleasure’, that pleasure is necessarily going to be a nervous one. It is a pleasure which strives towards unpleasure, which relies on unpleasure to exist - it is a pleasure which anticipates and which is defined only in anticipation. If the unpleasure did not arrive, the pleasure would itself be unpleasure, and it is the arrival of the image of unpleasure which is the moment of most pleasure. So the equation is altered from (psychoanalytical normative) unpleasure(+) + pleasure(-) = 0 or (filmicly) pleasure (-) + unpleasure(+) = 0. But in horror films the equation is more like pleasure (-) which is unpleasure in apathy (+) desires unpleasure (+) to achieve pleasure (-) but the unpleasure is the pleasure. It is not a vehicle towards the pleasure or differentiated from it. So from the ideal state zero (pleasure plus apathetic unpleasure) the subject desires unpleasure which is pleasure. This pleasure is not the pleasure of discharge but the pleasure of attainment, of affect. This puts the subject into orbit away from zero rather than in relation to it. Watching horror films may somehow alter the subject in a manner that sees zero as an undesirable experience, instead preferring a hyper-subjectivity of affect. Awaiting and witnessing the zombie attacks that constitute Paura is the pleasure of the film. There is no ‘narrative’ beauty, no ‘realist’ empathy, just bodies, visceral tension and the release of tension by more (different perhaps?) tension. In this instance, the fear of Paura is as much about desire as about anxiety. Tension is at once for desired object (the image) and for unbinding of fear (fear of the image), for pleasure (through horror) and unpleasure (images of gore).

If we take this subject which exceeds zero as the subjectivity of film watching (as opposed to the stable subject always striving to attain and re-attain the stability of level zero excitation), there is already a film being ‘watched’ before the actual images of the screen appear. The film-desiring subject begins with a drive to become agitated, not only in horror films, or in other emotive film genres such as porno and weepies, [105] but in the drive to witness that which exists as fake, and hence cannot travel a familiar cortical path of ‘real’ pleasure beaten out in childhood or adult life through experience. The drive for the aesthetic confounds the medico-biological idea that all pleasure is a) The same or at least travels upon the same path, and b) Stems from an actual experience of the subject which caused pleasure to occur (either as a foil for unpleasure or as an affect). In terms of the equation sensation + perception = affect, aesthetics exhibits an intangible form of ‘sensation’. In Paura, sensation would be the television being on, playing the film, and the perception, of light and sound entering eye and ear. There is little corporeal stimulation that is recognizable in the same way as the flow of milk in an infant’s digestive tract, or direct friction upon genitals. The situation demands either the body empathize with the sensations occurring upon the body-on-screen, or the body of the viewer be reminded of a pleasurable experience which occurred concurrently with watching the film. Both of these less than satisfactory scenarios would adhere to the idea that pleasure only follows already beaten out paths, yet both are deeply flawed in their mechanisms. In order for the body of the viewer to empathize with the flesh of Rose and Tommy on screen it would have to be in excruciating agony (and dead), but the pain perception on screen is fictionalized, emphasized both in its hyper-performativity and its primary being as a ‘story’, a film. Scarry writes

Every act of civilization is an act of transcending the body in a way consonant with the body’s needs: in building a wall, to return to an old friend, one overcomes the body, projects oneself out beyond the body’s boundaries but in a way that expresses and fulfils the body’s need for stable temperatures. Higher moments of civilization, more elaborate forms of self-extension, occur at a greater distance from the body: [106] the telephone or the airplane is a more emphatic instance of overcoming the limitation of the human body than is the cart. Yet even as here when most exhilaratingly defiant of the body, civilization always has embedded within it a profound allegiance to the body, for it is only by paying attention that it can free attention. [107]

The television would seemingly fit well into Scarry’s definition of high culture technology, and even more so because, unlike the telephone, computer or airplane, the body’s limits may be overcome in the phantasmatic world of corporeal rupture and transcendence on-screen, without the viewer’s body ever having to touch anything. The viewer’s body sits deliberately feet away from the screen, and feels the vulnerable tension acutely when this separated body leans towards abject imagery, as if something may jump out of the television. The danger of not doing so is evident in films such as David Cronenberg’s VideoDrome (Canada, 1982) when Max (James Woods) is so seduced by Debbie Harry’s giant female lips on the television screen he reaches his whole body into touch them and is sucked through the television. Or the most famous scene of television consumption (literally) in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (US, 1982) which sees a child eaten by and lost within the television. Yet the imagery of gory conditions of the body in Paura affirms Scarry’s insight into the impossibility of defying the body utterly. The viewer’s body sits away from the images of violated flesh on-screen in order to be close to their existence. This screen cranio-disembowelling is the only kind the body can cope with witnessing, theoretically without severe and ‘real’ trauma. The potential of the body for this kind of over-the-top rupture ignites a fascination by the subject for the images it both repudiates as ‘storytelling’ and fears as potentially ‘real’, as well as the interior surfaces it recognizes as ‘self’.

Cinematic empathy seems easier the more basic the condition of the body on screen. Linda Williams seems to claim implicitly in her book Hard Core that the function of pornography is to induce its audience to mirror itself. She cites male ejaculation (the ‘money shot’) as being of little interest to female viewers, and claims that in pornography aimed at women “Money shots are little in evidence.” [108] Williams takes up the idea that there is ‘truth’ in the pleasure of the body, especially that pleasure, which, like the male orgasm, has visual ‘evidence’. So, affect on screen correlates perfectly with affect upon the body of the viewer. The desire to watch and the pleasure, which travels down multiplicitous cortical paths, washing over hundreds of tributaries, is, however, ignored in this explanation. According to Williams, the primitive ‘monkey-see monkey-do’ effect is that which is working on the pornography-viewer’s body. Effect returns because it is an act that fits with the pleasure/unpleasure return to subjectivity principle, not the subject-changed principle, which constitutes affect. This mirroring effect idea has some very disturbing implications for censorship in terms of its ability to affirm that images of violence create mirror images, a theory that has little or no factual basis. But immediate affect-empathy in cinema obviously escapes horror film, even if it were a flawless argument for porno, because horror represents frequently impossible scenarios – living dead, fantastical gore, monsters and such.

How does one’s body empathize and mimic the body of Rose and Tommy in this scene? More importantly, after this potential mimicry, which cortical pathways of previous affect is pleasure following? Biology is not an entirely lost theory in this instance. Harking back to Scarry, perhaps the pleasure caused by this gruesome visceral scene is following an earlier pathway and mirroring the affect upon the screen. To preclude this theory I will use Freud’s explanation of repression in terms of pleasure. He states: “These processes strive towards gaining pleasure; psychical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure. (Here we have repression.)” [109] The interior layers of our flesh, the secret folds of our entrails and the violent rupturing potential of our surface breed a phantasy of violence implicit in having a body with that very potential. This could be a consciousness of the flesh alone, or of a relationship between the flesh, its vulnerability and its abjection with the psyche that has been forgotten, or repressed. If neurophysiology is used, its suggestion that there are so many cortical pathways the number defies definition could support the idea that there are alternate consciousnesses, which fleetingly appear and disappear. When culture teaches the infant that the body, and especially the ruptured body is unpleasure, there remains in the body the trace of the consciousness that existed before the prohibition of its existence - the pleasure of unpleasure. Lacan’s body-in-bits-and-pieces the memory of which dismemberment brings to the surface may be related to a consciousness of flesh and violence, a consciousness or subjectivity in bits-and-pieces that enjoys re-membering what has been squashed into repression by the sealed skin and the emerged subject whole. Such re-membering is not the pre-oedipal re-emerged infantile pleasure Creed explicates, but a more immanent, hitherto unknown pleasure. Repression may not be the correct term to use in reference to the visceral body; it is not so much a body that was once known, the memory of which is the repressed element. Rather this body is a body unfamiliar, yet still our own selves. The visceral body is a body that social subjects are forced to deny rather than repress. A visceral body is not a body remembered but a body disallowed. It is not an infantile body returned but an entirely new body not yet known. To know this multi-plateaued body, a true body-without-organs where material flesh, repressed or oppressed organs and intensity in pleasure are all points of interactive flow, means thinking differently elements of the traditional body un-theorized, theorized biologically or for a use (digestion, respiration) different to the use towards a body-without-organs.

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