<<TRANSMATHOME

1.6 Ingesting Pleasure; Ingesting Flesh

Transposing our eyes from the single scene of Rose and Tommy to the overall themes of Paura and indeed, many other zombie movies, including Fulci’s other zombie epics Zombi 2 (‘Zombie Flesheaters’, Italy, 1979) and ... E tu vivrai nel Terrore! L’Aldila as well as possibly the most famous series of zombie films, George Romero’s zombie trilogy Night of the Living Dead (US, 1968), Dawn of the Dead (US and Italy, 1979) and Day of the Dead (US, 1985), one particular feature stands out. It is the most obvious feature of the modern movie zombie (especially the Euro-zombie), especially of the latter part of the twentieth century, as opposed to the Haitian zombies prolific in such earlier films as Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (US, 1932), Revolt of the Zombies (US, 1936) or even the more recent Hammer version of the myth Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, UK, 1966). It is that zombies eat people, frequently ripping, tearing and squashing various parts of their victim’s anatomy into states of abjection before doing so. [110] The strong theme is consumption as opposed to the former slavery. In Romero zombies consume people as they haunt their former site of consumption – the shopping mall, in Fulci the zombies consume wastefully, performing acts of violence which defy both meaning and a semblance of need (for example, the apparent hunger of the Romero or O’Bannon zombies).

Zombies do not get much of a look in, theoretically, in horror texts. Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws calls the demons from Demoni (‘Demons’, Lamberto Bava, Italy, 1985) zombies, despite the name of the film, and Creed, in The Monstrous Feminine, similarly names the deadites from Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, US, 1983). Even including these pseudo-zombies, their studies are limited to a few lines in Creed to two pages in Clover. Gender in terms of zombies is highly ambiguous, the audience feels that even if these creatures did have concrete gender divisions in life, their gender specific parts have rotted off (film zombies are frequently in a badly decomposed state) and their reason for animation is a unified, non-specific hunger. Perhaps this is why their use for gender research in film is seemingly limited. [111]

In Paura the zombie ‘cannibalism’ is more a threat than an actuality, with the ‘ingestion’ of the living by the dead being carried out through ripping into the brains of the living digitally. This image, which occurs more than once in the film, seems not so distant as a metaphor for cannibalism, but a cannibalism that has intent, rather than the aimless direct chomping which occurs throughout Dawn of the Dead, or the openly fake ethnographic cannibalism of the mondo cannibal genre of Italian horror, most notably the films of Ruggero Deodato (Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, ‘Last Cannibal World’, 1976, Cannibal Holocaust, 1979), and Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox, ‘Make Them Die Slowly’, Italy, 1981). Squelching your fingers through the back of someone’s head to procure the brains is like the meat-eater which slaughters its own prey, rather than taking a bite out of something ‘neat’, in its distance from the cadaver which submitted the flesh. Digital evisceration is an image for repulsion because of its suggestion of cannibalism, intentional abjection and of course, gruesome rupture of the body and subjectivity of its victim. But because cannibalism is the most prolific and perhaps the most forbidden act the zombies of Paura relish, this act may be a riper site for potential pleasure. In culture cannibalism persists as one of the stronger taboos [112] despite the body being so orally driven. F. Gonzalez-Crussi describes it accurately as “Thanatos in pure form, the elemental and most ancient form of aggression”. [113]

Gonzalez-Crussi also points out the ambiguities of such an intimate act, which meshes disparate corporealities. Gonzalez-Crussi paraphrases Eli Sagan in explicating “‘affectionate cannibalism’, in which feelings of affection are manifested toward the object of aggression, in such a way that the boundaries of eros and thanatos, so neat upon superficial canvassing of their respective jurisdictions, lose their sharpness.” [114] In film cannibalism, especially zombie cannibalism which does not anchor itself on morality, taboo rupture or ritual, but only on desire and the attainment of its pleasure, the blurry lines between eros and thanatos are made doubly so with respect to pleasure and unpleasure. Immediately it seems easy to equate pleasure with eros, unpleasure with thanatos. [115] But using film as the topography for indulging violent phantasy changes the nature of the unpleasure of aggression, (both for victim and ‘essentially moral’ perpetrator) [116] and the distance between the glass which separates viewer from viewed alters the pleasure of ‘love’. [117]

In Paura thanatos incarnated in images of brains being squelched between the fingers of the living dead exceeds its rudimentary nature as a basic act of injury. It grits the teeth of the audience in a grimaced snarl that is catharsis for the aggression the audience may feel towards some of the more annoying characters in the film, a catharsis of pleasure because of the surrogate aggressor performing the act for the audience (hence no guilt). It is also a vehicle for the pleasure of having something revolting squash between the fingers, of touching something forbidden, something soft, wet, visceral and now undifferentiated from the self. This squelching of undefined matter carries with it signification of containment as life, and tactical union as death (we know that touching a real human brain would more often than not signify death except in brain surgery). Remembering the signified surface or skin with which the brain is bestowed in neurophysiology (of comprehension, not the dura), the act of grasping this surface-beneath-the-surface, is grasping the skin of intellectual subjectivity beneath the skin of corporeal subjectivity. The grabbing of the brain with disregard for the carefully beaten out paths mulches all pleasure into one unidentifiable mess, ignoring the imaginary privileging of certain pleasures over others which the image of the mapped brain-skin encourages. The intellectual node of the stratified body is made meat. It also continues the imagery of violence, of puncture, scratch, electrical charge and beating that seems to adhere to the brain as the most continually victimized of body organs.

In their most carnal reading, the audience grabs at thanatos, in its definition as aggression and death. They clutch in the tension of their hands their aggression towards death (clutching the hands seems a common reaction of tension, and the nail marks left are often used as visual ‘evidence’ of extremes of fear, anxiety, horror and aggression in film and novels). If the zombies, as perpetrators, are re-animated and unaffected by thanatos, they can afford to perform such an act. Audience fascination with gross things that cannot be touched, because they are gross and because to touch them means a death is signified, can be pleasurably felt. Both the fakery implied in the fact of Paura being a film and the fakery of the dead not ever being dead, compromises the fear that could prevent the (pleasure of the) act.

In terms of the pleasure of eros, Paura addresses one of the greatest flaws of desire for an other corporeality. Bodies are located as separate, skin is an organ which keeps the inside in, and the outside very firmly out. The mouth as rare site upon the body for ingestion is also the site of cannibalism. So along with the pleasure of desire is the constant frustration of never being able to ingest the object of desire. [118] This problem is addressed in Antonio Margheriti’s Il Mostro e in Tavola (‘Flesh for Frankenstein’, Italy, 1973). [119]   Baron Frankenstein opens up the abdomen of his female zombie in order to feel around and thereby bring himself to orgasm, following the act with the line “To know death ... you have to fuck life in the gall bladder”. His servant Otto tries later the same technique (unsuccessfully) all the while breathlessly uttering “ I have to get in to her, must get in!”.  David Cronenberg’s The Fly (Canada, 1986) which involves the use of teleportal pods to split genetic construction in order to transport matter, takes the desire for the interior surfaces of the lover to an even greater extreme. Seth Brundle is so keen to get inside the flesh of his lover he suggests a fusion of their two bodies into a single object. The use of terms involving eating to describe oral sex is a representation of the frustration of divided bodies and the desire to overcome the division. Maria Angel and Zoe Sofia point out the parallels between body and food, love and eating,

Important features of this symbolic/libidinal topography are outlined in various of Freud’s papers on infantile sexuality and anality which trace the metaphorical associations between the penis and the ‘stick’ of faeces, the rectum and the vagina, faeces and babies, and between excrement, gifts and money. Other associations may be made between breasts and buttocks (as in the golden arches of the junk i.e. ‘waste’ food giant McDonald’s) and between aliment and excrement. [120]

The body under trauma in Paura, although it is eaten, does not so much represent a metaphor for food. It is food. Instead of metaphorically taking the flesh of the beloved into the digestive system through oral sex, the zombies actually take the flesh in through mastication and swallowing. [121] Not only do they eat the body of the object of desire with the mouth, they break it and knead it from outside to inside and back again with the hands in the example of the brain-ripping. The zombies ‘take’ a lover in the manner about which all lovers phantasize, where there is no longer a separation between other and self, where the object is no longer external. The pleasure of eros, (haunted always by the unpleasure of the insurmountable distance between inside and outside,) is made acute by the repulsive unpleasure of gore, mutilation and cannibalism. The victims’ screams, as the backs of their heads are torn away, emphasizes the great amount of tactility and metaphorical ‘sexual’ excitation being experienced. The rolling upwards of the eyes indicates a relinquishment of the visual [122] for the entirely tactile, but tactility not only for the body of the self, but for the body of the other inserted into the self and no longer divisible from it. [123] The shock of an unwanted (in ‘reality’) violence which brings about unpleasure is made indistinguishable from the fascination of wondering what the violence feels like. This question, once the object (victim) and subject (perpetrator) are fleshly merged, becomes a wondering at what the violence feels like which spans both bodies involved and no longer constructs the violence performed as an act of dominant aggression over submissive victimization based on a matrix involving single subjects. The presence of perpetrator over the absence of (the subjectivity of) victim is compromised into a hyper-presence of a new body altogether. By reading the violence in Paura as a shifting of the borders between the single body’s inside and outside, and the subject and object’s bodies, violence changes from an act by one upon another, to a tactical fascination with the phantasm of visceral experience unattainable in biology external from the screen. The borders of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are affect-ively re-negotiated for the viewer. The limits of the viewer’s body are redistributed through visceral response and tension. Hence the viewer is made aware of two things. First her/his own inter-corporeal borders; the stratification of the body, or the organ-ed body becoming the Body-without-organs through making visible a re-stratification where organs are privileged not for their function but they way they look and the place they are seen i.e. outside not inside. Second the viewer is aware of the rupture of borders of body and mind, object of desire and subject desiring. The breakdown of these borders so that the self encompasses its own others while the other is ingested literally into the self avoids trite versions of psychoanalytic infantile incorporation through transforming rather than reducing the viewer. Instead of the viewer yearning for the breast and the pre-symbolic body as a result of watching zombies eat people and organs becoming spectacle, the viewer leaves previous ideals of incorporation - these are organs not breast milk, they are hardcore abject not nourishing - and becomes a re-stratified version of a desiring body. The mother is not the object of desire; non-specific flesh and feelings hitherto not experienced are the desired ‘things’, no longer object or predictable act because no longer recognizable as singular or specific to a person, kind of person or even fetish disembodied part of a person. The pre-symbolic body is not the viewing body because the body has been made multi-layered rather than formless; it is unbound not through a return to infantility but through a relinquishing of stratification, which begins by a turning-upside down of the corporeal strata hierarchy. For this reason the unbound body in horror must be a post-oedipal body rather than a pre-oedipal. But the post-oedipal body viewing is also post-oedipal in its repudiation of oedipal systems of desire because of the making other within the self and the object of desire being both unformed and abject.

Pleasure exceeds value, morality or singular forms of body because it defies those elements that constitute such in culture. Pleasure cannot be valuable or value-less if it cannot be predicted; it cannot be moral, amoral or immoral because each affect and experience demands unique and specific consideration, and may never recur; it cannot refer to any one kind of body or bodies, be they dominant or minoritarian because its specificity, in space and in the body’s affective interaction with the world and itself, creates a version of pleasure unique to any one moment. Feeling pleasure as a continuum which encompasses both traditional versions of its effect and their binary opposites means that only specific consideration of pleasure allows its full theoretical potential to begin. These situatedly specific considerations exist as moments in time and space as lines of flight. When pleasure occurs as disgust, as an indication of the multi-plateaued layers of the flesh, even as a state of rest, it compels the subject to exist at a new point. Each new point could be a point of setting off along a line of flight. Horror films renegotiate traditional versions of pleasure, and of the body, without shifting the flesh into interaction with other bodies. For this reason, depictions of horror, violence and gore are purely affect-ive and do not compromise the ethical consideration of an other body. Pleasure taken in them is a forced consideration of traditional versions of value placed on the nature of pleasure as being some beneficial ‘thing’, rather than a specific quality of motion or momentum, neither explicitly beneficial nor malevolent. At best these images force a consideration of the otherness of our own bodies and this itself is a line of flight upon which we may travel.