Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.3 On fear of the [extra-national] other
narratives, each with its own alter-protagonist (Otto in the frame narrative and Fritz [A short contextualisation for the characters will have to come earlier in the study] in the nested narrative – two characters perhaps amalgamating in the unnamed protagonist of LAZombie).
LaBruce’s use of the textual double and split narrative fragments – splits – how the viewer
‘reads’ the films. The various (sometimes disparate) modes of narrativization, which stretch the skin of the film close to breaking point, alienating-intriguing the viewer to the extent that our emotional and affective investment in the film is at risk of being compromised. These pairings of identification/alienation affects, the push-pull of arousal and repulsion, have a specific effect on the viewer, as it mirrors social process of inclusion and exclusion, and BLAB necessitate looking anew/askew at the relation between abject desire, genre/film-structural considerations, and the inclusion-exclusion pas de deux of citizenship. Based on a shift in textual engagement, from asking what the films mean, to asking what really happens to the viewer of LaBruce’s films [a second, nested, provocation: what happens when that rather generic-vague 'viewer' is give the adjective “Afrikaner”?] and how it activates a re-seeing of the unsettling, politicising, bodily engagement of queer film.
attempts to make bodily filial sense of something that is inherently about visceral, socius-based alliance.
Stern/Johnson’s model of contoured affect posits that we “conceptualize and reason the ways we do because of the kinds of bodies we have, the kinds of environments we inhabit, and the symbolic systems we inherit, which are themselves grounded in our embodiment (Johnson, 1999:99). Symbolic systems find their outflow in literature, art, film – all creative texts – and so shape our (perception of) reality: Our embodied patterns of understanding “determine the ways we can make sense of and reason about things” (ibid.). Through the use of metaphor and metonymy, “we extend image schemas with their spatial logic to structure abstract concepts and inference. Our rationality is embodied in the sense that it is built on and grows out of these affect-rich image schemas” (ibid.). We thus bring affect-rich schemata – lived through the body – to our viewing of these films, and blend this with our expectations of the generic conventions (i.e., the frame of reference built on how our bodies responded to this type of text in the past) of the film. This impacts on the way we construe meaning in a film, illuminated by our continued, collective thinking on macro (extra-textual) aspects, such as the implication of genre, the role of the auteur in changing/effecting the spectator’s expectations, and the nature of the effect of pornography.
But what exactly is it about the nature of queer film as “genre” that allows such (re)codings of pleasure, desire, intimacy? What characteristic of filmic (as opposed to literary or cultural, or even audiovisual or cinematic) representations of the desiring/abject body allows such bodies to be seen as a “means of challenging the explanatory limitations of social
constructionist/discursive accounts of experience” (Hook, 2006:15) through the becoming-abject of the filmic queer body? (And to what extent does genre or oeuvre play a role in this?)
Steven Shaviro starts his 2006 analytical opus on the cinematic body with a seemingly- throwaway reminder: “Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame” (2006:viii).
He names three pairs of affective-contoured response (desire-fear, pleasure-disgust,
fascination-shame) – all three pairs have the same dynamic at heart: an affective pull and push.
It is our response to affective contours, as much as our expectation of generic conventions, that come to define the texture of a genre. Awareness of genre can be defined as that moment
“when a noticeable unit of literary texts adhering to a similar literary convention becomes established” (Smit-Marais, 2012:11). Swanepoel, however, warns that “what constitutes this [...]
is not standardised” (2016: 42). Genre thus becomes that categorical coding which we as
viewers expect of a text, according to a blend of established conventions, contours of affect, and our own expectational schemata – as lived through the body.
LaBruce’s films seem to resist an easy categorical placement in terms of genre. It is not (necessarily) pornographic, but it is definitely a film that sets out to arouse (physically). In the same vein, it is not (necessarily) a horror film, but it is definitely a film that aims to repulse. Not surprisingly, both these affective responses focus on the body. Because of the focus on a visceral response, we could typify LaBruce’s films as films within the body genre, which then implies two things: Firstly, Christiansen (2011:312) states that in the body genre, “the film jerks at the spectator’s emotions and intends to overpower the spectator, which is in essence the opposite of classical film identification’s powerful spectator in control of the images”. This potentially intensifies the fragmentary identification detailed previously. Secondly, it is exactly through affect that “the boundaries between spectator/reality and representation are collapsed moving [sic] beyond the division which representation itself implies” (ibid.:314). Representation implies that there exists a boundary between the viewer and the text, but this boundary is
problematized in the body genre, because of the intense affective responses – in the case of LaBruce’s queerzombie films, of attraction and repulsion – working in on the viewer’s body.
Within the logic of LaBruce’s filmic universe, zombies can’t be citizens because they refuse to accept the invisibility associated with death (even, as I'd argue, here bodily death is a metaphor for social death) and continue to engage in sex after they are (socially) dead (i.e. after they’ve contracted the ‘purple plague’).
This connects the (sexually-politized) body in front of the screen with the (queerly engaging) bodies on screen; In this way, LaBruce’s lexicon of intimacy is also an articulation of national belonging through abjectivity. Over the years, the zombie has come to be a rather useful (and, perhaps, overused) trope, and LaBruce positions his fornicating undead figures specifically in terms of the zombie’s long cultural-historical and socio-political baggage. The zombie trope carries material fear of insecurities about empire building, social marginalisation, the fear of the other, and citizenship. Entering the (Western) cultural register during the early years of the previous century, with the American invasion and occupation of Haiti, the zombie was both highly sexualised and vilified through inverse fear and collective guilt projection over the US military’s monstrous behaviour towards the people of Haiti. Leading to Bishop labelling the zombie the “first thoroughly post-colonial creature” (Bishop, 2008:142). In its material history, then, the zombie trope carries the virus of xenophobic and exclusionary thinking, especially of the sexual other.
Fear of the (extra-national) other has proven to be a rather popular pastime, especially it is mixed with salaciousness (as a less threatening coupling of abject plus pleasure): McGee points to the immense popularity of such diverse media as zombie radio drama and zombie Broadway shows in the 1920s and 1930s when “Haiti [was still], for many white Americans, the
paradigmatic exotic Other” (McGee). Further colonial and racist traces are seen in, for example,
how Wade Davis writes in Passage of Darkness: The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie, that (quote) “For Americans, in particular, Haiti was like having a little bit of Africa next door, something dark and foreboding, sensual and terribly naughty.”
In our current era, zombie culture is experiencing a renaissance in response to renewed, this time global, fears and insecurities. Zombies had become almost blank texts onto which we project social anxiety about globalisation (and terrorism). New era, new anxieties, new (material) projections. In more recent zombie films from the US, “the infected are no longer considered Americans, but have become unwelcome immigrants, former citizens who have been
‘thirdworldized’” according to Wald (2008:61). This is not only the case in American film though:
Ancuta’s (2016) analysis of the zombie trope in Thai horror films indicates how these narratives are built on “foreignness and the tensions between what is local (Thai) and what is not”
(2016:35) relying heavily on newer tropes of inter-nation-al racial stereotyping. It is clear that the zombie sub-genre, which has since its inception been predicated on notions of (social) inclusion and exclusion, has now explicitly begun to engage with the idea of citizenship, specifically with the idea of the zombie as cypher of non-citizenship.