Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture [Paperback]

Annalee Newitz (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 223 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press; annotated edition edition (July 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822337452
ISBN-13: 978-0822337454
Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 15.5 x 1.4 cm
Shipping Weight: 249 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #655,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

"Pretend We're Dead sets our monsters free of the dank laboratory of psychosexual studies and sends them rampaging across the landscape of economic reality. A sweeping, liberating, and wonderfully readable book." Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book "Of all the modern (and postmodern) culture commentators, Annalee Newitz has the perfect blend of a fan's unabashed enthusiasm and a true critic's engaged, iconoclastic insights and questions. Casual and smart, bold yet breezy, Pretend We're Dead won't just make you take a second look at the landscape of modern horror--it'll make you look at modern consumerist life (and death) with fresh eyes."--James Rocchi, editor in chief of cinematical.com and film critic for CBS-5 San Francisco

Product Description

In "Pretend We're Dead", Annalee Newitz argues that the slimy zombies and gore-soaked murderers who have stormed through American film and literature over the past century embody the violent contradictions of capitalism. Ravaged by overwork, alienated by corporate conformity, and mutilated by the unfettered lust for profit, fictional monsters act out the problems with an economic system that seems designed to eat people whole. Newitz looks at representations of serial killers, mad doctors, the undead, cyborgs, and individuals mutated by their involvement with the mass media industry. Whether considering the serial killer who turns murder into a kind of labour by mass producing dead bodies, or the hack writers and blood-thirsty actresses trapped inside Hollywood's profit-mad storytelling machine, she reveals that each creature has its own tale to tell about how a free-wheeling market economy turns human beings into monstrosities. Newitz tracks the monsters spawned by capitalism through B-movies, pulp fiction, Hollywood blockbusters, and American literary classics, looking at their manifestations in works such as Norman Mailer's 'true life novel' "The Executioner's Song"; the short stories of Isaac Asimov and H. P. Lovecraft; the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and Marge Piercy; writing about the serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; and, movies including "Modern Times" (1916), "Donovan's Brain" (1953), "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "RoboCop" (1987), "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), and "Artificial Intelligence: A.I." (2001). Newitz shows that as literature and film tell it, the story of American capitalism since the late nineteenth century is a tale of body-mangling, soul-crushing horror.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Provocative!, Aug 7 2006

By Dave Alber - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Paperback)

Pretend We're Dead by Annalee Newitz explores pop culture images of monsters as metaphors for experiences within American-style capitalism. Her premise is stated in her introduction, "Capitalism, as its monsters tell us more or less explicitly, makes us pretend we're dead in order to live. This pretense of death, this willing sacrifice of our own lives simply for money, is the dark side of our economic system" (6.)

The following chapters of this energetic, erudite, and sometimes hilarious study of American pop culture are dedicated to five types of popular monsters, which Annalee shows to be projections of capitalist fears. The monsters are: Serial Killers, Mad Doctors, The Undead, Robots, and Mass Media. The final chapter ends this study of pop culture by reminding us that within this system, we are after all, "consumers" of images and cultural forms, which only exist to terrify us.

A fun, yet important book!

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