Touching an “Authentic” Swastika

[7 minute read]

CW: Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Swastikas

I’m currently writing this blog post from a hotel room in Durham, N.C. I’m here over Spring Break to do some archival research at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers live here, and it is an overwhelming and expansive collection. The collection guide here shows a preview of the breadth and depth of the papers in the archive.

This is my first time doing archival research. It is amazing.

It is hard for me to put into words why I like it so much, but I want to share an experience I had while here at the archive.

(I am still learning about archival research, and I know that all the unpublished material in the collection is under the copyright of Dr. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s daughter. So I won’t be sharing anything too specific here, and of course won’t be sharing any photographs or scans of my work.)

I am looking at Folder 3 of Box 19, described on the finding guide as containing

Officials documents including a Polish citizenship document tracking movement between Germany and Poland; Anmelde-Buch (enrollment book) which lists several of Heschel’s professors at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems zu Berlin including Leo Baeck , Ismar Elbogen, and Julius Güttman; Arbeitsbuch, which lists Heschel’s professional training in Frankfurt am Main; Heschel’s Ausweiskarte (identification card) at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentems; and a certificate (Zeugnis) for the Deutches Institut für Ausländer an der Universität Berlin which attests to Heschel’s satisfactory completion of requirement at Realgymnasium in Vilna.[1]

I have earbuds in my ears and am half-listening to a podcast episode I’ve listened to about a hundred times before as I carefully, and nervously, flip through the materials. I feel a bit like an imposter. I wonder if everyone else here has done plenty of archival research before. They probably have lots of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and may even have jobs. They are probably almost done with their dissertations, and even their first books.

I smile as I look through the materials surrounding Heschel’s early academic education in Berlin. I feel almost proud of Heschel for these early academic achievements, as if I knew him personally. I continue flipping through these materials. I flip another page over and look down and – freeze.

There is a small book, it looks about the size of a passport, staring up at me. It is an official document. Arbeitsbuch, it reads. In the center of it is a crest, an eagle perched atop a swastika.

***

I knew that Heschel fled Nazi Germany. I knew this. I suppose if I had been asked if Heschel had any official documentation from the Reich, I would have shrugged and said, “Well, probably.” But seeing this document – and seeing it nestled in a folder amongst more cheerful documents about Jewish Studies in Berlin made my stomach turn.

When I gingerly touched this document I thought to myself that this was the first “authentic swastika” I had ever touched. The first swastika was on a document made by The Third Reich.

***

In the days leading up to my trip to Durham, I restarted playing the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In it, the Nazis won WWII. You play a supersoldier with an artificially engineered body trying to start a revolution in the United States, which now operate as a colony of the Reich.

Image found at https://www.gamespot.com/wolfenstein-ii-the-new-colossus/images/

My husband was originally interested in the game after it generated some Internet buzz. Apparently, some White Nationalists were disturbed about a game centering on killing Nazis. Adi Robertson, writing for The Verge, published an article entitled “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.”

Robertston writes:

“The saddest thing about Wolfenstein’s YouTube comments isn’t the offended white supremacists. It’s the fact that in 2017 you can write “I can’t wait to kill some Nazis in a video game” as though that’s a meaningful political stance — which is exactly what a lot of the most popular comments are about. The second saddest thing is that you’ll be proven right by someone named “Pepe Von Europa.”[2]

And it’s true that the game is very overt with its message that killing Nazis in order to overthrow their regime is moral. As Kallie Plagge writes in her review of the game:

“Above all else, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus takes a very hard stance on the righteousness of killing Nazis. It never falters, not once asking whether violent resistance is the wrong way to fight back against oppression – and the game is stronger for it.”[3]

And so, while playing the video game, I “killed” Nazis. A lot of them. And I saw a lot of swastikas. Some were on people I “killed,” others were on buildings I “crept” by, and still others were on “official” materials I “found” and “examined” in the game. Occasionally the swastikas even seem to shout out to you: all bold and startling against a bright white or black backdrop.

This swastika is different than the other swastikas in that game, I thought to myself when I saw the swastika on Heschel’s Arbeitsbuch. It’s more… subdued. The lines are thinner. It looks… ordinary. And it was ordinary, in a horrifying way. It was a piece of official documentation, and even though it had a swastika on it, it still looked like something bureaucratic, ordinary, and everyday.

And in all its ordinariness, in all its slight bizarre delicateness, it was terrifying. Much more terrifying and startling, somewhat paradoxically, that the swastikas that seem to bombard you as you play Wolfenstein II.

After I saw it, I needed to step out of the reading room and get a drink of water.

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[1] Description of File 3, Box 19. Guide to the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers, 1880, 1919-1998 and undated. https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/heschelabraham/#aspace_ref478_be8

[2] Robertson, Adi. “Watching internet Nazis get mad at Wolfenstein II is sadder than the game’s actual dystopia.” The Verge. June 12, 2017. Accessed March 14 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/12/15780596/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-alt-right-nazi-outrage.

[3] Plagge, Kallie. “Rise: Review of Wolfenstein II: The New Collossus.” Gamespot. October 26, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2018. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-review/1900-6416796/.

Time and Authenticity in Visions and Images of Abraham Joshua Heschel

[7 minute read]

“Can we have snack right now? When we get back to the classroom?”

“We usually have snack at 10:00 or 10:30am. It’s only 9:30am now. Don’t you think you’ll want it later?” I ask one of my students doubtfully, walking beside him as we head towards the seventh-grade classroom at Temple Concord. We have just come from T’fila – the communal thirty-minute prayer-time that begins weekly Sunday school.

“I’m hungry now! Can I have two snacks? One now, one later at 10:30am?” the student continues. Twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds have a fast metabolism.

“Maybe. We will see if there is enough…” I say, hoping that there will be enough snacks for those who want two. Sure enough, there is – most of the students don’t want an extra snack. I hand over the snack-sized bags of pretzels for the hungrier students and begin the class. We are talking about the Holocaust today.

As I ushered my students down the hallway of the religious school wing at Temple Concord, we passed the following poster:

Masters Series©2012, Paula Scher, Quote: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Harold Grinspoon Foundation, West Springfield, MA.

Most days I walked by it unawares, busy with telling students not to run or going over the lesson plan for the day in my head. But it was always there, something that we looked forwards and upwards towards, metaphorically and literally.

The poster depicts a partial photograph of a man walking, with the quote “When I marched in Selma, I felt as though my feet were praying” offset to one side. The quote is by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, speaking about his involvement in, and experience with the famous Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21, 1965.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific writer and thinker, and an important figure to postwar American Judaism. Born in Poland to an important Hasidic family, he was able to escape the Holocaust by way of a visa program organized by Julian Morgenstern, the then-president of the Reform rabbinical college, the Hebrew Union College (for more information, see this link or Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel Dresner’s biography Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness. Information about this book here). Once in America, Heschel taught at the Hebrew Union College and later the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and wrote many influential works about Judaism and religion.

My dissertation projects seeks, in part, to understand how and why the memory of Heschel’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement is so important to contemporary American Jews. This poster, produced by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation’s Voices and Visions projects, is part of a series of posters sold (and in some cases donated) to Jewish communal organizations internationally. Under the tab “Our Vision” on the Voices and Visions website, the site reads “Voices & Visions is about art, about powerful messages, about combining them into posters, about starting conversations, about continuing the Jewish journey” (see this link for more). This poster, created by Paula Scher, is therefore intended to help Jews to “continue their Jewish journey” by way of having transformational conversations and experiences reflecting on the artwork and quote in the poster. The site contains background information and a “conversation guide” for Jewish educators who want to incorporate the poster into a lesson plan (see this link for more). The poster, then, is supposed to not only be a testament to the memory of Heschel’s involvement in the civil rights movement, but is also intended to influence contemporary Jews to think about and reflect upon their Jewish identity in some way.

*_*_*_*

I started this blog post intending to do a visual reading of this poster. A wrench was thrown into my original plan when I realized I had never asked myself an obvious, foundational question about Scher’s graphic art. Does the poster actually use an image of Heschel at the march? Is that really Heschel on the poster? What does it mean if it is? And, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean if it is not?

The most well-known photo of Heschel at the march can be found at this link. In it, a white-haired and bearded Heschel stands between Ralph Bunche and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stands in between Ralph Bunch and Ralph Albernathy (one person away from Heschel). Heschel’s right foot is in exactly the same position as the foot in the poster, albeit seen from another angle. However, in the historical photograph, Heschel is wearing a coat and his arms are linked with his fellow protestors, not simply hanging down as is the case with the poster.

This leads me to conclude that this image is not taken from a photograph of Heschel himself, unless it was taken from a later photograph. (Heschel passed away well before the creation of this poster, in 1972. This poster was made in 2012.)

When I saw the poster for the first time, I assumed it was of Heschel. However, I was a bit of a specialized audience member – I had already graduated with an M.A. in Jewish Thought from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (where Heschel worked himself!) and was therefore accustomed to seeing pictures of him in hallways. I was also already familiar with the quote and Heschel’s involvement in the Selma-Montgomery march.

But for those people not already-in-the-know about the historical background of the quote, the poster may be less clearly about a rabbi named Heschel (the attribution of the quote is quite small on the poster itself).

What is clear on the photo is that the quote is important, and furthermore, that the quote is a quote. The quotation marks are quite large – larger and bolder, in fact, than any of the words themselves! The important thing is that this is a historical quote, that someone from the Jewish community (perhaps it doesn’t even matter who, it matters that it was someone) said this and was therefore at the march in Selma. The graphic of the partial man marching looks old-fashioned (indeed, old-fashioned enough to make me initially think it was an altered photo of Heschel!), also signaling to the viewer the importance of the past-tense-ness of the poster. However, cyan and magenta lines rocket off the borders of the graphic of the man and of the quote, shattering the clean lines of image and making it almost difficult to stare at for too long a period. While this certainly doesn’t make the poster look vintage or of the 1960s, it still doesn’t look quite modern, either. The effect is alluring yet jarring as the temporal setting of the photo is destabilized and the poster becomes hard to look at for a sustained period of time – like a Magic Eye that your eyes just won’t “lock onto” correctly. This happened in our community’s past, the poster seems to whisper (remember, the poster is intended for a primarily Jewish audience) and it can happen again, as well.

I don’t know if any of my 7^th-grade Sunday School students took the time to look and reflect on the poster as they passed by it on their way from the sanctuary to the classroom. I’m a bit embarrassed now to admit that I never incorporated the poster into any of my lesson plans. However, I noticed it, and it had a transformational effect on me, at least – it helped me choose the topic of my dissertation.

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Maria Carson is a Dissertation Fellow at the Humanities Center at Syracuse University. She is a PhD Candidate in the Religion department at Syracuse University, working on her dissertation about the life, thought, and political activism of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Her work blends together cultural studies, affect theory, and Jewish thought and cultural studies. She has an M.A. in Jewish Thought from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a B.A. in Religious Studies from DePaul University, and a B.F.A. in Theatre Management from The Theatre School at DePaul University.

Spatial Representations

 

[5-7 minute read]

When going on vacation these days, we take our cameras (or phones) with us to commemorate the places we visited, and the adventures that we embarked on. Contemporary phones and photos offer a way to share our experiences with friends and loved ones in a manner that allows them to imagine they were on the trip with us. Whether it is curating a collection on Flickr or Facebook, or even circling around a TV set hooked up to a DSLR, sharing pictures of where we have been and what we have seen enables viewers to put themselves in our shoes, and imagine themselves in our company. In this sense, others vicariously embody the same spaces we once did. Of course, what must be remembered is that behind every photograph is the person taking the picture. In this way, the photograph is not necessarily an accurate representation of an unmediated space, but rather an intentionally selected perspective. Think of your Instagram account – each photograph has a specific angle, filter, and caption to guide your followers into seeing you how you wish to be seen.

My interest in photos and vacations is actually just a thinly veiled obsession with space and spatial formations.[1] The type of space that can send me into an existential crisis (or epiphany, if we’re feeling generous) is the space that bodies occupy. I’m intrigued by how our bodies occupy spaces, and how we come to understand the type of spaces certain bodies are either allowed to, or barred from, occupying. Think of your friends describing that one place where people get drinks in that one part of town as “the gay bar.” The bar’s designation as a “gay place” invites bodies with certain orientations (notably queer) and repulses others. In fact, in this example we discover something curious: spaces can make different bodies experience different emotions and feelings.

However, as an Early Modern scholar, my obsession with space uses a slightly different framework than these contemporary examples. Instead of local gay bars that certain straight male acquaintances would deny feeling uncomfortable attending, or a series of photos from that person you knew in undergrad who decided to vacation some different country for the fact that “it sounded cool and was different,” I work with texts.

Well no, they didn’t have SMS back in sixteenth and seventeenth century either; I work textual evidence such as travel writings and plays. And yes, I can see where this might be confusing, “Tyler, how do you study space when you just read books?” Well the thing is that even within texts we have representations of travel and different spaces. We can see who is traveling in narratives such as Adriaen Van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland (1656), as well as how other lands are imagined such as in Thomas Gainsford’s The Glory of England (1618). We can even see imagined responses to being shipwrecked in foreign lands in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1609).

Thankfully there are multiple social theorists who have spent an incredible amount of time conceptualizing what we mean when we say “space,” and even how space is produced. It is from theorists such as Lefebvre, Certeau, and Soja that we can begin to understand how it is possible to use the textual to study the spatial. Like a text, Lefebvre says that space can be read, decoded, and interpreted.[2] Certeau finds that the characteristics of any particular space are not stable, but in fact are produced through repeated performances.[3] As an extension of these assertions, Soja conceptualizes space being both real and imaginative.[4] So, when I read texts like A Description of New Netherland and The Glory of England, I consider what it means for readers to be reproducing, or re-performing, the spatial formations within the texts. I will ask, and attempt to explore the following questions: how do particular imaginations of certain spaces within these texts orient the readers towards certain bodies and spaces? What might the performance of courtly spaces within a text such as Twelfth Night inform us about the affects and feelings about certain courtly bodies?

Please join me this month as we explore the military exploits of an English soldier and his representation of the Ottomans, a colonist’s relationship to beavers in the New Netherlands, and the strange erotic nostalgia within courtly performances.

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[1] While space as in space space – like outer space – is cool for its own reasons, that is not the type of space that I mean here.

[2] Lefebvere, Henry The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Malden: Blackwell. 1991.

[3] Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life [Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984].

[4] Soja, Edward. Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999

Tyler Smart, an MA student in English at Syracuse University, is primarily interested how space produces certain subjectivities, locally and transculturally, in literary and cultural imagination. Other research interests include cross-cultural influences, queer theory and the history of sexuality, subjectivity, phenomenology, eco-criticism, and post-humanism.

‘Build That Wall!’: Studies in the 21st-Century Plague Zombie

[10 minute read]

In this month’s posts for Metathesis, I have been looking at how the metaphorical deployment of epidemic disease operates, and how we might understand the metaphorical function of plague zombies in contemporary texts. Why is it that the figure of the plague zombie features so prominently in the twenty-first-century imagination? If the plague zombie is a vehicle for addressing social issues, how have plague zombie narratives confronted the zombie threat? Of course, the traditional method for dealing with zombies is simply to kill them. While this method might work when zombies are a minority, when the zombies outnumber survivors, they can be dangerous and difficult to deal with. Often, the best solution for survivors is to find or build structures to separate themselves from the living dead. These structures are reinforced with the belief that those within are safe, and those outside are threats. This week’s post focuses on the construction and failure of such barriers, and their centrality to the plague zombie narrative.

This use of the zombie as a simple “vehicle” for larger social critique is central to many of the texts that comprise the explosion of “plague zombie” narratives in the new millennium. Some of the most acclaimed texts of this period include Robert Kirkman’s 2003 comic book series The Walking Dead and its AMC television series adaptation that began in 2010; Max Brooks’ book The Zombie Survival Guide, also published in 2003, along with its follow up novel World War Z (2006), which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Brad Pitt in 2013.[1] In each of these “plague zombie” universes, how survivors choose to socially respond to the zombie epidemic occupies the central narrative concerns of the text. In such stories, zombies themselves appear as deadly environmental hazards to be mitigated; they operate as a collective metaphor for existential threats to society and humanistic values in modern society, as well as threats to the lives of individual survivors.

In both The Walking Dead and Max Brooks’ World War Z, as with many other zombie narratives, physical infrastructure is important for managing survivors and zombies alike. Zombies, for all their persistence, tend to have problems with doors and walls. In the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes and his rag-tag band of survivors ramble about the Georgia landscape in search of architectural as well as social stability. In most cases, the former is prized over the latter. The Southern U.S. setting plays a prominent role in The Walking Dead, and the racial and economic tensions of the South are reproduced in the movement of Grimes’s migrant group. Whereas the urban center of Atlanta has been completely overrun by the dead, the plantation-esque farm is enveloped in a surreal calm.

An overhead shot of the zombie-infested Atlanta streets in The Walking Dead Season 1

The main residence of Hershel Greene’s Farm in The Walking Dead Season 2

This survivalist reimagining of the urban-rural racial and economic divide values isolationism and segregation. In season 3 of the series, Grimes and his group find sanctuary in a prison, whose labyrinthine walls provide layers upon layers of security from the zombies who stalk its fortified perimeter. However, after developing a feud with a nearby town of survivors, the prison becomes a constant reminder of the limits and dangers, as well as the constant state of isolation, that survivors face because of the outbreak.

Survivors contemplating the prison in The Walking Dead comic series

This narrative inversion turns the prison from a place of punishment and entrapment into a place of refuge and freedom. However, when a flu outbreak within the prison coincides with siege from without by a competing group of survivors, the prison and must be abandoned.

The centrality of security to The Walking Dead’s exploration of the urban-rural/town-prison divisions underscores a key theme of zombie narratives: population control. The threat of the zombie isn’t just in its mindless cannibalism or its role as a vehicle for a deadly contagion – the zombies’ power, and their threat, is in their overwhelming numbers. The disease they carry, whatever its fictional genesis, harbors a nearly universal ability to transform individuals—people with their own individual lives and narratives—into singular, homogenous, monsters. The epidemic empties the infected person of their identity and replaces their individuality with the terrifying singular hunger of the zombie. Through this process, zombies become a figure of contagious otherness; they are the once-minority that has become the now-majority threatening the stability of society and the existence of survivors. The plague zombie becomes a way to play out the fearful tensions of a society terrified of being overrun by those beyond our borders.

This is especially true when ethnic and racial tensions are made an overt aspect of the zombie narrative. In Brooks’ World War Z, Israel’s controversial partition wall is reframed as a barrier against the zombie outbreak, and the Palestinian people are invited into the protected space of the settler colonial nation that once denied their political existence. In the novel, the significance of the partition wall is inverted. That which once stood as a symbol of division and colonial expansion quickly converts into a nation-encasing quarantine barrier, and becomes a symbol for unity and reconciliation.

Survivors entering Jerusalem in World War Z (2013)

This is a condescending and problematic rendering of the Israel-Palestine conflict in that it places Israeli military-nationalism in a role to act as the benevolent saviors of the unprepared Palestinians. This unbalanced rendering is made more apparent and troubling in the 2013 film adaptation. During one of the film’s most dramatic scenes, the sound of singing Palestinian refugees incites the zombies outside of the wall to pile over and subsume both the wall and those it protects. The zombies construct their own structure, a sort of zombie-ladder, which allows them to quickly overrun the now-trapped citizens of the city. The organic, shifting, and adaptive structure of the zombie-pile is markedly distinct from the solid and immovable infrastructure of the partition wall, and attributes a certain vivacious, almost instinctual creativity to the zombie menace. The failure of the partition wall to stop the organic flow of bodies from one space to another is rendered as catastrophic, and the zombies themselves seem to move not as individuals, but as a massive singular organism.

Enraged zombies form their own type of structure to climb the reimagined partition wall in World War Z (2013)

By imagining the racial and ethnic “other” as a zombie or potential zombie, these narratives illustrate the stakes of the social issues lying just below the surface of plague zombie narratives. If we understand plague zombies as vehicles for larger social issues, narratives like The Walking Dead and World War Z show us the problems that attend the safety of isolation and exclusion. The walls within these texts represent the faith our society places in structural safety –be that the division of nations and ideologies as in the partition wall of World War Z, or in the medical capitalism of the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil (see last week’s post for more about Resident Evil). When societies build walls to keep imaginary threats at bay, it comes at the cost of innocent lives. Taking another look at the plague zombie narrative asks us to consider the extremes to which society will go for an ultimately false sense of security. These stories also ask us to imagine how we might treat each other under the worst of circumstances, and how we might reimagine society differently in the wake of its collapse. Of course, these narratives also show us how visions of utopia inevitably turn into twisted realities of isolationism, segregation, and violence.

These texts show us how systems and structures designed to isolate us from the problems of the world may comfort us in times of existential crisis. But ultimately, the metaphorical and material walls appearing to protect us become the cages that keep us from moving beyond the boundaries of our own fears and comforts.

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[1] I would also add that Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later played an important role in the revival of the zombie, but I won’t be discussing that film here.

Know Your Zombie: Understanding the Living Dead

[7 minute read]

Last week I discussed the use of contagion and metaphor, and mentioned how zombies can serve as “vehicles” for the metaphor of contagious disease. This week I continue my discussion of zombies, but before diving in, I want to draw a distinction between the two major representations of zombies in popular culture: what I somewhat reductively will refer to as the “Voodoo Zombie” and the “Plague Zombie.”

Although zombies have become somewhat synonymous with the spiritual practice of Voodoo in popular culture, the spiritual practices many of us refer to indiscriminately as “voodoo” have a rich and complex historical, spiritual, and cultural background far exceeding their limited representation in much of U.S. culture. In many instances, Voodoo involves casting spells of protection rather than curses, although it would be equally inaccurate to say that curses and other violent intent do not play some part of voodoo. Voodoo has also played an important role in historical movements of political resistance and cultural revolution, which has led to its vilification by many colonizing populations. The zombie figure is intertwined with both of these components—magical and cultural—and, like other aspects of this complex spirituality, has been largely distorted by popular culture’s appropriation of it.

The cover of Wade Davis’s book.

The Voodoo zombie is, in many ways, the “original” zombie. This incarnation of the zombie emerges out of the traditions and spiritual practices of Haitian voodoo. It represents a person who has died, or was near death, and has been resurrected by a “bokor” or sorcerer. One of the most famous (or infamous) modern Voodoo practitioners was the late Max Beauvoir, known as the “Voodoo Pope,” who claimed to know Voodoo priests who had resurrected the dead. Before his death in 2015, Beauvoir introduced anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and Harvard professor Wade Davis to a man who claimed to have been dead in 1962, but was resurrected to work as a slave on a sugar plantation. Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) chronicles his search to understand the botanical recipe of the “zombie powder” used to intoxicate and control alleged victims of zombification. In 1988, this book was adapted into a Wes Craven horror film of the same name.

The poster for its 1988 film adaptation by famed horror director Wes Craven.

The Voodoo zombie is tied to specific cultural practices and geographies (for example, Haitian Voodoo), and so the contextual “meaning” of the zombie is specific and discrete. Unlike their contagious cousins, which began to appear in popular culture late into the twentieth century, Voodoo zombies are not aimless, shambling corpses; they are people transformed into purposeful creatures. Voodoo practitioners like those described by Beauvoir and Davis resurrect the dead for specific reasons, including but not limited to slave labor, control, or revenge. Voodoo zombies are personal, medicinal, and spiritual; they do not appear in hordes, their state is not contagious, and their place between life in death is mediated and maintained by the sorcerer who controls them. They can even recover from their state of zombification, and may return to their justifiably surprised and horrified friends and family.

Anthropological works such as Davis’s and popular films such as George A. Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead are in part responsible for introducing the zombie figure to popular culture. However, the zombie as we know it now has undergone radical mutation from its origins in the Voodoo zombie figure, becoming what I’ll refer to as the “plague zombie.”

This type of zombie emerged from, but radically alters the trajectory of the original zombie myth, and became an increasingly powerful feature of contemporary horror texts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While the Voodoo zombie’s cultural specificity and its conjuror’s intentions for it make for a rather rigid metaphorical reading, the metaphorical and interpretative pliability of the plague zombie has made it an adaptive and increasingly popular trope of the new millennium. Recalling last week’s discussion of I.A. Richard’s “tenor-vehicle” model as a way of understanding metaphor, a zombie operates as a “vehicle” allowing us to form connections between what the living dead are (the reanimated corpses of strangers, friends, and neighbors) and what they represent (hunger, contagion, mindless consumption, loss of control, and a disruption of the natural process of life and death).

The cover of Capcom’s Resident Evil (1996)

The popularity of the plague zombie began to rise in the 1980s and ‘90s in the wake of the devastating HIV pandemic, and the emergence of deadly new viruses such as Ebola, Marburg, SARS, and MERS; it reached a fever pitch in the late ‘90s and first decade of the 2000s. One of the most popular and enduring depictions of the “plague zombie” was the third-person horror videogame Resident Evil (1996), a franchise that has spawned twenty-nine video games across multiple platforms, six feature films, four animated films, seven novels, and a comic book series. In the Resident Evil franchise, the central narrative conflict is the Umbrella Corporation’s creation and not-so-accidental release of the “T-Virus.” Players, viewers, and readers must unpack the bureaucratic and capitalistic functions of Umbrella Corp to understand why they released the virus, who helped them, and how to cure or mitigate the impending viral apocalypse. As with many plague zombie narratives, the central conflict of Resident Evil isn’t that the dead are rising from their graves to stalk the living, but that there are arcane political, medical, and economic forces that would permit (or encourage) the advent of a zombie epidemic.

An in-game promotional advertisement for the fictional Umbrella Corporation. The tag line “Quality Medical Care You Can Trust Since 1968” is not only a sarcastic jab at the advertising style of pharmaceutical corporations, but also an allusion to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which was released in 1968.

The threat to social stability that zombies nearly always embody is the “tenor” of their metaphor. The contagion or plague zombies carry and transmit connects the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor together, connecting the abject horror of living dead to issues of social cohesion, security, and medical ethics among the living. In plague zombie narratives, how the ever-present survivors of the zombie epidemic respond to their situation is always as important, if not more so, than the existence of the zombies themselves. Next week I will be discussing one particular trope of the plague zombie narrative: the wall. Walls separate survivors of zombie epidemics from the living dead that stalk them, but they also separate survivors from each other and create material and metaphorical divisions in post-apocalyptic society. Tune in next week for a discussion of how the walls we build to protect us can become the cages that entrap us.

Scholarship and Affect: Merging Critical and Fan Identities

[7-10 minute read]

Take an adventure with me through my affective and critical experiences with a few texts I encountered during my first year and a half of my Ph.D. program:

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I am sitting in the theatre in the last showing of the night for Star Wars: Rogue One. I have just come from my house where I have been drinking a bit of wine with friends. I am happily relaxed after a rather arduous first semester of Ph.D. study. It’s December, Christmas is coming on quickly, and as an early present, I get another Star Wars film.

Thirty minutes into the film, the protagonist, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), navigates through city streets on a desert planet, searching for her childhood mentor. Her companion, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), becomes increasingly agitated, and when Jyn questions him, he says the city “is about to blow.” Moments later, a tank full of Stormtroopers rumbles down the street with Imperial propaganda chiming out of loud speakers affixed to the machine: The Empire is a beacon for “truth and justice,” saviors to a city being terrorized by a radical revolutionary.

I nearly choke on a mouthful of popcorn.

Seconds later, when these “radical revolutionaries,” complete with headscarves, suicide-bomb the Stormtroopers, I have lost my place in the fantasy. I’m not a fan watching another Star Wars film. Terms like “Islamophobia” and “Extremists” swirl through my brain alongside Rhetoric and Ideology.

I lean over to Adam: “Well that’s not very subtle.”

He is getting used to my inability to “simply watch” films anymore.

*****

Rewind. It’s November of 2016. I am sitting in a darkened theatre, wearing yellow and grey and black. I feel a squeal rise up in my throat as the familiar theme plays.

I’m back at Hogwarts.

I’m back to being 11, 12, 13, waiting for an owl with a letter that I know won’t come but I still love to make-believe anyway.

The film ends and I’m crying, sniffling, smiling.

Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is the man I want to be. He is gentle, empathetic, fiercely loyal and protective, kind. He feels. He cries.

Look at his beautiful smile at that tiny walking stick critter! (Warner Bros.)

Two days later, and every thinkpiece on my Facebook feed is about his tender, non-normative masculinity.

Part of me wishes I could have written them; part of me is ever so glad that I just reveled in my yellow and grey shirt and smiled with happy tears streaking my face.

*****

Mid-December 2016 again. My husband and I are watching episode one of The Magicians on Netflix.

The main character, Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), starts the episode in a psychiatric ward.

The main character starts the series in a psych ward.

The main character openly struggles with depression.

The main character struggles with depression to the point of committing himself to a psychiatric ward, and he will be our hero.

I’m out of the fantasy.

Minutes later, when Quentin’s best friend, Julia (Stella Maeve), comforts him at a party and pecks him on the cheek as her boyfriend walks into the room, I’m further gobsmacked.

Instead of ire, James (Michael Cassidy) responds with a joke and leaps onto the small twin bed where his girlfriend and Quentin are lying beside each other.

I think of Neurotypicality, Compulsory Jealousy, Toxic Masculinity.

*****

December, 2016. Blizzard releases the Overwatch comic titled “Reflections.” Tracer is officially gay. The Internet loses its mind. Tumblr is an inarticulate mass of squeals.

The panel that launched a thousand flame wars. (Blizzard)

I’m excited about this. It’s about time we have more LGBTQIA+ characters in our popular culture texts. I hold off on darting away to join the bustle of posts about our favorite lesbian time-traveler. Two pages later and I am literally squealing myself:

Hanzo has an undercut! And piercings! And a cowl neck sweater! One of my favorite characters looks not far from my own aesthetic.

Earrings, a upper bridge piercing, and an undercut hairstyle. Merry Christmas! (Blizzard)

I have nothing articulate to say. I feel a flare of imposter syndrome rear up in my chest. Am I really a scholar if I have nothing to say? I should compose something intelligent, praise the company for creating space for non-normative representations, but all I can do is smile and text my other queer friends to ask if they’ve seen it. I remind myself it’s Christmas break, and it’s okay to just love this.

*****

March, 2017. KONG: Skull Island. The military man, Samuel L. Jackson’s Preston Packard, is full of rage. His masculinity is driven by violence, misplaced aggression, and a need to dominate. He tries to kill Kong; I try to feel something other than detached speculation about the root of his rage and what history the film does not reveal to us.

Toxicity

Valor Narratives

PTSD

*****

March, 2017. Beauty and the Beast.

I am so ready for the first representation of a gay man in a feature film.

I am so ready for a peck on the lips between two men, on screen, in a feature film!

I am thrilled with LeFou’s (Josh Gad) fawning over Gaston (Luke Evans).

Gaston has war trauma and unprocessed grief.

Gaston acts out of a place of rage that is only calmed by LeFou’s careful and caring interventions.

LeFou gets 2 seconds of dancing with a random man in the final ballroom scene.

Yes, that is someone’s shoulder nearly blocking our revolutionary “gay moment.” (Disney)

I am annoyed.

I write a blog post about toxic masculinity, trauma, and grief in the film for Metathesis.

I am still annoyed.

*****

March, 2017. Power Rangers.

The yellow ranger is officially a lesbian. Her admission is explicit. It is not seen in a glance on a dance floor packed with people. She openly discusses her orientation with the other rangers. They accept it and no one makes a single fuss about it. I cry during that scene.

The blue ranger is on the autism spectrum. The other rangers value his ability to see the world differently. No one makes a fuss. No one makes a big deal. He is just as much a hero as any of the others.

I’m torn between posting about how amazing the representation in the film was, and how nostalgic and happy it made me. I need to justify my affective experience. I gush about the representation and the animal-shaped mega-bots.

*****

It is June, 2017. The film I’m about to see has been talked about ad nauseum for almost two weeks already.

“The skirts are too short.”

“The heels are not historically accurate.”

“Themyscira can’t be historically accurate.”

“There’s no need for a romance narrative.”

“The romance narrative flies in the face of cultural norms.”

“Gal Gadot is a woman of color.”

“Gal Gadot is most definitely not a woman of color.”

“We need to nuance our terminology when discussing women of color.”

I watch Diana (Gal Gadot) stride into No Man’s Land and my body shoots with gooseflesh. Before she takes more than two steps, I have tears running down my face. This is a woman, striding into No Man’s Land, where no man can stand, and she is marching into it, claiming ground, claiming space. I am weeping before she ducks behind her shield under a hail of bullets.

I do not post about the film. I relish the experience of seeing a woman, clad in armor, marching into No Man’s Land. I imagine how I might have felt to see that film as a child of 12. I weep too for that little child that I was, who never saw Diana make that march.

*****

October, 2017

It’s the Halloween event for Overwatch and that means Halloween skins for the characters.[1] The Halloween and Christmas events are my favorite because the skins tend to be holiday themed and generally fun to look at. I appreciate them with the same part of myself that cried during Fantastic Beasts and Wonder Woman.

Symmetra’s Halloween event skin is a Dragon:

Symmetra’s skin in all its scaled glory. (Blizzard)

But Symmetra is not my first encounter with this skin. I encounter it first as a fan-made modification to the skin, created for one of my favorite characters, a gunslinging cowboy named McCree.[2] The skin is the creation of Twitter user, Loudwindow.

McCree, with a modified dragon skin. (Blizzard Entertainment/Loudwindow)

I immediately retweet this post on Twitter. “I need this Queer McCree skin in my Overwatch life immediately,” I proclaim.

Then I pause for a moment in a bit of horror. Twitter represents my platform for the majority of my academic contacts, where I comment on posts by scholars and critics who I respect (and honestly probably fan over a bit too). My cohort follows me and I follow them. A few of my professors follow me. Here I am reposting a skin from a videogame not because I have something profound or critical to say about it, but because I find it aesthetically pleasing; because a slightly feminized masculine character who I frequently read about in fan fiction looks incredible with a dragon skin and a crown of horns.

I scramble to think of something intelligent to say about it, latching on to the name the creator gave the skin:

“I’m fascinated by how this skin feminizes the character while announcing him as the object of female desire through the Incubus myth.”

I’ve turned my own aesthetic fascination with the object into a sort of critical inquiry, not so much into the skin itself, but my own affective relationship to it. I follow up my pseudo-astute tweet with another: “Less critically, I find this skin incredibly aesthetically pleasing as a queer, androgynous take on my favorite character.” Hopefully I have succeeded in covering over my moment of excessive affect for this skin with some sort of critical commentary.

For days I am troubled by my response. Why did I feel the need to justify my love of this popular text? Is it because it rises out of my own desire and I’ve therefore villainized it, made it dirty with my ever-clinging Evangelical guilt?

While I’m sure this is part of my motivation, one of the many pressures acting on me as I produce the performance of myself as queer scholar and fan and spouse and student and teacher, reflection has made me consider another reason for this response.

In The Limits of Critique,[3] Rita Felski states the following about our scholarly habits of critique:

Critique is a remarkably contagious and charismatic idea, drawing everything into its field of force, patrolling the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. It is virtually synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo . . . For many scholars in the humanities, it is not one good thing but the only imaginable thing . . . To refuse critique . . . is to sink into the mire of complacency, credulity, and conservativism. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? (8)

This description of critique speaks directly to how I experience the compulsion to justify my own affective attachments to texts. How did I come to internalize this need to critique everything? What can I do now that I recognize it? Is this just a symptom of my profession – not unlike the experience of those versed in music who cannot listen to a concert in the same way as someone less knowledgeable in musical theory?

These questions have no answers for or from me at the moment, and I suspect they might be a specter that haunts many in my profession. I have to believe there exists a happy medium between a devotion to the value of critique and an ability to appreciate a text without critiquing it. It remains for me to discover how to straddle the spaces, how to be comfortable with both critical and affective experiences, with texts that leave me speechless, leave me reveling in an excess of experience. As Walt Whitman (another author of the texts I approach more as fan than critic) has said, “I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.”

---

[1] Skins refer to different sets of aesthetic based costumes which you can unlock for your characters via gameplay. They make up the bulk of rewards for continuous play on Overwatch, a fantasy First Person Shooter game from Blizzard Entertainment.

[2] Fan-made content does not exist within the actual game and usually involves gender-bending or character-bending skins that the game has officially released. Character-bending would involve taking a skin made for one character and modifying it to fit another character, while gender-bending refers to taking a skin made for a male-bodied character and modifying it to fit a female-bodied character or visa-versa.

[3] Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

“What more does the Traveler want of Me?”: Destiny 2, Ghaul, and the Sci-Fi Villain

[7-10 minute read]

As its title screen fades to black, Destiny 2 (2017) sets itself up to follow the familiar science fiction trope of moral disambiguation. After destroying the last vestiges of human society on the planet, the new villain of the series – the not so subtly named Ghaul – has just thrown your player avatar off a hovering space craft to plummet toward earth. His final words to you hang in the air, a sinister snarl: “I am Ghaul, and your light…is mine.”

This “light” references the power bestowed on your character by a roving god-like entity known as The Traveler. In the first game, guardians chosen by this entity have the power of light bestowed upon them, granting them exceptional abilities. These powers are granted to them in order to facilitate their fight against the enemy of The Traveler – again, the not subtly named, “The Darkness.” Destiny is not aiming for subtlety in the moral lines that it draws. This idea of clear cut sides, of a “right” side and a “wrong side,” serves to anchor Destiny not only within the genre of science fiction, but within the medium of video games.

Science fiction has a long history of “black and white” narratives. Both Star Wars and Star Trek, arguably the two most popular science fiction texts in 20^th and 21^st century American culture, utilize a rather simplistic moral framework. Star Wars relies on “The Force” with characters falling to either the “light” side or the “dark side.” While the occasional “grey” character may emerge,[1] on the whole, Star Wars falls back on characters that are motivated either by selfish interests (the dark side, the Sith) or general good will and honor (the light side, the Jedi). “Light” side characters in the franchise films (the most widely and frequently consumed Star Wars texts) often receive ample development time on screen, leading to what Murray Smith calls “alignment,” a form of audience identification with a character that results from our exposure to information about that character within the film.[2] The motivations of the texts’ central heroes are made fairly explicit; for example: Luke wants off his home planet, wants to help the mysterious and beautiful Leia from his droid’s recordings, and wants to escape the Empire who murdered his aunt and uncle. However, the major villains of the franchise receive little-to-no attention: Emperor Palpatine is evil because of “reasons,” or simply because he’s Sith.

The Poster for the most recent installment makes the split between good and evil readily apparent. (Lucasfilm/Disney)

Star Trek carries this same tradition: The Borg are defined by their inhumanity, the Klingons and Romulans are aligned with their cultures of violence, imperialism, and war; all alien species that fight against the United Federation of Planets quickly become coded as vicious, violent, and evil. Even when the series investigates the motivations behind its antagonists, there is no question about who we view as villain and hero: Khan’s devotion to slaughter in Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) is reprehensible and unforgivable, even if he is responding to manipulation on the part of the Federation. Struggle between a righteous, noble humanity and a violent alien “other” quintessentially characterizes much of the science fiction that populates our popular culture.

This convention rings even more true for video game narratives where the developers must establish not only the moral framework of the world, but do so in such a manner that motivates the player by interpolating them into this struggle. The Halo (2001-2017) series utilizes humanity vs. The Covenant, and the Mass Effect (2007-2017) series explores the fight between humanity and “the Reapers.” In both cases, the player knows immediately which side they should root for – that is, which side is the victim in need of a hero – because it is the side their avatar fights for within the world of the game. Even in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), which allows players to choose a side in Jedi vs. Sith battles, the Jedi are still coded explicitly as good, and the Sith as evil.

This overwhelming generic convention has followed gamers down the pipeline to their first encounter with the world of Destiny in 2014. The presence of this science fiction trope for moral disambiguation made it easy to buy into the clearly delineated light vs. darkness world of good vs. evil present in the first game. Immediately, within the game’s opening cinematic, players know they are in the right, aligned with the Traveler and his Light against the forces of The Darkness, and justified in the goals of the first-person shooter/ MMO-hybrid: shooting and killing everyone who shoots at you. Narrative turns act in concert with these game mechanics to structure your behavior and pit you against alien “others.” The initial player encounter with aliens in the game, creatures known as The Fallen, is introduced by your robot guide stating that he “needs to find you a gun before the Fallen find you.” From this point forward, information about the various aliens species encountered in the game comes filtered to the player through their robot guide and the various leaders of the human resistance on Earth. Cut scenes within the game focus on the player’s hero, or on members of the human resistance, but never on the aliens. Again, they are evil simply because they are pitted against the hero, and bent on the same goal as the player: to kill rather than be killed. Their motivations remain vague, clothed in the language of “domination” (The Imperial Cabal), “dark ritual” (The Hive), “resource theft” (the scavenging Fallen), and “technological superiority to non-robots” (The Vex). In all cases, the aliens act as violent aggressors, while the humans simply attempt to defend the remaining human population.

With this framework from the first game, our return to the Earth of Destiny feels familiar in the opening moments of Destiny 2. The surprise comes not from a new alien threat, but from the success of this threat to obliterate the majority of humanity’s last bastion on Earth, and to cripple the heretofore invincible character avatar, the guardian. Destiny 2 opens by insisting that the “good” guys might not win this time.

Ghaul prepares to boot the player’s guardian off the Cabal command ship. (Bungie/Activision)

The narrative continues this insistence on mortality in the following scene, reducing the heroic guardian from the first game to a limping, weaponless shell that must navigate the ruins of the Earth outpost. Mechanics force the player to experience this powerlessness alongside their character: stripped of all the powers and abilities that made their guardians super-human, as well as the ability to jump or run, the player instead can only control the direction of their guardian as the figure limps through burning rubble at a crawling pace that stretches the moment out interminably.

Something else is different in this opening sequence as well, a change whose significance becomes clear as the game’s cut scenes begin to unfold. In the beginning cinematic, Ghaul, the player’s new alien enemy, is presented to us with a recognizable face. Up until this point in the series, members of the alien species of The Cabal enemies faced by the guardians have all been helmeted, with a single exception encountered if the player seeks out lore hidden throughout the worlds of the game.

The usual Cabal suspect. (destiny.wikia.com)

In contrast to this, Ghaul’s face is open to us, or at least his eyes and head:

Dominus Ghaul (destiny.wikia.com)

The impact of seeing his face, and of the eye contact made with the camera (and therefore the gaze of the audience) startles the player. In no small part, this rises from the forces of abjection functioning in this moment of reveal.[3] Here, the face of the other, scarred, mangled, red-eyed, and trapped behind a breathing apparatus, nevertheless still looks human in shape. Ghaul still has eyes which gaze at the player the player gazes at him. The barrier of helmet that helped to define the Cabal as “other” more easily for players is torn away, causing an encounter with an abject other that may be closer to the self than the helmet allowed.

This almost “humanizing” moment in the opening of the game serves as prelude to the function of the rest of the narrative. Where the first Destiny centered cut-scenes almost exclusively on characterization for the player-guardian and their companions, Destiny 2 instead focuses half of its cut-scenes on Ghaul and his ongoing dialogue with The Speaker, a human who serves as a sort of voice for The Traveler. During these scenes we discover that Ghaul is motivated toward his conquest of The Traveler’s light not by some abstract evil, but by victimization he suffered as a child coupled with manipulation wrought by his mentor, The Consul, a disgraced Cabal scholar. Born a runt and albino in a culture that prizes physical domination and strength, Ghaul was abandoned to die. Though The Consul saved him, it was only so he could mold him into a tool to use for conquest and destruction. Ghaul’s childhood abandonment clearly still impacts him, regardless of his accumulated power and prestige as the leader of the Red Legion. His continuous plea to The Speaker and The Traveler rises from the insecurity of his childhood trauma, as he calls for them to “see” him: “Do you see, Traveler, all that I have done? Grace me with your light.”

As the game progresses, Ghaul’s desire to be worthy becomes more and more desperate. He begs the Speaker to “help [him] understand,” to reveal to him why the Traveler will not bestow its light on him. Even though he could simply tear the light out of the Traveler and claim it for himself, he insists that the Traveler must recognize him and what he has accomplished, and gift to him the light instead. When The Consul insists that taking the light by force is the only way, Ghaul retorts, “Not for me.” At the surface level, he is driven by selfish thirst for glory and power that we have come to expect from villains, but beneath that, he is an abandoned child seeking to repay his mentor for rescuing him by raining revenge on “an empire that failed him” – and the game makes sure that we, the players, know this. Unlike past Destiny villains, we know what drives Ghaul: not an abstract concept, but a relatable need for acceptance that feels all too human. His final demand of The Speaker reiterates his desire toward worthiness: “Tell me, Speaker. What more does the Traveler want of me?” It is only after this moment that The Consul leverages his power over Ghaul, and questions his loyalty and the value of his word. In the face of failing the man who raised him, the man who “chose” him, Ghaul consents to take the Traveler’s light.

While the end of the video game’s narrative resolves to place Ghaul squarely in the role of the evil villain in order to generate the medium’s essential boss battle and clean narrative closure, this expository work throughout the bulk of the game’s campaign serves a significant purpose. In our current political environment of creeping fascism and nationalism that relies so heavily on rhetoric of “us vs. them,” a genre that bends conventions to serve up a complicated and pitiable villain creates a bold political statement. Ghaul, ostensibly the enemy, reveals his motivations as hubris and a need for vengeance against those who hurt him. He asks us to question our notions of a black and white world. He presents a narrative of moral ambiguity that reflects back on our reality of human experience. He causes us to question our easy moral binaries, and the lines we draw between others and ourselves.

---

[1] Han Solo and Anakin Skywalker both exemplify these “grey-area” characters: Han due to his questionable motivations of wealth rather than honor, and Anakin due to his slaughter of the entire sand tribe rising out of a uncontrolled rage over the violence done to his mother

[2] For an easily accessible overview of Murray Smith’s theories on audience identification see Greg Smith’s chapter, “How do we identify with characters,” from his book What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss, Routledge, 2011.

[3] The term abjection and the theory surrounding it is pulled from Julia Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia UP, 1982.

Hillarie Curtis is a second year Ph.D. student in English at Syracuse University where they study masculinity, monstrosity, censorship, and queer representations in Classic Hollywood films and Popular Culture texts.

Seduction and Devastation

[10 minute read]

In my final foray into Hannibal, I will examine the final season and its tragedy and seduction. After the violence of “Mizumono,” the season two finale, Hannibal escapes to Italy, his pursuers scattered and recovering from their injuries. Driven by vivid hallucinations and a grisly murder, Will sails the Atlantic to seek Hannibal out. Will’s obsession with Hannibal lures him into a deep web of seduction, mirroring, and finally, unity through violence.

Before we are able to fully understand the tragedy of the reunion between Hannibal and Will, it is important to explore the extent of Hannibal’s trauma in “Mizumono.” Rather than anger, Hannibal responds as if he has been hurt, acting as the betrayed party. In a flashback, Hannibal discusses forgiveness with his therapist-confidante, Dr. Du Maurier. “Betrayal and forgiveness are… best seen as something akin to falling in love,” she explains. However, Hannibal counters this, saying “You cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love.” The framing of this conversation makes it clear they are both speaking of Will. In Hannibal’s grief, he reaches out to Will in his typical fashion.

Will finds Hannibal’s broken heart 

Impersonating a museum curator, Hannibal befriends a young, attractive man, Anthony Dimmond.^[1] When he is invited to the home Hannibal and du Maurier share (playing the role of husband and wife), Dimmond casually and flirtatiously proposes a threesome. After looking to du Maurier for guidance, Hannibal admits “it’s not that kind of party.” Rebuked but intrigued, Dimmond falls right into Hannibal’s trap: he beats Dimmond with a decorative statue and savagely breaks his neck. Hannibal then transports the body cross-country, mutilating it to form the shape of a human heart which he leaves in a church for Will to find. It’s a gruesome Valentine, and one with a clear message: Hannibal’s heart is broken. Italian detective Pazzi observes “Is Will Graham here because of the body, or is the body here because of Will Graham?” The aftershocks of Hannibal and Will’s mutual betrayal are felt as distantly as Europe, placing them in a difficult and peculiar position of forgiveness.

Will’s response to Hannibal’s hurt is not a pursuit, but a seduction. Upon tracking Hannibal to a maze of church catacombs, Will calls into the darkness “I forgive you.” The exceptionally painful nature of the relationship between these two men muddies the scene. In their previous moments together (in the season two finale) Hannibal guts Will and murders Abigail, a young woman that Will had begun to view as a surrogate daughter. And yet, despite this pain, there is no uncertainty or disingenuousness in Will’s voice.^[2] Rather, it is Will’s method of signaling the start of their web of seduction and violence. After Will makes this statement, he leaves immediately. He does not pursue Hannibal aggressively, but instead invites him to give chase by retreating back to Hannibal’s childhood home.

Will leaves Hannibal a Valentine of his own

In an attempt to better understand Hannibal’s history and trauma, Will seeks out Hannibal’s birthplace in Lithuania. There, he begins to understand Hannibal’s genesis as a killer, starting with Hannibal’s forced cannibalization of his young sister Mischa. With new insights, Will leaves to reconnect with Hannibal, but not before leaving behind a gift of his own: a body presented in a remarkable fashion, reaching out to Hannibal through the man’s own art form.

When Will finally returns to Hannibal, it is from a place of understanding and confidence. Although the nature of Hannibal as a character makes it impossible to fully understand him, Will’s revelations about Hannibal’s past offer clarity into their relationship. Will admits that he already defines his life in terms of his relationship with Hannibal, but understands that Hannibal’s own expression of his past is blurrier. However, their paths forward are linked; they are led inescapably to each other.

Will and Hannibal reunite in the latter’s favorite art gallery

Despite the inevitable weight of the past, the long-awaited reunion of Hannibal and Will is powerful moment of brightness and pleasure. “If I saw you every day, forever, Will, I would remember this time,” Hannibal remarks, gazing at Will with adoration and open affection. There is a sense of palpable relief as the two men come together. Surrounded by the beauty of the art gallery and the symmetry of the shot, it is easy for us to forget the trauma that Will has experienced at Hannibal’s hands. We can almost believe forgiveness. Remarking upon the twisting intimacy of their relationship, Will explains “We’re conjoined. I’m curious whether either of us can survive separation.” This comment speaks frankly to the relationship between Will and Hannibal. They remain obsessed with each other to the point that they are all the other can think about, all the other longs for.

An image from the show’s opening credits shows Hannibal and Will’s edges blurring together

The tender moment in the museum is shattered as the two men walk out side by side. In a moment painfully resonant with “Mizumono,” Will attempts to stab and kill Hannibal. This attempt is thwarted by Hannibal’s childhood caretaker, Chiyoh, who shoots Will through the shoulder, saving Hannibal. True to Will’s prediction, he cannot be separated from Hannibal, attempts to do so only bring them closer. Once Hannibal has dragged Will to safety, he disrobes him, embraces him, and tends to his wounds. The intimacy of the scene is gentle, but unsteady. The camera lingers over Will’s delicately arched neck and vulnerable form. Even when Hannibal literally places the knife back into Will’s hand, it is to emphasize his weakness. “You dropped your forgiveness, Will,” Hannibal says, seeming more intrigued than hurt. He is fascinated by Will, and by their inability to fully separate.

Will and Hannibal in their final moment of unity

Will and Hannibal’s link reaches its crescendo in the season three finale “The Wrath of the Lamb.” Having chased and been chased by serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, Will and Hannibal are finally united in their violence. In a final and bloody confrontation, the two men kill Dolarhyde with knives and teeth, each giving themselves over fully to the fervor of the fight. With Dolarhyde slain, Will and Hannibal fall into each other’s arms, coated in each other’s blood and exhausted from the fight. “This is all I ever wanted for you,” Hannibal finally says to Will. Hannibal is delighted by Will’s violence, the joy he has taken in killing. “It’s beautiful,” Will admits, before pitching them both over the cliff’s edge and into the turbulent waters below.

Will and Hannibal are unable to survive separation. Like a rubber band, attempts to pull away only send them back together until the only option left is to break.. Their trauma and torment is so wrapped up in the other’s existence that even living is impossible while the other still breathes. Will’s final act of murder-suicide allows the only modicum of agency in his relationship to Hannibal: choosing when it will happen. By taking responsibility for Hannibal’s destruction, Will accepts their unity, but is unable to allow Hannibal his freedom. His victory is bittersweet, but it is ultimately heroic.

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^[1] In many ways, Dimmond resembles Will: the same dark, curly hair and scruffy jaw.

^[2] This is especially important as Will’s character is shown to have difficulty lying.

Molly is an MA student pursuing her degree in English Literature with a focus on Game Studies and New Media. She uses these fields to explore her additional interests of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT representation. She has also studied Victorian literature, the Gothic, and 19th century American literature. Her teaching interests include film, graphic novels, and popular culture.

 

“Remarkable Boy…I Think I’ll Eat Your Heart.”

[7-10 minute read]

The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The cop-vs-serial killer subset of the thriller genre adds an element of intense, personal desire to what would otherwise be a genre categorized by rote sleuthing. So it is in Hannibal, where the main draw of the series (besides its stunning visuals) is the eroticly-charged cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent Will Graham and cunning killer Hannibal Lecter. Several characters of the series equate the furious obsession the two men share for each other to love. This suggestion troubles the relationship between the two men, indicating that their painful, self-destructive relationship is based simultaneously in love and hate. They are unable to pull away from each other, just as they are unable to completely become one. Instead, their relationship serves to complicate the viewer’s understanding of desire and the desire to kill.

Hannibal stabs Will in the opening shots of the film Red Dragon (2002)

To fully understand the complexity of Hannibal and Will’s relationship, we must return to one of the first incarnations of this relationship in the 2002 thriller Red Dragon.^[1] What is unique about the Silence of the Lambs trilogy is that no one film depicts Hannibal’s time before prison in great detail.^[2] Hannibal’s crimes are defined largely through rumor and his own description; Hannibal is the arbiter of his own mythos. However, there is a significant gap in the viewer’s understanding of the relationship between Hannibal and Will. This is deftly remedied in the opening scene of Red Dragon. Over the opening credits, Will Graham, here played by Edward Norton, comes to the shuddering realization that the mysterious killer is eating his victims — and that the killer is none other than his close confidante. At the crescendo of Will’s understanding, signified by the drawing of his gun, Hannibal sinks his knife into Will’s stomach. Despite the violence of the action, there is unmistakable tenderness as well. The stabbing mirrors a lover’s embrace; Hannibal rests his chin on Will’s shoulder, hushing him gently. In this scene, Hannibal gains no visible pleasure from hurting Will. Instead, he is careful, tender. “Remarkable boy,” he says. “I think I’ll eat your heart.” The reverent, intimate delivery of the line, coupled with the way Hannibal holds the fallen Will around the waist like a dance partner suggests a fond tenderness that goes beyond the bounds of homosocial friendship. Their intimacy serves to hint at a homoerotic bond that is only briefly touched upon in Red Dragon.

Hannibal embracing Will

This highly-charged bond is given far more screen time and consideration in Hannibal. The two men are far closer in age, diminishing the mentor/pupil relationship present in Red Dragon^[3] and emphasizing a more equal footing. Furthermore, the first two seasons of Hannibal take place prior to the moment of understanding in Red Dragon that culminates in Will’s stabbing. The challenge of Hannibal then is to balance the painful anticipation of this “breakup” with the pleasure of watching the budding relationship between two fascinating, electric men. And a pleasure it is. Hannibal and Will have a powerful chemistry that obsesses the narrative. They share intense, longing looks, have little regard for each other’s personal space, and have many moments of strangely endearing domesticity. Hannibal is always cooking for Will, seeking to impress him with increasingly elaborate presentations. Food in Hannibal is always a matter of seduction and charm, a way for Hannibal to exert power over his guests (Will most frequently) while simultaneously providing them with nourishment and artistic pleasure.

Hannibal preparing a rare non-human delicacy for Will.

The homoeroticism of food and eating crescendos in Hannibal’s second season, when Hannibal and Will share a meal of songbirds eaten whole. In an interview with Logo, director Bryan Fuller comments on this feast below:

We really want to explore the intimacy of these two men in an unexpected way without sexualizing them, but including a perception of sexuality that the cinema is actually portraying to the audience more than the characters are. There’s a scene at dinner where we were tackling in the edit bay because it was so transparently homoerotic. They were doing something that was not sex or anywhere near sex, but it was shot so suggestively that they may as well have been…

This scene lingers lovingly over open mouths, swallowing throats, and blissful expressions. In mood, framing, and aesthetic, it is a sexual scene. And yet, everyone’s clothes remain on. The evident homoeroticism of the scene is tempered by its modesty. There is power and seduction, but the lack of sexual acts and romantic physical gestures such as kissing leaves it clear that the relationship is not a traditionally romantic one.

For LGBT audiences, representation in film and television is an obstacle course of flirtation with canon. This battle with on-screen depictions of queer couples is often waylaid by a phenomenon known as queerbaiting. Queerbaiting teases the viewer with hints to a homosexual relationship in order to entice LGBTQ viewers, but this potential relationship ultimately remains unfulfilled. (Shows such as Supernatural are notorious for queerbaiting its fans.) Despite accusations of queerbaiting when it became apparent that central characters Will and Hannibal’s relationship would never be a physical one, queer fans nonetheless rejoiced at Hannibal. While Will and Hannibal would not explore a homosexual relationship on-screen, which frustrated some fans, many others were content in the highly-aesthetic, subtext-heavy portrayal of Hannibal and Will’s relationship.

“Hannigram” fan art by DeviantArt user Look-ling

Fans of this relationship, which is affectionately dubbed “Hannigram,” are quick to admit that the relationship between the two men is certainly an abusive one. For all of the intimacies between Will and Hannibal, their relationship is one built on manipulation, violence, and entrapment. However, for many, this is part of the attraction. The intensity and darkness is appealing, especially with two lead actors with significant fanbases. Many elements of “Hannigram” are aesthetic; there are large sects of fanworks dedicated to the sheer beauty of the show and its actors. However, the appeal of “Hannigram” is not wholly artistic. The cat-and-mouse element of their relationship, emphasized by a history of serial killer/cop films with similar relationships, is characterized by danger and seduction. In a show about the art of violence, “Hannigram” dances alongside the violence, rather than shying away from it. The honesty of the appeal of “Hannigram” in (largely female) fans allows for a deeper exploration of the intimacy of violence between Will and Hannibal.

This violence culminates in a stabbing, just as in Red Dragon. In Red Dragon, the stabbing is presented as a shock. In Hannibal, however, there is great anticipation for the moment. While this could be, in part, due to lingering audience familiarity with the source material, it is more likely a reading of the tone of the scene. Red Dragon amplified the shocking element, playing off of Will’s horrified revelation about Hannibal’s guilt. In Hannibal, however, we anticipate the betrayal. Will has spent the season desperately, obsessively working to prove Hannibal’s guilt. And yet, when the time comes to make the arrest, Will balks; he reveals the ploy to Hannibal. When he finds that Hannibal has not run but instead done grave violence to Jack and Alana, Will is heartbroken. “You were supposed to leave,” he says, his voice low and devastated. Hannibal responds by touching the side of Will’s, and stabs Will like an apology, like a betrayal.

Hannibal pulls Will close after stabbing him

The embrace that Will and Hannibal fall into speaks to the unsustainable nature of their relationship. They are so deeply caught up in each other’s obsession that they are desperately linked. They are fated to trap each other. While their romance departs from traditional depictions, Will and Hannibal are still star-crossed, their mutual erotic obsession only just beginning.

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Next week: Seduction and Devastation After the Betrayal

^[1] There is also an adaptation of Red Dragon even before Silence of the Lambs, a thriller titled Manhunter released in 1986. However, this did not enjoy the same popularity as the later Harris-based film trilogy.

^[2] _{A later film, Hannibal Rising (2007) attempts to remedy this, but it is considered separate from the trilogy.}

^[3]_{This is not to say that mentor/pupil relationships lack homoerotism. Rather, this particular relationship is strengthened by a different power dynamic.}

The Erotics of Evil

Among the harmful tropes of Hollywood, the figure of the Sissy Villain is one tainting LGBT representation in film and television. Despite the improvements of LGBT rights outside of film, the image of men in women’s clothing is one that pervades the genre of horror in particular. Such figures at Buffalo Bill, Cillian Murphy’s John/Emma of Peacock, or James McAvoy’s multiple-identity’d character of the controversial Split perpetuate this notion of dangerous men being made all the more terrifying by their eschewing of gender norms by dressing in women’s clothing. The argument made by these films is clear — men in dresses are dangerous, perhaps even more dangerous than brilliant psychologist-cannibals.

Promotional image for NBC’s Hannibal

Because of this, a second, more subtle argument is made by Hannibal’s narrative about the “right” way to be a killer. The pop-culture juggernaut of Silence of the Lambs isn’t the terrifying Buffalo Bill, or even the feminist darling Clarice Starling, but rather the slick and seductive Hannibal Lecter, whose presence in psychological thrillers spans three books, four films, a television series, and endless fanworks. The audience — casual viewers and “Fannibals” alike — is charmed by Lecter, largely due to the way he departs from other popular fictional killers. Lecter is not a brute: he does not resemble the slasher-killers of the gory teen film franchises; he is no Freddy Kruegar or Michael Meyers. Nor is he the pure psychological villain such as those made popular by the Saw franchise. Instead, Hannibal performs a meeting of the two, all of their strengths and seemingly none of their weaknesses.

Though he is never seen working out, Hannibal is physically fit, shown to be extremely strong and agile; he is able to easily overpower police officers and threatening patients, and, like any proper serial killer, he shakes off injuries that would cripple anyone else. Despite this strength, Hannibal is lean; his bone structure is that of a dancer. His physical presence is catlike and easily predatory. This effortless strength is the kind of appealing danger that typically befits the slender femme fatale, but Hannibal subverts this by having its hero-villain emulate these traits. His graceful-killer performance is further emphasized by the raw, calculating intelligence he displays. When his cannibalistic secret is revealed to Jack, Lecter attempts to fight his way out.  When FBI agent Jack Crawford puts him in a stranglehold, Hannibal goes limp, playing dead. In Jack’s moment of ensuing confusion and hesitation, Hannibal takes up a piece of broken glass, stabbing Jack in the side of the throat. As Crawford bleeds out in Hannibal’s pantry, Lecter is able to make his escape.

Hannibal uses an improvised weapon in his fight with Jack Crawford

Logically, Hannibal should not be able to overpower a highly trained federal agent, but his combination of strength and wit allow him to move beyond the killer roles his gender suggests. He deliberately avoids the highly-phallic, hypermasculine killer forms, seen in Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees, Pyramid Head, and many others, as does he avoid the physical frailty of the feminized mastermind. Although Hannibal embodies the sissy killer, his success^[1] in the television series speaks to his performance of this trope. He navigates between men and women’s worlds with ease, and confidence. This confidence is what is most critical. Hannibal is never shown to struggle. His acts are effortless. Those that struggle to express themselves, fashionably, romantically, sexually, or otherwise, are portrayed as desperate, fawning, trying too hard. Hannibal paints a clear image of its wannabe villains — either you’ve got it, or you don’t. And Hannibal has “it” in spades.

This charm is instinct, intuition. Hannibal is a natural leader, drawing moths to his flame. It is predatory power. He is described by a childhood acquaintance as “charming, like a cub is charming before it’s learned to be one of the big cats.” His therapist describes him as wearing “a well-tailored person-suit.” His danger is magnetic, sensuous. Even in his most threatening moments, the men and women surrounding Hannibal are drawn to him. He works a cobra-dance, expertly weaving aesthetic, philosophy, and manipulation together to entangle his victims. And yet, they are glad to be wound in his web. The violence (and resulting cannibalism) is filmed like sex: lush, lingering shots of stolen breath and trembling bodies.

Hannibal experiencing a completely innocuous projector malfunction

Though Hannibal’s victims are male and female in similar ratios, his only (onscreen) sexual relationship is with a woman, whom he later attempts to murder. However, he engages in his erotic, sensual seduction with men and women alike. In an interview  with Entertainment Weekly, director Brian Fuller opened up on his view of Hannibal’s sexual preferences. “I think Hannibal is a very broadly spectrumed human being/fallen angel, who probably is capable and interested in everything humanity has to offer.” This interpretation of Hannibal positions him in a unique position of the sissy villain. Being presented as a figure with attractions all over the gender spectrum both embroils Hannibal in gender and distances him from it. He never indicates a preference for men or women in particular, but in this lack of preference, Hannibal is presented as a man who samples from any and all areas of the spectrums of gender and sexuality.

When not trying to kill and eat his paramours, Hannibal performs the role of an attentive lover, acting with sensitivity and romance. He remembers food and drink preferences, washes his lover’s hair, teaches them to play instruments. He draws beautiful European landscapes, plays the harpsichord, and, of course, cooks. Although it is often used as a way of disposing of his victims, Hannibal’s love of cooking also expresses a departure from gender norms. He delights in feeding his friends (and, on more than one occasion, feeding his friends to his friends). He uses food for care-taking, for seduction, for friendship, and for art. Such expertise furthers his aura of effortless skill, and the appeal of his power to those around him. He works with precision and tenderness — many shots see him lingering lovingly over smells and tastes, clearly impressed by his own work. (And with Hannibal, we know that’s the only opinion he truly values.) This delicate care is a humanizing moment of tenderness, one that allows him to embrace his gentler side.

Hannibal enjoying the fruits of his labors

Hannibal is the true Renaissance man, an exquisite dandy in bespoke suits. Alongside the cannibalism and culinary skill, Hannibal is known for his stunning fashion sense. His suits are finely tailored, the colors and patterns unique, precise, and often mirroring the color scheme of the episode. Dedicated fans have compiled a list of images for a complete look at Hannibal’s wardrobe over the television series. Hannibal’s suits tend to depart from traditional male attire, often featuring colors and patterns most would not attempt. Hannibal wears them with confidence, embracing a look that is not traditionally masculine. He also wears ascots and unironic bowties, many articles of clothing that are reminiscent of queer menswear. And yet, his unique style is celebrated among straight and cisgender male fans. Men’s fashion websites even offer instruction on “How to Dress Like Hannibal Lecter”.^[2] Through fashion, Hannibal is shown to thread a delicate dance through gender expression that is very often lauded by those who would never describe themselves as queer.

Promotional image featuring Hannibal Lecter for the NBC television series

In Hannibal’s nuanced performance of gender, he embodies the danger of the Sissy Villain while also working to appeal to an audience across the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality. However, rather than a Buffalo Bill-esque performance that disturbs both audience and characters, Hannibal is deeply appealing to both. This suggests that there is a correct amount of sissiness to be played to still remain attractive and desirable, even when the subject in question is a serial killer and cannibal. For Hannibal, his effortless performance allows him to glide through gender in the “fallen angel” manner his creator intended.

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^[1] Here, success is defined as Hannibal’s ability to escape danger and pursue his sadistic goals.

^[2] The how-to guide is prefaced not by a disclaimer that emulating serial killers is wrong, but that Hannibal was canceled due to the fact that “most people would rather the quality of McDonald’s over the quality of a 5-star restaurant.” Hannibal would approve of such haughtiness