Human Sciences, Human Monsters: the SF-Horror Film from the 1930s to 1960s

This dissertation argues that monster movies from the 1930s to the 1960s infected the popular imagination with deep anxieties over the rapid and seemingly uncontrollable advances made by the human sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientific progress appeared to threaten not only the human body but the very humanistic concept of being human itself. Human monsters as imagined by cinema embodied modern techno-science's terrifying erosion of the liberal-humanist subject. Such embodiments took numerous shapes, including industrial and soldier zombies, Darwinian ape-men, nuclear werewolves, viral revenants, and mutant children. These films reveal less the dissolution of the sovereign self than that of the fleshy human itself; they are filled with creatures that suffer as much as they threaten./nThese creatures engage in the historical work of articulating and addressing the epochal change of technoscience's transformation of the human and that transformation's political ramifications, which Michel Foucault termed biopower. Biopower uses the modern human sciences-psychology, economics, medicine, and human biology-to "invest life" with power. I show that the two poles of biopower-the disciplinary and the biopolitical- are best embodied by the zombie in its two iterations, those of the 1930s and 1960s, respectively. The zombie and the other monsters I examine are a way to make legible the invisible nature and progression of biopower. Unsurprisingly, the films they inhabit are science fiction-horror films, films in which the breach of rationality erupts into terror. Moreover, I show that this blurring of boundaries between the genres of science fiction and horror mirrors the blurring of boundaries between other conventional categories-humans and animals, humans and machines, upper and lower classes, "free" people and slaves, and the human and the physical sciences./nBeginning with the early zombie film, I argue that the cinematic zombies of the 1930s embody a trend of human automatism. The battlefield and the factory floor, both sites of Foucauldian discipline, are where we first find the zombie and the early zombie's "docile body." Also in the 1930s, primatology, influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, established itself as a discipline, under the umbrella of concerns over sex and reproduction. Genre films responded by using ape-men to simultaneously engage with issues of sex, evolution, and contemporary human-ape experiments. I contend that these depictions instantiated human-ape equivalency and further provided simple, if inadequate, solutions to the systemic concern over reducing humans to animals./nJumping ahead to the late 1950s to analyze how the atrocities of World War II reverberated in sf-horror films in the form of composite creatures, I examine how creatures from werewolves to cyborgs arose from contingency. The modern world of technoscience is filled with technological accidents. The "villains" of these films are not mad scientists, but medical doctors, who exploit the victims of these accidents in the name of humanity. I argue that, in their figuring of cybernetics, radiation, and Nazi atrocities, these films dealt with a fear of apocalyptic accidents that put individual humans at the mercy of dehumanizing scientific practices. Finally, I look at films from the early 1960s that feature monstrous populations instead of singular monsters. These are monsters of biopolitics, which does not discipline individuals but regulates entire populations. In the films the members of these populations have no visible monstrosities, but rather announce a new normal. These monsters, often children, are figures for anxieties over invisible forces such as DNA and radiation. It is these invisible and seemingly agentless forces that animate a new type of zombie. The zombie has gone from being a docile body under the command of a master to a member of a horde that acts "instinctually" and arises by chance. Instead of a laborer or a soldier, the zombie is now a cannibal, consuming merely to perpetuate itself. The canonical zombie inaugurated with the Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) is the exemplary monster of biopolitics: power and life are now indivisible.

Advisor: Kaes, Anton
Whissel, Kristen