Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: serial killer narratives, capitalist monsters, crawling chaos, United States, New York, Logan's Run (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 unfortunates mutated by their involvement with the mass media industry. Whether considering the serial killer who turns murder into a kind of labor by mass producing dead bodies, or the hack writers and bloodthirsty actresses trapped inside Hollywood’s profit-mad storytelling machine, she reveals that each creature has its own tale to tell about how a freewheeling market economy turns human beings into monstrosities.

Newitz tracks the monsters spawned by capitalism through b movies, Hollywood blockbusters, pulp fiction, 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; true-crime books about the serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer; and movies including Modern Times (1936), Donovan’s Brain (1953), Night of the Living Dead (1968), RoboCop (1987), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Artificial Intelligence: AI (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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Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press; 1st edition (June 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822337452
• ISBN-13: 978-0822337454
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #405,041 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Dave Alber (CA) - See all my reviews

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!