The Law and Its Illicit Desires: Transversing Free Market Claustrophobia and the Zombie Imaginary in Dredd 3-D

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Susie O'Brien and Emily Hill for reading and offering comments to previous versions of this article.

Notes

The concept of the zombie imaginary draws from Benedict Anderson's idea of the “imagined communities” that are constructed in modernity amongst large groups of strangers via nation-building tools like print capitalism (Anderson 2006). In the case of the zombie imaginary, however, social cohesion is reified around a traumatic breach, making it similar to what Mark Seltzer called “wound culture,” or “a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1997, 3). Used in support of neoliberal hegemony, the zombie imaginary maps the limit between society and its exteriority (nonsociety) onto an internal division within social space itself (Žižek 2000, 92). The idea that capitalism depends upon devalued racialized and gendered subjects for its reproduction draws from Roswitha Scholz's theory of “value disassociation” (2014). In an excellent treatment of zombie culture, Sherryl Vint usefully links the figure of the modern zombie to the production of the sovereign exception under biopolitics, using Foucault and Agamben to situate zombies as “abjected and expelled parts of the body politic” (Vint 2013, 87). I am also greatly indebted to Sarah Trimble (2010), who described the apocalyptic vision of many sci-fi films as a “patriarchal survivalist fantasy” that grounds itself through the production of racialized and gendered, disposable others.

I am here indebted to Chris Breu, whose use of cultural fantasy as a theoretical category combines psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity with materialist analysis of culture and political economy (2005, 16). This approach has also been skilfully elaborated by Slavoj Žižek, for whom ideology is not “an illusion masking the real state of things but … an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” (2008, 30). The zombie imaginary as fantasy/ideology thus pushes the “intertwining of the material and ideal” (Breu 2005, 16) present in Marx's idea of the commodity fetish to the point where it delimitates a socially constructed boundary separating valued human subjects from a devalued and ultimately disposable, dehumanized “object.” If, under the commodity fetish, material objects take on the qualities lost by human subjects in the exploitative labor of the commodity's production, the zombie imaginary describes the state of “being made object” that befalls those subjects whom capitalism must radically devalue for its own reproduction. My analysis is also informed by Judith Butler's examination of the norms that filter our ability to recognize and value human subjects (2010, 5–13).

The ideological operation that makes a surface registration of social anxiety to reinforce and preserve the hierarchies that support it is described by Jameson (1979) as the twin actions of “utopia” and “reification.”

This is not to say that satirical-critical zombie films are not still being made; the Canadian films Pontypool (2008) and Fido (2006) offer two examples. But larger budget, recent films like World War Z (2012) or Contagion (2011) tend more toward reinforcing biopolitical state apparatuses, rather than critique. For more on the ideological workings of popular apocalyptic films, see again Trimble's excellent analysis, where she argued that “the patriarchal survivalist fantasy hinges on affective and ideological (re)orientations towards an imaginary past—a return to savagery that, paradoxically, authorizes the re-founding of civilization according to the imperatives of paternal protection, corporeal containment, and fortified space” (2010, 300).

For more detailed descriptions of the workings and development of neoliberalism, see Gilbert (2013), Giroux (2004), and Harvey (2005).

Both Berlant (2011) and Cazdyn (2010) emphasized the contemporary, everyday sense of “crisis ordinary” (Berlant 2011, 9), or the shifting, background sense of emergency that generates a slow simmering, omnipresent sense of malaise. Foucault (2003) located the beginning of this shift at the end of the eighteenth century, when the logic of epidemic (spatiotemporally distinct outbreaks) was eclipsed by the logic of endemic or “illnesses that were difficult to eradicate” becoming “permanent factors which … sapped the population's strength, shortened the working week, wasted energy, and cost money” (244). Cazdyn's critique usefully reveals epidemic as linked to the inner logic of capitalism's everyday workings, a fact that, due to the recent turn to austerity, “seems more and more visible today than at any other time in recent history” (60).

Although I am using the term zombie imaginary in this article to describe a fantasy structure that manages negative affect by reducing portions of the population to disposable objects, part of the popular appeal of zombies resides in the undead collectivity they constitute. By removing subjects from the deep implication of human life and subjectivity in biopolitical control structures, zombie fantasies might offer emergent forms of collective agency and subjectification that exceed bourgeois individuality. For examples of this reading, see Lauro and Embry (2008) and Orpana (2011).

Kant (1996) gave a detailed account of space and time as a priori categories of cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Sections 1–8, and causality in “Analytic of Principles,” Section III, subsection B. For a shorter treatment of space and time by Kant (1997) see his Prolegomena (35–40). In contrast to this view, David Harvey insisted “that we recognize the multiplicity of the objective qualities which space and time can express, and the role of human practices in their construction” (2005, 203).

Zygumnt Bauman (2000) distinguished between tourists, who “move because they find the world within their reach irresistibly attractive” and vagabonds as the “waste of the world” who “move because they find the world within their reach unbearably inhospitable” (22–26).

In addition to megacities with populations of over eight million, Davis described “hypercities” with populations exceeding twenty million inhabitants (2006, 5). The production notes for Dredd make explicit reference to these developments, then add a harrowing prediction, casting the film's vision of urban decay as a possible actual future: “Within Mega City One, the filmmakers echo the hyper-cities popping up around the world today in places like Sao Paolo, Mexico City and Jakarta—but take that to the next level of heart-stopping human chaos. It is estimated that some 95% of humanity may one day live packed into urban centers, so Mega City One becomes harrowing vision of what might come” (“Dredd Production Notes” nd, 14).

This renewal is portrayed visually in the film as an emphatically phallo-centric process: against the drug lord Ma-Ma's literal and metaphorical penchant to castrating the male member, the apartment tower itself constitutes a phallus, the redemption/restitution of which is symbolized by a bird's eye shot of the central skylight at the top of the building being opened once Dredd vanquishes Ma-Ma.

Jameson identified the revelation of the bare “multiplicity of other people” as the horrific and “existential” content of the genocides and holocausts of the twentieth century (2003, 709). He saw this as culminating in the postmodern “reduction of the body to a present of time” (2003, 712).

The filmmakers devised a special, hand-held 3-D camera that allowed for extreme close ups, turning the actors’ “faces into landscapes.” They also used a Phantom-Flex camera that shoots 3,000 frames per second, allowing for extremely slowed-down play back effects (Dredd 3-D 2012). The film's cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, also worked on Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and 28 Days Later (2002), placing Dredd 3-D in a lineage of films that graphically register environments of social breakdown and abjection.

Sheena Roger's research into the psychological effects of slow motion images reveals that, the more one slows down an image, the less force is perceived as registered in the movements depicted (2013, 156–158). Rodger points out how in the Rodeny King court trial, the bystander video taken by Goerge Holliday of King being beaten by police was shown to jurors by the defense in slow motion and with the sound removed. This produced the deception, as one juror testified, that “a lot of those blows … were not connecting” (ABC News interview, quoted in Rogers 2013, 155). This perceptual distortion raises serious questions for Rogers about the use of slow motion film as evidence in courts of law. In Dredd 3-D, filmic distortion of reality is used, I would argue, to a similar end to make the Judges’ violent justice seem less “real.” The slow motion is not deployed, for instance, at the moments when Judges Dredd and Anderson are shot, because this would have the effect of dis-identifying the audience with the gravity of protagonists’ wounding.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon (2011) described and critiqued a form of violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Because these forms of structural, gradually occurring violence often escape media and political apparatuses calibrated to short-term, event-focused, and body bound parameters, slow violence constitutes a challenge for the politics of representation and accountability (3).

Žižek (2007) argued that Kantian ethics harbor Sadean and totalitarian tendencies only if we accept Kant's designation of desire as purely pathological. Once we recognize an attitude of responsibility, rather than disavowal, toward our desire, the formalism of the categorical imperative becomes linked to the particularity of our life in an acceptable way: Kant's ethics tells us that we must perform our duty, but require a further, personal, judgment to determine what this duty is in the context of our individual life (Žižek 1998, Section 3). Without the personal sense of a particular content to duty, one grounded in ethical self-understanding, we are delivered unto the “purposiveness without a purpose” that Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) identified as the totalitarian impetus behind the seemingly rational order of capitalist modernity (69).

“Stain” here refers to the Lacanian objet petit a “which forever blurs our picture of reality” (Žižek 2000, 239). In Dredd, the techie's mechanical eyes, rather than merely registering the violent scenes he monitors, act as the suppressed cause of these acts. Put another way, just as Ma-Ma has forcibly replaced the techie's eyes with mechanical implements, so too does the Slo-Mo effect blind the audience to the ideological work done by the film's aestheticized violence.

Whereas Foucault, informed by twentieth century genocides, identifies modern racism as mobilizing a discourse of purity to legitimate itself—the idea that racialized subjects are akin to an epidemic that weakens the social body (2002, 258)—a different logic seems to be at work in the contemporary, bioeconomic version of racial discrimination and violence. In the bioeconomic model adopted by modern, seemingly cosmopolitan states, a surface adherence to multicultural diversity is used to cover over the hegemonic white, male position. The older discourse of racial purity as shoring up the vitality of the nation is replaced by a social Darwinism that disavows its structural discrimination via the neoliberal alibi of “personal responsibility.” The American myth that “anyone can make it if they work hard enough” is used to conceal the unequal exposure to risk of racialized populations.

It is interesting that most of Dredd's panoramic cityscapes were filmed in Capetown and Johanessburg, South Aftrica: places where the older, epidemic model of racial discrimination held sway until very recently. This history of racism haunts the production of Dredd from its political unconscious. As the special features of the DVD note, the film used the “brutalist, seventies architecture” of Johanessburg to full advantage, merely adding, via CGI, the towering presence of the mega-appartment blocks that punctuate the skyline (Dredd 3-D 2010).

Žižek pointed out the Lacanian distinction between “the ‘subject of enunciation’ (the subject who utters a statement) and the ‘subject of the enunciated (statement)’ (the symbolic identity the subject assumes within and via his statement)” (1998, Section 2). He goes on to explain how the fact that Kant does not specify the “subject of the enunciation” of the ethical imperative opens the door for Lacan's suggestion that the Sadean torturer provides the disavowed subject, one who takes pleasure in our inability to ever live up to the moral law. This same logic makes intelligible the curious seductiveness of the drug lord Ma-Ma's voice in Dredd. Addressing the traumatized populace of Peach Trees via the building's P.A. system, Ma-Ma seems to take sadistic pleasure in issuing her impossible demands (to kill Dredd and Anderson) to the citizenry. The seductiveness of Ma-Ma's voice in her imperatives to “obey, or else!” registers the jouissance of surrender to the will of another, expressing the disavowed, affective truth of the apparently “just” but equally strict and sadistic law of the Judges.

Although Canada tends to pride itself on providing a more open and tolerant alternative to the U.S. “melting pot,” discriminatory immigration policies buttressed by this same “clash of civilizations” rhetoric are part of the current conservative government's bioeconomic strategies. See, for instance, Beenash Jafri's (2012) study of the way a discourse of transnational whiteness is deployed in the recently revised Canadian Citizenship Guide given to all new immigrants.

The emancipatory dimension of the populist comic book might have to do with the critical distance enabled by comics’ status as a “cool” medium, over and against the more immediate and sensorial “hot” immersion of the viewer in the world of the film (McLuhan 1965). Derrida evoked the concept of hauntology partly as a way to address the “spectralizing” nature of media in shaping the political and public sphere (1994, 63). As an alternative and subaltern medium that is only now beginning to gain the attention and theorization it deserves, comic books provide a rich field for investigating the disavowed and potentially utopian dimensions of popular culture.

As Stuart Hall (2007) pointed out, the ideological work done by media texts is not “a one-sided process which governs how all events will be signified.” Rather, these texts work to “enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has been connotatively signified” (484). Such products of popular culture do not dictate what we must believe, but they limit the imagination and discussion of crucial issues to parameters that work in the interest of the cultural dominant.