Gothic Wars – Media Lust PDF Print E-mail
Written by Elisabeth Bronfen   
Sunday, 26 July 2009 16:03

Gothic Wars - Media's Lust
Elisabeth Bronfen

Lecture given at the 9th Biennal Gothic Association at Lancaster University 21-24 July 2009

 

    At the end of his famous elegiac praise of war, "1914" Rupert Brookes expresses the wish, "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England. There shall be/ In that rich earth of richer dust concealed; / A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,/Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,/ A body of England's, breathing English air,/ Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home." Now, on first view this may not strike you as a very gothic image, yet as I was teaching WWI poetry in a modernism class last term, doing so I must add, under the influence of the film I want to foreground in my discussion today, namely George Romero's Diary of the Dead, I began to think about the dead soldier Brooke's invokes precisely along the line of a zombie, dislocating the boundary between the living and the death. I saw him as part of an invading army, come to contaminate a country, whose boundary this force has also crossed. Romero's film, after all, begins, as I will discuss in further detail in while, with an immigrant, killing his wife, child and then himself, and as such prompting first a discussion about the threat of illegal entrance into the U.S. (always under the auspices of Homeland Security's border paranoia after 9/11), only to move to the far more toxic boundary transgression from death back to life. Both, I suggest, are anticipated in Brookes' sonnet, given that his mournful image invokes a body, left to rot in a foreign field that will, by virtue of physically merging with the soil, impregnate this foreign site with English culture. While I am fully aware that this was not Rupert Brooke's intention, one can, by cross-mapping his lyricism with the lore of voodoo zombies, see an uncanny infestation being anticipated. The foreign field will forever be a double, hybrid cultural site, conjoining over the dead body of the English soldier two cultures that were at war with each other.
    The notion of culture, as a set of socially transmitted beliefs connected with home is, by virtue of this violent death at the front, transformed into its biological definition, namely the cultivation of soil for growing plants. Or if you like, over the dead body of an English soldier the notion of culture deconstructs itself to show the visceral materiality that was always the hidden kernel of mediality; the body growing after death as the uncanny flip side to cultural values and institutions growing in a foreign place, after they have been brought there by, say, an imperialist armed force. What I am interested in highlighting in the image Brooke's creates to commemorate the dead soldier he in fact will himself become, is that the afterlife of English culture, surviving a war zone, emerges as a form of bodily haunting. Contained in the rich foreign soil will be, "of richer dust concealed English dust," which is to say the remains of a man, treated as a representative of the country he fought and died for. This poetic rendition of war turns a metaphorical relation into a literal one: The soldier symbolically stands in for his country literally with his body, and yet the dust that will live on, is also meant materially. It is the dead body that has decomposed and is conjoined with the decomposed materials of the foreign, enemy soil, to produce a cultural zombie: A foreign field which is forever England.
    To make the connection between war and zombies richer, let us remember the historical context, in which these monsters came to infest a different sphere, namely American popular culture. In his recent history, Jamie Russell traces a connection between the emergence of zombies to the American military involvement in the Caribbean between 1900 and 1930. As U.S. forces began  introducing Jim Crow laws of segregation, the zombie proved useful to a crude propaganda of the occupation forces; he became the emblem for anxieties and fantasies about the other 'black' body of the Caribbean people. This need to turn the strange, dark bodies the U.S. troops encountered south of their national border into exotic bodies they could control, even while feeding them into their own categories of racial segregation, in turn, produced a strangely resilient conversation between military occupation of Haiti and anthropological research into ancient voodoo rituals and superstitions. As both North American researchers and soldiers described their experiences in this particular "corner of a foreign field" in travelogues and letters home, stories of the living dead found entrance into American popular imagination, helping to transform the nightmare about imperialist wars in exotic places into culturally useful narratives. The dead returning break open not only the boundary between death and life, but explode the notion of geographic boundaries as well, importing superstition into western rationality, black culture into white. The movement, of course, is in the opposite direction as the one described by Rupert Brookes. The dead of a 'foreign' land, who return to haunt their own living, come by virtue of a transferal on the level of mediality to haunt foreign survivors as well, namely the families of those who took part in the military occupation of the Caribbean. Furthermore, the haunting of these zombies is not located on the level of ritual, as it was in Haiti. Rather it occurs precisely in that site where, in modern technological cultures, magic ritual moved photography and film had been invented, namely the cinema screen.
    While Rupert Brooks was most certainly not intending to write gothic war poetry, I would argue that those less idealistic about the war were clearer about seeing the connection between the men, rotting in no man's land or in the trenches of northern France, and the stock figures of vampires and ghosts they knew from gothic lore. Wilfred Owen, for example, will not only embellish the horror of seeing one's friends dismembered in battle and offer visceral images of bodies blended with the earth in death. In the poem "Strange Meeting," he explicitly invokes the gothic tradition of dead enemies re-encountering each other. "It seemed that out of battle I escaped/ Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined." In this war heterotopia, a counter-site to the actual battle field, his dead soldier encounters "encumbered sleepers groaning," and while he is probing them, one springs up and stares at him with his dead smile. A zombie's fatal embrace might be a good subtitle for the final stanza of this poem: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend./ I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned/ Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed./ I parried; but my hands were loath and cold./ Let us sleep now…" Owens, of course, is explicitly picking up an a common trope of war literature, namely the re-union of friends turned enemies owing to a political struggle, or enemies discovering that while their politics may differ, they share a common culture. Yet what is poignantly gothic is the insistence that this conversation take place between two dead men, who have come alive again to address to each other and us. After all, the voice speaking the poem is a spectral one, coming to us not only from some corner of a foreign field, but from a mass grave.
    The second part of a chiasm, in which the spectral voice of a dead soldier emerges as the voice of poetry is, what I am primarily concerned with in my talk today, namely how cinema (as a visual poetry of sorts) is not only always a spectral medium, but as such one invoking dead bodies. Let's remember: What we see flickering on the screen are visual effects of presence. Neither the actors, nor the world they represent, nor the world in which the fictional setting referred to was staged and filmed, exist as we watch the play of light and shadow on the screen. All are irrevocably absent, yet made present again by virtue of light projected through film. As the first great vampire filmmakers, the expressionist Germans argued, film is always the art of revenants. What I would like to emphatically add to this equation is the specific death of war. Let me, therefore, highlight the two premises I had, when I decided to look at George Romero's Diary of the Dead in conjunction with the question of monstrous media. My first intuition was to think about this film as a comment on the Iraq War, and more precisely the problem produced by what has come to be called 'embedded journalism'. At one point in the film, we hear a bewildered woman explaining to someone interviewing him, "We're in a war, but I don't know who the war is with." Given the critical discussion media embedding qua censorship has invoked, let me remind you that the Vietnam war was the first  – and only – American war, in which journalists were allowed to go where ever they wanted, photograph whatever they wanted and have these photographs published. So, as deplorable as the controlling of all images and stories coming to us from Iraq may be, we must remember that in relation to war correspondents, Vietnam is not the norm but the anomaly. At the same time, it is also worth reminding ourselves that George Romero's first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, explicitly invokes the influence of the Vietnam war. In 1968, when the film came out, the American (and international audience) was more than familiar with search and destroy missions and could immediately see the connection between local militia and US combat units. Similarly they would immediately connect the insistent sound of helicopters and the dehumanized language of the Sheriff regarding the extermination of the zombies with what they were seeing in the news on T.V. each day. Jamie Russell in fact quotes a commentator on the war claiming after the event, if Lyndon B. Johnson had seen this film he might never "have permitted the napalming of the Vietnamese."
    In Romero's Diary of the Dead, as I will show in more detail in a moment, the American military engagement in Iraq is encrypted in his ambivalent and multi-layered discussion of media coverage, ranging from paranoid fantasies about the editing of official news by the government to equally paranoid fantasies about the unmanageability of the mass of unofficial information transmitted through the internet. And indeed what the particular situation of embedded journalism has produced is both a lack and a surplus. As Nick Mirzoeff has pointed out, the Iraq war has had no 'memorable' photographs, comparable to the naked girl running away from a village that has just been napalmed, or the police chief of Saigon, shooting a Vietcong in the head. There is, however, something else, perhaps stranger and thus more befitting the gothic sensibility Romero invokes in his political criticism. Given that the only people who were able to pass the censorship under Bush were troops themselves, the most poignant war commentary is that made by them. Again, the soldier as reporter may not be new, but what is new is the scope and scale; the mass of images that can now be transmitted almost immediately through cell-phones and the internet, seemingly by-passing all instances of official control. It was, of course, such images that gained notoriety, when a group of MPs working in Abu Graib mailed their trophy shots to friends. So my second wager is that at the beginning of the 21st century, where another wave of new media (through cell-phones and the internet) has surfaced as a counter-zone to the official media (television, print news), producing and disseminating what photographic and filmic images always are, namely media revenants, it may make sense to see gothic sensibility as one of the most fruitful modes of thinking through war, war trauma and its mediated reenactment in literary and visual representations.
    Before looking more closely at Romero's Diary of the Dead, I want to give two more pieces of media historical intertext. Let me first invoke yet another gothic fiction writer, so as to bring in a further theoretical point. By the beginning of the 20th century, Ambrose Bierce had become well known for his gothic tales of supernatural events. Yet it is worth remembering that he spent over three years during the Civil War in the 1860s, working as a cartographer for the Union army. Furthermore, his first collection of stories, ironically called In the Midst of Life, are not only about the soldiers and civilians, who fought once the nation officially became divided against itself, in a war that anticipated WWI in its technological monstrosity. In these texts we also  repeatedly find scenes, in which the dead transgress the boundary of the grave to return to the living: A guard undergoes a nocturnal battle with an enemy and is slain by him even though the enemy had already been killed. A young man hears the voice of his former friend, now enemy, only to find that he killed him by accident the night before. A Union officer spends a night in a hotel and finds himself surrounded by Confederate wounded, only to discover that the hotel had been a make-shift hospital before Atlanta fell. More interesting for the point I am trying to make, however, is the fact that writing about the Civil War in a gothic mode begins for Bierce with an autobiographical piece entitled, "What I saw at Shiloh." I quote the last passage at length, because it offers the chiasmic reverse image to Rupert Brook's poem.
    After describing the horrific carnage, the ravaged landscape, and the confusion produced by the fog of war in graphic detail, and I mean graphic, he ends on an elegiac note: "And this was, O so long ago! How they come back to me – dimly and brokenly, but with what a magic spell – those years of youth when I was soldiering! Again I see…" and then the landscape of war re-emerges as on a private cinema screen, to unfold its spectral glory: "dim valleys of Wonderland," "the ghost of an odor from pines," "unfamiliar landscapes demanding recognition, pass, vanish and give way to others." Indeed, what emerges in Bierce's written recollection is a process of re-presence and re-absence, reflecting not only on the way all memory and commemoration makes present again what is irrevocably lost, but also the way the mediality of representation (be it verbal or visual) involves a fragile process of re-appearance and re-vanishment. This seems fairly straightforward, and yet listen to the end of the piece: "O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights…when there was something new under the sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life? Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? – that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah, Youth…Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh."
    Not only is Ambrose misrepresenting his own text, he has absolutely no difficulty in offering very realist images of the dangers and death and horror of war. He is also explicitly juxtaposing the war scene at Shiloh onto the present, asking to be haunted by zombies, who stem from the violence of war, so as to screen out the post-war Gilded Age, the drear and somber scenes of consumerism and corporate violence. Indeed Bierce wants to be consumed by these spectral zombies, willing to sacrifice his present life. But note also the curious final formulation: "willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh." The life he has now (and is willing to surrender) is decidedly different from the life he should have lost at Shiloh but didn't. Bierce thus implies a counter-point to Brook's spectral poetic voice and names this quite explicitly in a letter to a friend: "If I ask myself what became of the young Ambrose Bierce, who fought in Chickamauga, I am tempted to reply, he is dead. A small part of him remains in my memory, but the rest of the person is dead and gone." Survival emerges as a monstrous spectral existence not only because the world of post-war America is drear and somber. Rather, he is willingly haunted by the uncanny double of his earlier self, and he repeats – and cements – this doubling by turning it into the narratorial voice of his autobiographical recollections.
    Those who return from the war are revenants of themselves, and their visions are monstrous spectacles. This is a point Romero makes, when in the final scene of Diary of the Dead, the last three survivors (a film professor and his two students) lock themselves into a panic room, only to watch an invasion of zombies on the screens of the security cameras, even while putting the final touches on the film they have been making throughout, entitled The Death of Death. They are in a media interzone, between dead returned to the living and the living turned into 'dead' images. And the images they are sending out into the world, our heroine Deborah assures us, are there to warn us. They are the message someone, who has returned from the battle zone, has for those who hope to survive. Cinema as the monstrous medium on which cultural survival rests is, of course, also the point of my second historical intertext, namely Abel Gance's anti-war film, J'Accuse (1919). As Tony Kaes recently pointed out to me, this the urtext for Romero's living dead films, particularly in the way it deploys the shell-shocked war veteran as a visionary of a monstrosity, which is also the monstrosity of cinema. Let me remind you of the plot. Before he became an officer in the French army, Jean Diaz was a poet, whose texts appeared as mythic visions of idyllic landscapes with scantily clad women on the screen. Now, having returned from a particularly horrific battle as the only survivor, he is once again invoking his visionary powers, this time, however, to warn the villagers that their deceased are on their way to visit them.
    As Judith Halberstam has noted, "monsters are meaning machines," and their existence gives us insight into the anxieties of the culture that produced them. The word monster, after all, has etymological roots that trace back to the Latin monstrare, meaning to show, to display, to demonstrate. We have, of course, a multiple vision: On the one hand we have the images which the words of the shell-shocked veteran evoke as the villagers gather around him. These words anticipate the coming of the dead and are issued as a warning to his fellow men. On the other hand, we have the vision embedded in the vision, the vision he had after he, the only survivor, looked back at the battlefield and watched one dead man, rising and calling out to his fellow soldiers to do the same. The vision he offers to the survivors as a monstrous message about the afterlife of those slain in war, is a recollection of his personal vision, an expression one might say of his personal trauma. Yet there is a third level to the extraordinary scene of the dead soldiers returning home, culminating in the doubled march through the Arc de Triomphe, and this is on the extradiegetic level of the film's narration. Explicitly, it pertains to Abel Gance's radical critique of war, splicing together the triumphant survivors with their uncanny counterparts, who have been left behind on the battlefield. But implicitly this is also a self-reflective comment on the monstrosity of the cinematic medium itself, resurrecting specters of both the dead and the survivors of the war on a split screen. Cinematic envisioning, as I have already suggested, is inevitably caught up in a relay of revenants, regardless whether the message these living dead convey is a wholesome one about the political life of post-war France, regenerated out of death, or a more disturbing one of the dead, who refuse to remain under the earth. Splicing them together not only illustrates the mutual implication of the two, but also the medium's implication in such a dialogue with the dead.
    If what these revenants perform is not so much a universal fear of death, rather than the need to commemorate a very specific one, namely the death in the trenches of modern technological warfare, significant for the discussion of Romero I will move towards in a moment is the conciliatory ending Abel Gance conceives. Because the poet has convinced the villagers not only of the veracity of his monstrous warning but also that they should confess how they have betrayed the dead – by partying, embezzling their money, over all by profiting from their absence - the zombie invasion, though monstrous, is not dangerous. The dead are familiar, and because the survivors are willing to look at and listen to them, they can again depart peaceably. The final scene shows them carrying their crosses back to the battlefield, presumably to bury themselves. They require no head shots.
    It is the two monstrosities invoked– dead soldiers returning as zombies and visual language returning them as spectral bodies on screen – which George Romero re-iterates in Diary of the Dead, doing so explicitly in relation not only to the question of whether anyone will survive this invasion, but also whether the survival is justified. The very last piece of down-loaded film we see is of hunters, using zombies as targets: A woman, hung by her hair on a tree, shot in the face. In her voice over Debora, the woman editing the material her boyfriend has been shooting, poignantly asks: "Are we worth saving. You tell me." George Romero is obviously far removed from Abel Gance's romantic pathos, coming out of a tradition in American popular culture, in which, the zombie has come to signify something much more complex than merely a cultural fear of death. As Jamie Russell notes, growing out of a wide range of cultural anxieties in relation to American imperialism and paranoia about political disenfranchisement, the zombie has instead become "a potent symbol of the apocalypse…a harbinger of doom. Its very existence hints at the possibility of a world that cannot be contained within the limits of human understanding."  Not reconciliation with the war dead, but rather doom is, indeed, the over-arching mood of Diary of the Dead, which sets in with images a cameraman secretly uploaded on the internet showing the corpses of three immigrants coming alive again and attacking a news team. As Deborah, editing this material explains, this was the camera man's way of telling the truth about what was happening. In editing into a cinematic narrative what Jason, a casualty of the zombie invasion, had either filmed or downloaded from the internet, she, in turn, is emulating this journalist's quest for truth. As she goes on to explain, "I've added music occasionally for effect hoping to scare you. You see, in addition to trying to tell you the truth, I am hoping to scare you so that maybe you'll wake up."
    The gothic mode of warning is implicitly the only way the truth can be told in a situation of catastrophe. That is an ethically complicated project is what Romero is after in his reflection on the monstrosity of media coverage of war. What is the position of the war correspondent, reporting, witnessing, and commemorating, even while not intervening in the battle? And in what sense does the production of images of death produce a desire for media violence that consumes us? Can the boundary between a dedication to truth-telling and a lust for images be drawn any more neatly than the one between life and death the zombie renders fluid? And how are we, the viewers directly addressed by this voice-over, implicated in a shooting that rather than killing, brings the dead back to life, on the film screen.
    For those of you who haven't seen the film: A group of college students is in the process of shooting a 'horror film' under the tutelage of their British professor, Andrew Maxwell, when they get the first news of the zombie invasion, but radio. Two of the students leave immediately for the villa in Philadelphia, where the three survivors will ultimately end up in a panic room. The rest go on a road trip, throughout which Jason insists on recording everything they encounter, so as to make a film entitled "The Death of Death." Romero's concern with the ethics of war reporting uncomfortably ties together various themes. For one, his film students repeatedly address the way official news, under the pressure of the government, reedits material so as to screen out the real danger of the situation and appease the population. At the same time, the unofficial material being posted on the internet, while giving voice to the clear and present danger, produces a clutter of images and information that is equally distracting. Panic sets in, because people do not know the truth, but also because there are too many personal spins on what might be the truth on the part of uncontrolled bloggers. Thus the truth becomes hard to find. The conscientious war reporter believes herself to be in the intermediary position, telling the truth being withheld, but, as Deborah admits in her voice-over, she can only do so by herself having recourse to editing for effect, even if her intention is morally justified. Her version is as redacted – and as subjective – as all other media representations of this war. Most importantly, and that is a staple of all critical discussions of war correspondents, those reporting are not immune to the fascination for media violence; the desire for watching and recording consumes them as the zombies consume their victims.
    In a hospital, seeking attention for Mary, who shot herself after driving over three people that were blocking the passage of the bus she and her friends are using to escape, the following scene occurs: Clip - Scene in Hospital. Zombies undermine semantic meanings, the power to shoot is electric and mental, the shooting itself with a camera and a gun. The professor names yet another semantic indetermination, namely the one between enemy and friend, on which all war, as Carl Schmitt claims, is based. Yet Romero shows us that our own position towards the uncanny blurring zombies enact is ambivalent. Invoking his own wartime experience, Maxwell contests that marking the enemy semantically not only renders cruelty justified. To the war correspondent, the killing is easy, because the camera allegedly shields him from taking responsibility for the death he is 'only' recording. That the line between friend and enemy is not easily drawn becomes clear, when their friend Mary 'turns', yet it is over her dead body that Romero's alter-ego also insists on drawing the line. For them to survive, he must shoot her. Romero, however, doesn't leave it at that, the sequence, as you just saw is doubled by a second, edited version, in which Deborah's spectral voice-over (emerging from her panic room) points to their complicity in producing death to surmount death. Her edited version is a cinematic zombie, the re-animation in a different mode of the uncut film material they produced at this scene of death. To make the theoretical point he is after even more complex, Romero adds a final layer, Deborah's self-critical analysis of Jason's lust for images, which is clearly also hers, and ours. Compel is such an apt word, because it turns force into something passive. One is driven by some force which can't directly be named, to do something; by a desire with no definite object.
    Romero's argument, I take it, is that a xenophobic culture, responding to 9/11 with a declaration of war, prompts fantasies of violence, which turn against the American homeland itself. Out of a discussion of illegal immigrants a different form of illegal boundary crossing emerges, namely people crossing the border between life and death. But Romero is also arguing that a culture obsessed with producing and consuming images of violence engenders violence, or at least a greater hunger for its mediated transition, turning us into media zombies. Romero refuses to resolve the conundrum, leaving us hanging between a surplus of media information and a need to believe in the story that someone can tell the truth. I have myself redacted his film images, splicing together two sequences, both of which deploy Deborah as their focal point. Clip where all becomes noise and the final double shooting of her boyfriend filming him as he dies. She is the voice of meta-textual criticism of the project of war-reporting and she is the one to complete the war reportage. And precisely because she is split between both positions, compelled to continue a project she has throughout the film also radically put into question, Romero opens what is the only third space of ethics, namely that of a markedly aesthetic re-figuration, which addresses the way looking at things through a screen makes you immune to the affects of the images, to their intended effect. We cannot be blind to the temptation images of violence have for us, even while we can't be cynical about the truth-telling power they also contain. Iconoclasm is as unviable as is visual censorship.
    By way of closure, let me return to where I began, the photographs from Abu Ghraib and a particular scene from Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure. He, too, uses the rhetoric of stylized reconstruction to address the monstrosity of images from a war zone. Let us remember, this film, also, is about an interzone during war time; not a panic room but a prison. As all the young American M.P.s, who Errol Morris interviews, re-iterate, they felt that Abu Ghraib was a weird foreign place, which their recreational fun – the photographs as well as, in the case of Sabrina Hamen the letters home – sought to make sense of. They were attacked if they left the prison but at times also attacked by the prisoners inside their cells. They were not only following orders they themselves found odd, but, often admit that, what in a different situation might seem strange, did not seem so under the pressure they found themselves. Indeed, what Errol Morris tracks is a curious adjustment to a dehumanizing operating procedure; another form of becoming immune. And he tracks this by splicing together interviews with a highly aesthetic re-construction of the scenes of violence described by his witnesses. The tortured and dead, who returned to the world outside the prison, when the photographs taken by Graner and his friends surfaced on the internet and then the regular news channels, return again, as self-consciously mediated film specters. In the following sequence, one of the convicted MPs names the OGA – Other Government Agencies – as the group operating without rules, which changed the level of violence. He and his friends called them 'ghosts,' because they didn't know who they were and their prisoners were never logged. These 'ghosts' operate like the zombies I have been discussing, clandestine and unofficial, they are neither living nor dead. The only traces we have of them are the confessions of those speaking in front of Errol Morris' camera, and it is as mediated traces that we also see them on screen.
    You remember that one of the scandalous images is of Specialist Sabrina Haman, giving the thumbs up while standing next to man who had died during torture. Errol Morris' mise-en-scène, resurrects the dead man as a media zombie of a ghost detainee. The photograph turns an unlogged prisoner, who was meant to disappear, into a figure of accusation as forceful as the dead, who return in Abel Gance's J'accuse. Errol Morris' highly aestheticized re-enactment wants to make sure, I gather, that we read it in this and no other way. The point of the film, of course, is that the distinction between criminal act and S.O.P. used by the court martial to convict some and drop the charges on others (including Sabrina Haman) is that this boundary is fragile, indeed ethically unsustainable. While Morris does not debunk the young men and women he interviews, acknowledging the psychic pressure of the special circumstances they found themselves in (and clearly morally and intellectually unprepared), he is as unequivocal in his critique of the military apparatus which produced this world of ghost investigators and ghost detainees as George Romero is in his critique of our cultural media lust.
    Which brings us back to my wager that the zombie, poised in the space between life and death, embodies not only an epistemological crisis, regarding our intellectual ability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, absent and present bodies, human and monstrous; bringing us face to face with the limits of our human understanding of a world, where binary oppositions no longer hold. Rather, Romero and Morris follow Abel Gance in using the revenant to force us to confront an ethical crisis raised by the ubiquity of digital images and the visual lust this freedom of representation at will brings with it. As life and death fold into each other – in the heterotopia of a panic room, in a prison but above all the movie theater – our moral categories may come to be disturbed, but not necessarily obliterated. Indeed, I understand both Romero and Morris as arguing, it is precisely when categories are challenged that a clear ethical position of critique opens up. The very images that produce such a fateful lust are also the site where this intervention can occur. If the line between a criminal act and a standard operating procedure has come to be uncannily blurred then because it makes no sense to draw it in this way, once we leave the twilight zone of a prisoner of war camp. What these monstrous bodies - the zombies and the cinematic images - show us is the need to distinguish ethically, where we can't epistemologically. Then perhaps we can find an answer to the question Romero so poignantly leaves open: Are we worth saving?