Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (39 page)

All of these procedures, invasive and destructive, have grown in popularity over the last thirty years, with notable spikes in the early twenty-first century. The number of chemical peels in 2001, for example, represented a 2,356 percent increase over the number administered in 1997. Breast augmentation surgery grew from 20,000 procedures a year in 1992 to 200,000 in 2002 and climbing.
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This mass desire to transform the body did not emerge organically from the availability of new aesthetic surgery techniques. Instead it represents a carefully orchestrated effort to create a new aesthetic by an industry that views divergence from a universal template of attractiveness as an abnormality and seeks to fully medicalize divergences from this template. Concerned over failing profits, The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery began defining small breast size as a medical abnormality in 1983. An extensive advertising campaign, and the transformation of plastic surgeons into public figures who as authors and talk-show guests spread the gospel of bodily transformation, convinced many American women that face-lifts, tummy tucks, and breast implants could further their career goals, improve their mental health, and even save their marriages.
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The promoters of reconstructive surgery found an unlikely ally in evangelical Christian culture’s growing obsession with the body in
the 1980s. American Christianity’s interest in the body as a carrier of meaning and a path to fulfillment fused theological themes and cultural yearnings in the late twentieth century. Millennialist Christianity, with its emphasis on “the glorified body” in the apocalyptic resurrection of the dead, sought to celebrate an eschatological destiny for the Christian body. A new movement toward Christian dieting and exercise, and even increased sexual fulfillment, suggested that the body could begin its glorification even now.
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An evangelical dieting and fitness culture that focused both on the disciplining and glorification of the physical body as a spiritual act of devotion emerged in the 1960s and exploded in the 1970s. Books with titles like
More of Jesus, Less of Me
,
Slim for Him
and
Help Lord! The Devil Wants Me Fat!
encouraged evangelical Christian women to see eating and exercise as integral to their spiritual lives. While this principle may not sound radically different than older Christian ascetic disciplines such as fasting, these new dieting and fitness regimes promised the same rewards as secular fitness culture. God wanted evangelical Christian women to diet so they could enjoy a better self-image, increased sexual attractiveness, and a reversal, or at least a slowdown, of the effects of aging. In
Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman
, one of an avalanche of Christian dieting texts directed at women, the author claimed that preventing weight gain is “a key factor in being a beautiful woman for God” and noted God’s special interest in “helping you get to and keep the weight that is right for you.”
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Americans proved remarkably uncomfortable in their own skins at the dawn of the twenty-first century. An emphasis on the body’s aesthetics and the need to save the body from death (or save it
for
the resurrection) betrays a profound anxiety about physical experience. The obsession of physical aesthetics combined with concerns about infectious disease, the politics of the womb, cultural battles fought over alternative sexual identities, controversy over genetics, and the obsession with physical aesthetics have absorbed enormous amounts of media attention.
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Zombies and vampires became the ultimate meaning machines in this era of the body wars. The rotting, and yet animated, bodies of the zombie mapped anxieties about the body, both religious and secular. The immortal, and often eerily beautiful, bodies of vampires sucked the blood that Americans imagined as the carrier of infection and death, creating an iconography of fatal, diseased, erotic pleasure.

The zombie, with its awkward movements, single-minded desire, and rapidly decomposing flesh, manages to combine terror, threat, and humor into a single flesh-eating package. In a grotesque reversal of
dieting culture, zombies are the ultimate late-night snackers who have no interest in anything but their victims and no interest in their victims except as a source of food. In some respects, this makes the zombie the ultimate nightmare of the culture of dieting, exercise, and bodily transcendence. They are unable to transcend their flesh and its desires. They are frightening, or more generally just described as “gross,” because their appetites denigrate the human body, turning it into an abject consumable. Meanwhile, their own bodies, or at least what is left of them, represent a parody of both secular and religious hopes for the body as a vehicle for transcendence.
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The walking undead, whether they are flesh-eaters or bloodsuckers, evoke images of plague, disease, and infection as well as monstrous consumption. Modern America had worried little about the dangers of disease since the deadly influenza epidemics of the early twentieth century. The 1980s saw the beginnings of new fears of older diseases as well as the metaphor of malignancy and ill health applied to a variety of social problems. The AIDS epidemic and its political and cultural uses became central to a societal discourse about threats to the body. Warnings about sexual permissiveness went hand in hand with warnings about poison and illness in a strange new vocabulary. Social critics Arthur and Marilouise Kroker dubbed this new vocabulary a “Body McCarthyism,” which sought to contain threats to the body and the social order.
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The vampire and the zombie became the perfect monstrous metonyms for this era since each spread a kind of infection. The AIDS epidemic seemed to especially resonate with the mythology of the vampire given the immune disorder’s blood-borne disease vector. This comported with a homophobic tendency to imagine gays and lesbians as a kind of vampire. The antigay activist Anita Bryant, who more than anyone helped to initiate fundamentalist Christianity’s national backlash against gay liberation, made explicit use of the vampire metaphor. Bryant once wrote that, “the male homosexual eats another man’s sperm. Sperm is the most concentrated form of blood. The homosexual is eating life.” Bryant also argued, in imagery redolent with vampire symbolism, that “homosexuals … must recruit, must freshen their ranks.” While conservative critics often focused on gay men as a source of moral and physical corruption, film imagery of lesbian vampires became an increasingly common trope in the 1970s. Films like
Daughters of Darkness
,
The Hunger
, and
Embrace of the Vampire
offered men voyeuristic pleasures while evoking fears that imagined women as both bloodsucking freaks and dangerously autonomous in their sexuality.
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Conservative politicians and the leaders of the New Right eagerly deployed imagery that connected homosexuality with images of infection, transforming AIDS into a metaphor for a diseased and dying social structure. In 1983 Jerry Falwell urged blood banks to reject gay donors and suggested that gay political influence had stood in the way of stopping the spread of disease. A growing moral panic over infection and gay sex led to the passage of a 1986 Senate bill that legalized the creation of donor pools that individual families could contribute to and thus avoid the use of blood from “the general population.” The Reagan administration had, at this late date in the epidemic, not even acknowledged the existence of AIDS, even as the president made use of the imagery of disease, infection, contagion, poison, and degeneracy to describe the general moral state of American society. When finally speaking publicly about the epidemic, Reagan and his speechwriters used imagery from serial killer narratives when they described AIDS as moving “insidiously through the length and breadth of our society.”
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The homosexual as vampire and AIDS as a “gay plague” delivered by the blood provided a powerful weapon in the culture wars. The pale gauntness of the vampire and the transmission of his condition through an exchange of bloody body fluids became juxtaposed with gothic imaginings regarding gay sexuality in which infection spread in bathhouses where men allegedly had “30 to 40 sexual encounters a night.” Phrases like these became a common way for conservatives to talk about the spread and origins of AIDS. It suggested that gay men must have a supernatural sexual appetite combined with an impossible physical prowess. It further envisioned them as voracious creatures of the night, eagerly infecting as many victims as possible.
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The monster would not allow itself to mean only one thing. The vampire became, for many in the age of AIDS, a symbol of transcendence rather than of societal decay and decadence. In the 1980s, in part inspired by Rice’s novels, a loose network of local networks, night clubs, and eventually websites and chat rooms created a “vampire subculture,” an offshoot of the goth movement.
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Becoming a part of the vampire community could mean anything from dressing in black and wearing high-priced fang implants to taking part in exchanges of blood with willing sexual partners. For the most part, vampire communities have encouraged safe practices (AIDS awareness and testing became a common element of vampire clubs), as well as tolerant, New Age style spirituality. “Real Vampires,” a term usually used by those who want to delineate themselves from vampire fandom and role players, come in two basic types. “Sanguinaries,” or “Sangs,”
drink the blood of a partner or have their blood drunk by a partner. This is often, but not always, in a sexual context. “Psychic vampires,” or “Psis,” believe they siphon mental energy from their willing victims. This seemingly diabolical activity is often presented as a kind of mental communion between the participants rather than an invasive attack.
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Those who do not want to take their vampirism so far can take part in the role-playing game
Vampire: The Masquerade
. Reaching the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s, this live-action role-playing game allowed participants to become members of various vampire clans and act out various gothic scenarios. Cultural critic Eric Nuzum describes
Masquerade
as a kind of “improvisational theatre” in which players can perform their vampire fantasies with plastic fangs, blood capsules, and the roll of dice.
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Cultures frequently employ an iconography of death to deal with moments of historical horror and rapid social change. Fourteenth-century Europe freely employed the “Dance of Death” imagery during the plague. In the late eighteenth century, daughters of the nervous French aristocracy wore red chokers and effected a deathly pale aesthetic during the days of the guillotine. In an era that desires the transformation of the body, and transcendence through the corporeal, the bloodred lips of the vampire prove enticing, while the zombie, falling apart before our eyes, becomes a black joke about our worst social fears.

“I’m the Slayer … and you’re history!”

In the late 1990s the critically acclaimed television series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fused, parodied, complicated, and nuanced the American fascination with the apocalyptic and the gothic. Running for one hundred and forty-four episodes over seven seasons,
Buffy
told the story of a teenage girl, seemingly a typical petite blonde in Southern California, interested in cheerleading and boys. The conceit of the show was that Buffy was actually “the Chosen One,” the one girl in every generation empowered to fight vampires, demons, and a whole host of monsters. Since Buffy’s school, Sunnydale High, sat atop a convergence of dark mystical energy known as a “Hellmouth,” the young slayer could be supplied with plenty of monsters, week after week.
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Joss Whedon, the creator and sometime writer/director for the series, has described Buffy as a kind of feminist fairy tale. Media descriptions have underscored this claim frequently, seeing the show as an example of what the late ’90s christened “girl power.” The
Village Voice
described
Buffy
as “a female empowerment saga,” while critic Michel Ostow saw its lead character as a model of feminine strength. When
the show premiered, most discussions of its politics centered on how Buffy combined a traditional femininity with supernatural strength and monster-killing prowess.
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Buffy

Buffy
’s feminist inclinations and how that message engages its audience has received more attention than the show’s subversive cultural and political comments about the nature of society and how forces in society construct, and seek to destroy, the monster. Incorporating both traditional monster imagery and the apocalyptic concerns of 1990s America, Whedon’s series inverted the meaning of its own source material and made Buffy into a different kind of monster slayer from anything audiences had ever seen.
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