Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey.
Episode 14: Beware! The Blob and Capitalist Realism
Hey everyone. Quick note on this episode. I am just starting to get over a pretty nasty cough. My allergies hit me really hard this year and evolved into bronchitis, which, no surprise, isn’t the best condition in the world for trying to record a podcast or do any voiceover work. But things appear to be returning to normal, finally. So, if I sound a bit off today, well, that’s why.
As this episode is dropping on Halloween, I figured maybe I’d do a little horror movie pairing with our next bit of philosophical text unpacking; so, The Blob (1958 and 1988) and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? I recently re-watched both The Blob movies (as well as the “sequel” Beware! The Blob, also called Son of Blob in the trailer, and, oh boy with that one, it’s got a whopping and surprisingly high rating of 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, ugh, the things I do for this podcast. At any rate, I suppose it was better than listening to Trump or Vance, though, given some of Trump’s recent rally and interview statements, he may be providing the best horror content on TV this October), but yeah, the Blob, so, I think both ‘original’ movies – 88 is a remake, not a sequel – carry some interesting political paranoias and socio-economic metaphors, and do actually relate well to what Fisher, and others, have written about Capitalism and Capitalist Realism.
Before getting into the movies or the book, I should explain the phrase “Capitalist Realism.” Fisher uses it as a play on the phrase Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism arose in the Soviet Union in 1934 and was adopted as a cultural template of sorts by Soviet states and then allies following World War II. This was a top-down objective that all things literary and in the arts are filtered through a lens of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideology. There wasn’t a rule system per se, but writing and the arts needed to fit the Soviet revolutionary narrative. Now, to be fair, this was nothing new in the arts. Ancient Greece and Rome had socio-political schema that determined how art looked, how subjects were depicted, etc., for example, up until the Hellenic (Greek-style) Roman Emperors, you won’t see long hair or beards on sculptures of men because it was considered non-Roman and therefore barbaric; the Judeo, Christian, and Islamic clergy have long held dominance over what kinds of “art” is acceptable and what is forbidden or sacrilegious, Napoleon ushered in a return to Classical-style (life-like, representational) painting, even the organization of the Louvre Museum is itself set up to walk the viewer through the history of art from the ancient world up to the pinnacle and ‘end of history,’ French neo-Classicism; and on and on up to things like the late Jesse Helms’ (who once led the congressional committee that controlled the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts and fought, unceasingly, to reduce or eliminate it), and his statement that the entirety Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography was pornographic, because, as a homosexual, the homosexual theme runs through all of Mapplethorpe’s work, or, for that matter, current book-banning movements like Moms for Liberty. Controlling art and literature is fundamental for a totalizing regime, regardless of its economic intent. If you can control art and literature, you can control what people think.
Capitalist Realism, on the other hand, operates through a very different schema. Capitalism is inherently diffuse, with power constantly shifting wherever the money is flowing. Rather than a top-down imposition on culture by the state, Capitalist Realism has spread from the economy into all areas of social life, and now determines what that social life is capable of. It’s not what one is supposed to write or paint about, the style or narrative content, but the being of it, it is Capital become the ontological condition of any and all things and the determining limit of the entire social, cultural, and political space.
Fisher is following a line of thinking he attributes to Frederic Jameson (an American literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist political theorist – whose text Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has been sitting in my Amazon shopping list for quite some time now) and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual, you can find plenty of his lectures and debates online) that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Fisher opens the text using the film, Children of Men, as a case study of a post-catastrophe society on the brink of utter collapse, in which not merely capitalism, but specifically neoliberal capitalism – the shrinking of government to police and military functions only, the elimination of public spaces, the market as determinant of all social value – seems to be the only social system still functioning. It may be the end of the world, but at least I can still get my overpriced corporate-chain coffee. Fisher uses Children of Men to demonstrate such a world in which the end of the world precedes the end of capitalism. Now, we’re going to opt for a couple of different movies, but we’ll get to them in a bit.
Before continuing, a word on postmodernism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
Okay, without going down a rabbit hole here, univocity is a singularity in voicing of meaning, though the term is more often univocity of being, going back to medieval philosophy, and the idea that to say God is Good and Man is Good both mean the same thing as far as good, but don’t mean the same thing as far as man and God in their being, so to say that Man is Good is not to say Man is like God – basically, as far as postmodernism, think difference, as opposed to sameness, being central to determining identity. Back to the quote,
The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard.”
Lyotard isn’t someone we’re going to be getting into anytime soon, but, here’s the quick and dirty run down on how we get to postmodernism. The ‘modern’ era (in the arts, philosophy, and science) begins with the enlightenment, with the sidelining of God as the answer to “Why” and an emphasis on “Reason.” Modernism evolves after Nietzsche kills God, placing human thought and action at the center of human Being. Ontology, such as Heidegger’s ‘What is Being’, Existentialism, such as Sartre’s ‘What is Nothing?’, and Historical Materialism, such as Hegel’s and Marx’s ‘What is the social structure of history?’, and Analytics and Logicians, like Wittgenstein’s language games and ‘What is the logic of language?’, and, critically, Lacan’s concept of lack as the basis of desire and the social order of real, symbolic, and imaginary; push the argument further, and we get to postmodernism and poststructuralism – basically, we exist now in a world after either the basic concept or the basic structure of the world have been displaced or replaced, and wherein we are fundamentally alienated from ourselves; a state of being of constant lack that can never be satisfied.
For Fisher, Capitalist Realism is, essentially, the postmodern world. A world of constant alienation and lack that can never be satisfied. And, it’s an easy parallel from this Lacanian condition of permanent lack and the fundamental drive of late, or consumer (or post-Fordist), Capitalism. Consumer capitalism both feeds on, and is fundamentally reliant upon insatiable desire. Take the current market trend of Planned obsolescence, the built-in expiration date of most modern goods is just one aspect of this. Companies, no surprise, want to sell their products. But what value does that sale have to them in the long run if the consumer only ever buys the one product? There are only so many disposable income/middle class jobs in the world – at least at any notion of sustainability, which I seriously doubt is anywhere close to even the current number of disposable income/middle class jobs; and I strongly encourage you to check out David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs if you want to look into this issue in more depth – but we’ll be coming back to this idea in a few weeks anyway with Livingston’s No More Work. On the other hand, if that car, dresser, microwave, phone, or whatever they just sold you is only designed to last 3-5 years, well, so long as no one else is making ‘durable’ goods anymore, as long as they can sell you on their brand, or trap you in a relationship where they’re the principal or only provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.) they can sell you a replacement and get you back as a returning customer. Why sell a product, when you can sell a dozen of them to the same person, or better yet, a subscription?
Fisher leans on Deleuze and Guattari for their conception of Capitalism, which he notes is “the most impressive [account of Capitalism] since Marx’s…” wherein they describe capitalism
as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing,’ the abomination which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance.’ When it arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law… The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film… a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.
Now, while I do like the comparison to Carpenter’s The Thing, and I think that as both a horror movie and a remake, it’s superior to the Blob, but I think the Blob really embodies this description of capitalism better. The Thing mimics the human body, consumes what it needs and then masks itself as what it’s consumed; whereas the Blob simply metabolizes. At least in the original, it has no orifice or anything by which to consume, it simply rolls over, absorbs, and grows, transforming the human body into more of itself, while leaving the material things (the doctor’s office, the movie theater, the diner, the car, the phone booth, etc.) unphased – with one interesting exception: the film reel. Also, another interesting parallel, the Thing requires cold to survive and is badly damaged by fire whereas the Blob is a total opposite. It draws energy from heat and shrinks back, solidifies, due to cold. Likewise, capitalism, when the market is hot, few people are wondering in the public discourse about the pros and cons of capitalism, but when the market cools, whenever there’s a recession, the debate over capitalism reignites.
The Blob, 1958, takes place in that same time period somewhere around Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and has the feel, in ’58, of a small, semi-rural town in the middle of anywhere America – side note, it’s a cool little town just outside of Philadelphia (and shout out to Ravensgate, Jordan and John, and Steel City coffee) and they actually hold an annual Blob-fest in Phoenixville, if you’re in Philly, check it out, it’s like a 30-40 minute drive, as long as it’s not rush hour. The movie follows a group of teenagers, centered on Steve Andrews (a then already 27 year old Steve McQueen) and his date that evening though maybe potential girlfriend – it’s never made clear what the deal is – Jane (played by Aneta Corsaut, then 24) and a supporting crew of 20 somethings introduced collectively in the opening credits as “the Teenagers.” The movie opens with a meteorite crash in nearby foothills, which is investigated by a hermit/hobo type character, credited as “Old Man,” and his dog. Meanwhile, Steve and Jane embark on a date that almost immediately deteriorates. They also witness the meteorite crash, though from a greater distance, and go to check it out, where they, well, run into the old man when he runs into the road. They decide to take him to the town doctor because of the accident, and discover he’s already in need of help because of some strange goo all over his hand. Racing back to town with Old Man and Dog in the backseat, they improperly pass some ‘teen’ guys, whose pride is deeply wounded by such an event, and they get sucked into a vaguely threatening race us or we screw with you situation, that leads to an extraordinarily polite and reasonable police stop. Eventually, they just manage to get Old Man to the town Doctor as he’s closing up shop. We get a little bit of character development, we find the ‘head’ of the police, Lt. Dave, is at odds with Sgt. Bert, who would prefer to be far more strict with the town’s youth. The Blob, growing both larger and a darker shade of red as events transpire, consumes the old man, a nurse, and the doctor, the last just in time for Steve to get back and witness the event through a window. Steve and Jane try to get the police involved, but, of course, there’s no evidence (no bodies) and a random woman intervenes to tell the police the kids are wrong, the doctor’s out of town. So, slowly, chaos begins to ensue. The ‘teenagers’ spend the movie trying to warn people, the adults/authority figures dismiss them and/or accuse them of mischief, until finally, in the grand climax, the Blob attacks the movie theater during a “midnight spooky show” and chaos really does erupt. Most of the crowd appears to exit the theater in full panic, but an untold number of the rest are consumed, Steve and Jayne take shelter in a diner, and the Blob tries to cover it too and nearly gets them when they decide to hide, along with the diner owner(?) staff(?) in the walk-in cooler, where they discover the monster can’t handle cold as the police decide they need to electrocute it to destroy it. Steve and Jane escape, convince Lt. Dave to change the plan and The Blob is ultimately frozen by townsfolk and police and firemen wielding fire extinguishers and the creature is airdropped somewhere in the arctic. The end?
Okay, now, why do I think this can be used as a metaphor for capitalism? Well, for starters, I definitely don’t think that was the writers or the producers' intent in ’57 , ’58 as the Cold War was evolving. I think it’s an appropriate metaphor now, but I suspect it was more about changing social norms and ‘the red scare’ more than anything more nuanced, at the time anyway. In 57 the Cold War began evolving into the Space Race with the USSR launching Sputnik – the first man-made satellite – Americans could literally see Soviet technology race over their heads at night – yes, the satellite itself was like the size of a basketball, but the booster would have been visible as well as the light reflecting off Sputnik, it was basically a chrome mirror-ball as severely as it was polished – and as far as the teens, as noted in an article on “Teenage Culture” by the Digital Public Library of America, “The 1950s were marked by the emergence of a distinct teen culture. Seeking to distance themselves from the culture of their parents, teenagers turned to rock and roll music and youth-oriented television programs and movies—all packaged for them through new marketing strategies targeting their demographic.
Teen culture in the 1950s also marked an important shift in American race relations. Most teenagers during this time attended segregated or near-segregated schools, and interracial interaction was limited. However, rock and roll appealed to teenagers from many backgrounds, and rock concerts often hosted mixed-race audiences. White teenagers embraced the music of African American musicians like Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry, while African American teenagers listened to white rock and rollers, such as Elvis.”
Perhaps not ironically, the ‘teenagers’ depicted in the Blob were anything but, and carried themselves like a hybrid of the youth of the current and previous generations. That said, I think the “teenagers” are what make the comparisons to the Blob itself as metaphor for Red Scare Expansionist Communism kinda weak, or at least more complicated. It’s not the authority figures in the movie that are concerned about the Blob, at least not until the reality of the problem is exposed directly to them. The warnings the younger generation are trying to issue are largely dismissed, until it’s too late. If it’s the youth that are at risk of corruption and it’s the youth that are sounding the alarm, then what’s the real threat? Now, compare that to something like the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers which doesn’t feature any youth in the principal cast, and only one young boy with any speaking lines.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another Red Scare era horror classic that got a remake treatment (though I haven’t seen the 78 version), it tells the story of a divorced, successful, ruggedly handsome 30-something Dr. Miles Bennell, played by Kevin McCarthy, the actor, returning from a conference out of town to beautiful, but deeply troubled, fictional Santa Mira, California – no, really, this place has issues, it’s the setting for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, 4! Sharknado movies, Halloween 3, I mean… these poor fictional people. Miles soon runs into his once upon a time high school girlfriend, the globe-trotting, cosmopolitan, also divorced Becky Driscoll, played by the beautiful Dana Wynter. Ah, love rekindled, in a picturesque American, suburban town in the midst of a complete population replacement by alien pod-people. What begins with a little mild confusion and paranoia, deteriorates into full blown survival horror, as Miles and Becky, along with Jack and his wife Teddy, discover themselves surrounded by conspiracy, appearing to be the only four normal humans left in a town of emotionless pod-people, and if they make the mistake of falling asleep, they’ll be replaced too. The pods are staged everywhere, just waiting on you to fall asleep so they can spawn a copy of you. Keep in mind, if you haven’t seen it yet and want to – it’s a classic, I don’t think it’s “horror” so much as suspense, but it’s almost 70 years old – the bookending scenes of Miles hysterical in a hospital were forced additions to the movie since the studio thought the original ending was way too grim. Interestingly, and a bit unfortunately, the main theme of the movie, alien replacement, is even more relevant today than it was as a cold-war/red scare era film. As notes Kathleen Loock, in “The Return of the Pod People: Remaking Cultural Anxieties in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The film’s theme of alien paranoia—the fear that some invisible invaders could replace individual human beings and turn them into a collective of emotionless pod people—resonated with widespread anxieties in 1950s American culture. It has been read as an allegory of the communist threat during the Cold War but also as a commentary on McCarthyism, the alienating effects of capitalism, conformism, postwar radiation anxiety, the return of “brainwashed” soldiers from the Korean War, and masculine fears of “the potential social, political, and personal disenfranchisement of postwar America’s hegemonic white patriarchy.” (Which, in the last bit, the author is also citing another text on “Body Snatchers” by Katrina Mann). I’d add to that the immigration paranoia in far-right movements across the world today, including the Nazi propaganda derivative ‘replacement theory’ popular among the MAGA and other American far right nationalist movements certainly fits this bill.
Now, as “Body Snatchers” can be read as both McCarthyist and Anti-McCarthyist, I think the Blob can be read as metaphor for both Communism – though I think that argument is pretty weak as far as red scare paranoia, as the generation Communism was supposedly corrupting in the US is the same generation portrayed as the somewhat hapless heroes of the film – and Capitalism, especially late Capitalism – so, sure, that argument is anachronistic, it’s all but impossible to believe a warning about post-industrial consumer capitalism was the authors’ original intent, but, I’m chalking this one up to theoretical death of the author, or authors, rather. It’s about how the Blob is relevant now. That said, I couldn’t really find anything about screenwriters Theodore Simonson and Kay Linaker (credited then as Kate Phillips), or idea-man Irvine H. Millgate that would implicate any opinion at all about their politics one way or another.
Like we mentioned in the last Episode as regards Edelman’s reference to the Birds and the real fear of the bird attacks being driven by the meaninglessness of it all, the real fear of the Blob isn’t so much death or bodily dissolution, it’s that, even more so than the Birds, we can imagine this happening. If not necessarily the impact of some alien lifeform or virus on the human population, then the potential impotence, incompetence, or gross negligence (as in the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak) of the authorities to manage a novel crisis – both 2016’s Shin Gojira and last year’s Gojira: Minus One do this spectacularly, evolving the theme of the original 1954 Gojira from one of the threat of another atomic catastrophe and the ongoing American Occupation of Japan to one of the Japanese government’s sclerotic, hyper-bureaucracy… and a little American obstruction (in Shin Godzilla), or its abject failure and continued commitment to secrecy (in Minus One), that holds Japan back from protecting its people. Though Shin eventually resolves when some scientists and younger, junior bureaucrats come up with an action plan for the Defense Forces, in both the original and 2023 versions, as well as 1984’s Godzilla Returns, an impressive condemnation of Cold War superpower politics (at least as the original Japanese version. The American release contains a bunch of added footage that completely alters America’s role and blatantly mistranslates the Russian ship captain’s dialogue to make the Russians appear as the villains) saving the day is left to one or two civilians and a clever scientist – “Minus One” does have a large scale naval operation for the finale, but the final blow is still delivered by one man; a common theme in basically every American action movie from the 80s – in a world beset by horror, one man can save us all…
Okay, so, let’s pivot a little, there’s more Blob movies to get through!
Next up, and boy my life was probably better having missed this, um, gem of early 70s cinema, we get 1972’s Beware! The Blob, directed by future nighttime soap opera star Larry Hagman – who also plays, briefly, a hobo in the film. Well, we have a familiar story, small town middle America – this one takes place during the day for the first half of the movie though – we have some youth and the police to fill out most of the speaking cast, and not one, but three hobos (including Burgess Meredith?!)! Though there’s no explicit reference to teenagers and most of the young cast seem earnestly in the early to mid-20s, including a brief appearance by Cindy Williams, some 10 years before Laverne and Shirley fame, playing a bit of a counter-culture stoner that’s almost jarring to someone that only remembered the more strait-laced Shirley from TV reruns when they were a kid. In contrast to the original’s vague social paranoia, Beware! The Blob jumps headlong into a reefer-madness-esque depiction of the town’s youth being into art, music, weed, partying, and nothing else. In a step into the modern world, the town is no longer comprised of white people only, though the few Black residents are certainly portrayed as Other, for example Chester, the horny, heavy drinking, rarely home husband camping in a tent in his own house with a tackle box full of beer, or the seemingly-kinda-slow and clumsy deputy who, after having the audacity of having an idea as to what they should do, gets shot down by the portrayed-as-heroic and progressive, older white Sheriff, with a cringeworthy, “that’s why I’s the Sheriff, and you’s the deputy.” The movie can’t figure out if it’s horror or camp, going so far in one scene to show Chester watching the original movie on TV. Where Steve and Jane in the original spend the movie trying to figure out what’s happening and warn or save people, the leading couple of the sequel, Bobby and Lisa, spend most of the movie driving, running, partying, or scream-crying. Lisa, who downs a ‘party brownie’ in the first minutes she’s on screen, becomes the first survivor of a sighting of the blob, spends the next 30 minutes of the movie screaming, crying, and laughing, and just comes across to everyone else like she’s on a bad trip. Much like the original, people go missing, the police are largely ineffective, no one believes Lisa until after they witness the Blob (if they survive), the Blob attacks a large venue, this time a bowling alley/ice rink (which is of course inactive and closed). The police decide they can’t allow the Blob’s survival, so they get ready to burn the building down with the Blob (as well as Bobby and Lisa and the thoroughly annoying bowling alley/ice rink owner and town wealthy-man, Edward Fazio). Bobby manages some daredevil rope climbing and miraculously cuts the ice on, freezes the Blob, and gets outside to stop the impending burnout all in the time it takes the Sheriff to find one working lighter.
Unfortunately, there’s not much here, I think, worth getting into. As a horror movie, well, the movie is a horror. I’ve seen worse, but this would have been a lot more enjoyable as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 spoof. If there’s social commentary, it’s maybe that we’re just all screwed? The capitalist class is a pain in the ass that whines about everything and impotently yells at the police to do what they want them to do, the police are clueless and ineffective, the youth have dropped out of society, and the few children depicted in the film, a troop of boy scouts, are more interested in playing with their balls than doing anything scouts are typically depicted as doing – and yes, playing with their balls. The scenes are rough on the ears, they all have these pairs of large glass marbles connected by string that you bounce off each other and make a constant, loud clacking sound – if you’ve ever seen those little plastic clacker wand toys with the 2 small balls you smack into each other, imagine that except with much larger balls made of glass or resin or something. It’s an annoying couple of minutes of film. Oh, and how could I forget Samuel? Poor Samuel, probably the only character worth mourning. The movie opens and runs the entire opening credits following a small kitten in a field to a score that could only be called… progressive, if you think the music of a b-rate arcade game from the early 80s would be ahead of the curve for 1972 movie scoring. Unlike the scruffy dog from the 58 original, who has a penchant for disappearing and reappearing, reassuring the audience of his survival, poor little Samuel is this Blob’s first kill, once it’s free, not including a fly that mistakenly lands on it while it’s still in a container. The Blob is just as ambivalent about what and who it consumes as the cast and crew were about whether the audience should care about them. Welcome to 1972, no one will be missed.
Which leads us to the 1988 remake of The Blob, but, before I get into that, I want to take a minute to consider why these movies are worth considering in terms of Capitalist Realism; which, recall, Fisher considers to be the postmodern condition. I have, for a long time now, been fascinated by the idea of ‘gods and monsters,’ specifically, in how they reflect the values and anxieties of a culture at a given time – that, there’s a reason we get waves of media about vampires and zombies and aliens or giant monsters or world ending storms or astrological events, in that they reflect the current mass anxiety. Consider some of the top horror movies last year; M3GAN (AI and robots), Talk to Me (Supernatural/Possession), Evil Dead Rise (Supernatural/Possession), Knock at the Cabin (paranoia, the unknown, fate of the world, good people having to do bad things). Now, compare that to 2016; Ouija (Supernatural/Possession), The Conjuring 2 (Supernatural/Possession), The Void (by the way, this one’s great, definitely recommend, kind of modern Lovecraftian supernatural, the unknown, cults, it’s got a lot going on), 10 Cloverfield Lane (captivity, the unknown, a murderer? monsters?). How about 2004? Monsters and Violence rule the day, mostly undead, Vampires and Zombies, holy shit with the zombies: Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Shawn of the Dead, another Frankenstein remake, Frankenfish, Blade Trinity, Van Helsing, Dracula 3000, Alien vs Predator, Hellboy, another Chucky movie, and of course some slashers and supernatural movies, and not one, but two Ginger Snaps sequels.
Consider this passage from Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction;
Just as the anxieties regarding technology and the Other have produced complex responses within science fiction, so the horror genre has produced a wide range of textual strategies, most of which center upon an extensive hyperbolization of the body and its (dys)functions. … The threats in the horror film to the subject’s health and well-being are, perhaps, excessive attempts at a recuperative mission. The task of the horror film might therefore be to rescue the body, and thus the subject, from the vicissitudes of modern urban, cybernetic, and viral existences, in other words, from the interface with those exterior forces that threaten the subject’s hegemony. … The return of the body could actually be understood as an obsession with the surface of the body. While the interior organs are externalized or revealed to the viewer’s fascinated gaze, the “depth” of subjectivity continues to be denied. The subject continues to be displaced in horror fiction, while the body is hyperbolized – opened up, as it were – as an infinite set of surfaces…
I’ll unpack that a little. So, first, Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University – if you’re interested in Film and Comic Books and want to read some really in depth, theory heavy analysis of pop culture, check out his stuff – Terminal Identity, if you’re interested in Science Fiction, subject/identity, and postmodernism, and Matters of Gravity, if you’re more interested in special effects, technology, superheroes, etc. to investigate if/how pop culture has transformed the old fear and anxiety of technological advancement resulting in change into a roller-coaster type anxiety – it’s scary, but it’s controlled, safe, so it’s thrilling. The issue for the body (of the subject – a human being, a being which is at the center of its own subjective experience of the world, to be Kantian, or a Dasein, to go back to Heidegger) in a horror movie is that the body is constantly in a position of danger, but, the emphasis, in horror, for Bukatman, is always only on the body. Not so much ‘the subject.’ It’s the body as thing to be exploded, often literally, into view. The subjectivity of the body isn’t a matter of concern, only the mere survival or dissolution of the body itself. To which I would add, the embodiment of the threat to the body tends to reflect the social anxieties of the time. When there’s a general anxiety of powerlessness, lack of agency, that things are out of control, we typically wind up with movies about unseen threats, the supernatural, possession and exorcism; if the anxiety is some perceived external threat, like a hostile foreign power or immigration, we wind up with movies about zombies, aliens, and giant monsters. A little caveat here, and I haven’t done much reading on this, but it sounds really interesting, the Black Horror subgenre seems to be changing this formula up, returning the subject to the center of the crisis. The body is still an issue, but the storyteller is now someone for whom the body has always been an issue, and so merely focusing on the body-in-danger isn’t telling a story that’s in any way novel.
So, capitalist realism and the dissolution of the body… The Blob, 1988.
Welcome to the remake. We’re taking the Blob back to its roots. We’ve got our lead couple, a high school football star (who also seems to be a little inept with the ladies) and his skeezy friend Scott – man, the cringe of that guy. By today’s standards, this character is far more of a horror show than the Blob itself. A word of caution if you’ve never seen this one, the Scott character is a walking trigger warning, but, don’t worry, he doesn’t live long and the cause of death is… poetic. This time around, the role of Steve kinda gets split in two, between all-American, clean cut, football playing Paul, and long haired, motorcycle riding, bad boy Brian Flagg, played by Kevin Dillon. Jane’s been replaced by one-dimensional cheerleader turned final girl Meg, played by Shawnee Smith. We once again have the blob crash into a field some small distance to the small-ish town (we’re also in California now instead of Pennsylvania), once again found by a hobo and his dog. The hobo, with Blob on hand, runs into the road causing an accident between Paul and Meg, in his car, and Brian, going by on his bike. Paul transforms from milktoast, suburban good boy to stereotypical hypermasculine jock at the sight of Flagg, they eventually, with Meg’s leadership, get their shit together long enough to try to get the hobo to a doctor. Now, we get a little modern twist. Where in 58 the kids drove up to the town doctor and got him to reopen his office at the urgency of the unknown situation, now we’re immediately thrust into the banality of modern healthcare. Everyone stopped in their tracks while the nurse handles paperwork and then tries to send them away for lack of insurance. The hobo is eventually let into an exam room, but he's left alone while the doctor has a long quiet talk with a paying patient in his office, as Paul and Meg spend their date filling out admissions paperwork. Paul notices the body of the hobo moving irregularly, and we get a good look at this new blob. This time, it’s bigger, faster, and seriously acidic (to human flesh anyway, doors, counters, walls, etc, the material goods of the world are, once again, totally fine), and um, night-night Paul. We get a retelling of kids and police, who are still led by a more patient Sheriff, whose deputy is far more keen to blame the entire incident on Flagg. Blob runs amok, people go missing, chaos eventually ensues, Meg and Flagg go back to the woods to try to get evidence of the killer ‘thing.’ Now we get a full on 80s plot twist. Where in 58 the Blob cracks out of a basketball-sized meteorite, this time, the kids arrive in the woods to find a team of government agents in plain white hazmat gear and no insignia on anyone’s uniforms, vehicles, or PPE. They pull the sphere out of the crater, and this time it’s a satellite with the American flag clearly visible. The agents, led by a couple of scientists, capture the kids – Flagg escapes, which turns out to be critical to finding out what’s really happening, but Meg goes along with them, under the impression the agents must surely be the good guys. The agents round up the town in one building, Flagg discovers the Blob is a top-secret US biological weapon experiment – a virus was sent into space and cosmic rays transformed it into the Blob – and the agents’ plan is to capture the blob, firebomb the town, kill everyone, so it’s up to Flagg and Meg to save the day.
The Blob, in this version, does a textbook perfect job of illustrating Bukatman’s point about the dissolution of the body, and the attempt, by the heroes to save as many bodies as they can, as well as adding an additional dimension to the threat in the form of the government agents’ inverted agenda of preserving the blob’s amorphous, viral, ‘body’ while terminating the bodies of everyone else, lest their illegal biological weapons research come to light. We also get a look at the anxieties of the era, in this case, pretty clearly, from the stark contrast in social attitudes between the 58 and 88 versions. The fear of the unknown is still there, but the ‘kids’ are more delinquent risk to the community than just vaguely at risk, the older sheriff would rather try to kindle a middle age romance with the local waitress/diner owner and settle down whereas the younger deputy is of a mind for a more authoritarian approach to police work, the federal government, absent from the 58 version, is here in force in 88 and they are most certainly bad guys, whether or not the Blob is a greater threat than they are or not, and ultimately incompetent and impotent to deal with the threat that they created, perhaps leaning a little on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. And of course we have the Blob itself. This time around the Blob is more pink than red, it’s more about consumption than subsumption, it doesn’t simply roll over everything in its path, it’s still amorphous, but now more of an active predator, generating tentacles and orifices depending on the need of the moment, appearing kinda like a giant, tentacled, pink, well, anus in a major attack and escape scene in a sewer, and laden with all of the metaphors and anxieties those images represent or imply. If the 58 Blob was intended as a stand-in for the Red Scare, the 88 Blob implies a Pink Scare, and has given up anxiety of external social threats to small town America, for internal ones, trading implied foreign threat for the explicit threat of being caught between anonymous federal agencies led by amoral scientists wielding the might of the US military and the amorphous (but laden with sexual imagery) threat they created.
So, let’s bring this back to Capitalist Realism.
Imagine a version of the Blob where the Blob wins. In 58, the Blob is airdropped in the arctic and the concluding ‘the end’ on the screen resolves into a question mark. The Blob frozen on the ice rink in 72 is immediately climbed on by the news, the teens, and the Sheriff, standing and sitting on the barely frozen surface directly under the can lights, where the sheriff's body heat melts enough area under his boot for the blob to latch onto him, and for him to recognize his inevitable demise just as the film freeze frames on his doomed expression and the credits roll. In 88, a local pastor that survives the incident snatches up some frozen chunks of blob and goes off into the wastes to set up shop as a hellfire and brimstone revival preacher, ready to bring on the end of the world himself, for the good of Christianity of course, with his own pet blob. In each big screen version, the Blob survives, but what if it were to win? To just keep on consuming? Metabolizing everything, consuming and growing, until it’s all there is.
This isn’t what Fisher is afraid will happen with Capitalism, this is what Capital has already done and continues to do. Now, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism was published in 2009 in the wake of the credit crisis and Great Recession, in the hopes that this was one of those moments where the Blob had been cooled down, slowed, frozen maybe long enough for folks to realize there’s a monster on the loose but it’s hurt, and maybe now’s a good time to do something about it. Unfortunately, and to Fisher’s credit, what he had to say about Capitalist Realism seems to have been right. The Occupy movements petered out, collapsed under their own lack of organization, intent, and imagination. The idea of socialism managed to get some ideological dust kicked off its shoes, but has otherwise not accomplished much, it’s no longer a real alternative to capitalism so much as a benign caring about society. And beyond any of Fisher’s concerns, since covid, there has a been a global upsurge in far right, authoritarian movements – though they have seen some surprising electoral defeats this year (so far) – that are fully compatible, where not openly complicit with, capital in the neoliberal sense of money equals power. Not the least of which being the alliance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Before wrapping, I want to touch on another problem Fisher brings up regarding late capitalism and the modern work space that also connects to the anxieties played on in the Blob movies regarding the Blob’s amorphousness – both it’s lack of shape and its ability to access any and every place it can find people; interesting note, only the 72 movie depicts the Blob attacking anyone in their home and the only couple attacked in their home are Chester and his wife, because Chester brought the specimen container into the home, placing it in the freezer per warning on the container, that his wife promptly ignores because she doesn’t want his things in her freezer. Every other attack occurs in a public space or work site.
Regarding post-Fordist work (work today, i.e. beyond the limits of the factory or assembly line), Fisher, following Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism notes, “Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As organizational work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’… Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism.”
And this is of course predating just-in-time scheduling – Sennett’s text was written in 1998 – and the heightened precarity of the modern gig economy. (It’s one thing to say a salaried, professional, like a doctor or a network infrastructure engineer may need to be on-call, in case of an actual emergency, and to claim you need a Starbucks barista or McDonald’s cashier to be on-call in case of sales volume during peak hours).
The amorphousness of the Blob and the anxiety around general trends of social change, whether teen counter-culture, diversity and inclusion, economic uncertainty, workplace precarity, changing cultural, political, and ethnic demographics, etc. is what keeps the Blob relevant – granted, I think there’s definitely an argument to be made for a new ‘Red Scare’ in the US as far as the spread of Trumpism, MAGA ideology, and White/Christian Nationalism – which the recent movie Civil War, I think, was perfectly teed up for some kind, any kind, of commentary on, but opted instead to make a political movie with no political stance whatsoever, that thoroughly ignores the cause of the war and what anyone is fighting for and instead dramatizes over two hours the idea that violence traumatizes everyone, hoping that they can perhaps reach everyone by speaking to no one, except maybe photography and journalism majors.
The apolitical-ness of Civil War stands in stark contrast to the amorphous and shape-changing monsters in The Blob, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. By lacking a political position in a political movie, Civil War speaks to no one, it’s the horror movie of late capitalism’s race to the bottom, the ‘we can reach everyone if we target the lowest common denominator.’ Whereas The Blob, The Thing, and Invasion remain relevant today because of the ambiguousness of the monster, that it can be anywhere and get (or be) anyone, any audience can read their fears and anxieties onto it. Likewise with the meaninglessness of it all in The Birds, or the anxiety of human powerlessness in the wake of a hurricane, an asteroid, a haunted house, or a Godzilla.
Alright, next episode we’ll come back to Mark Fisher and get into the details of the text. Given it’s Halloween, I figured this diversion into horror movies would be a bit more fun and set the stage for how Fisher and the next couple of authors we’re looking at are thinking about capitalism.
The next episode will be dropping after election day here in the US, so, here’s hoping we’re not in the midst of some electoral crisis or careening headlong into an institutional confrontation with fascism. I suspect I’ll be glued to the TV and/or my computer well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning next week. So, in closing out this Halloween episode, I’ll leave you with this passage from David Frankfurter’s Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History
If there is irony, then it lies not in my having to describe the experience of evil in its extreme, but rather in the fact that, in every one of the historical cases I address, it was the myth of evil conspiracy that mobilized people in large numbers to astounding acts of brutality against accused conspirators. That is, the real atrocities of history seem to take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world. Real evil happens when people speak of evil.
‘til next time.
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Episode 14: Beware! The Blob and Capitalist Realism
Hey everyone. Quick note on this episode. I am just starting to get over a pretty nasty cough. My allergies hit me really hard this year and evolved into bronchitis, which, no surprise, isn’t the best condition in the world for trying to record a podcast or do any voiceover work. But things appear to be returning to normal, finally. So, if I sound a bit off today, well, that’s why.
As this episode is dropping on Halloween, I figured maybe I’d do a little horror movie pairing with our next bit of philosophical text unpacking; so, The Blob (1958 and 1988) and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? I recently re-watched both The Blob movies (as well as the “sequel” Beware! The Blob, also called Son of Blob in the trailer, and, oh boy with that one, it’s got a whopping and surprisingly high rating of 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, ugh, the things I do for this podcast. At any rate, I suppose it was better than listening to Trump or Vance, though, given some of Trump’s recent rally and interview statements, he may be providing the best horror content on TV this October), but yeah, the Blob, so, I think both ‘original’ movies – 88 is a remake, not a sequel – carry some interesting political paranoias and socio-economic metaphors, and do actually relate well to what Fisher, and others, have written about Capitalism and Capitalist Realism.
Before getting into the movies or the book, I should explain the phrase “Capitalist Realism.” Fisher uses it as a play on the phrase Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism arose in the Soviet Union in 1934 and was adopted as a cultural template of sorts by Soviet states and then allies following World War II. This was a top-down objective that all things literary and in the arts are filtered through a lens of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideology. There wasn’t a rule system per se, but writing and the arts needed to fit the Soviet revolutionary narrative. Now, to be fair, this was nothing new in the arts. Ancient Greece and Rome had socio-political schema that determined how art looked, how subjects were depicted, etc., for example, up until the Hellenic (Greek-style) Roman Emperors, you won’t see long hair or beards on sculptures of men because it was considered non-Roman and therefore barbaric; the Judeo, Christian, and Islamic clergy have long held dominance over what kinds of “art” is acceptable and what is forbidden or sacrilegious, Napoleon ushered in a return to Classical-style (life-like, representational) painting, even the organization of the Louvre Museum is itself set up to walk the viewer through the history of art from the ancient world up to the pinnacle and ‘end of history,’ French neo-Classicism; and on and on up to things like the late Jesse Helms’ (who once led the congressional committee that controlled the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts and fought, unceasingly, to reduce or eliminate it), and his statement that the entirety Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography was pornographic, because, as a homosexual, the homosexual theme runs through all of Mapplethorpe’s work, or, for that matter, current book-banning movements like Moms for Liberty. Controlling art and literature is fundamental for a totalizing regime, regardless of its economic intent. If you can control art and literature, you can control what people think.
Capitalist Realism, on the other hand, operates through a very different schema. Capitalism is inherently diffuse, with power constantly shifting wherever the money is flowing. Rather than a top-down imposition on culture by the state, Capitalist Realism has spread from the economy into all areas of social life, and now determines what that social life is capable of. It’s not what one is supposed to write or paint about, the style or narrative content, but the being of it, it is Capital become the ontological condition of any and all things and the determining limit of the entire social, cultural, and political space.
Fisher is following a line of thinking he attributes to Frederic Jameson (an American literary critic, philosopher, and Marxist political theorist – whose text Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism has been sitting in my Amazon shopping list for quite some time now) and Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual, you can find plenty of his lectures and debates online) that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Fisher opens the text using the film, Children of Men, as a case study of a post-catastrophe society on the brink of utter collapse, in which not merely capitalism, but specifically neoliberal capitalism – the shrinking of government to police and military functions only, the elimination of public spaces, the market as determinant of all social value – seems to be the only social system still functioning. It may be the end of the world, but at least I can still get my overpriced corporate-chain coffee. Fisher uses Children of Men to demonstrate such a world in which the end of the world precedes the end of capitalism. Now, we’re going to opt for a couple of different movies, but we’ll get to them in a bit.
Before continuing, a word on postmodernism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “
That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.
Okay, without going down a rabbit hole here, univocity is a singularity in voicing of meaning, though the term is more often univocity of being, going back to medieval philosophy, and the idea that to say God is Good and Man is Good both mean the same thing as far as good, but don’t mean the same thing as far as man and God in their being, so to say that Man is Good is not to say Man is like God – basically, as far as postmodernism, think difference, as opposed to sameness, being central to determining identity. Back to the quote,
The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard.”
Lyotard isn’t someone we’re going to be getting into anytime soon, but, here’s the quick and dirty run down on how we get to postmodernism. The ‘modern’ era (in the arts, philosophy, and science) begins with the enlightenment, with the sidelining of God as the answer to “Why” and an emphasis on “Reason.” Modernism evolves after Nietzsche kills God, placing human thought and action at the center of human Being. Ontology, such as Heidegger’s ‘What is Being’, Existentialism, such as Sartre’s ‘What is Nothing?’, and Historical Materialism, such as Hegel’s and Marx’s ‘What is the social structure of history?’, and Analytics and Logicians, like Wittgenstein’s language games and ‘What is the logic of language?’, and, critically, Lacan’s concept of lack as the basis of desire and the social order of real, symbolic, and imaginary; push the argument further, and we get to postmodernism and poststructuralism – basically, we exist now in a world after either the basic concept or the basic structure of the world have been displaced or replaced, and wherein we are fundamentally alienated from ourselves; a state of being of constant lack that can never be satisfied.
For Fisher, Capitalist Realism is, essentially, the postmodern world. A world of constant alienation and lack that can never be satisfied. And, it’s an easy parallel from this Lacanian condition of permanent lack and the fundamental drive of late, or consumer (or post-Fordist), Capitalism. Consumer capitalism both feeds on, and is fundamentally reliant upon insatiable desire. Take the current market trend of Planned obsolescence, the built-in expiration date of most modern goods is just one aspect of this. Companies, no surprise, want to sell their products. But what value does that sale have to them in the long run if the consumer only ever buys the one product? There are only so many disposable income/middle class jobs in the world – at least at any notion of sustainability, which I seriously doubt is anywhere close to even the current number of disposable income/middle class jobs; and I strongly encourage you to check out David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs if you want to look into this issue in more depth – but we’ll be coming back to this idea in a few weeks anyway with Livingston’s No More Work. On the other hand, if that car, dresser, microwave, phone, or whatever they just sold you is only designed to last 3-5 years, well, so long as no one else is making ‘durable’ goods anymore, as long as they can sell you on their brand, or trap you in a relationship where they’re the principal or only provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.) they can sell you a replacement and get you back as a returning customer. Why sell a product, when you can sell a dozen of them to the same person, or better yet, a subscription?
Fisher leans on Deleuze and Guattari for their conception of Capitalism, which he notes is “the most impressive [account of Capitalism] since Marx’s…” wherein they describe capitalism
as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing,’ the abomination which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance.’ When it arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law… The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film… a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.
Now, while I do like the comparison to Carpenter’s The Thing, and I think that as both a horror movie and a remake, it’s superior to the Blob, but I think the Blob really embodies this description of capitalism better. The Thing mimics the human body, consumes what it needs and then masks itself as what it’s consumed; whereas the Blob simply metabolizes. At least in the original, it has no orifice or anything by which to consume, it simply rolls over, absorbs, and grows, transforming the human body into more of itself, while leaving the material things (the doctor’s office, the movie theater, the diner, the car, the phone booth, etc.) unphased – with one interesting exception: the film reel. Also, another interesting parallel, the Thing requires cold to survive and is badly damaged by fire whereas the Blob is a total opposite. It draws energy from heat and shrinks back, solidifies, due to cold. Likewise, capitalism, when the market is hot, few people are wondering in the public discourse about the pros and cons of capitalism, but when the market cools, whenever there’s a recession, the debate over capitalism reignites.
The Blob, 1958, takes place in that same time period somewhere around Phoenixville, Pennsylvania and has the feel, in ’58, of a small, semi-rural town in the middle of anywhere America – side note, it’s a cool little town just outside of Philadelphia (and shout out to Ravensgate, Jordan and John, and Steel City coffee) and they actually hold an annual Blob-fest in Phoenixville, if you’re in Philly, check it out, it’s like a 30-40 minute drive, as long as it’s not rush hour. The movie follows a group of teenagers, centered on Steve Andrews (a then already 27 year old Steve McQueen) and his date that evening though maybe potential girlfriend – it’s never made clear what the deal is – Jane (played by Aneta Corsaut, then 24) and a supporting crew of 20 somethings introduced collectively in the opening credits as “the Teenagers.” The movie opens with a meteorite crash in nearby foothills, which is investigated by a hermit/hobo type character, credited as “Old Man,” and his dog. Meanwhile, Steve and Jane embark on a date that almost immediately deteriorates. They also witness the meteorite crash, though from a greater distance, and go to check it out, where they, well, run into the old man when he runs into the road. They decide to take him to the town doctor because of the accident, and discover he’s already in need of help because of some strange goo all over his hand. Racing back to town with Old Man and Dog in the backseat, they improperly pass some ‘teen’ guys, whose pride is deeply wounded by such an event, and they get sucked into a vaguely threatening race us or we screw with you situation, that leads to an extraordinarily polite and reasonable police stop. Eventually, they just manage to get Old Man to the town Doctor as he’s closing up shop. We get a little bit of character development, we find the ‘head’ of the police, Lt. Dave, is at odds with Sgt. Bert, who would prefer to be far more strict with the town’s youth. The Blob, growing both larger and a darker shade of red as events transpire, consumes the old man, a nurse, and the doctor, the last just in time for Steve to get back and witness the event through a window. Steve and Jane try to get the police involved, but, of course, there’s no evidence (no bodies) and a random woman intervenes to tell the police the kids are wrong, the doctor’s out of town. So, slowly, chaos begins to ensue. The ‘teenagers’ spend the movie trying to warn people, the adults/authority figures dismiss them and/or accuse them of mischief, until finally, in the grand climax, the Blob attacks the movie theater during a “midnight spooky show” and chaos really does erupt. Most of the crowd appears to exit the theater in full panic, but an untold number of the rest are consumed, Steve and Jayne take shelter in a diner, and the Blob tries to cover it too and nearly gets them when they decide to hide, along with the diner owner(?) staff(?) in the walk-in cooler, where they discover the monster can’t handle cold as the police decide they need to electrocute it to destroy it. Steve and Jane escape, convince Lt. Dave to change the plan and The Blob is ultimately frozen by townsfolk and police and firemen wielding fire extinguishers and the creature is airdropped somewhere in the arctic. The end?
Okay, now, why do I think this can be used as a metaphor for capitalism? Well, for starters, I definitely don’t think that was the writers or the producers' intent in ’57 , ’58 as the Cold War was evolving. I think it’s an appropriate metaphor now, but I suspect it was more about changing social norms and ‘the red scare’ more than anything more nuanced, at the time anyway. In 57 the Cold War began evolving into the Space Race with the USSR launching Sputnik – the first man-made satellite – Americans could literally see Soviet technology race over their heads at night – yes, the satellite itself was like the size of a basketball, but the booster would have been visible as well as the light reflecting off Sputnik, it was basically a chrome mirror-ball as severely as it was polished – and as far as the teens, as noted in an article on “Teenage Culture” by the Digital Public Library of America, “The 1950s were marked by the emergence of a distinct teen culture. Seeking to distance themselves from the culture of their parents, teenagers turned to rock and roll music and youth-oriented television programs and movies—all packaged for them through new marketing strategies targeting their demographic.
Teen culture in the 1950s also marked an important shift in American race relations. Most teenagers during this time attended segregated or near-segregated schools, and interracial interaction was limited. However, rock and roll appealed to teenagers from many backgrounds, and rock concerts often hosted mixed-race audiences. White teenagers embraced the music of African American musicians like Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry, while African American teenagers listened to white rock and rollers, such as Elvis.”
Perhaps not ironically, the ‘teenagers’ depicted in the Blob were anything but, and carried themselves like a hybrid of the youth of the current and previous generations. That said, I think the “teenagers” are what make the comparisons to the Blob itself as metaphor for Red Scare Expansionist Communism kinda weak, or at least more complicated. It’s not the authority figures in the movie that are concerned about the Blob, at least not until the reality of the problem is exposed directly to them. The warnings the younger generation are trying to issue are largely dismissed, until it’s too late. If it’s the youth that are at risk of corruption and it’s the youth that are sounding the alarm, then what’s the real threat? Now, compare that to something like the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers which doesn’t feature any youth in the principal cast, and only one young boy with any speaking lines.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another Red Scare era horror classic that got a remake treatment (though I haven’t seen the 78 version), it tells the story of a divorced, successful, ruggedly handsome 30-something Dr. Miles Bennell, played by Kevin McCarthy, the actor, returning from a conference out of town to beautiful, but deeply troubled, fictional Santa Mira, California – no, really, this place has issues, it’s the setting for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, 4! Sharknado movies, Halloween 3, I mean… these poor fictional people. Miles soon runs into his once upon a time high school girlfriend, the globe-trotting, cosmopolitan, also divorced Becky Driscoll, played by the beautiful Dana Wynter. Ah, love rekindled, in a picturesque American, suburban town in the midst of a complete population replacement by alien pod-people. What begins with a little mild confusion and paranoia, deteriorates into full blown survival horror, as Miles and Becky, along with Jack and his wife Teddy, discover themselves surrounded by conspiracy, appearing to be the only four normal humans left in a town of emotionless pod-people, and if they make the mistake of falling asleep, they’ll be replaced too. The pods are staged everywhere, just waiting on you to fall asleep so they can spawn a copy of you. Keep in mind, if you haven’t seen it yet and want to – it’s a classic, I don’t think it’s “horror” so much as suspense, but it’s almost 70 years old – the bookending scenes of Miles hysterical in a hospital were forced additions to the movie since the studio thought the original ending was way too grim. Interestingly, and a bit unfortunately, the main theme of the movie, alien replacement, is even more relevant today than it was as a cold-war/red scare era film. As notes Kathleen Loock, in “The Return of the Pod People: Remaking Cultural Anxieties in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The film’s theme of alien paranoia—the fear that some invisible invaders could replace individual human beings and turn them into a collective of emotionless pod people—resonated with widespread anxieties in 1950s American culture. It has been read as an allegory of the communist threat during the Cold War but also as a commentary on McCarthyism, the alienating effects of capitalism, conformism, postwar radiation anxiety, the return of “brainwashed” soldiers from the Korean War, and masculine fears of “the potential social, political, and personal disenfranchisement of postwar America’s hegemonic white patriarchy.” (Which, in the last bit, the author is also citing another text on “Body Snatchers” by Katrina Mann). I’d add to that the immigration paranoia in far-right movements across the world today, including the Nazi propaganda derivative ‘replacement theory’ popular among the MAGA and other American far right nationalist movements certainly fits this bill.
Now, as “Body Snatchers” can be read as both McCarthyist and Anti-McCarthyist, I think the Blob can be read as metaphor for both Communism – though I think that argument is pretty weak as far as red scare paranoia, as the generation Communism was supposedly corrupting in the US is the same generation portrayed as the somewhat hapless heroes of the film – and Capitalism, especially late Capitalism – so, sure, that argument is anachronistic, it’s all but impossible to believe a warning about post-industrial consumer capitalism was the authors’ original intent, but, I’m chalking this one up to theoretical death of the author, or authors, rather. It’s about how the Blob is relevant now. That said, I couldn’t really find anything about screenwriters Theodore Simonson and Kay Linaker (credited then as Kate Phillips), or idea-man Irvine H. Millgate that would implicate any opinion at all about their politics one way or another.
Like we mentioned in the last Episode as regards Edelman’s reference to the Birds and the real fear of the bird attacks being driven by the meaninglessness of it all, the real fear of the Blob isn’t so much death or bodily dissolution, it’s that, even more so than the Birds, we can imagine this happening. If not necessarily the impact of some alien lifeform or virus on the human population, then the potential impotence, incompetence, or gross negligence (as in the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak) of the authorities to manage a novel crisis – both 2016’s Shin Gojira and last year’s Gojira: Minus One do this spectacularly, evolving the theme of the original 1954 Gojira from one of the threat of another atomic catastrophe and the ongoing American Occupation of Japan to one of the Japanese government’s sclerotic, hyper-bureaucracy… and a little American obstruction (in Shin Godzilla), or its abject failure and continued commitment to secrecy (in Minus One), that holds Japan back from protecting its people. Though Shin eventually resolves when some scientists and younger, junior bureaucrats come up with an action plan for the Defense Forces, in both the original and 2023 versions, as well as 1984’s Godzilla Returns, an impressive condemnation of Cold War superpower politics (at least as the original Japanese version. The American release contains a bunch of added footage that completely alters America’s role and blatantly mistranslates the Russian ship captain’s dialogue to make the Russians appear as the villains) saving the day is left to one or two civilians and a clever scientist – “Minus One” does have a large scale naval operation for the finale, but the final blow is still delivered by one man; a common theme in basically every American action movie from the 80s – in a world beset by horror, one man can save us all…
Okay, so, let’s pivot a little, there’s more Blob movies to get through!
Next up, and boy my life was probably better having missed this, um, gem of early 70s cinema, we get 1972’s Beware! The Blob, directed by future nighttime soap opera star Larry Hagman – who also plays, briefly, a hobo in the film. Well, we have a familiar story, small town middle America – this one takes place during the day for the first half of the movie though – we have some youth and the police to fill out most of the speaking cast, and not one, but three hobos (including Burgess Meredith?!)! Though there’s no explicit reference to teenagers and most of the young cast seem earnestly in the early to mid-20s, including a brief appearance by Cindy Williams, some 10 years before Laverne and Shirley fame, playing a bit of a counter-culture stoner that’s almost jarring to someone that only remembered the more strait-laced Shirley from TV reruns when they were a kid. In contrast to the original’s vague social paranoia, Beware! The Blob jumps headlong into a reefer-madness-esque depiction of the town’s youth being into art, music, weed, partying, and nothing else. In a step into the modern world, the town is no longer comprised of white people only, though the few Black residents are certainly portrayed as Other, for example Chester, the horny, heavy drinking, rarely home husband camping in a tent in his own house with a tackle box full of beer, or the seemingly-kinda-slow and clumsy deputy who, after having the audacity of having an idea as to what they should do, gets shot down by the portrayed-as-heroic and progressive, older white Sheriff, with a cringeworthy, “that’s why I’s the Sheriff, and you’s the deputy.” The movie can’t figure out if it’s horror or camp, going so far in one scene to show Chester watching the original movie on TV. Where Steve and Jane in the original spend the movie trying to figure out what’s happening and warn or save people, the leading couple of the sequel, Bobby and Lisa, spend most of the movie driving, running, partying, or scream-crying. Lisa, who downs a ‘party brownie’ in the first minutes she’s on screen, becomes the first survivor of a sighting of the blob, spends the next 30 minutes of the movie screaming, crying, and laughing, and just comes across to everyone else like she’s on a bad trip. Much like the original, people go missing, the police are largely ineffective, no one believes Lisa until after they witness the Blob (if they survive), the Blob attacks a large venue, this time a bowling alley/ice rink (which is of course inactive and closed). The police decide they can’t allow the Blob’s survival, so they get ready to burn the building down with the Blob (as well as Bobby and Lisa and the thoroughly annoying bowling alley/ice rink owner and town wealthy-man, Edward Fazio). Bobby manages some daredevil rope climbing and miraculously cuts the ice on, freezes the Blob, and gets outside to stop the impending burnout all in the time it takes the Sheriff to find one working lighter.
Unfortunately, there’s not much here, I think, worth getting into. As a horror movie, well, the movie is a horror. I’ve seen worse, but this would have been a lot more enjoyable as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 spoof. If there’s social commentary, it’s maybe that we’re just all screwed? The capitalist class is a pain in the ass that whines about everything and impotently yells at the police to do what they want them to do, the police are clueless and ineffective, the youth have dropped out of society, and the few children depicted in the film, a troop of boy scouts, are more interested in playing with their balls than doing anything scouts are typically depicted as doing – and yes, playing with their balls. The scenes are rough on the ears, they all have these pairs of large glass marbles connected by string that you bounce off each other and make a constant, loud clacking sound – if you’ve ever seen those little plastic clacker wand toys with the 2 small balls you smack into each other, imagine that except with much larger balls made of glass or resin or something. It’s an annoying couple of minutes of film. Oh, and how could I forget Samuel? Poor Samuel, probably the only character worth mourning. The movie opens and runs the entire opening credits following a small kitten in a field to a score that could only be called… progressive, if you think the music of a b-rate arcade game from the early 80s would be ahead of the curve for 1972 movie scoring. Unlike the scruffy dog from the 58 original, who has a penchant for disappearing and reappearing, reassuring the audience of his survival, poor little Samuel is this Blob’s first kill, once it’s free, not including a fly that mistakenly lands on it while it’s still in a container. The Blob is just as ambivalent about what and who it consumes as the cast and crew were about whether the audience should care about them. Welcome to 1972, no one will be missed.
Which leads us to the 1988 remake of The Blob, but, before I get into that, I want to take a minute to consider why these movies are worth considering in terms of Capitalist Realism; which, recall, Fisher considers to be the postmodern condition. I have, for a long time now, been fascinated by the idea of ‘gods and monsters,’ specifically, in how they reflect the values and anxieties of a culture at a given time – that, there’s a reason we get waves of media about vampires and zombies and aliens or giant monsters or world ending storms or astrological events, in that they reflect the current mass anxiety. Consider some of the top horror movies last year; M3GAN (AI and robots), Talk to Me (Supernatural/Possession), Evil Dead Rise (Supernatural/Possession), Knock at the Cabin (paranoia, the unknown, fate of the world, good people having to do bad things). Now, compare that to 2016; Ouija (Supernatural/Possession), The Conjuring 2 (Supernatural/Possession), The Void (by the way, this one’s great, definitely recommend, kind of modern Lovecraftian supernatural, the unknown, cults, it’s got a lot going on), 10 Cloverfield Lane (captivity, the unknown, a murderer? monsters?). How about 2004? Monsters and Violence rule the day, mostly undead, Vampires and Zombies, holy shit with the zombies: Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Shawn of the Dead, another Frankenstein remake, Frankenfish, Blade Trinity, Van Helsing, Dracula 3000, Alien vs Predator, Hellboy, another Chucky movie, and of course some slashers and supernatural movies, and not one, but two Ginger Snaps sequels.
Consider this passage from Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: the Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction;
Just as the anxieties regarding technology and the Other have produced complex responses within science fiction, so the horror genre has produced a wide range of textual strategies, most of which center upon an extensive hyperbolization of the body and its (dys)functions. … The threats in the horror film to the subject’s health and well-being are, perhaps, excessive attempts at a recuperative mission. The task of the horror film might therefore be to rescue the body, and thus the subject, from the vicissitudes of modern urban, cybernetic, and viral existences, in other words, from the interface with those exterior forces that threaten the subject’s hegemony. … The return of the body could actually be understood as an obsession with the surface of the body. While the interior organs are externalized or revealed to the viewer’s fascinated gaze, the “depth” of subjectivity continues to be denied. The subject continues to be displaced in horror fiction, while the body is hyperbolized – opened up, as it were – as an infinite set of surfaces…
I’ll unpack that a little. So, first, Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University – if you’re interested in Film and Comic Books and want to read some really in depth, theory heavy analysis of pop culture, check out his stuff – Terminal Identity, if you’re interested in Science Fiction, subject/identity, and postmodernism, and Matters of Gravity, if you’re more interested in special effects, technology, superheroes, etc. to investigate if/how pop culture has transformed the old fear and anxiety of technological advancement resulting in change into a roller-coaster type anxiety – it’s scary, but it’s controlled, safe, so it’s thrilling. The issue for the body (of the subject – a human being, a being which is at the center of its own subjective experience of the world, to be Kantian, or a Dasein, to go back to Heidegger) in a horror movie is that the body is constantly in a position of danger, but, the emphasis, in horror, for Bukatman, is always only on the body. Not so much ‘the subject.’ It’s the body as thing to be exploded, often literally, into view. The subjectivity of the body isn’t a matter of concern, only the mere survival or dissolution of the body itself. To which I would add, the embodiment of the threat to the body tends to reflect the social anxieties of the time. When there’s a general anxiety of powerlessness, lack of agency, that things are out of control, we typically wind up with movies about unseen threats, the supernatural, possession and exorcism; if the anxiety is some perceived external threat, like a hostile foreign power or immigration, we wind up with movies about zombies, aliens, and giant monsters. A little caveat here, and I haven’t done much reading on this, but it sounds really interesting, the Black Horror subgenre seems to be changing this formula up, returning the subject to the center of the crisis. The body is still an issue, but the storyteller is now someone for whom the body has always been an issue, and so merely focusing on the body-in-danger isn’t telling a story that’s in any way novel.
So, capitalist realism and the dissolution of the body… The Blob, 1988.
Welcome to the remake. We’re taking the Blob back to its roots. We’ve got our lead couple, a high school football star (who also seems to be a little inept with the ladies) and his skeezy friend Scott – man, the cringe of that guy. By today’s standards, this character is far more of a horror show than the Blob itself. A word of caution if you’ve never seen this one, the Scott character is a walking trigger warning, but, don’t worry, he doesn’t live long and the cause of death is… poetic. This time around, the role of Steve kinda gets split in two, between all-American, clean cut, football playing Paul, and long haired, motorcycle riding, bad boy Brian Flagg, played by Kevin Dillon. Jane’s been replaced by one-dimensional cheerleader turned final girl Meg, played by Shawnee Smith. We once again have the blob crash into a field some small distance to the small-ish town (we’re also in California now instead of Pennsylvania), once again found by a hobo and his dog. The hobo, with Blob on hand, runs into the road causing an accident between Paul and Meg, in his car, and Brian, going by on his bike. Paul transforms from milktoast, suburban good boy to stereotypical hypermasculine jock at the sight of Flagg, they eventually, with Meg’s leadership, get their shit together long enough to try to get the hobo to a doctor. Now, we get a little modern twist. Where in 58 the kids drove up to the town doctor and got him to reopen his office at the urgency of the unknown situation, now we’re immediately thrust into the banality of modern healthcare. Everyone stopped in their tracks while the nurse handles paperwork and then tries to send them away for lack of insurance. The hobo is eventually let into an exam room, but he's left alone while the doctor has a long quiet talk with a paying patient in his office, as Paul and Meg spend their date filling out admissions paperwork. Paul notices the body of the hobo moving irregularly, and we get a good look at this new blob. This time, it’s bigger, faster, and seriously acidic (to human flesh anyway, doors, counters, walls, etc, the material goods of the world are, once again, totally fine), and um, night-night Paul. We get a retelling of kids and police, who are still led by a more patient Sheriff, whose deputy is far more keen to blame the entire incident on Flagg. Blob runs amok, people go missing, chaos eventually ensues, Meg and Flagg go back to the woods to try to get evidence of the killer ‘thing.’ Now we get a full on 80s plot twist. Where in 58 the Blob cracks out of a basketball-sized meteorite, this time, the kids arrive in the woods to find a team of government agents in plain white hazmat gear and no insignia on anyone’s uniforms, vehicles, or PPE. They pull the sphere out of the crater, and this time it’s a satellite with the American flag clearly visible. The agents, led by a couple of scientists, capture the kids – Flagg escapes, which turns out to be critical to finding out what’s really happening, but Meg goes along with them, under the impression the agents must surely be the good guys. The agents round up the town in one building, Flagg discovers the Blob is a top-secret US biological weapon experiment – a virus was sent into space and cosmic rays transformed it into the Blob – and the agents’ plan is to capture the blob, firebomb the town, kill everyone, so it’s up to Flagg and Meg to save the day.
The Blob, in this version, does a textbook perfect job of illustrating Bukatman’s point about the dissolution of the body, and the attempt, by the heroes to save as many bodies as they can, as well as adding an additional dimension to the threat in the form of the government agents’ inverted agenda of preserving the blob’s amorphous, viral, ‘body’ while terminating the bodies of everyone else, lest their illegal biological weapons research come to light. We also get a look at the anxieties of the era, in this case, pretty clearly, from the stark contrast in social attitudes between the 58 and 88 versions. The fear of the unknown is still there, but the ‘kids’ are more delinquent risk to the community than just vaguely at risk, the older sheriff would rather try to kindle a middle age romance with the local waitress/diner owner and settle down whereas the younger deputy is of a mind for a more authoritarian approach to police work, the federal government, absent from the 58 version, is here in force in 88 and they are most certainly bad guys, whether or not the Blob is a greater threat than they are or not, and ultimately incompetent and impotent to deal with the threat that they created, perhaps leaning a little on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. And of course we have the Blob itself. This time around the Blob is more pink than red, it’s more about consumption than subsumption, it doesn’t simply roll over everything in its path, it’s still amorphous, but now more of an active predator, generating tentacles and orifices depending on the need of the moment, appearing kinda like a giant, tentacled, pink, well, anus in a major attack and escape scene in a sewer, and laden with all of the metaphors and anxieties those images represent or imply. If the 58 Blob was intended as a stand-in for the Red Scare, the 88 Blob implies a Pink Scare, and has given up anxiety of external social threats to small town America, for internal ones, trading implied foreign threat for the explicit threat of being caught between anonymous federal agencies led by amoral scientists wielding the might of the US military and the amorphous (but laden with sexual imagery) threat they created.
So, let’s bring this back to Capitalist Realism.
Imagine a version of the Blob where the Blob wins. In 58, the Blob is airdropped in the arctic and the concluding ‘the end’ on the screen resolves into a question mark. The Blob frozen on the ice rink in 72 is immediately climbed on by the news, the teens, and the Sheriff, standing and sitting on the barely frozen surface directly under the can lights, where the sheriff's body heat melts enough area under his boot for the blob to latch onto him, and for him to recognize his inevitable demise just as the film freeze frames on his doomed expression and the credits roll. In 88, a local pastor that survives the incident snatches up some frozen chunks of blob and goes off into the wastes to set up shop as a hellfire and brimstone revival preacher, ready to bring on the end of the world himself, for the good of Christianity of course, with his own pet blob. In each big screen version, the Blob survives, but what if it were to win? To just keep on consuming? Metabolizing everything, consuming and growing, until it’s all there is.
This isn’t what Fisher is afraid will happen with Capitalism, this is what Capital has already done and continues to do. Now, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism was published in 2009 in the wake of the credit crisis and Great Recession, in the hopes that this was one of those moments where the Blob had been cooled down, slowed, frozen maybe long enough for folks to realize there’s a monster on the loose but it’s hurt, and maybe now’s a good time to do something about it. Unfortunately, and to Fisher’s credit, what he had to say about Capitalist Realism seems to have been right. The Occupy movements petered out, collapsed under their own lack of organization, intent, and imagination. The idea of socialism managed to get some ideological dust kicked off its shoes, but has otherwise not accomplished much, it’s no longer a real alternative to capitalism so much as a benign caring about society. And beyond any of Fisher’s concerns, since covid, there has a been a global upsurge in far right, authoritarian movements – though they have seen some surprising electoral defeats this year (so far) – that are fully compatible, where not openly complicit with, capital in the neoliberal sense of money equals power. Not the least of which being the alliance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Before wrapping, I want to touch on another problem Fisher brings up regarding late capitalism and the modern work space that also connects to the anxieties played on in the Blob movies regarding the Blob’s amorphousness – both it’s lack of shape and its ability to access any and every place it can find people; interesting note, only the 72 movie depicts the Blob attacking anyone in their home and the only couple attacked in their home are Chester and his wife, because Chester brought the specimen container into the home, placing it in the freezer per warning on the container, that his wife promptly ignores because she doesn’t want his things in her freezer. Every other attack occurs in a public space or work site.
Regarding post-Fordist work (work today, i.e. beyond the limits of the factory or assembly line), Fisher, following Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism notes, “Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role. As organizational work is decentralized, with lateral networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on ‘flexibility’… Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism.”
And this is of course predating just-in-time scheduling – Sennett’s text was written in 1998 – and the heightened precarity of the modern gig economy. (It’s one thing to say a salaried, professional, like a doctor or a network infrastructure engineer may need to be on-call, in case of an actual emergency, and to claim you need a Starbucks barista or McDonald’s cashier to be on-call in case of sales volume during peak hours).
The amorphousness of the Blob and the anxiety around general trends of social change, whether teen counter-culture, diversity and inclusion, economic uncertainty, workplace precarity, changing cultural, political, and ethnic demographics, etc. is what keeps the Blob relevant – granted, I think there’s definitely an argument to be made for a new ‘Red Scare’ in the US as far as the spread of Trumpism, MAGA ideology, and White/Christian Nationalism – which the recent movie Civil War, I think, was perfectly teed up for some kind, any kind, of commentary on, but opted instead to make a political movie with no political stance whatsoever, that thoroughly ignores the cause of the war and what anyone is fighting for and instead dramatizes over two hours the idea that violence traumatizes everyone, hoping that they can perhaps reach everyone by speaking to no one, except maybe photography and journalism majors.
The apolitical-ness of Civil War stands in stark contrast to the amorphous and shape-changing monsters in The Blob, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. By lacking a political position in a political movie, Civil War speaks to no one, it’s the horror movie of late capitalism’s race to the bottom, the ‘we can reach everyone if we target the lowest common denominator.’ Whereas The Blob, The Thing, and Invasion remain relevant today because of the ambiguousness of the monster, that it can be anywhere and get (or be) anyone, any audience can read their fears and anxieties onto it. Likewise with the meaninglessness of it all in The Birds, or the anxiety of human powerlessness in the wake of a hurricane, an asteroid, a haunted house, or a Godzilla.
Alright, next episode we’ll come back to Mark Fisher and get into the details of the text. Given it’s Halloween, I figured this diversion into horror movies would be a bit more fun and set the stage for how Fisher and the next couple of authors we’re looking at are thinking about capitalism.
The next episode will be dropping after election day here in the US, so, here’s hoping we’re not in the midst of some electoral crisis or careening headlong into an institutional confrontation with fascism. I suspect I’ll be glued to the TV and/or my computer well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning next week. So, in closing out this Halloween episode, I’ll leave you with this passage from David Frankfurter’s Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History
If there is irony, then it lies not in my having to describe the experience of evil in its extreme, but rather in the fact that, in every one of the historical cases I address, it was the myth of evil conspiracy that mobilized people in large numbers to astounding acts of brutality against accused conspirators. That is, the real atrocities of history seem to take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world. Real evil happens when people speak of evil.
‘til next time.
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