Comfortably Numb: Material Ecocriticism and the Postmodern Horror Film

Abstract

In recent years, the topic of materiality has become a central concern for ecocritics. This move toward material ecocriticism has served to distance us from the highly polarizing debates about postmodernism versus deep ecology and practical versus theoretical ecocriticism that characterized the field during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than drawing ecocritics into separate camps—the discursive versus the real—material ecocriticism is recentering the field by bringing these two camps directly into conversation, taking us, as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann put it, into “a newly explored territory: one where material realities merge into discursive dynamics” (448). Bodies, both human and nonhuman, have emerged as a particularly fascinating site of analysis within this conversation. Writing about transcorporeality—the concept that the human body is “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” and thus “ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’”—Stacy Alaimo contends that thinking about materiality “necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (238). In this essay, I argue that the postmodern horror films of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s provide a particularly useful site for examining the ways that material ecocriticism can help us rethink our approach to discussions of the human body by situating cinematic bodies within their cultural and ecological contexts.