Wonderland: the digital and the cosmopolitan at the borderlands in Monsters

Abstract

ABSTRACT Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010) illustrates the collusion in contemporary visual culture between the digital and the cosmopolitan. Starting from a pivotal moment in the film in which the wonders of the borderlands are presented through an uncanny mixture of documentary-like reality and digital effects, this article explores such collusion through a combination of digital and cosmopolitan theory and close readings of particular scenes in the movie. The analysis offered here is framed by an acknowledgment of the centrality of space in the cinema. I use Lev Manovich’s concept of ‘compositing’ and its further theorization by Steven Shaviro and, especially, William Brown to discuss the specificities of digital space and its potential for a cosmopolitan understanding of the borderland. In order to describe the particular nature of the borderland constructed by Monsters, I draw on border theory (Anzaldúa, Pratt, Gómez Peña) and engage with the focus on borders and borderlands in cosmopolitan theory (Beck, Cooper and Rumford). The article concludes that Monsters, for all its cosmopolitan ambivalences, offers a complex understanding of the borderland and its potential to explicate global societies by highlighting cinematic space and turning the human figures into functions of space, thus evoking Brown’s notion of ‘enworldment’.