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TEXTUAL EVOLUTION: ADAPTATION IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY LITERATURE, FILM, AND CULTURE

By

Gregory W. Wright

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2007

ABSTRACT

TEXTUAL EVOLUTION: ADAPTATION IN TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY LITERATURE, FILM, AND CULTURE

By

Gregory W. Wright

One of the most common responses to adapted texts——-“The book was better”——evinces
the often reductive and simplistic critical response to adaptation. Instead of dwelling on
the limited critical enterprise of comparisons inherent in many studies of adaptation, this
dissertation constructs theoretical models for analyzing adaptation as a process, rather
than evaluating works’ supposed ﬁdelity. My theoretical models’ central trope
analogizes textual adaptation to biological adaptation to solidify how intertextual
relationships operate and change over time in relation to cultural environments. This
approach focuses on ﬁve original models—influenced by yet adapting meme theory—for
exploring adaptation, mapping texts’ associations through synaptic, viral, symbiotic,
macrosymbiotic, and emergent paradigms. These models stem from readings of both the
content and form of the textual clusters surrounding, respectively: Michael Paterniti’s
Driving Mr. Albert’s synaptic connection to Beat literature and Einstein’s brain; Koji
Suzuki’s Ring’s viral expansion to other media forms; the symbiotic interdependence of
Spike Jonze’s Adaptation and Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief; Wells’s T he War of the
Worlds and its macrosymbiotic afﬁliations to the invasion narratives, spoofs, adaptations,
and homages it spawns; and the emergent evolution along orders of complexity between
and among the textual threads of George Romero’s zombie movies. Even though this

dissertation performs original studies on texts, the process is much more important than

the product; in other words, this study’s primary yield emanates from the fresh theoretical
groundwork it creates and the interdisciplinary dialogues it initiates among scholars of

ﬁlm, literature, and culture.

Copyright by
Gregory W. Wright
2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the course of researching and writing this dissertation, I have been inspired
by the energy and generosity of my supporters, whose spectrum bridges across categories
of family, friends, and scholars. I am most indebted to those who have read portions of
this project and offered the constructive criticism that helped me reﬁne it. First and
foremost, I must thank my dissertation chair, Patrick O’Donnell, for his guidance, but I
am also extremely grateful for the rigorous encouragement of my committee, Ellen
McCallum, Scott Michaelsen, and Judith Roof. Likewise, I applaud the dedication and
diligence of Kelly Battles, Daniel Hasty, Ann Lawrence, Greg Nicholson, Lance Norman,
Brian Olszewski, and Christine Wilson, all of whom provided invaluable feedback and
reinforcement.

I thank the Yunck family for the benevolent ﬁnancial support of the John and
Ruth Yunck Endowed Scholarship, which allowed me to complete this dissertation at a
much faster pace. Similarly, the aid provided by teaching assistantships through
Michigan State University’s English Department, Integrative Arts and Humanities
Department, and College of Law have buoyed me both professionally and monetarily via
a range of academically stimulating and fulﬁlling experiences.

Finally, I want to recognize the love and encouragement of my family and friends,
who have helped me keep both my patience and my sense of humor throughout the
process of researching, writing, and revising this dissertation. First, I heartily appreciate
the nurturing and understanding of Bill, Carol, and Sarah Wright. I also applaud the
kindness and support of Becky Anderson, Cheryl Anderson-Wilhelm, Dan Anderson,

Jake Brettrager, Adam Garvin, Jason Gauna, Jenn Gauna, Katie Haraminac, Stephanie

Herzberg, Crystal Jorgenson, Roy Jorgenson, Aaron Kaufman, Jon Muzzall, Jason Omo,
Carl Oxley III, Megan Oxley, Sandip Suvedi, Amanda Thomas, and Scott Wilhelm. I
owe them all my thanks and esteem. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated, with all my
love, to my wife, Amy Anderson, who is always there and has an uncanny ability to
know when to give advice as well as when not to give it. Without her, I could never have

completed this task.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS ,

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1
It’s All in Your Head:
Synaptic Convergences and the Beat-in g of Einstein’s Brain ................................. 18

CHAPTER 2
The Viral Spiral:
Tracing the Transference of a Cross-Cultural Media Virus through the Ring texts ........ 83

CHAPTER 3
Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Evolve, Monkey Write Screenplay:
Symbiotic Textual Evolution in Adaptation ................................................... 143

CHAPTER 4
Invasion of the Bacteria:
Larger Symbiotic Orders in The War of the Worlds and Its Adaptive Textual Legacy...181

CHAPTER 5

Complexity, Emergence, and the Adaptive Serial Iterations of George Romero’s
“Brainless” Zombie Movies ...................................................................... 231
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 272

vii

Introduction

In an article titled “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,”
Thomas Leitch argues that, “despite its venerable history, widespread practice, and
apparent inﬂuence, adaptation theory has remained tangential to the thrust of ﬁlm study
because it has never been undertaken with conviction and theoretical rigor” ( 149). This
dissertation undertakes Leitch’s challenge through critically theorizing adaptation as an
intermedial process rather than the product of the essentialist media forms proposed by
George Bluestone in his 1957 Novels into Film, the ﬁrst major work to address adaptation
critically. Given this focus, my project parallels the efforts of ﬁgures such as Linda
Hutcheon, Brian McFarlane, and Leitch himself, in that the focus lies in theorizing
adaptation rather than performing the fairly limited comparisons and contrasts—or
“ﬁdelity criticism”——-suggested by Bluestone’s model. Each chapter focuses on the
development of a theoretical model for analyzing the process of textual adaptation as
parallel to biological adaptation and ﬁlm studies, yoking textual theory and evolutionary
theory. The models unfold through my readings of textual clusters, arcs of adaptation that
deal implicitly or explicitly with the tropes of adaptive evolution through their content
and form. Thus, even though this dissertation performs original studies on texts, the
process is much more important than the product; the focus lies on the intertextual and
intermedial relationships rather than solely on monadistic or essentialistic texts. While
this approach relies on science-based analogy and metaphor, it also develops concrete
vocabularies for conceptualizing adaptation as an intertextual undertaking, making the

dissertation an interdisciplinary dialogue among the academic realms studying literature,

ﬁlm, and culture.

In his seminal 1976 book The Selﬁsh Gene, Richard Dawkins ﬁrst initiated the
term “meme” as a cultural parallel to the concepts he elucidates in the rest of the text,
primarily genetic evolution. The meme functions like a gene, transmitting cultural DNA
through evolving, adaptive systems, and the meme is passed on through imitation. This
cultural transmission creates an analogous paradigm to biological replication: memes can
mutate, replicate with high ﬁdelity, lie dormant, or even suffer extinction. Since Dawkins
ﬁrst introduced the idea of the meme, many other commentators have taken up the trope
to elaborate on a variety of phenomena in ﬁelds as disparate as psychology, philosophy,
sociology, and anthropology. If memes are measured by their proliﬁc inﬂuence, then the
“meme” meme has been fairly successful indeed. One of the central challenges, however,
lies in just how we evaluate and utilize memes; part of the debate that continues to
increase their inﬂuence focuses on just what utility this concept represents now that we
have it. The metaphorical weight of the meme concept works well—the analogy is both
basic and appealing—but what exactly is a meme? The referent is largely unstable, and,
because of the difﬁculties in quantitatively observing culture on either the micro or macro
levels, much of what has been written about meme theory analyzes what memes are, how
they work, and why we should even care in the ﬁrst place.

In his ﬁrst invocation of the meme, Dawkins insists that the concept not become
mystical, yet his own writing seems to shroud the idea in mystery. In order to provide
illustrations and a working deﬁnition of memes, Dawkins writes:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes

fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes
propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via

sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by

leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be

called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes

it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions itin his articles and his

lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to prOpagate itself, spreading

from brain to brain. (192)
This brief, oft-quoted encapsulation has caught on fairly well, but these examples provide
a perplexing blur between form and content. The list, citing “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases,
clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches,” includes and equivocates
both material and nonmaterial substances, making memes unstably shift between the
artifact and the inspiration, the tangible and the intangible, the dancer and the dance.
Thus, part of the difﬁculty in dealing with memes is that even those who agree on the
fundamental premise of this evolutionary model of ideas and society cannot agree on
what exactly the cultural particles are at the center of it all.

Since Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, many others—~most prominently,
Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and Robert Aunger—have approached deﬁnitions and
explanations of memes’ properties, but there is little cohesion among these theorists as to
the memes’ physicality, their scope, and their method of transference. For some, the
meme is immaterial, a metaphorical concept that works in a parallel analogy to the
transference, adaptation, and mutation of genes, but, for others, the meme concept is
couched in language that makes it sound like an as—yet undiscovered, microscopic mental
parasite, operating according to its own anthropomorphized desires. For Blackmore, the

meme circulates within society, and for Aunger, the meme replicates and mutates within

the brain itself.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett points out in the ambitiously titled Consciousness

Explained that this distinction of the values of memes only stems from memes dictating

worth to begin with, and, moreover, these memes have only caught on through virtue of

their propagation and general acceptance. Dennett explains this value judgment loop

through exploring the idea of a “meme” itself and the relativistic lack of intrinsic merit

ideas in general possess, outside of meme-created value systems; as he writes:

(Note that in its own terms, whether or not the meme meme
replicates successfully is strictly independent of its epistemological virtue;
it might spread in spite of its perniciousness, or go extinct in spite of its
virtue.)

Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and
replicate at rates that make even fruit ﬂies and yeast cells look glacial in
comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from
medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.
Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend
on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in
the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively
permanent, and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but
unless these are under the protection of human conservators, they tend to

dissolve in time. (205)

But, to some extent, the reader must then ask why Dennett’s argument has any more
appeal than another formulation of meme theory; there certainly are enough others to
choose from, appealing to various memetic structures within different niches of
readership. Brodie, after all, enjoys a great deal of popularity for his watered down,
populist version of meme theory, despite (and even perhaps because of) his overall lack
of intellectual rigor and basic inability to deﬁne what exactly a meme is. With all of
these disparate conceptions as to what memes are, what values they or the worldview

implicit in their creation have, and to what ends they can be directed, however, there is

hardly a holistic, uniﬁed encapsulation of what “meme theory” is. So why invoke meme

theory at all, if the referents are so blurred?

The meme metaphor, with some adjustment toward ‘speciﬁcity, creates innovative
channels for discussing the evolution, adaptation, and proliferation of ideas, fundamental
concepts for understanding the social impact and inﬂuences of texts. Although theorists
such as Joseph Carroll have combined literary and evolutionary theory, few authors have
explored the concept of evolutionary adaptation taking place on the textual level. Carroll,
in his Literary Darwinism, for example, primarily utilizes literature as a means of
understanding and employing a kind of Universal Darwinism to help explain human
nature, his project running a course parallel to evolutionary psychology in that it focuses
on human behavior within key texts instead of analyzing texts as themselves indicative of
algorithmic processes. Rather than investigating a kind of fundamental—and perhaps
essentialist—form of human nature, I am adopting and adapting evolutionary theory for
the purposes of investigating the phenomena of textual replication, adaptation, and
proliferation in various social and cultural contexts. In short, the focus is on how
narratives—and the memetic ideas they perpetuate—evolve. This approach is by no
means exclusive of historical, theoretical, or deconstructivist readings of texts, but instead
I seek to complement and synthesize these methods into a syncretic, adaptive and

adaptable model for rethinking the physical and metaphorical transmission of texts, the

propagating of new, recombinant cultural DNA.

In order to proceed with such a project, though, the parameters of meme theory——
more speciﬁcally, the relevant deﬁnitions of terms—need to be addressed. Nearly all

forms of meme theory, from its ﬁrst coinage by Dawkins, situate memes as brain-based

entities that interact with cultural artifacts and are passed along through some form of
imitation or replication. Some theorists pull back from meme theory a bit to hold that
there is still a humanistic “free will” or “human creativity” operating outside the memes’
inﬂuences, a “real self” that mystically cuts through social interactions. Yet arguing both
for memes and against their totalizing inﬂuence is a bit like founding a nonconformists’
club; it may be fun, but it contains a paradox that makes such a ﬂawed action virtually
pointless. Susan Blackmore attacks such humanist biases as those underlying these kind
of speculations about simultaneously having memes and individual, inexplicable tastes in
The Meme Machine, and she does so along lines that are surprisingly similar to Marxist
anti-humanism. According to her line of thinking, we are “selves” only by virtue of our

genes and the cultural inﬂuences (or memes) that bombard us constantly every day, some

of them sticking around long-term. As she categorizes an individual’s personality

formulation and self-identiﬁcation:

Memetics provides a new way of looking at the self. The self is a vast
memeplex—perhaps the most insidious and pervasive memeplex of all. I
shall call it the ‘selfplex’. The selfplex permeates all our experience and
all our thinking so that we are unable to see it clearly for what it is—a
bunch of memes. It comes about because our brains provide the ideal
machinery on which to construct it, and our society provides the selective

environment in which it thrives. (231)

With some slight linguistic adjustments, Blackmore’s ideas here sound almost
Foulcauldian, and with this theoretical afﬁliation in mind, meme theory identiﬁes social
networks as its arena of interest and inﬂuence. As Imentioned earlier, though,
Blackmore’s formulation of meme theory is merely one competing for dominance
(appropriately enough for a Darwinian reconceptualization of thought and culture), and,

since her formulation of the meme is based on imitation rather than on material artifacts,

her particular brand of memetics is nearly impossible to quantify and thus test.

Blackmore’s memes are abstract concepts divorced from speciﬁc material or temporal
circumstances, yet their explanatory power has some merit as a foundation for
considering selves and texts as destabilized from the comfortable notions of identity and
traditional considerations of narrative form so often found within Western society, a
helpful distinction for my project’s interest in the relationships between and among texts .
In detailing her conceptual model, Susan Blackmore carefully distances meme
theory from such other frameworks as evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, which
also ostensibly examine the interrelationships between human evolution and the
particularities of culture; one of the key differences, according to Blackmore, is sex.
Unlike alternative paradigms which understand contemporary human behavior as rooted
primarily in the survival strategies of prehistoric peoples—which, with their exclusive
focus on genetic propagation, have difﬁculty explaining such anomalies as voluntary
celibacy, masturbation, homosexuality, or monogamy—Blackmore clariﬁes that memetic
theory and sociobiological accounts of sex differ in two key ways. As she frames it,
“First, memes have been around for at least 2.5 million years; coevolving with genes and
inﬂuencing sexual behaviour and mate choice. Second, memes are now well off the leash
and during the last century sexual memes have inﬂuenced our lives in ways that have
little or nothing to do with genes” (129). With Blackmore’s representation, mates with
higher memetic capabilities have greater sex appeal (which explains the charms of artists,
communicators, and academics), as their intellectual capital also has its own kind of

power lineage, distinct from raw genetic survival and proliferation, yet linked to it.

This formulation helps explain why sex sells. Advertising has a long legacy of

manipulating sexuality for marketing purposes, but while other theories have elucidated
the connections between sex appeal and the spread of ideas, meme theory makes the
spread of ideas itself a kind of sexuality, as memes form their own sort of libidinal
economy. Though academics might joke about the marketplace of ideas being a red-light
district, the tenets of meme theory can map the multivalent meanings of texts, explaining
and parsing out the multiple memes linked to signs and signiﬁers. In this fashion, sex
sells because it allows the memetic conﬂation of eye, brain, sex organs, wallet, social
status, and unquenchable desires from each into a single sign. Texts are very literally

sexy, procreating in an evolutionary mix that has seen an exponential explosion of
information transference in the last few decades as technology allows for more powerful
and cheaper modes of communication. Thus, while the textual messages expand outward
from these proliferating media, the signs themselves also proliferate outward, taking on
shifting, evolving meanings. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari formulate the elastic

and expansive realm of signs and interpretation in their book A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind. It’s
made for that, it’s the tragic regime of inﬁnite debt, to which one is
simultaneously debtor and creditor. A sign refers to another sign, into
which it passes and which carries it into still other signs. “To the point
that it returns in a circular fashion...” Not only do signs form an inﬁnite
network, but the network of signs is inﬁnitely circular. The statement
survives its object, the name survives its owner. Whether it passes into
other signs or is kept in reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state
of things and its signiﬁed; it leaps like an animal or a dead person to
regain its place in the chain and invest a new state, a new signiﬁed, from

which it will in turn extricate itself. (113)

Just as Deleuze and Guattari here describe the leaping of signs and meanings, so does
meme theory concern itself with the survival of ideas and their “place in the chain,”
separate and distinct as a statement or a name, surviving “its object” or “its owner.” The
memes are tied to genes, but they also move beyond to outlive their hosts, meaning that,
while those who deal in ideas may disappear, the memes’ heritage as well as their

potential to be new creators or inspirations continues on within this “inﬁnite network.”

But just what evolves in this process? In characterizing memes as being as wide a
range as “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches,” Richard Dawkins seems to suggest that physical entities change as part of meme
adaptation, such that we can see new clothes, new pots, and new arches as evidence of the
change taking place (192). Or, since Dawkins call those things the memes themselves,
perhaps the physical change encapsulates the mutation of memes, making a new pot as
much a meme as a way of making a new pot, using form and content interchangeably.

For Susan Blackmore, the memes behave like microorganisms, spreading between people
like a contagion through such diverse media as speech, literature, television, computer
technology, radio, and ﬁlm. For still another theorist, Robert Aunger, author of The
Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think, memes reside solely in the brain, and
the mutations and adaptations involved in changing memes from one state to another
relies only on applied thought; brains transmit their ideas outward, where they take hold
in other brains, replicating the same process again so that two people can say they have

“got the same idea.” Aunger even uses this evolution of ideas to elucidate how the

concept of evolution began in the ﬁrst place, writing that:

Memes are generally thought to be replicators residing in people’s brains

that are able to reproduce themselves during transmission between

individuals. Thus memes in Malthus’s head were somehow recoded as

spots of ink that survived their originator’s demise on the pages of a book,

there to be visually picked up and copied into Darwin’s active, living

brain. Once inside, they became linked to other ideas already present in

Darwin’s mind to form a unique complex: the theory of evolution. (1 I)
With all of these conﬂicting deﬁnitions of what a meme is, discussing “the meme” as a
single, uniﬁed concept accepted to all parties becomes difﬁcult. Perhaps the slippery
qualities of the amorphous meme serve to help the idea proliferate on its own terms.

Throughout the chapters that follow, I will apply several different variations of
meme theory, adapting the models proposed by these theorists and others, adapting them
as needed. While meme theory sometimes analyzes cultural transfers as solely material
or linguistic, I will adapt these existing molds of adaptation as conforming to other bases
of evolution. My theoretical speculations will not overlook the material or the linguistic,
but instead I reshape these categories as components of dynamic evolutionary
frameworks, applying such metaphorical systems as the synaptic model, the viral model,
the symbiotic model, the macrosymbiotic model, and the emergent evolutionary model.
These diverse models contain nodes of intersection, and, as they replicate elements of
other conceptions for understanding the interdependence of cultural and textual evolution,
they cannot be absolute departures of prior methods for understanding the relationships
between texts and cultures. What I am attempting, however, is the development of a
more coherent process for analytically discussing the development of ideas, texts, and
cultures across time and space. The rewards for these analyses and the evolutionary

patterns that arise from them will be of great help to narrative theory, as they provide a

new vocabulary for discussing the evolution, adaptation, and proliferation of texts

10

throughout and across cultures, while also making certain sorts of scientiﬁc discourses
mutable and applicable to studies of myriad types of narrative. By developing new ways
of examining texts as they shift through different forms, perspectives, and contexts, this
project aims to concretize new modes of analysis to implement in the study of texts and
their changes, through visions and revisions, as well as versions and reversions.
Through utilizing meme theory, as well as expanding the scope of this biological
metaphor, my dissertation creates ﬁve original models for explicating the transference of
ideas and texts across media and cultures. Although Dawkins informs my understanding
of cultural and textual evolution, these ﬁve models are of my own design and are linked
to my readings while also providing relevance to studies of other adaptive texts.
Formulations of meme theory up to this point have focused primarily on the rhetoric and
merits of models for meme theory, discussing the merits of its explanatory framework
rather than applying it. And, indeed, the concept of the meme almost rejects the notion
that we can be cognizant of these ever-shifting cultural particles, since they move and
evolve so rapidly. The yield in such a project, however, lies in its ability to create
interpretive patterns for understanding cultural evolution 0n the ground level, looking at
adaptation as a function of larger, comprehensive trends. The difﬁculties in constructing
these models and creating their vocabulary, however, stem from the differences between
biological evolution and cultural evolution; when examining cultural texts’ survival,
reproduction, and mutation, there is only artiﬁcial selection. While we would, of course,
have to question the “natural” in natural selection at least as much as biologists
themselves do, the problem with adaptive texts is that their modiﬁcations are all applied

with a sense of purpose—whether conscious or subconscious—by those who pass the text

11

along. Also, when applying meme theory, we encounter the same difﬁculties of
classiﬁcation that the meme theorists themselves encounter: what exactly are we talking
about?

The terms of discussion change when we move between and among the levels of
material texts, visual texts, oral texts, conceptual texts, and texts within texts. In other
words, we could speak about the physical transference of a single copy of On the Road
from one pair of hands to another as “the spread of memes” just as easily as we could
write about the adaptive evolution of memes within Jack Kerouac’s creation of On the
Road, the novel itself being the conceptual progeny of Henry Miller’s earlier work The
Air—Conditioned Nightmare, about a cross-country trip and the resulting change in his
ideological perspective. My focus here will center primarily on studying the process of
conceptual adaptation of ideas, though occasionally this focus will branch out into
tracings of material objects, oral histories, or changing trends in the visual arts. With
meme theory’s capacity for tracing texts’ lineage and their adaptive impact in different
contexts, cultural works reveal themselves to be components of a larger system, spawning
multiple other narratives in the forms of sequels, remakes, and new forms that re-imagine
their original inspiration. Still, within these larger systems, patterns emerge that parallel
and privilege the dynamics of certain biological and conceptual relationships, which
informs the ﬁve distinct models for adaptation I posit in this dissertation’s chapters.

The ﬁrst chapter of my dissertation reﬁnes this framework for understanding
adapted and adaptive texts along evolutionary lines. Still, just like theories as early as
Darwin’s teach, evolution is not necessarily progressive, so the textual variations are not

necessarily improvements from one iteration to the next. In looking at the web of

12

anastomosis weaving together nonﬁction accounts such as Carolyn Abraham’s
Possessing Genius, Michael Paterniti’s travel memoir Driving Mr. Albert, and Kevin
Hull’s BBC documentary Relics: Einstein ’s Brain with the ﬁctional work of the Beats,
this ﬁrst chapter details how texts—along with their material, intellectual, and social
impact——rely on their current cultural milieu for future proliferation, as well as the
survival and success of the cultural particles that helped create them. This study of
proliferation throughout a population ideally ﬁts with meme theory’s conception of
culture as a system of concepts in constant ﬂux and mutation. This line of inquiry
extends into a tracing of Driving Mr. Albert back to On the Road to explore how the all—
American road novel enacts the metaphorical and metonymical ways in which texts
spread, adapt, and inspire one another, particularly in American culture. By examining
the ways in which Driving Mr. Albert traces Einstein’s inﬂuence through Kerouac,
Burroughs, and Ginsberg, thus “Beat~ing Einstein’s brain,” I advance a synaptic model of
adaptation, whereby concepts and texts arc across conceptual gaps much like electrical
charges pass across neurons, showing that adaptation can develop like the ideas that serve
as the literal and ﬁgurative subjects of the texts in question.

From this conceptualization of synaptic adaptation, I expand my scale to theorize
the viral model by exploring how the core central narrative of Koji Suzuki’s horror novel
Ring—about a videotape that infects viewers with a virus-like curse—spirals outward in
viral fashion itself, from book to book series, multiple movies, and digital texts in
multiple cultural contexts, much like an adaptive viral epidemic. The viral model
focalizes the somewhat random transferences and branchings of the synaptic model into a

more streamlined version of Darwinian competition in the intersecting economies of

13

infections, markets, and mass media. This analysis centers on how textual mutations can
occur from one form to another within a very brief time period, and, although Suzuki’s
central conceit in the Ring books is how media technologies have severely negative
effects as they spread through social consciousness in viral forms, the author’s ideas have
spread in a kind of media epidemic similar to the virus attack at the core of Suzuki’s
frightening tales, proving, as Marshall McLuhan asserts, that “the medium is the
message,” rather than the subtle critique below the texts’ surface (McLuhan 7).

In moving from the analytical model for the Ring-related texts to the model for
analyzing Susan Orlean’s travel memoir The Orchid Thief and the Spike Jonze-directed
Adaptation, the focus once again enlarges, moving from the viral scale to a larger order of
magniﬁcation; my third model for defining and criticizing adaptation concentrates on the
interdependent intermingling of symbiosis. Much like the symbiotic relationship between
orchids and their fungal symbionts, the relationship between Charlie Kaufman, Susan
Orlean, and John Laroche is not quite so simplistic as parasites and hosts; instead, the
tropes of evolution throughout Adaptation invite audiences to question the more
comfortable categories inherent in Hollywood hierarchies as well as overly reductive
Darwinism that labels all relationships as intrinsically antagonistic and competitive.
Evolution in this case is not progressive, and, because the ﬁlm’s ending self—consciously
indulges in cliché Hollywood conventions, the narrative is innately concerned with the
impossibility of individualistic separation from others within the deep-seated
interconnections of the social and cultural environment.

In forging the macrosymbiotic model, the analysis of the fourth chapter expands

the scope from the symbiotic relationship between individual texts operating within a

I4

relatively narrow timeframe to examine a much larger constellation of texts originating
from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, covering over one hundred years’ worth of
cultural impact and expanding a web of interconnection among texts so wide that it
almost covers the entire genre of invasion narratives. The reading of these
macrosymbiotic texts concentrates on how the content of the narrative—with its emphasis
on bacterial tropes—mirrors the ways in which the relationships between and among
adaptive War of the Worlds texts form through a seemingly parasitic, antagonistic
paradigm through the narrow focus to macrosymbotic, long-term cooperation. Wells
undertakes an explanation of evolution through a Darwinian deus ex machina by having
his Martians die off because they have not adapted to the bacteria inhabiting everyday
humans, making Homo sapiens the “ﬁttest” by default of surviving. The relationship
between humans and bacteria in Wells’s novel, which seems forged in mutual adversity,
eventually provides a kind of “Darwin ex machina” that saves the planet. Yet the story of
the story does not end there. In turn, the adaptive texts extending from Wells’s work——
several movies, parodies, trading cards, a television series, a rock musical, a radio play,
and many comic books—resemble the overarching pattern of macrosymbiosis when
interpreted through a more diachronic scale. In other words, the texts’ concerns with the
macrosymbiotic social and biological functions of bacteria reﬂect how the adaptations of
Wells’s text also take on macrosymbiotic cultural roles themselves, often while being
recast as an essentially American allegory.
Finally, with the ﬁfth chapter’s emergent model, my focus expands another level
to examine the emergent evolution of complex systems through a reading of George

Romero’s zombie movies, theorizing their intertextual relationships among one another

15

as well as analyzing the larger network of texts and inﬂuences that lead to the emergence

of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Through this ﬁnal chapter, my study culminates
in a more totalizing formation of how adaptation allows for intertextual constellations of
pluralistic, distributed meaning through the adaptive iterations of groups of texts. Despite
the seeming simplicity of the zombie movie, reading Romero’s “Dead” series————Night of
the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead—as
sequential unfoldings of order demonstrates how these slow-moving killers demonstrate
evolution through ascending levels of complexity via the process of emergence. In this
way, as the collective zombie character undergoes slight yet signiﬁcant metamorphoses
from ﬁlm to ﬁlm, “learning” as a species, the texts themselves take on additional meaning
as a series rather than as isolated entries.

The role of adaptation studies and media criticism continues to grow, as does the
popularity of meme theory as a means for explaining cultural phenomena, and my
dissertation both follows and redirects these trends in a unique fashion. This project
provides new directions for literary theory and cultural studies, as well as giving
evolutionary theory another direction in which to adapt. In other words, this study’s
primary yield emanates from the fresh theoretical groundwork it creates and the
interdisciplinary dialogues it initiates among scholars of ﬁlm, literature, and culture.

With this dissertation’s progression from theoretical grounding to analyses of the

velocity, time, and space of cultural evolution, the project improves our comprehension of
how texts reﬂect and recreate their cultures of origin, as well as the changes they undergo

from one form to another. Many contemporary literary critics and narrative theorists fuse

scientiﬁc studies with their own textual explications, but few have explored the

16

possibilities of this particular offshoot of evolutionary theory, making my work unique.
Thus, this dissertation aims to break new ground while also proceeding along lines

similar to many important contemporary cultural theorists. V

I7

Chapter One: It’s All in Your Head: Synaptic Convergences and the Beat-ing of
Einstein’s Brain

1. Memes on My Mind

In Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, Lawrence Weschler performs a
series of image-based juxtapositions he calls convergences; by pairing such
representations from seemingly disparate realms and then explicating the rife possibilities
for connective associations, Weschler provides new critical contexts and rich intertextual
meanings. Weschler admits that, using this methodology, there is a certain “range in [the]
tone of these convergences some [are] fanciful, others polemical; some merely silly,
others almost transcendental. Some tended to burrow toward some deep-hidden, long
submerged causal relation; others veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood” (l).
The book’s ﬁnal set of convergences concerns linkages between and among tree branches
and roots, river deltas, and neuronal dendrites; Weschler explores the meaning-making
patterns’ similarities, asking ﬁnally:

Which, still, is to say exactly what? Maybe nothing. The

convergence so far verges on the tautological. But things get more

interesting, perhaps, when we start thinking about how human brains in

turn conceptualize the world’s workings, for, time and again, they deploy

treelike branchings as a way of visualizing complex processes across time.

Family trees, for instance or the splay of artistic inﬂuence or the

reputed progress of evolution. (210)
Weschler then explains how the process of linking these images and concepts——
converging them—allows larger patterns to emerge, and Weschler’s rhetoric itself seems

to bifurcate into neuron-stimulating electrical stems (forks of lightning, too, ﬁgure into

the convergence), literalizing his central pattern-making metaphor.

l8

These meanings that can zap across such wide gaps in time, space, and traditional
contexts allow for new ways of reading disparate connections, even allowing for
convergences of “manifest unlikelihood.” Weschler even reads patterns of synaptic
activity outward as paralleling human constructions such as the Internet, as well as
reproduction and evolution, writing that:

No doubt at some sub-submicroscopic level, the furthermost neural

dendrites in the brain are in fact exuding spasms of chemical foam, whose

electrical consequences well out in concentric waves across the synaptic

gap and toward the furthermost extensions of neighboring neurons.

And——genius to genes, cerebellum to cereal, concepts to conception——

what else, what other is procreation itself? (223)

Using Weschler’s far-reaching pattern analyses as an initial step toward similar
metaphorical convergences, this chapter explores the connections between and among
meme theory, synaptic patterns, personalities, and texts, as well as links outward to
patterns found in the works of Albert Einstein, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Carolyn
Abraham, and Michael Paterniti. While these branching argumentative lines might seem
unnecessarily convoluted at this early point, they will hopefully converge through the
analysis that follows. The purpose of this chapter’s forking paths extends beyond simply
intertextual weavings; the aim is both to create a new model for thematic analysis of
textual adaptation—based on principles of evolutionary theory and neurological
science—and to demonstrate that model through application. This “synaptic model”
follows the threads of meme theory, as deﬁned by Richard Dawkins and reﬁned by

Robert Aunger, though it also represents a critical intervention in response to these

theorists’ ideas.

The term “meme” was initially created by Richard Dawkins to explain how the
process of biological evolution had corresponding patterns of evolution in such a
disparate realm as culture. While biological theory is just as much socially constructed as
literature or the literary theory that analyzes it, the merits of meme theory are that it
provides an effective means for exploring culture with enhanced vocabularies different
from the standard parameters of literary or cultural theory, looking speciﬁcally at cultural
and textual evolution. In this context, evolution is deﬁned as incremental change over
time that, while often adaptive to environmental surroundings, is not necessarily
teleological, and this perspective complements the cultural relativism most often
employed in contemporary theory. By utilizing the paradigm of evolutionary theory as
applicable to culture, meme theory allows us to depart from the traditional, limited
debates about works’ ﬁdelity in textual adaptation or standard readings of the anxiety of
inﬂuence. Similarly, the plasticity of the terms and methods within meme theory present
practical tools for investigating concepts as ﬂuid as those most often contained in
narrative theory. Clearly, texts and our understanding of texts within certain cultural
contexts change in ways that reﬂect a form of evolution, and my work here seeks to study
the possibilities for models of narrative theory as suggested by divergent trends within the
various incarnations of meme theory. Despite the fact that theorists have had notorious
difﬁculties in pinning down the “meme” as a concrete concept, meme theory texts offer
fertile ways for conceptualizing the relationships between texts and their surrounding
cultural environment.

But, when we View texts as enacting a kind of historical and conceptual

connectedness itself through their convergences and branching inﬂuences, the resulting

20

map describes a net of anastomosis, or a network in which streams both branch out and
reconnect like the synaptic relations of neural cells and the larger patterns they form.
Such webs serve to structure both a form of intersubjectivity and a kind of intertextuality
through bifurcating and grafting texts and subjects that previously seemed disconnected.
Through tracing this textual lineage both backwards and forwards, we can tease out a
theoretical model for understanding intertextuality as its own kind of synaptic
connectedness through disconnection, not unlike the highway system Kerouac explored
both metaphorically and literally in On the Road.
According to Robert Aunger’s book, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How

We Think, the evolution of ideas works within a single brain, not exclusively between or
among subjects’ brains, as theorists such as Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett, and
Richard Dawkins all posit. In order to explore this concept of internal intellectual
evolution, Aunger discusses the possibility of neuromemes (which, in a confusing turn, he
sometimes also calls memes), a new concept he deﬁnes as being: “A conﬁguration in one
node of a neuronal network that is able to induce the replication of its state in other
nodes” (197, italics in original). Within this deﬁnition, Aunger asserts that the evolution
and internal transfer of information operates on as narrow a basis as the interactions of
individual neurons. Because these neural links inform the basis of individuals’
personalities, expressions, etc., Aunger’s neuromeme framework has many
complementary facets to the neurological explanations Joseph LeDoux offers in his book:
Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Although LeDoux, as a professor
at New York University’s Center for Neural Science, does not evoke the term “meme” in

his work, much of Synaptic Self is concerned with illustrating how the chemical and

2i

electrical components surrounding neurons determine the construction of self. LeDoux
views his work only within a literal framework, but his assertions also have larger
theoretical implications when drawn into the metaphorical realm; his explanations of the
brain’s convergence zones provide unique connections not only to Aunger’s work but to
the textual juxtapositions and explications found in Lawrence Weschler’s convergences.
LeDoux writes of both synapses and larger convergence zones in the brain, but, I argue,
these schematic outlines have implications on external models as well. LeDoux
illustrates the associations between synapses—~the gaps between neurons—and self by
writing that:
My notion of personality is pretty simple: it’s that your ‘self,’ the

essence of who you are, reﬂects patterns of interconnectivity between

neurons in your brain When a neuron is active, an electrical impulse

travels down its nerve ﬁber and causes the release of a chemical

neurotransmitter from its terminal. The transmitter drifts across the

synaptic space and binds to a dendrite on the receiving neuron, thus

closing the gap. Essentially everything the brain does is accomplished by

the process of synaptic transmission. (2)
Aunger and LeDoux’s respective texts complement each other fairly well, but the
difﬁculties in applying their conceptions of the inner workings of the brain to the
evolution of texts lie mostly in the fact that few texts deal exclusively with the inner
workings of the brain. Instead, I propose to modify these literalist understandings so as to
draw their frameworks outward to analyze a potential, metaphorical model for textual
transmission across historical time and cultural space, operating in a similar function to
the neural transmissions explored by Aunger and LeDoux.

The synaptic model relies not on the explicit connections between texts but the

process of both transmission and evolution that takes place during the projection of texts

22

and ideas. The importance of the synapse is that it provides the medium for transmitting
information within the brain, but such a transmission can only occur when the two
neurons in question are separated by a synapse. The connections are not exactly
connections; instead, the synapses represent chasms of meaning which can only be
traversed by a certain sort of chemical or electrical charge. This process is not about
closing the gap; rather, it concerns utilizing the energy produced by the synapse as a result
of the disparate pieces of information contained in the unbridgeable neurons.

From this model, I will explore the possibilities for the appropriation of
intentionality that results from this energy dispersal, looking at transfers not within a
single brain but through the neural structure written large upon the outside culture. Later
in this chapter, I will examine the cultural, textual, and ideological correlations among the
literature by and about Albert Einstein, the Beats, and an unconventional journalist named
Michael Paterniti. Though there are no direct associations between these individuals or
the texts they created, the electrical charge—a kind of intellectual energy—that builds
between the gaps existing between their respective positions in space and time creates a
new kind of meaning when we perform a synaptic-style tracing of their works. By
reading subjects’ texts as operating in an analogous fashion to neurons, what formerly
divided their conceptual positions now creates a sort of neural electricity that arcs across
the gaps of meaning. Such work does not close the gap so much as enrich our
understanding of formerly disconnected elements, exploring the energetic tension that
arises from their juxtaposition. The synaptic model here produces a generative energy

through the paradox of linking what seems to be categorically separated, mimicking the

23

work the brain performs as both an information—processing space and as a conceptual map

for analyzing the evolution of texts.

2. The Brain as Cultural Hub

In order to furnish a bottom-up conception of Albert Einstein, a ﬁgure normally
situated at the top of conceptual hierarchies, we need look no further than a tabloid’s
treatment of the famous physicist. In the September 26, 2005, edition of Weekly World
News, the tabloid that regularly reports on the likes of bat boy and the saber—toothed baby
while billing itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper,” there is an unusual story
about Albert Einstein’s brain (1). The cover contains a photo montage with an inset of
Albert Einstein smiling, a brain in a bell jar exuding electricity, and a man gripping his
head in pain as electrical arcs grip him and trigger explosions to his left. The headline
blares: “Einstein’s Brain Comes to Life—And Goes on Rampage!” As wacky as this
front page claim is, a semiotic reading of these images along the lines of critic Roland
Barthes shows that there is a form of cultural logic to this bizarre reportage.

Our culture recognizes that Einstein possessed some form of genius, and, though
average people might not understand Einstein’s theories, they know his ideas contained
revolutionary, world-changing power. The implicit reasoning here suggests that if
anyone’s brain were to come alive and go on a rampage, Albert Einstein’s brain is a likely
candidate. Moreover, this peaceful image of the kindly physicist grinning and raising his
eyebrows creates a dialectical opposition to the cover, given the wanton destruction his
renowned organ perpetrates in the fabricated photo below; this contrast gestures—though

most likely unintentionally—to the central irony of Einstein’s life and work: the work of

24

the world-famous paciﬁst was apprOpriated by other scientists to create atomic weapons,
the most destructive devices the world has ever known. The “rampage” that Weekly
World News depicts fails to have such far-reaching implications as possible nuclear
holocaust, though, and even the promise of a man gripping his head in pain while
wracked by volts of electricity proves false in the article itself.

Showing an unusual amount of restraint, the tabloid’s story has no high—voltage
torture or ﬁery explosions; instead, pseudonymous author Henry Fisick writes about
Einstein’s brain reanimating as a result of “reactivating microwaves from satellite dishes
and cell phones,” which lead to the brain having special communicative powers via cell
phone networks (24). Albert Einstein—if we can equivocate and call his brain “him,”
which the article does——then launches a number of prank calls using his new cellular
capabilities of his revitalized brain cells, ordering pizzas to Ontario’s ﬁctional
“McMeister University” and prank-calling the clean to say his wife was out with another
man. While these events hardly explain the electrical arcs and the anguished man
screaming, the article also has a certain logic vis-a-vis the mythology of Einstein. His
brain, the incomprehensible source of genius that changed our world forever, lives on
through a network of communication; his ideas are so powerful they keep ﬁring
electricity outward from his brain even years after his death, machine-like and
unstoppable. In terms of meme theory, Einstein’s brain is a resonant meme proliferator;
its signifying capacity provides multivalent meaning, both metaphorical and
metonymical. His brain produces ideas literally and symbolically, culturally and
materially: through Einstein’s intellectual work, through the evolution that work sparked

for other thinkers, through the ideological impact his work had, through the physical

25

manifestation of atomic bombs which Einstein secretly supported for use against the
Nazis and then spent the rest of his life denouncing. The explosion outward from this one
brain is immense, not entirely unlike the analogy suggested by the whizzing volts of
electricity in the doctored tabloid photo. And, while Weekly World News does not
substantiate much of anything in its publication, the front-page treatment proves that
Einstein’s brain as a richly mythological semiotic symbol is very much alive in the
present day.

Weekly World News is not the ﬁrst to report on Einstein’s brain as a cultural icon,
nor is it any coincidence that I invoked Roland Barthes when discussing the semiotic
mythology of the twentieth century’s most powerful organic metaphor. In Roland
Barthes’s collection of essays, Mythologies, the critic scrutinizes cultural products that
others overlook, everything from Greta Garbo’s face to professional wrestling to cleaning
products; but Barthes also dissects Einstein’s brain (semiotically, of course), in an essay
titled “The Brain of Einstein.” As if predicting the tabloid reportage that links the famous
brain to mechanical adaptability, Barthes writes that:

Einstein’s brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest

intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the

man who is too powerful is removed from psychology, and introduced into

a world of robots; as is well known, the supermen of science-ﬁction

always have something reiﬁed about them. So has Einstein: he is

commonly signiﬁed by his brain, which is like an object of anthologies, a

true museum exhibit. Perhaps because of his mathematical specialization,

superman is here divested of every magical character; no diffuse power in

him, no mystery other than mechanical: he is superior, a prodigious organ,

but a real, even a physiological one. (68)

Barthes characterizes the brain as embodying machine-like intelligence, constrained only

by its physiological limitations, which dictate the organ’s eventual death and

26

decomposition. Yet these mechanical qualities are the source of Einstein’s ability to
fascinate whole cultures; here is an intelligence recognized by the international
community, yet only a tiny sliver of the population can follow his unintelligible line of
thought through strings of equations and computations. The mystery of Albert Einstein’s
intelligence is how his black box of a brain was so efﬁcient, so mechanical, that it could
topple society’s previous ways of understanding time, space, and matter. Even Einstein
himself, when pressed on the point, did not know how his mind differed from the average
person’s, making his genius somehow unknowable even unto itself. Thus, conceptions of
his brain perform a kind of textual conscription that shift it from the literal register to a
metaphorical text, reconceptualizing the organic material as kind of text itself.

As Barthes illustrates, most people, rather than examining Einstein’s actual work,
want to unlock the secret of what made him so uniquely intelligent, or, looking at the
products of his thought, they want to unlock the secret of the universe in a neat and tidy
package. The beautiful simplicity of “E = mcz” rests in that the equation reiﬁes the
concept of knowledge as a discrete chunk existing in a vacuum, revolutionary without
requiring additional explanation. Barthes discusses this popular misconception, as well,
noting that “Popular imagery faithfully expresses this: photographs of Einstein show him
standing next to a blackboard covered with mathematical signs of obvious complexity;
but cartoons of Einstein (the sign that he has become a legend) show chalk still in hand,
and having just written on an empty blackboard, as if without preparation, the magic
formula of the world” (69, italics in original). According to the legend of Einstein’s

genius, his brain produces earth-shattering observations effortlessly, equations like “E =

mcz” erupting fully formed from his forehead like Athena from Zeus’s brow.

27

This presumption contradicts contemporary neuroscience as well as
commonsensical understandings of scientiﬁc work. The ideas within Einstein’s head
underwent many years of development and adaptation before his reports were published,
and, following the publication of Einstein’s 1905 work, the scientiﬁc community took
several more years to recognize the scope of what exactly his work signiﬁed. This
evolution of Einstein’s ideas conforms to Robert Aunger’s iteration of meme theory;
ideas replicate and mutate within the brain, which, according to neuroscience, is the ideal

location for evolution as developmental change. Aunger investigates neurons and
synapses as themselves constitutive of an environment in the following terms:
In fact, the brain is just the kind of place Replicator Theory would

suggest as the birthplace of a replicator. It is full of ambient energy

waiting to be harnessed and provides lots of scaffolding for a replication

reaction in the form of a network of cells with support structures on which

to hang components, all in standardized conﬁgurations, and so on. Just as

DNA is protected inside a double envelope of outer cell and nuclear walls,

so too is the brain encased inside a system of doubled protection, this time

made of bone, tissue, and chemicals. (176)
As Aunger frames the brain, this neural landscape provides the ideal space for
populations of ideas (meme species) to evolve and adapt, transferring outward only after
the weakest variations of the ideas have died off, making the strongest ideas the surviving
“ﬁttest.” While Aunger’s theoretical formulation is not so democratic as to say that all
brains are created equal, the process of thought does not vary so signiﬁcantly, based on
his studies, as to constitute an entirely different class of thinkers like Einstein. In other
words, Einstein may have been a member of the intellectual elite (according to a social

model of evolution), but his ideas developed through the same processes as any other

thinker (according to a neurological model of evolution).

28

Still, something about the deft nature of E 2 me2 captures the social imagination
with its brevity. The cultural popularity of Albert Einstein over other scientists is this
persistent notion that his efforts have unwittingly produced: Einstein’s thoughts make
intelligence basic and commodiﬁable in neat, little phrases. Moreover, in reducing
Einstein’s research to this Platonic ideal of a single equation formed out of thin air,
popular culture creates a secondary myth to justify intellectual laziness and stupidity.
Einstein had some special power, the thinking goes, and since most people do not have
super—powered smarts, they can continue their lives without critical thinking because, as
Einstein personiﬁes, either you already have intelligence or you never will. Einstein’s
mental aptitude is the source of his greatness, not his conceptual achievements
themselves; the comfort is, as Barthes elucidates, that:

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the
image of knowledge reduced to a formula. Paradoxically, the more the
genius of the man was materialized under the guise of his brain, the more
the product of his inventiveness came to acquire a magical dimension, and
gave a new incarnation to the old esoteric image of a science entirely
contained in a few letters. There is a single secret to the world, and this
secret is held in one word; the universe is a safe of which humanity seeks
the combination: Einstein almost found it, this is the myth of Einstein. In
it, we ﬁnd all the Gnostic themes: the unity of nature, the ideal possibility
of a fundamental reduction of the world, the unfastening power of the
word, the age-old struggle between a secret and an utterance, the idea that
total knowledge can only be discovered all at once, like a lock which

suddenly opens after a thousand unsuccessful attempts. The historic

equation E = mcz, by its unexpected simplicity, almost embodies the pure

idea of the key, bare, linear, made of metal, opening with a wholly magical

ease a door which had resisted the desperate efforts of centuries. (68)

With Barthes’s explanatory framework, Einstein’s appeal is conversely not his

intelligence but the safety of his intelligence somehow existing in no one else, as well as

the comfort that all brilliant ideas are reducible to singular, holistic nuggets.

29

Paradoxically, “‘the most powerful brain of al ’” can justify uncritical thinking, and that
thinking, in still another paradox, props itself up on a kind of evolution, not of ideas but
of genes (69, italics in original). The implicit logic behind Einstein’s genius—as
somehow not being a product of years of study (Einstein earned bad grades in school, the
fallacious urban legend contends)———the reason to abandon reason is that Albert Einstein
was the pinnacle of evolution, the ultimate specimen bred for thinking. We can never
reach his level of thought, so the suppositions reason, if we simply do not have the
genetic stuff which serves as the brain blueprints for genius; Einstein’s brain is
unattainable in the absolute.

The cultural text of Einstein’s brain signiﬁes this mythic, medieval order of
knowledge, but Barthes also implicates Einstein himself in supporting this image of the
factory brain as elevated above all others, writing that “Einstein himself has to some
extent been a party to the legend by bequeathing his brain, for the possession of which
two hospitals are still ﬁghting as if it were an unusual piece of machinery which it will at
last be possible to dismantle” (68). While Barthes accurately parses the sociological
meaning of Einstein’s brain—what the brain-as-text itself signiﬁes—this characterization
of Albert Einstein bequeathing his brain to science is not entirely accurate, or, at least,
some parties still dispute that Einstein ever did such a thing. Einstein’s wishes about

what to do with the remains of his body, his ideas about what to do when “‘the most

powerful brain of all has stopped thinking,”’ are still unclear, as the only remains of his

wishes are the multiple, conﬂicting narratives of diverse parties with diverse interests (69,

italics in original).

30

No authority disputes the brain’s fate, however. Everybody agrees that Dr.
Thomas Harvey, the pathologist in charge of Einstein’s autopsy, removed the brain
without hesitation. Some claim this act was theft; some claim it was following orders.
Otto Nathan, the executor of Einstein’s estate and thus the man in charge of Einstein’s
physical and intellectual property (of which the brain certainly must fall into either
category, one would think), has claimed both that he authorized Harvey to remove the
brain and that he never said any such thing. In his nonﬁction book Driving Mr. Albert: A
Trip Across America with Einstein ’3 Brain, Michael Patemiti carefully avoids labeling

Harvey’s actions as simply legal or illegal, instead claming that:

Working under the humming lights, jugging the liver, palpating the
heart, Harvey made a decision. Who’s to say whether it was inspired by
awe or by greed, professional duty or malpractice, beneﬁcence or mere
pettiness? Who’s to say what comes over a mortal, what chemical
reaction takes place, when faced with the blinding brightness of another’s
greatness, and with it a knowledge that we shall never possess even a
cheeseparing of that greatness? (10)

Within this passage, Patemiti captures major questions at issue with respect to Einstein’s
brain as a socio-cultural object; the controversy in question is not the ethics of “grand
theft anatomy” so much as it is “what chemical reaction takes place, when faced with the
blinding brightness of another’s greatness.” But the passage does not focus on chemical
reactions in Einstein’s brain; Patemiti depicts Thomas Harvey as the new mental mystery
man since his unknown thoughts set in motion the controversial behavior of removing the
brain.
Here I would like to add a reminder that although the levels of meaning are
different when examining developments in a single brain versus a larger social

framework, the patterns within the mental model emerge as paradigmatic of the larger

31

social model. The impact of one brain, even after its functions have ceased, inspiring a
certain “chemical reaction” in another brain as “the blinding brightness of another’s
greatness” exposes within social interconnectivity the synaptic patterns by which any

ideas negotiate the neural network. There is a larger schema of convergence working

here, mirroring the work done between synapses. From the memetic perspective, Einstein
created a revolutionary wave of ideas, igniting minds across the globe with thoughts of
relativity and its atomic potential, but the proliferation of Einstein’s ideas (as well as the
ideas permeating our culture about the nature of intelligence), just like the synaptic
evolution of ideas, relies on the brain itself. The chemical reaction in Paterniti’s text,
Robert Aunger points out, requires something akin to a social network within the brain,
so that transmissions of communication can catch on and negotiate between genes and
memes to produce the best behavior for the organism, even when the transmissions focus
on that organism’s recognition of its lack of greatness within the larger {social network.

As Aunger writes:

The brain is designed by natural selection to produce behavior——
adaptive activity in the organism. That is what the brain does: intervene
between genetic instructions and environmental stimuli to produce an
adaptive response. So it seems natural to suppose that competition among
memes must be to produce behavior, to be selected for the good effects
they produce in the host. That is how the symbiosis between genes and
memes arises: Both seek to promote “good” behavior in the organisms
they ﬁnd themselves in It’s the fact that memes are necessarily social
that sets them apart from essentially independent replicators like genes or
prions. Memes are “born with connections”: Their substrates are
physically tied to one another as parts of a single, massive neuronal

network. (227)

With Aunger’s conception in mind, the brain’s neurons are constant negotiators between

the limits of DNA strands and themes of memes, genetic programming and social

32

programming (more problematically labeled as “nature” and “nurture”). The ideas
spraying in and out of the brain are sorted based on their potential success for raising the
station of the brain’s owner to the highest possible position, which, in social animals, is
more about status than survival. Thus, when faced with the greatness of Einstein’s
intelligence, as evinced by the cultural and intellectual standing of his brain, Thomas
Harvey, the lowly pathologist, seems to have little option—at least in Paterniti’s depiction
of aspiring to “a cheeseparing of that greatness”——other than to take that brain so as to
obtain a greatness of his own. The idea has its own kind of evolution internally in
Harvey’s brain just as his status evolves to a higher social level. After all, other great
ﬁgures, such as Erwin Shrodinger and, more (in)famously, J. Robert Oppenheimer, have
raided the cerebral fruits of Einstein’s brain to achieve their own sort of greatness; Harvey
just goes right for the source. Harvey’s action has little to do with his survival, but, with
someone else’s brain in his basement, the importance of Harvey’s status, his power to
shape larger cultural, social, and intellectual patterns, increases tremendously.

Harvey saw an opportunity and exploited it, which Patemiti exploits in his own
right in his own book, and both earn a higher social standing in Darwinian terms for their
behavior. Appropriately enough, the above passage from Paterniti’s book represents a
synapse-like transference of narrative focus (from Albert Einstein to Thomas Harvey)
while it simultaneously depicts a synapse-like transference of notoriety, in both form and
content. Harvey holds noteworthiness and intelligence (or at least potential for
intelligence through neurological research) simply by ownership of the brain; he achieves
intellectual fame by proxy for transplanting the brain from Einstein’s body into a

formaldehyde-ﬁlled Tupperware container in Harvey’s own basement, much like

33

Patemiti, as Harvey’s friend and chauffeur, obtains his own quirky cerebral appeal by
transporting Harvey across America with Einstein’s brain in the car’s trunk, making
Paterniti a genius twice removed.

Like a football player receiving attention for scooping up a fumbled ball, Harvey
is famous because he has Einstein’s brain, and Patemiti explores that possession of
genius through the brain removal’s complicated interlacing of legal, cultural, intellectual,
and material concerns. In cutting out the brain of Albert Einstein—“a genius, a guru—
mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God’s own mind”——-Harvey also performed a
dissection of our understanding of body and mind, as well as the material rudiments of
identity and thought, which deﬁne understanding itself (6). As Aunger elucidates in his
own version of meme theory (as an evolutionary neural epistemology), passing ideas
between brains requires replication, and replication instigates a tension between the
information’s ﬁdelity and inaccuracy. Moreover, this information, by its very design,
aims at further replication, because, as Aunger explains:

It is only when information replicates that an additional causal

force becomes involved in the explanation of communication. This is the

very essence of the meme hypothesis. The memetic suggestion is that

there is an information-bearing replicator underlying communication that

goes unnoticed by the traditional approach: a hidden homunculus acting as

a second kind of agent, a puppeteer pulling invisible strings that direct

aspects of the communication process. This puppeteer is the information

packet itself, evolved to manipulate its carriers for its own ends. (12-3,

italics in original)

Although Aunger’s formulation relies on a somewhat sinister anthropomorphization, the
observation holds that, just as Marshall McLuhan asserts, “the medium is the message”

(7). Ideas have a cultural valence beyond and outside of themselves in that their

memes—as the atomistic particles parsed out of ideas parsed out of texts parsed out of

34

contexts parsed out of cultures~—function as adaptive proliferators. Although certain
ideas may be unpopular, or in Einstein’s case, difﬁcult to understand, their central
purpose lies in reproduction, even (perhaps especially) outside of their original contexts,
creating energy through the disparate juxtapositions allowed for by the synaptic model.
This proliferation of meanings, outside of original contexts and appropriated away from
any creators’ initial intentions, partially explains why Einstein’s formulation of physics
exploded outward to such previously unforeseen possibilities as the atomic bomb. Our
present comprehension of how the brain works, and of how ideas spread from one source
to another, is still relatively limited, but even Harvey knew that the brain, which he had so
carefully removed, dissected, labeled, and preserved, could play a key role in furthering
that knowledge and give Harvey a fair dose of fame along the way.

In her account of the various transfers of Einstein’s brain, Possessing Genius: The
Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein ’s Brain, Carolyn Abraham includes Harvey’s removal of the
brain as well as Paterniti’s narrative about the brain’s cross-country trek. Patemiti
suggests that the trip was undertaken out of Harvey’s desire to right the wrongs of his
brain-snatching by returning the renowned brain to Albert Einstein’s granddaughter,
Evelyn Einstein. Abraham, though removed from Paterniti’s story and yet another
remove from the original genius, describes the trip:

With Harvey in the passenger seat of a rented Buick Skylark,

Patemiti behind the wheel and Einstein’s brain bobbing once again in a

trunk, the unlikely couple set out in February 1997 on a cross—country

adventure that would eventually read like an urban legend itself. With

roadside diners and Las Vegas and the atomic history of Los Alamos, the

journey offered a buffet of Einsteinian parallels and comic anecdotes for

the artful wordsmith Paterniti. His travelogue, which ﬁrst appeared in

Harper’s magazine, eventually became a book, Driving Mr. Albert, with
Paramount Pictures snapping up the movie rights. (310)

35

Patemiti, Abraham, and even Paramount Pictures all understand intuitively what makes a
story like this one work: it “read[s] like an urban legend itself.” Like Einstein’s ideas,
like the popular images of the wild-haired mad scientist who made a mushroom cloud out
of Newton’s universe, the memetic rudiments of this story proliferate like mad, tapping
the cultural desire for unusual, quirky tidbits-that-feel-like-rumors, creating the sense of
an urban legend, urban legends being the structures which Susan Blackmore, Robert
Aunger, and Richard Brodie all use as accessible explanations for how memes mutate,
adapt, and propagate. Not only that, just like Patemiti implies at the beginning of his trip
with Harvey, this urban legend is, at its core, also about redemption, about returning
remains to the next of kin. Unfortunately, once the two arrive at Evelyn’s house in
California, Harvey refuses to hand the brain over.

At the journey’s end, Harvey wants only to clear his throat and show Evelyn the
brain rather than give it back. Harvey retains control as the man appointed by fate to dole
out the pieces of Einstein’s brain, unready to give up his status, despite charges from
nearly everyone that his greedy possession of the brain inhibits any knowledge we could
still squeeze out of his Tupperware’s pulpy contents. After a quick overview of critical
opinions about Harvey’s handling of the brain (as well as the relativistic importance the
research on Einstein’s brain provides to cognitive science), Patemiti depicts Harvey’s role
as brain benefactor thus:

Harvey, however, spins [the work on the brain] with a little more

drama. “You see,” he says, “we’re ﬁnding out that Einstein’s brain is

more unusual than many people ﬁrst thought.” And when it comes to the

dissemination of its pieces, he paints himself as a bold leader who’s

carefully hand-picked an international squadron of distinguished movers
and shakers after reading their work. By some of their own admissions,

36

   

   

 
   

 

rave
‘ «mu Jilted;

however, many contacted him ﬁrst, then months—in some cases, years——

later, received anonymous packages containing wrapped pieces of brain.
(55)

In the Barthes essay, we saw how popular assumptions about intelligence tend toward the
culturally conservative, especially in the case of Einstein’s brain as an iconic, pristine,
incomprehensible machine; this paragon of intelligence justiﬁes intellectual conformity
since the status quo simply does not possess the genetic, chemical, or psychological
makeup of such a great man as Einstein. In a similar fashion, Harvey’s attitude toward
intelligence—as evinced by his parceling out the brain to those he deems worthy——is
conservative in that intelligence is not only material, it is property which a patriarchal
ﬁgure must oversee and protect. Harvey acts as the brain bourgeoisie, meting out slivers
of brain for other researchers to utilize, pontiﬁcating on what “we’re ﬁnding out about
Einstein’s brain,” when his legitimacy in the academic realm has long since expired. In
light of the fact that Harvey declines to return the brain to Evelyn Einstein, Patemiti and
Harvey’s trip, then, seems to be not so much a tale of redemption as just another excuse
to transport the brain, spreading Einsteinian ideas along the way, as though proliferating
the pieces of brain were equivalent to spreading the brain’s ideas themselves.

And why not? Patemiti observes several times in his book that his perspective is
somehow different simply for having Einstein’s brain in the trunk of his car. From this
sort of thinking we can logically extrapolate that this physical presence of Einstein’s brain
must also change the landscape of the America whizzing by outside Paterniti’s car
windows, although such an irregular, quantum theory—based sense of epistemology
implies Heisenberg rather than Einstein. Yet formal educators support this rather

backward notion that Einstein’s genius is physically trapped like a genie in its

37

Tupperware bottle of murky formaldehyde, and after Harvey addresses the school in an
assembly, Patemiti describes how “there are about twenty—ﬁve people in the room,
teachers and a few invited students, handpicked for exhibiting their own traces of
brilliance in science class, in hopes that their close proximity to the brain may imbue
them with some of the Einstein magic” (180). Here again are the charges of electricity
radiating out from the dead genius’s brain to communicate with the synapses of the
living, mischievously manipulating the fate of the status quo with a spike or two of
energy.

In spite of such mystical interpretations and faith in relics (or perhaps because of
them), theories of intelligence, including meme theory, have a very difﬁcult time deﬁning
a person’s smarts by means that are not quantiﬁable and therefore bound to the material
realm. Here, in the nutshell of the human skull, is Aunger’s central problem: how can
meme adaptation and replication take place in the brain and then escape to adapt and
replicate in other iterations in society? According to Aunger’s paradigm of neuromemes,
an idea matures out of “basically just a brain-based, super-molecular structure capable of
replication” (197). Although Aunger at times relies on external explanations of
memetics—such as those Dawkins develops—most of the action takes place between the
brain’s synapses rather than in material culture, but the difﬁculty here is that the brain
itself is material culture as well. Even when Aunger asserts that “memes are not bound to
particular cells,” he also claims that: “The molecules in a neuron that deﬁne its
electrochemical state, as a readiness-to—ﬁre, come and go; it is the readiness-to-ﬁre that
endures. Memes are still physical; it’s just that their substrate is energetic—‘electric,’ if

you will——-rather than material” (199). This mental mapping of informational evolution

38

may work within the mind, but then how can those electric memes zap outward? Despite
the tabloid reportage in the Weekly World News story and the desperate hopes of
schoolchildren ogling “the most powerful brain of all,” ideas do not literally are like
electricity from one physical space to another, outside of the brain, at least. We can draw
such connections through the tracings of the synaptic model, but even Aunger and
LeDoux’s ideas about the internal transfer of information within the brain have difﬁculty
explaining how ideas evolve and adapt beyond the conﬁnes of the human skull. In order
to map the synaptic model outward to look at gaps between and among other outside
social nodes, we need to examine how conﬂicting and competing transmissions interact
within the brain. LeDoux writes of how synaptic broadcasts meet in convergence zones
for processing:

A convergence zone (CZ) is a region that receives inputs from other brain

regions and that integrates the information separately processed, by other

regions Once information is integrated, it can then be used to inﬂuence

the activity of the input regions. These are examples of bottom-up and

top—down processing. The ability of working memory to integrate

information from various systems and hold that information temporarily

for the purpose of performing mental operations (comparing, contrasting,

recognizing) is a typical bottom-up process, and the ability of working

memory to use the outcome of this processing to regulate what we attend

to is a typical top-down or executive function. (316)
The convergence zones LeDoux details have their metaphorical counterparts
within interpretive frameworks wherein we exercise top-down function to
compare disparate elements, much like the performative readings Weschler pulls
out of juxtaposing seemingly disparate visual texts. According to LeDoux’s

reading, such juxtapositions, as well as any transfer of intelligence outward, rely

on some sort of material vehicle, but to what extent must each material text rely

39

 

 

on the internal evolution of another brain forming the ideas in order for meaning—

making to take place?

3. Models for Consumption in the Marketplace of Ideas

In order to examine the materiality of informational transfers, Aunger provides a
provocative metaphorical framework for the material consumption of cultural
transmission. At the beginning of The Electric Meme, Robert Aunger outlines three
scenarios involving the transmission of information, and he questions the extent to which
these incidents also involve the replication of information, the difference being a
deﬁnitional crux for meme theory. By assembling these three “apparently unrelated
vignettes,” Aunger creates a kind of convergence zone in which the reader draws parallels
across the conceptual gaps, mirroring the workings of synapses within the brain (8).
These vignettes involve: a funerary rite among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea; a
passage of ideas from Thomas Malthus to Charles Darwin via the written word; and an
initial step in the transfer of the so-called Michelangelo computer virus. According to
Aunger, these examples involve transmission in the biological, cultural, and electronic
form, respectively. Perhaps the most unusual of the three—the vignette Aunger spends
the most effort analyzing—is the ﬁrst account, concerning the epidemiology of
neurological disease:

In 1953, a young girl of the Fore tribe, participating in funerary rites,

consumed pieces of her deceased grandmother ’3 brain. The elderly

woman had died from an illness that progressively caused an

uncontrollable quaking of the limbs, loss of coordination, paralysis, and

dementia. Four years later, just as a brash American doctor reached their

village in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the girl began to
exhibit symptoms of the trembling disease herself. A year later, she was

40

dead too. Most of the women in her village were soon suﬁ‘ering from what

they called kuru, the shaking. But then the young virologist, Carleton

Gajdusek, established a connection between participating in funerals and

becoming the subject of a funeral yourself The cultural practice of eating

brains soon stopped when the news of this link spread, and kuru ’s

devastating consequences on Fore society gradually dwindled away. (7,

italics in original)

In this brief passage, Aunger’s research undergoes an unusual conﬂation; within this tale,
form and content, matter and ideas, brain and tradition all crystallize into an apt, yet
complicated metaphor for the spread of disease and its relationship to intelligence. The
Fore people have a tradition involving the consumption of the honored dead at a mortuary
feast, wherein the men eat the best pieces—~the meaty muscles—while women and
children eat the less desirable bits, including the brain. In this cannibalistic funeral ritual,
even the bones are ground up and sprinkled onto food so that the dead and their memory
may perpetuate through the living.

From this rite we add another wrinkle to the synaptic model, as it provides a more
sophisticated metaphorical model for the textual transfer of ideas, assuming that ideas ﬁt
within a discourse of disease and infection. The Fore rite is the biological transfer
Aunger discusses, but few westerners would have heard of the Fore were the rites not also
linked to the transfer of the kuru disease. Western conceptions of knowledge enter the
narrative in the form of Carleton Gajdusek, who posits that a “slow virus” disease causes
the Fore epidemic. In 1976, Gajdusek wins a Nobel Prize for medicine as a result of his
research-based detective work; but the story continues on with Stanley Prusiner winning
another Nobel Prize for medicine in 1997 for his own, very different explanation of kuru,

which involves prions (proteinaceous infectious particles) rather than a viral transfer.

Aunger formulates how prions work in this way: “With the aid of a catalyst, prions cause

41

another molecule of the same class to adopt an infectious shape like their own simply
through contact. Thus prions are an important and only recently discovered mechanism
for the inheritance of information through means other than genes” (94). Prions, in
enacting passage from one particle to the next, provide a provocative parallel to the way
in which information passes from one neuron to the next across synapses. The electricity
and chemicals that trigger the reactions propel the messages not entirely unlike an
infection.

Prusiner’s prion explanation does not provide an alternative means for kuru’s
method of transfer (the culprit is still the cannibal funeral), but Prusiner’s work diagnoses
that the replicator in question in such a transfer is a class of disease that the world had not
been able to explain in the past. The moral (and model) here is that we are moving along
lines of intelligence that expand and adapt through time and space, moving from brain
cannibalism to two Nobel Prize-winners’ work. But in Prusiner’s study, we ﬁnally return
to the West again, after what seems like a foray into a wholly alternative, exotic rite of
cannibalism; Prusiner’s work cycles back also to explain mad cow disease, the scourge of
beef-eating Western cultures that feed cow and sheep brains to their cattle. While
Aunger’s opening salvo elucidates the differences between viral diseases and prion-based
diseases, as well as how those differences pertain to meme theory, he does not explain
what, exactly, the memes are in this case of blending Fore tradition with Western
epistemology and epidemiology. The Fore funerary ritual involves a gesture toward
immortality, but, by Western standards, that immortality was achieved only on the textual

level when the ideas made it into print as Gajdusek’s missing puzzle piece in the spread

42

 

 

 

of disease, resurfacing again after a long period of dormancy, much like the kuru disease
itself, years later in Prusiner’s work to resolve the mad cow disease phenomenon.

This multi-layered narrative teases out questions regarding the spread of infectious
particles, whether literal and biological or abstract and intellectual, pulling threads of
materiality into question. As Aunger observes, although Gajdusek and Prusiner both won
Nobel Prizes, they cannot both be correct; the material explanation of the disease must
reside in either a virus or a prion, not both. Likewise, while Western society may scoff at
the cannibalistic traditions of the Fore tribe, it has few viable explanations for how and
where the “essence” of consciousness rests———be it called a mind, an ego, or a soul——and
the “proper” means of transferring that “essence” from one subject to another. The
explanation for how to understand, let alone transfer, genius remains elusive, though
something about the theme of quick and easy material transfer, as primitive or
cannibalistic as it may sound, appeals to popular interests time after time.

While this study of cerebral consumption contains synaptic bridges to a variety of
dissimilar ideas, we can extend it also to the multiple attempts to understand Einstein’s
brain through narrativization. Within Carolyn Abraham and Michael Paterniti’s texts,
there exists a framework for consumerism, intellectual cannibalism even, that evokes the
Fore’s tribal traditions, even though the ingestion of Einstein’s brain is not quite so
literal.

Although the means were not cannibalistic in the traditional sense, everyone
seemed to want a piece of Albert Einstein when he was alive. Abraham details how:
“Harassed by requests for his autograph, Einstein had once remarked that mere signature

hunting was the last vestige of cannibalism: ‘People used to eat people, but now they seek

43

   

 

 

symbolic pieces of them instead’” (68). Something about the collector’s obsessive mania
sets in—desire to be genius however many degrees removed—when the physicality of
celebrity and intelligence collide. Einstein’s brain represents the ultimate souvenir, as it
is his real thinking tool “in the ﬂesh.” Patemiti, after his tourist trap-riddled trip with
Harvey, steals the opportunity to experience Harvey’s souvenir ﬁrsthand in Evelyn
Einstein’s home. Although Harvey refuses to give Evelyn her grandfather’s brain, even a
piece of it, Patemiti slips out a few slivers for her, writing:

I pick some out of the plastic container and hand a few to Evelyn. They

feel squishy, weigh about the same as very light beach stones. We hold

them up like jewelers, marveling at how they seem less like a brain than——

what?—some kind of snack food, some kind of energy chunk for genius

triathletes. Or an edible product that offers the consumer world peace,

space travel, eternity. Even today, the Asmat of Irian J aya believe that to

consume a brain is to gain the mystical essence; and Microsoft employees

glug potions of herbal energy elixirs called Einstein’s Brain at company

parties. But to be absolutely honest, I never thought that, holding

Einstein’s brain, I’d somehow imagine eating it. ( 194)
The ﬁrst thoughts that transfer through Paterniti’s synapses upon contact with the brain
are consuming the coveted object, like the “Microsoft employees” who “glug potions of
herbal energy elixirs called Einstein’s Brain at company parties.” While the passage is
very odd, Paterniti illustrates the desire to take the complicated mysteries of intelligence,
that “mystical essence,” and simplify it into discrete, digestible chunks. Within the
framework of cultural transference, ideas’ origins may imply authorship, but such origins
do not dictate ownership, as the easy appropriation inherent in the digestibility of

intelligence as Patemiti indicates here. Paterniti’s all-American odyssey culminates in a

ﬂash to a consumer fantasy; although he knows better than to stick pickled brain pieces

44

 

 

 

into his mouth, part of Patemiti believes that this morsel of Einstein’s mental matter
promises “world peace, space travel, eternity” to its consumer.

Paterniti’s phrasing of the “consumer” relationship-to “some kind of energy chunk
for genius triathletes” and the energy drinks of Microsoft employees operates in the
framework of intellectual dissemination that his whole trip has taken. His journey with
Dr. Harvey is premised on the notion that distribution of the brain—whether metaphorical
or literal—serves some beneﬁcial purpose, perhaps mystical and unknown. Traveling
across America with Einstein’s collected writings in the trunk would have nowhere near
the same cultural impact, since the brain as text itself—singular and rare, despite the
slicings Harvey has performed over the years—creates a strange performative aura,
somewhat removed from the actual ideas associated with Einstein’s corpus. The ideas
produced by the brain prove to be less provocative as they are unknowable to the average
person, as well as reproducible anyway, but the uncommon rarity of the brain, in both its
achievements and its stark scarcity, makes its presence powerfully charged. Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” applies here
to the extent that we can view Einstein’s brain as a text and a text as a work of art, and, as
Benjamin writes, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens
to be” (220). The brain is absolutely unique, not just for the work it performed, but
because it is irreplaceable, unﬁt for any kind of meaningful reproduction; Patemiti notes
that the process by which Harvey preserved the brain makes its cells impossible to clone.

We have seen the last of Albert Einstein, with the exception of the pieces Paterniti

45

   

 

 

literally salivates over as he confuses his intellectual response with some undefinable
urge to consume the genius.

But Einstein’s genius, and its capacity to inspire an’aura of awe, does not limit
itself to the physical space of his brain, as the reproductions and images and impressions
of Einstein have long been in place as marketing tools in spheres of consumption.
Abraham writes of how Einstein’s direct authorial production of ideas may have died
with him, “But the genius was as fashionable as ever. He glared out from greeting cards,
T—shirts and postage stamps from Nicaragua to Mali. He had become a bona ﬁde brand,
his image re—purposed as the quintessential smart consumer selling cameras, hair
products, beer and women’s stockings—things he never would have agreed to do in life”
(126). The irony of this summation of Einstein’s posthumous conunercialization is that,
despite Roland Barthes’s claims to the physicist’s complicity to be “party to the legend by
bequeathing his brain,” Albert Einstein would not likely have endorsed his brain’s
commodiﬁcation either, the splicing of chunks as research specimens or souvenirs also
being “things he never would have agreed to do in life.”

Such intellectual ownership—of one’s ideas, of one’s images, and even of pieces
of one’s body—is clearly not absolute, regardless of the original owner’s intentions. No
matter how obviously stated, executing those intentions relies on a certain interpretation,
and such enactment can veer far from the original intention, whether willfully or
unconsciously. Such (perhaps unintentional) appropriation evokes the example of the
Fore people’s traditional funerary rites, where the intention of the deceased was obviously
not to spread the kuru disease, let alone open up divergent levels of global understanding

about the epidemiology of viruses or prions. As a metaphor for the proliferation of

46

   

 

 

intelligence, Aunger’s opening case proves problematic, as its implications for the
distinctions between originator and replicator, between generator and proliferator, are not
clear. The origins of certain Western medical knowledge, Speciﬁcally the current
understanding of prions and disease transference, trace their roots back to what,
exactly? The possible candidates include: Stanley Prusiner’s work, Carleton Gajdusek’s
work before him, the Fore people themselves, the young girl who ﬁrst exhibited the
symptoms of kuru under Western eyes, the grandmother who had the kuru before the
young girl did, the kuru disease itself, or perhaps just the grandmother’s brain that
transferred the kuru in the ﬁrst place, making possible the sequence of events that led to
two Nobel Prizes and multiple paradigm shifts in Western society. Inside the brain of a
deceased Fore woman in 1953 lay the seeds for an explosion of ideas—dependent, of
course, on the causal train of thought begun by the Fore people’s cannibalistic funerary
traditions—but the ideas that exploded outward were far removed from any of the
woman’s intentions. In much the same way, Einstein’s brain—both its intellectual
products and its actual, material presence—produces effects and affects that are likely far
removed from the intentions of the brain’s owner. That energy, that are from one point to
a more removed, seemingly disparate one, illustrates the core of the synaptic model, both

in terms of internal, mental transmissions and external, social transmissions.

4. Another Cluster of Convergences

Aside from the nonﬁction works of Michael Patemiti and Carolyn Abraham,
Einstein’s brain has also inspired ﬁctional work, such as Mark Olshaker’s 1981 novel,

Einstein ’s Brain. Although the novel’s concerns are largely peripheral to the matters

47

explored in this chapter, Einstein’s Brain provides a provocative metaphorical parallel to
this chapter’s central interest in convergence. In Olshaker’s bizarre narrative melange of
international espionage, mad science, and brain—swappingthree individuals seek to
uncover what links them together and makes them all the convergent, collective target of
a multi—national conspiracy. The three-v—a cutting—edge physicist, a scientiﬁc
journalist/activist, and a Zionist rabbi—discover that they all share a history of brain
disease, speciﬁcally, brain diseases that seemed inoperable when they were
simultaneously admitted to the Goddard Institute. Not long after their admission, all three
were miraculously cured. The mystery of their interconnective, instinctual intelligence
ﬁnds its ﬁnal answer, somewhat anti-climactically, in the title of the book itself. The evil
(and completely ﬁctional) Dr. Norbert Ramsey, in whose care Einstein’s brain was
entrusted, decided to implant the healthy, super-intelligent parts of Albert Einstein’s dead
brain into the waiting receptacles of three terminally ill patients’ skulls, in the hopes that
Einstein’s intellectual legacy would live again. The three consciousnesses then proceed
to feed on the pieces of Einstein’s brain that replaced their own diseased cerebral chunks.
Dr. Ramsey explains his nefarious plot to the bewildered physicist and Einstein receptacle

Paul Garrett:

[Ramsey] paused and breathed in slowly and fully, as if he would
take all the air in the room. “I had the brain,” be repeated. “And now you
have it!”

“But this is the work of a Frankenstein,” Paul countered. “How
could you be so cavalier about playing with our very souls?”

“There was nothing cavalier about it. You were a dead man, Paul.
You must have realized that. How many people back then recovered from
a grade four oligodendroglioma, or a medullo blastoma, or glioblastoma
multiforme? Even the celebrated Norbert Ramsey didn’t save them. But I

saved you, and I saved Amanda, and I saved Kagan. It was a long shot,
but I knew there was a chance my theory of ‘invasive tissue dominance’

48

 

"" ' In ,
"'A W'Wﬁlftnd' “41“.:

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would work, and in your three cases, it did. No other surgeon could have
pulled it off.”
“Are you claiming you stuck a piece of Einstein’s brain in our

skulls on the off chance it would turn our cancers around,” [sic] Paul said

derisively. (215) i
The “invasive tissue dominance” Dr. Ramsey speaks of endows the three patients with
Einstein’s mental superpowers, which arc synaptically between them when they are near
one another, possessing genius bodily in their three—fold collective brain.

The novel constantly gestures beyond the individual abilities of the three
characters, pointing to a larger, systemic mode of thought; the discovery of a grand
uniﬁed theory, the scientiﬁc holy grail which Einstein was working on unsuccessfully at
the time of his death, is possible only with this group’s combined brainpower, the parts
adding up to a higher scale of emergent intelligence as though they were neurons in a
larger brain themselves. The memes developed by Einstein’s brain, according to
Olshaker, could only be extracted bodily and processed in new host brains in order to
continue their adaptation. Dr. Ramsey’s project does not clone Einstein, but it replicates
his intelligence, creating three hybrid intelligences, who all grind away at issues
important to Einstein: his theoretical work, his paciﬁsm, and his Zionism, picked up by
the physicist, the journalist/activist, and the rabbi, respectively. In this way, the novel’s
paradigm supports and subverts Aunger’s conception of meme theory as it pertains to
memory:

Memories simply aren’t warehoused in the miniature bodies of speciﬁc

neurons, to be elicited by an electrical prod to the exposed gray matter or

excised by surgically removing an area of the cortex. You can’t separate
some molecules from the brain and expect to hold a memory in your hand.

No bit of information has meaning except through its relationships to other
bits of information. Our model of memes must be consistent with what we

49

presently know about the distributed and contextual nature of memory and
learning in the brain. (194, italics in original)

Within this passage, Aunger explains that memories are not merely physical, literally

transferable as pieces of matter, but memories rely on the physical structure of the brain

as they rely on the context of the brain’s internal environment. The ideas take seed with
different individuals in Olshaker’s novel because they ﬁnd themselves in brains receptive
to certain aspects of the intellectual development, adapting the parasitical part of the brain
to its own essentialist surroundings, just as Einstein’s work means different things to
those minds who encounter it. The three physically enact LeDoux’s convergence zones,
processing pieces of the puzzle in their own way. Their bodies as texts, then, and also as
meme vehicles, can adapt themselves to existing knowledge and reform it at the same
time.

Thus, as bizarre as Olshaker’s plot is, it gestures toward severalproblems with
exploring cultural convergence: the blurring of texts, authors, bodies, intentions, and
ideas. Because the three characters in Olshaker’s novel all receive bits of Einstein’s
brain, they are endowed with superior intelligence, or perhaps the brain leftovers thrived
because they were planted in intelligent people’s heads, which raises another problem
with convergence: Is it really divergence? Franco Moretti explores such questions about
cultural texts in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, where he
traces the material literary history of certain traits along Darwin-style family trees. For

example, Moretti examines the thematic development of detective stories and their tropes,
explaining how Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes emerges as the ﬁttest, tracing the

process as categorical divergence, splitting of branches from singular sources (67—74).

50

Moretti also acknowledges, however, that convergence is similarly bound up in the

process, writing that:
Divergence prepares the ground for convergence, Which unleashes further
divergence: this seems to be the typical pattern And don’t be misled by
the ‘topological’ technicalities of all this: the real content of the
controversy, not technical at all, is our very idea of culture. Because if the
basic mechanism of change is that of divergence, then cultural history is
bound to be random, full of false starts, and profoundly path-dependent: a

direction, once taken, can seldom be reversed, and culture hardens into a

true ‘second nature’——-hardly a benign metaphor. If, on the other hand, the

basic mechanism is that of convergence, change will be frequent, fast,

deliberate, reversible: culture becomes more plastic, more human, if you

wish. (80-1, italics in original)

In other words, the lines of textual genealogyl consist of tangled exchanges, diverging

and converging. Similarly, the concept of the synaptic model of adaptation is likewise

bound up in this paradoxical anastomosis; the structure of neurons is divergent, and yet
the synapses between and among them represent convergence.

Some of the linkages we can draw across texts are provocative, while others seem
to lead nowhere. Much like Weschler notes, this insight seems tautological, although the
associations may in fact indicate much larger insights about how cultures and texts
evolve. Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, like any text, draws from a wide variety of
inﬂuences, but not all of these conceptual connections generate provocative energy
through their juxtaposition. On the informational level, much of Paterniti’s research
stems from a prior nonﬁction road narrative: Kevin Hull’s BBC documentary Relics:
Einstein ’s Brain, though the thematic inﬂuences stretch another direction, going back to

Einstein via the inﬂuence of the Beats, which I treat in the following section. Patemiti

directly refers to Hull’s work in his own, and both concern the brain-toting pathologist

 

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Thomas Harvey (87). Relics: Einstein’s Brain, however, follows Japanese scholar and
Einstein enthusiast Kenji Sugimoto as he treks across America in search of part of his
hero’s brain, performing amateur detective work to track dewn Harvey’s whereabouts in
spite of overwhelming odds and numerous dead-ends (including Dr. Harry Zimmerman,
of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claiming that Harvey has been
dead for years). Kenji Sugimoto’s attempts to understand Einstein better through a
material connection to his all-but—destroyed body—the last remnants of his brain ﬂoating
in formaldehyde—prompts Sugimoto to track down Thomas Harvey, much like Michael
Paterniti does in his own quest; both ﬁgures are searching for conduits through networks
that can connect them historically, materially, and intellectually to Einstein’s legacy, the
cultural backdrOp looming behind the twentieth century. Kenji Sugimoto’s trials, which
begin with footage of him staring up at a stained glass representation of Einstein, take on
the qualities of a holy pilgrimage, tempered by humorously bizarre encounters Sugimoto
has with the Americans he encounters. Some of the entertainment value of Hull’s cinema
verité-style witnessing of Sugimoto’s quest stems from misunderstandings and
mistranslations, but the dialogue usually posits Sugimoto’s limited English as vastly
superior to the quirky idiom of the various scholars who seem equally incapable of
keeping track of autopsied organs and former colleagues.

For example, in a rare set of geographical convergences, Sugimoto’s search takes
him to Lawrence, Kansas, which is the one-time home of Thomas Harvey. Sugimoto
walks up to a television repair shOp’s window facing the street and witnesses the

annihilation of Lawrence on television via an atomic blast. After pensively watching this

 

back to the work of Charles Darwin.

52

made-for-television spectacle of atomic destruction, Sugimoto turns his head to say “Oh,
hello!” to an unseen man. The man then enters into a friendly dialogue with Sugimoto,
explaining that: “You see, Lawrence has the distinction of having been destroyed in the
ﬁlm here.” The television movie in question, which is never named in the documentary,
is The Day After, and the likewise unnamed man further explains—in response to
Sugimoto’s simple reaction of “Yes, atomic bomb. Wow!”-——that this movie was made
“right here in Lawrence. I knew lots of people who got on the ﬁlm, worked on the ﬁlm as
extras. They did a pretty good job. Look at those trees, huh? What puts Lawrence on the
map is that it was wiped off the map. Absolutely.” He then asks what brings Sugimoto
to Lawrence and offers directions to Dr. Harvey’s house, constantly referring to landmark
locations that are no longer there, as if The Day After somehow actually had blown them
off the map literally. The point of including this snippet, both in the documentary as well
as in my analysis here, stems "from the unusual and fascinating network of anastomosis
that permeates even the detours of this kind of historical tracing, which may in fact be
nothing but detour itself, always deferring authority as metaphor and/or metonym to some
other, outside source, partly due to the indeterminacy of coincidence. This web of
meaning mirrors the biological ebb and ﬂow of life itself, as Elizabeth Grosz notes:

Not having a given place in the universe—except that which it forges for

itself—life is also out of time, not simply determinable in its time and

place, but is that locus or orientation that invariably strives for a new

future. Not limited by what it was, by its form, its history, its past life can

now be understood in terms of its forces, its ability to act, to move, to

survive, to make itself over into what can survive Life exceeds itself, its

past, its context, in making itself more and other than its history: life is

that which registers and harnesses the impact of contingency, converting

contingency into history, and history into self-overcoming, supersession,
becoming-other. (40)

 

 

 

In other words, with the right sense of scope, there are webs of signification that occur
even in coincidental pairings, such as Harvey’s residence in Lawrence tracing back to
Einstein, much like the atomic apocalypse movie set in Lawrence can also trace back to
Einstein. This “happy accident” of Harvey living out a metaphorical connection between
place and history is captured by Sugimoto, Hull, and the nameless man, and the network
of meaning, history, and contingency thickens through this sort of anastomosis.

In Ariadne ’3 Thread: Story Lines, J. Hillis Miller meditates on the possibilities
within narrative for anastomosis, writing that criticism, in mapping out these
potentialities for meanings, is “implicitly a transaction between mind and mind” (154).
That is, the multiple threads of meaning can intersect through diverse levels in “one or
another line in the network of anastomoses joining the author to the narrator or the
character to the critic, or the critic, without mediation, to the cogito of the author, or the
reader to the web of relations among the imaginary persons in the text.” Sugimoto’s
search, like the documentary text connected to it, enacts anastomosis by positioning itself
in dialogue with the historical and literary moments that came before it, connecting
multiple authors, critics, and texts, many of which serve only as conceptual placeholders,
like the Lawrence landmarks that are no longer there. Just like the ﬁctional fate of
Einstein’s brain in Olshaker’s novel, the distributed nature of this meaning, the inherent
intertextuality, is key, as it represents a kind of textual adaptation. With the framework of
meme theory, we can trace the intellectual genealogy of adaptive concepts through time
and across space, in what might previously have been seen as unlikely progressions. This
framework allows for something of a Rube Goldberg-style intermingling of histories and

historiographies, literary trends and material/textual patterns, and cultural and social

54

linkages. Dawkins writes that: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by
leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the
meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be
called imitation” (92). By applying the paradigm of evolutionary theory to culture, meme
theory allows us to depart from the traditional, limited debates about works’ ﬁdelity in
textual adaptation or standard readings of the anxiety of inﬂuence. Similarly, the
plasticity of the terms and methods within meme theory present practical tools for
investigating concepts as ﬂuid as those most often contained in narrative theory, such as
intertextuality and intersubjectivity. With these overlapping networks of convergence in
mind, we can trace Paterniti’s book back not through its informational inspiration but
through its thematic inﬂuences back to Einstein both through the myriad inﬂuences of his
brain as well as through the literary inﬂuences of Beat authors like Kerouac, Ginsberg,

and Burroughs, thus “Beat-ing” Einstein’s brain.

5. Beat-ing Einstein’s Brain

With the framework of meme theory, as developed by Richard Dawkins, Robert
Aunger, and others, we can trace the intellectual genealogy of adaptive concepts through
time and across space, in what might previously have been seen as unlikely progressions,
and this framework allows for something of a Rube Goldberg-style intermingling of
histories and historiographies, literary trends and material/textual patterns, and cultural
and social linkages. This section examines how Albert Einstein himself authored a
complicated meme genealogy, and perhaps the author who captures the bizarre twists of

that lineage best is Michael Paterniti. And of all the stops that Patemiti and Thomas

55

Harvey make in Driving Mr. Albert, none is more fraught with complications than their
visit to the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, a site devoted both to preserving
ephemera related to the development of the atomic bomb and to rationalizing its use by
American armed forces against the civilians of Japan.

Toting Einstein’s brain to this historical locale creates history itself, Patemiti
conjectures, because, while the pieces of brain ﬂoating in a jar no longer perceive
anything, this tour aligns the preserved organ with what it indirectly wrought. This
reunion between preserved brain and preserved documents presents the contradiction
Patemiti explores, that: “The truth is that Einstein himself was confounded by the idea
that his theory of relativity had opened up a Pandora’s box of assured annihilation” ( 107).
Moreover, despite the fact that the site mars Einstein’s commitment to paciﬁsm, the
museum’s stance on historical interpretation complicates the visit by what commentary
the museum provides—and fails to provide—on America’s history of nuclear aggression.
As Patemiti frames the museum’s spin on Albert Einstein:

Sure enough, the ﬁrst exhibit is a photograph of Einstein, and then a copy

of his letter to President Roosevelt, behind glass. Harvey stands before it,

reading, nodding seriously, then moves on. There’s no mention of

Einstein’s regret at having written the letter. Instead, with a little selective

editing, the museum, the town, the feat of dropping two bombs, comes

with an Einsteinian seal of approval. The museum—and the culture of

Los Alamos as a whole—is most glaringly deﬁned by what its curators

seem to have forgotten about the bomb. (142)

This partial appropriation of Einstein’s public record feels almost libelous, considering
how forcefully Einstein spoke out against the creation and use of nuclear weapons, as

well as how he recanted the letter itself. And yet, the letter is no forgery. The

“Einsteinian seal of approval” on the atomic bomb only comes into question for those

56

who understand the larger historical narrative that the famed scientist’s other discourse
provides.

With Albert Einstein’s status as genius ﬁrmly solidiﬁed by his work in theoretical
physics, his political thoughts held considerable weight for the average person, and he
often directed his attention toward championing pacifism. Much of this rhetoric performs
a certain type of disavowal in terms of what Einstein believes he ought to be held
accountable for; while Einstein’s work made possible the creation of nuclear bombs, such
weaponry directly opposed Einstein’s political stance. This central paradox of Einstein’s
life serves to illustrate how one’s ideas evolve and adapt beyond their creators’ intention
when loose in the social sphere. The memes within Einstein’s brain and its intellectual
products, once released upon the world, could mutate through the appropriation of the
Manhattan Project’s scientists, such change demonstrating that evolution of ideas—like
the evolution of species—does not rely on any sort of progressive march toward
perfection. Einstein himself outlines this intellectual progression, from theoretical
research to pragmatic application in the form of the atomic bomb, in terms of evolution of
the species, though perhaps an evolutionary step that could end the species. In Out of M y
Later Years, in an essay entitled “The Way Out,” Einstein writes:

The construction of the atom bomb has brought about the effect that all the

people living in cities are threatened, everywhere and constantly, with

sudden destruction. There is no doubt that this condition has to be

abolished if man is to prove himself worthy, at least to some extent, of the

self-chosen name of homo sapiens. (133)

Einstein constructs this excerpt as pitting knowing subjects, or homo sapiens, against the

unknowing, animalistic threats of manmade destruction, basically calling those who

would use atom bombs incapable of thought, despite the bombs tracing their conceptual

57

origin back to Einstein. The bomb—constructing but avoiding its use—proves for
Einstein to be the last lynchpin of civilization, what will either destroy or redeﬁne the
species. For “man” to “prove himself worthy of the self-chosen name of homo
sapiens,” widespread revision of the militaristic mentality must take place, with greater
emphasis on peace, intelligence, and understanding. Clearly, he excoriates nuclear
weapons and the politicians who brandish them, but his admonitions about them at times
bear a hint of self-reproach.

In the title essay of Einstein’s The World as I See It, the great physicist takes on
the military mentality directly, writing how humankind’s worst outcrop is: “herd nature,
the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in
formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been
given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of
Civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed” (4). Although his ﬁnal gesture
seems to mirror the Nazis’ ﬁnal solution, Einstein places the human species as a whole in
danger of losing its status as cognizant animals capable of self-reﬂection. If the only aims
of humankind are military aggression, then the “big brain” is a mistake, consciousness
needing (and deserving) much less than the mental capacity we all currently enjoy as a
result of our own evolution.

Despite the fact that Einstein held his paciﬁsm before the bomb, these ideas about
peace—being from a different realm from his scientiﬁc work entirely—did not adapt or
ﬁlter into his theoretical work to such an extent that they preempted the creation of the
hydrogen bomb. Once one’s memes are released out into the world, those particles shift,

adapt, and mutate in ways completely divorced from the original thinker’s intentions.

58

With this continual metamorphosis of thoughts in mind, Einstein’s memes (and, by
extension, memes produced by lesser intellects as well) resemble the rhizome Deleuze
and Guattari propose in A Thousand Plateaus, where they write: “The rhizome is an
antigenealogy. It is short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by
variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (21). The short-term memes still
operate within the Darwinian framework, though Einstein’s work does allow for a
sweeping appropriation separate and distinct from his political views; however, we can
still trace this short-attention-spanned, rhizomic “antigenealogy” as itself a kind of
genealogy. While the work of the Manhattan Project bastardizes Einstein’s larger
perspective, Einstein’s work is still the origin, and any evolutionary tracing undertakes
questions of lineage, not questions of legitimacy. The bomb is an adaptation that
represents the “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, [and] offshoots” of Einstein’s
texts.

Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that the exception to Einstein’s pacifism
was found in the face of Nazi oppression; he viewed atomic bombs as repugnant means to
a noble end with regard to beating Hitler’s forces. Though Einstein’s work made the
atomic bomb possible, though he condoned the Los Alamos research in his letter to
Roosevelt, nuclear warfare was anathema to Albert Einstein, at least as far as most of his
public texts indicate. For example, Einstein writes, in Out of My Later Years, an essay

entitled “Atomic War or Peace,” that:

I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy.
My part in it was quite indirect. Idid not, in fact, foresee that it would be
released in my time. I believed only that it was theoretically possrble. It
became practical through the accidental discovery of chain reaction, and
this was not something I could have predicted. ( 175)

59

With this passage, Einstein acknowledges how the knowledge he produced links to “the
accidental discovery of chain reaction,” though be simultaneously emphasizes that he
should be exculpated by history. Still, in spite of this passage’s intent to unburden
Einstein from blame, the professions of innocence here seem overdetermined; he writes a
half dozen times that he had nothing to do with the atomic bomb, all of which gestures
backward to the fact that he did. Atomic energy was “not something [he] could have
predicted,” and yet he “believed only that it was theoretically possible.” Even in his call
for peace (dialectically opposed in the essay’s title with atomic war), Einstein projects a
vexed relationship to nuclear warfare.

One might easily write off Einstein’s pacifism after the creation and deployment
of atomic weapons, if his anti-militaristic views were not backed up by the liberal,
paciﬁstic politics he publicly espoused long before the bomb’s mushroom cloud ever
loomed on the conceptual horizon. Despite his earlier calls for peace, Einstein’s paciﬁsm
intensiﬁed—both in the strength and number of his speeches and letters—after the bombs
were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making his efforts seem very much like a
response to the actions of the United States. In an essay entitled “The War Is Won But
Peace Is Not,” Einstein collapses the political responsibilities of America with his own
professional responsibilities as a scientist, taking much more ownership of the atomic
bomb than his stance in “Atomic War or Peace” indicates. He explains his position via
the less guilty ﬁrst-person plural:

Physicists ﬁnd themselves in a position not unlike that of Alfred Nobel.

Alfred Nobel invented the most powerful explosive ever known up to his

time, a means of destruction par excellence. In order to atone for this, in
order to relieve his human conscience he instituted his awards for the

60

promotion of peace and for achievements of peace. Today, the physicists

who participated in forging the most formidable and dangerous weapons

of all times are harassed by an equal feeling of responsibility, not to say

guilt. And we cannot desist from warning, and warning again, we cannot

and should not slacken in our efforts to make the nations of the world, and.

especially their governments, aware of the unspeakable disaster they are

certain to provoke unless they change their attitude toward each other and
toward the task of shaping the future. We helped in creating this new

weapon in order to prevent the enemies of mankind from achieving it

ahead of us, which, given the mentality of the Nazis, would have meant

inconceivable destruction and the enslavement of the rest of the world.

(186—7)

Here Einstein admits a certain amount of culpability, but he exonerates himself by
invoking not just the Nazi menace but also “inconceivable destruction and the
enslavement of the rest of the world,” which, even by the most staunch paciﬁst’s
standards, seems like adequate cause for raising nuclear weapons in opposition.
Obviously, though, we know that the two bombs were not used against “the mentality of
the Nazis,” yet Einstein situates his rationalization ﬁrmly in opposition to the fascist
government that prompted his ﬂight to America.

Although Einstein’s perspective was often complicated or even paradoxical, his
nontraditional beliefs and rebel opinions served as a template for criticizing the
hegemony of the dominant U.S. culture, founding the basic components of the
counterculture in the postwar years. Einstein was clearly not the only public personage to
hold convictions that ran counter to the majority of American society, but in examining
his work as part of a meme genealogy—revisions of Newtonian models of time and
space, which led to atomic weapons, which led to Einstein’s more pronounced paciﬁsm

in the face of potential nuclear holocaust—Albert Einstein’s ideas trace a trajectory that

informs nearly all of the twentieth century. Einstein’s views against right-wing

61

conformity, his criticisms opposing unthinking military action, and his vexed paciﬁsm in
the face of America’s emerging superpower status all provide the framework for
understanding postwar literary and cultural movements. When we examine the overlap
between Einstein’s scientiﬁc and political ideas, Albert Einstein transforms into
something of an ur—Beat.

Given the synaptic train of inﬂuence, since Einstein’s ideas engendered atomic
weapons, they also, in a sense, inspired the reaction against atomic weapons. After all, if
Einstein——as intellectual inspiration, or intellectual origin—~is the father of nuclear
weapons, he certainly never was a proud father. We can trace the cause and effect of his
intellectual work through this kind of cerebral history, with Einstein’s ideas restructuring
anti-nuclear proliferation both directly (through his passionate calls for paciﬁsm) and
indirectly (by laying the groundwork that enabled the atomic bombs in question).
Einstein’s theoretical physics provided the intellectual seeds for the creation of atomic
bombs, and his political views prompted him to respond later in the historical ﬂow of
ideas (perhaps what we could call the “meme stream”) to speak out against nuclear
proliferation. As such, Einstein’s inﬂuence directly impacted the thematic concerns and
anxieties of the Beat Generation, speciﬁcally the works of Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac. The material fruits of Einstein’s thoughts—taking the form of nuclear
weapons—ﬁlter into Ginsberg’s poems even while Einstein’s personal politics seep into
Ginsberg’s work as the voice of reason through paciﬁsm. Granted, the paciﬁsm Ginsberg
espouses is tinged with a kind of schizophrenia—or at least a dissonant crackling among

the synapses’ convergence zones—in that it holds multiple contradictory positions

62

simultaneously, but that particular coloration seems even more Einsteinian, holding as it
does a kernel of the physicist’s original paradoxical perspective.

Perhaps this complicated relationship between personal views, national politics,
and the technology of mass destruction plays itself out best in Allen Ginsberg’s poem
“America,” where the poet addresses America about the historical and contemporary
issues that parallel personal problems. Early in “America,” the poet writes: “I can’t stand
my own mind. / America when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your
atom bomb. / I don’t feel good don’t bother me” (62). In these few lines, Ginsberg
establishes that an aggressive paciﬁsm is a kind of contradiction in terms, but, despite the
fact that the poet “can’t stand [his] own mind,” he still does not want to be bothered by
the atom bomb. Later, of course, he acknowledges, after assorted diatribes and
declarations, that “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again” (63).
Here the poet admits that he is “talking to myself again,” that he is, speaking as America,
responsible for the atom bomb, that his aggression is directed backward toward himself,
that he will have to perform the impossible task of fucking himself with the atom bomb.
Such criticism proves self-referential, just as Einstein’s vociferous calls for peace have a
way of spiraling inward, though his personal cause-and-effect relationship to the bomb is
obviously more direct than Ginsberg’s is as just another average American citizen. The
insider/outsider dialectic of these paciﬁst commentaries collapse in on themselves, but
this reﬂexivity enriches the messages’ power rather than detracts from it; both Einstein
and Ginsberg are part of the problem, whether they admit it or not, but individual guilt is
far less important than their textual parallels, which gesture beyond the individual subject

toward a species—wide cry for survival.

63

   

 
     
   

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This analytical linkage between Einstein and Ginsberg’s internally conﬂicted
perspectives on the atomic bomb provides a thematic connection between their respective
bodies of work, but the meme-based cause and effect is fairly loose, as stated before:
Einstein’s theoretical physics effecting the atomic bomb effecting anti-nuclear pacifism,
which the Beats espoused. With Allen Ginsberg’s work, however, the correlation
between Albert Einstein’s views and his own extends beyond just similar thematic
concerns in their texts. Although many of Ginsberg’s works focus on speciﬁcally anti-
nuclear paciﬁsm—as in such poems as “Nagasaki Days: Everybody ’s Fantasy” and “Hum
Bom!”—Ginsberg addresses Einstein even more explicitly several times in several texts,
though only ever on Ginsberg’s own terms. For example, “Xmas Gift,” written on
Christmas Eve, 1972, creates a ﬁctional encounter between Allen Ginsberg and Albert
Einstein:

I met Einstein in a dream

Springtime on Princeton lawn grass

I kneeled down & kissed his young thumb

like a ruddy pope

his face fresh broad cheeked rosy

“I invented a universe separate,

something like a Virgin”—

“Yes, the creature gives birth to itself,”

I quoted from Mescaline

We sat down open air universal summer

to eat lunch, professors’ wives

at the Tennis Court Club,

our meeting eternal, as expected,

my gesture to kiss his ﬁst

unexpectedly saintly

considering the Atom Bomb I didn’t mention. (240)

As with many of Ginsberg’s poems, “Xmas Gift” creates a dreamlike tension between

abstract conceptions of the universe and material realities of the contemporary world.

64

Here, Albert Einstein, in the form of a dream, has magniﬁcent thoughts about the
universe, becoming “unexpectedly saintly,” only to be undone at the end by “the Atom
Bomb I didn’t mention.” Even though Ginsberg aligns himself with Einstein’s thinking
and what that thinking represents in the abstract—“open air universal summer” in a
“meeting eternal”——the grim material reality sets in that Ginsberg has opposed for years
in the form of nuclear weaponry, a devastating specter that seems far removed from the
quaint leisure time of “Princeton lawn grass.” Ginsberg admires Einstein despite the fact
that the physicist spawned a creation capable of plaguing the poet’s conscience even
while he is unconscious.

As a world-changing thinker, Einstein represents the ultimate goal of Ginsberg’s
poetry, and, as such, Einstein is a saintly ﬁgure for many, regardless of the part he played
in fathering nuclear warfare. Carolyn Abraham describes Einstein, saying that:

He was the accidental and eminently quotable prophet, uniting the world’s

war-weary under a cosmic banner that transcended the volatility of

national politics. He preached equality. He championed the causes of

underdogs, lobbied for the wrongly convicted and himself suffered Nazi

persecution. An admirer once called him the greatest Jew since Jesus.

Einstein himself joked that he had become a Jewish saint. (66)

Einstein’s complicated, contradictory “sainthood” is what Ginsberg praises—and even
emulates—in his own way. The obstacles for both Ginsberg and Einstein lie in the
tensions between the abstract and the material, leaving their “sainthood” more or less
permanently vexed, just as the relationship between the physicist and poet stretches
whatever thematic or material connections we might draw across the synapses that

separate them. In one of his attempts to overcome the limitations of physical reality,

Ginsberg writes in an unpublished 1966 “Letter to Wall Street Journal” (found in

65

Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995) about the dissonance between
material possessions and the satisfaction American culture claims they will provide. The
key to satisfactory ownership of material goods, he explains, lies in awareness, since “the
mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more (sic) dead matter, machinery,
possessions and rugs and fact information at the expense of what really counts as more:
feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling” (144). This anti—
capitalist deconstruction of America’s commodity fetishism mirrors Einstein’s
bewilderment at American consumer culture, but Ginsberg relies more concretely on
Einstein’s theoretical physics in the letter, linking Einstein’s scientiﬁc re-creation of the
world to Eastern religion. Later in the letter, Ginsberg writes that:

History’s accelerating like technology’s accelerated. Can’t go back. We

can blow the whole show up. Or we can calm fear, see the world is really

changing, like a dream, and go explore and help each other through. It’s

all safe because as Einstein and the Buddhists secretly tipped everybody

off long ago: the whole show is a harmless wave~illusion. (145)

Within these few sentences, Ginsberg equates Einstein’s redeﬁnition of Newtonian
physics with the Buddhist teachings Ginsberg similarly values, and, despite this abstract
acknowledgement that “the whole show is a harmless wave-illusion,” Einstein’s
contributions also make it possible for us to “blow the whole show up.”

Within Ginsberg’s model, Einstein’s thoughts have the capacity to destroy the
world, both physically and theoretically; the physicist becomes something of the ultimate
Beat existentialist, able to map his realities out onto the world in ways that could level the
supreme critique of capitalism through having the system demolish itself. Likewise, the

linkages that Ginsberg establishes between Einstein and the Buddhists—the

reformulations of space and time through theoretical science and cosmic meditation,

66

respectively—touch on another Beat obsession: becoming an agent who can adequately
know and move through time and space. Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac typically attempt to manipulate time and space through certain forms of Zen
Buddhist praxis, but they both frequently allude to other channels being open through
other forms, such as Albert Einstein’s theoretical physics.

With textual and intellectual obsessions similar to Ginsberg’s work, Jack
Kerouac’s books often reveal themselves as operating within a much larger national
matrix, deeply overshadowed by the looming possibility of nuclear bombs falling down to
earth and just as concerned with how to reformulate space and time. In The Dharma
Bums, the narrator character of Raymond Smith—a loose autobiographical pseudonym
for Kerouac himself—ﬁnds himself hitchhiking across the desert when he is picked up by

a trucker. Smith then describes his trek:

And did he ever push that rig! From that desert in Arizona he

roared on up to New Mexico, took the cut through Las Cruces up to
Alamagordo where the atom bomb was ﬁrst blasted and where I had a
strange vision as we drove along seeing the clouds above the Alamagordo
mountains the words as if imprinted in the sky: “This Is the Impossibility
of the Existence of Anything” (which was a strange place for that strange
true vision) and then he battled on . .. and ﬁnally on Monday night bashing
across Illinois and Indiana and into old snowy Ohio with all the cute
Christmas lights making my heart joy in the windows of old farms. (132)

Within this rambling passage, Kerouac collapses the temporal duration of the trip into a

listing of place names, casually inserting in the middle of his thoughts a “strange vision”

in “the clouds above the Alamagordo mountains” that announces to the narrator the
impossibility of the existence of anything. Like the Ginsberg pieces illustrate, the atomic
bomb represents a form of nihilism that is absolute in both its material and theoretical

forms. Still, the account of Smith’s travels pushes ever onward like the rig toward its

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destination, and Kerouac’s sentences ends with “all the cute Christmas lights making my
heart joy in the windows of old farms.” The narrator’s status as an American both
supports and depends on that atomic presence in the desert, and his joy at “all the cute
Christmas lights” relies, by deﬁnition, on the coexistence of the American heartland and
its nuclear superpower. As with Ginsberg, Kerouac’s characterization recognizes that
fear of atomic detonation is largely pointless since reality is an illusion——that the

existence of anything is itself an impossibility—and, moreover, nuclear paranoia pervades

every aspect of American life, even the most material and trivial pleasures.

Before Kerouac’s narrator has the vision at the atomic bomb test site, he discusses
a “rucksack revolution” with J aphy Ryder, a ﬁctional surrogate for Gary Snyder who,

while drinking, leaps up and lectures the Kerouac and Ginsberg characters, saying he

envisions:

“Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they
consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of
consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as
refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and
deodorants and general junk you ﬁnally always see a week later in the
garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce,
consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack
revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering
around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children
laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier,
all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear
in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also strange
unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and

to all living creatures...” (97-8)

Within this speech, Jack Kerouac, through Gary Snyder, through the Japhy Ryder
character, espouses an order of “Zen Lunatics” as a means for fashioning new

conceptions of time, not through theoretical physics but through a revision of the

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capitalist system of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.” Although

J aphy’s rucksack revolution relies largely on adjusting American attitudes and values, it
is no coincidence that the agents for these changes are called “Dharma Burns” and “Zen
Lunatics,” since they represent the Beats’ means for fusing ecstatic wisdom with the
everyday American landscape. As Kerouac demonstrates through the narrative events
involving Raymond Smith’s conﬂicts with his family (who view him as a freeloading
deadbeat), the Beat formulations of “Dharma Bums” and “Zen Lunatics” depict an
asymptotically close connection between Zen Buddhism and a sort of slacker perspective,
yoking ancient wisdom with the outsider outlook of burns and lunatics. That cognitive
leap from America-centered philosophies across the Paciﬁc mirrors the same unlikely
synaptic energy that also ﬂows across the gaps between Ginsberg and Einstein. By
juxtaposing the disparate terms, Kerouac infuses them with jazzy tension, a kind of cross-
cultural charge.

Within the narrative of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s most popular work, the
characters’ meditations still contain shades of Zen mysticism, but the obsession with
manipulating space and time becomes a more overt thematic concern. Instead of
following Gary Snyder in the form of Japhy Ryder, Kerouac’s narrator—now christened
Sal Paradise—searches for and with Dean Moriarty, a ﬁctional stand-in for Neal Cassady.
Dean Moriarty represents a kind of Zen performer since he, as a character, can create and
inspire ecstasy, though he is incapable of articulating his thoughts about the aura of
wisdom that surrounds him. As Kerouac phrases the relationship between the narrator
and Dean: “We sat and didn’t know what to say; there was nothing to talk about any

more. The only thing to do was go And all this time Dean was tremendously excited

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about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that
passed. He was out of his mind with real belief” (119-20). In the character of Dean
Moriarty, the line between lunatic and “Zen Lunatic” becomes indistinct. The key to
understanding time and space seems to involve being “out of [one’s] mind with real
belief,” a state that is linked also to a simultaneous appreciation of motion through time
and space. Dean’s fascinations with travel, ideas, speed, and sex all coalesce into his
praxis for living as a kind of dissemination, not entirely unlike the libidinal framework of
meme theory itself. As Dean’s manic ﬁts and starts at new lives, lifestyles, cars, and
wives indicate, he wants to spread himself across the continent, getting as much as he can
out of the experiences he encounters.

But Dean Moriarty’s excited and exciting lifestyle is infectious, and Kerouac’s Sal
Paradise character catches the same physical and intellectual wanderlust as the two
friends zip back and forth across America. When and if Dean ﬁnds enlightenment, he
does not ﬁnd the words to express that experience deﬁnitively; Kerouac’s narrator, on the

other hand, is able to describe his experience manipulating space and time through a kind

of Zen understanding:

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always
wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time
into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal
realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a
phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all
the angels dove off and ﬂew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the
potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence,
innumerable lotus—ﬁlled lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of

heaven. (173)

This brief attainment of ecstasy—which Sal experiences outside a ﬁsh-and-chips

restaurant—rewards Sal’s meditations, being “the complete step across chronological

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time into timeless shadows,” a navigation of time and space that ﬁnally empowers him, if
only for a moment. From this vantage point, Kerouac’s narrator can perceive “Mind
Essence” without the mediations that normally serve as obstacles to his observations.
Here, he can ﬁnally know and explore time, which, since the vision holds “mnumerable
lotus-ﬁlled lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven,” suggests a synthesis

of Eastern and Western philosophies through the juxtaposition of concepts like “lotus”
and “heaven.” By blending spatialized modes of thought and a new conception of time as
a kind of space itself, Kerouac presents an amalgamation of physics and metaphysics, one

seemingly capable of mixing mysticism with science.

Of course, other characters in On the Road ﬂirt with similar ﬂuxes between modes

of knowledge and individual agency, especially as these concepts relate to movement in
space and time. For example, Old Bull Lee, Kerouac’s alias for William S. Burroughs,

contemplates his own explorations of the boundaries between the knowable and the

unknowable, saying:

“Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the
dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict,
if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the

next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of
catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that
we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if
scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in

seeing if they can blow up the world.” (153)

Once again, the dialectics emerge of knowable and unknowable, abstract and material,
what scientists could understand of the human experience and the atomic weapons that
they build instead. Similarly, the capacity for agency is undermined, as Old Bull Lee also

indicates that all the Beat meditations will ultimately mean nothing more than individual

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experiences unless scientists ﬁnally investigate the means for comprehending time, space,
and the perceptions of the human brain. In referring to contemporary scientists as “[t]he
bastards only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world,” Old Bull Lee
indirectly gestures backward to Einstein’s inﬂuence, and, while Dean and Sal do not
investigate Old Bull Lee’s hypotheses about mutations in the brain, the pair do explore
his concept of bending time and space through exertions of individual will, expanding on

the Einsteinian project of perceiving a quantum reality, in which space and time are

indissolubly bound with perception.

Throughout Sal and Dean’s cross-country adventures, Dean becomes obsessed
with knowing time, with knowing IT. When Sal narrates that “I wanted to know what
‘IT’ meant,” Dean laughs and clears his throat and explains through a metaphor about
how jazz riffs work through the example of an alto the pair have just enjoyed: “‘Time
stops. He’s ﬁlling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his
bellybottom strain, remembrances of ideas, rehashes of old blowing’” (207). Dean’s
somewhat inarticulate explication of “IT,” which hints at a relationship between time,
space, and play, eventually derails when Dean starts sweating too hard to formulate his
ideas. Instead of describing “1T,” Dean and Sal mostly try to capture “IT” with their
hi gh-speed lifestyle of continental travel and uninterrupted ﬂows of ideas, narratives, and
stream-of—consciousness dialogue, and their efforts represent a way of reducing time and
space to smaller particles until the measurable difference between their positionality
becomes moot, thus achieving a new way of knowing time. “IT,” then, is a conflation of

Einstein’s concepts of time and space with Kerouac’s formulation of narrative. Alex

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Albright connects Kerouac’s temporal and spatial revisions to attempts to reorder
everyday life, writing that:

Kerouac [is] working with variations of what M. M. Bakhtin referred to
as the road chronotope, which “permits everyday life to be realized” within
its narrative. Bakhtin’s idea of “chronotope” comes, as he explains it,
from science, indicating for us the temporal and spatial relationships that
are artistically expressed in literature. Like Einstein’s theory of
relativity—and rheomode—it indicates for us that space and time are
inseparable, that time is the fourth dimension of space. Bakhtin’s
discussion is clearly directed to classical forms of literature, but his
deﬁnition of “adventure-time” in novels (whose traits he also sees in
drama and epic poems) seems perfectly suited as descriptive of
Kerouac’s work: Moments of adventure time occur when the normal
course of events is interrupted, providing an opening for the intrusion of
nonhuman forces, which then take the initiative. The temporal marker, for
Bakhtin, is inseparable from the spatial marker. In using the chronotope of
the road, the writer permits everyday life to be realized within his
narrative; choice controls the path he will take. However, once on the
path, chance encounters predominate. (136-7)

According to Albright, chance encounters predominate among the adventures Sal and
Dean experience, episodes that evoke the existential arbitrariness of the Beat narrative
aesthetic, but, at the same time, a narrative cannot be fully random, as there is always an
intentional ordering system, even when an author applies Burroughs’s process of literally
cutting up texts to randomize their sequential progression. A narrative can discuss the
subject of chaos and try to recreate its effects, but it cannot produce absolute chaos, as the
text is ﬁxed. The impossibility of narrativizing chaos, the fact that Beat writers can never
fully convey the chaotic nature of contemporary life, seems critically synched with
Einstein’s initial doubts about quantum physics. In a letter to Max Born, Einstein writes
that: “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not
yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any close to the

secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice” (Clark

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414). Popular sources typically paraphrase this quotation as “God does not play dice with
the universe,” and, while this idea retains its popularity, Einstein has since been proven
wrong about his reservations regarding quantum theory. Just as the Beats have difﬁculty
reproducing the random factors of the world through narrative, there are certain
theoretical concepts that presented difﬁculties for Einstein when it came to understanding
the intellectual repercussions of the theory of relativity.

Although writing—Beat literature or any other type—does not adequately convey
true randomness since it is always the result of some authorial intent, the “chance
encounters” Albright discusses do contain elements beyond the control of Dean and Sal;
their lack of agency, the control they rarely possess with respect to their daily efforts
regarding time, space, and understanding, aligns their anxieties about Einsteinian time
and space with their anxieties about nuclear threats. Neither set of concerns is entirely
random, but time, space, and the threat of nuclear obliteration are factors that, in their
everyday life, are far beyond their means to control. Nuclear weapons may be outside of
Kerouac and Ginsberg’s individual control, but both the ontological and onticological
impact of atomic bombs create a tension that ﬁlters downward from the national level to
strike the psyches of individual citizens. Neither Kerouac nor Ginsberg want to suffer the
consequences of the nuclear weapons, but they are powerless to prevent such an
encounter, making the mystic, nihilistic message of the atomic bomb—“This Is the
Impossibility of the Existence of Anything”-—-an existential translation of Einstein’s
theory of relativity, not along the lines of scientiﬁc relativity (in which the measuring
observation by deﬁnition plays a role in changing what is observed) but a kind of moral

relativity on the level of national politics. Choice cannot overcome chance within this

74

social framework, and the impossibility of preventing nuclear annihilation becomes just
another everyday factor, just like the frustrations that result from Dean and Sal struggling
with the impossibility of controlling space and time, of capturing and holding “IT.”

The characters that pass through On the Road’s narrative parade may appear
random, as they are bound to “adventure-time” and the interruption of everyday life, but
their entrance is no coincidence, as they are reproduced in the text under the control of
Kerouac as author. Unlike the random transmissions and interactions of daily life that led
to the production of the text, the text itself is ﬁxed. Bizarre events or personalities may
erupt as though the product “of nonhuman forces,” but, in spite of the coincidences
intersecting the life of the author, the text is obviously a result of authorial intent. That is
why Kerouac’s “chance encounters” in the text, while they may not conform to standard
conventions of narrative importance, are not truly random. For example, although to the
character of Sal Paradise (standing in for Jack Kerouac), a meeting with Old Bull Lee
(William S. Burroughs) may feel coincidental, the text, as a static entity, cannot arrive at
any other “random” point. Likewise, when Michael Patemiti meets William S.
Burroughs in Driving Mr. Albert, even though the account is nonﬁctional, there is no
random coincidence operating, since, as a ﬁnished and published book, the text always
already included this uncanny episode.

In writing Driving Mr. Albert, Patemiti explores several bizarre coincidental
connections, but their inclusion is his text is not random since Patemiti undertakes the
writing so as to compile these disparate elements into a linear narrative. In fact, Patemiti
capitalizes on the unlikely synchronicities of his tale, recounting that he “ﬁrst heard the

story of Albert Einstein’s brain as an urban myth too weird to believe” (vii). Years after

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ﬁrst being exposed to the “urban myth too weird to believe,” Patemiti passes on this
urban myth (which theorists such as Susan Blackmore argue are the ideal paradigm for
looking at meme replication and selection) to his landlord, only to be told that the
landlord already knows the story since he knew Thomas Harvey when the two of them
lived in the same neighborhood as William S. Burroughs. The truth of the story Patemiti
had been telling and embellishing for years collapses in what appears to be an unusual
layering of coincidences, but, upon these events’ transference into a textual narrative, they
cannot be coincidences any longer. Paterniti’s account then follows the trail leading him
back to Thomas Harvey, getting Patemiti’s story intertwined with Harvey’s, Einstein’s,
and Burroughs’s, and, in the process of traveling across America with Einstein’s brain in
the trunk and stopping along the way to visit Burroughs, Patemiti replicates parts of On
the Road’s form as well as its content.

In connecting Albert Einstein (through the story of his brain) to America’s Beat
legacy, Patemiti brings a kind of meme loop back to its origin, connecting the end of the
twentieth century to the theoretical physics that kicked off its beginning. The style of
Driving Mr. Albert takes on the rifﬁng, jazzy style of On the Road in several spots,
throwing in rhythmic rambles that correspond to Kerouac’s meditations on the nature of
the universe, but, instead of attempting to master time and space through performing
“1T,” Patemiti backs up his observations on events’ cosmic signiﬁcance through easy-to-
understand, pop versions of Einstein’s scientiﬁc work. At times, Patemiti openly alludes
to his inﬂuences in the Beat aesthetic, such as admitting that Dr. Harvey “didn’t impress

me right away as a rebel or a Casanova or a Beat wanderer, as a hero or a thief or a holy

man—all of which, in various moments, he later would” (xi). Harvey becomes a “Beat

76

wanderer” in Paterniti’s eyes when they criss—cross the country together, but this brief
passage gestures toward Beat writing also in its formulation of a list of disparate labels——
rebel, Casanova, Beat wanderer, hero, thief, and holy man—that mimics the Beats’
exuberant style, mixing concepts in much the same way as Kerouac writes about
“Dharma Burns” and “Zen Lunatics.” The terms are admirable since theirjuxtaposition is
as nonconformist as the characters the terms were invented to describe. Other passages of
Paterniti’s indirectly draw parallels to the Beat perspective through Einstein’s views on
consumerism and America’s materialistic culture, all while Patemiti makes his own Beat—
like poet critique of contemporary America: “Einstein would be horriﬁed by our world
and its extravagances: the Land of the Free and the Home of the SUVs. The absurdities
of our Whopper—sized lives. And perhaps, too, he’d be stunned by the sheer roaring
speed and interconnectedness of it” (70). The “interconnectedness” of Paterniti’s
criticism of American excess presents contemporary commodity fetishism with the
poignancy of Ginsberg or Kerouac’s language, while uniting such criticism with
Einstein’s likely reaction to the “absurdities of our Whopper-sized lives.” Although this
passage (as well as the context surrounding it) does not announce any afﬁliation with
Beat literature, Paterniti’s text has already aligned itself with the Beats, and, since the text
has already performed this rhetorical move, we can read such countercultural passages as
an intertextual part of the historical and intellectual continuum, the inﬂuence of the
memes popping up like peripheral billboards as Patemiti drives down the highway.
Although the subtitle of the book—A Trip Across America with Einstein’s
Brain—proclaims that the text works within the tradition of the road novel, which was

presented in perhaps its most popular form in On the Road, Patemiti overtly attempts to

77

recreate the Beat form through infusing Driving Mr. Albert with Beat content; through
Paterniti’s arranging, Thomas Harvey is reunited with his old neighbor William S.
Burroughs. Though Harvey and Burroughs never interacted as neighbors, Patemiti
reunites them as if they were old friends, a quirky, charged juxtaposition which both men
play along with like the best of Kerouac’s characters. Like the interactions of Kerouac’s
characters, the encounter between Burroughs and Harvey is mostly anecdotal, signiﬁcant
because of how something about it transcends the everyday; Patemiti writes of the trip to
Burroughs’s house:
Father of the Beats, the counterculture incarnate, the junkie poet

laureate, Burroughs, along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, were

the original rappers about truth and beauty, while opening the door on an

underworld world of American drifters, living only for the high of any

given moment. Though Harvey once lived around the corner from here, he

only ever met Burroughs once, for a lunch arranged by Kevin Hull, the

ﬁlmmaker. Now, Harvey Clasps his hand, enunciating loudly, believing

that the eighty-three-year-old Burroughs is hard of hearing, which he isn’t,

then climbs up the writer’s arm until they are in a startled embrace, the two

of them as pale as marble. (87)
The interaction between Harvey and Burroughs after this point consists of an amusingly
awkward social ballet, with Harvey shouting since he believes Burroughs is “hard of
hearing” and Burroughs offering a joint to Dr. Harvey while calling him “Dr. Senegal” for
some reason (91). Nothing much happens in this short episode, but it works so
delightfully because this meeting of unusual personalities carries some sort of weight
within a popular cultural/countercultural matrix. Patemiti unveils the encounter as

though it is just another wacky incident that results from having Einstein’s brain in the

trunk, another “urban myth too weird to be true.”

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The trip to Burroughs’s house takes on additional meaning, however, in that,
anecdotal eccentricity aside, it also holds a sense of history. Burroughs died not long
after Patemiti and Harvey visited, making the meeting impossible to recreate, taking place
as it did within Burroughs’s ﬁnal days. More than that, though, textual history repeats
itself when Burroughs launches into diatribe much like the predictions he uttered in front
of Jack Kerouac, or even those he ﬁlled his books with. While Harvey is recounting the
twentieth century’s progress in mental health improvements (his area of expertise only
through roundabout proxy via possession of Einstein’s brain), Burroughs interrupts to
say:

“No, Doctor, nothing good will come from the End. More of a police

state. More crime. More attacks on queers. I hope not to be here for it.”

And he won’t be. In a few months he’ll be dead. But now, he’s
bewildered, jigging to some distant music in his mind. Since we haven’t
planned to stay for dinner, we get ready to leave, though once he’s gotten
started on the End, Burroughs has much to say. Computer chips lodged in
the brains of newborn infants, poets lynched in the trees along magnolia-
lined driveways to Corporate Headquarters, a howling pandemonium of
neo-Nazis, hip-hop brothers, bom-agains, and Black Muslims all getting to
know one another in the city streets of America with automatic weapons.

It appears Harvey has never considered the matter from this angle, and

seems a bit stunned. (92)

Paterniti’s description of Burroughs’s litany sounds like the voice Burroughs developed
in his own texts, or what we read of Burroughs through the texts of Ginsberg or Kerouac
or others. The conspiratorial prediction of “the End” even evokes the speech cited above
in which Old Bull Lee elaborates about mutations in the brain during an interaction with
Sal, an interaction that takes place after Old Bull Lee discusses the possibility of history

haunting mankind in ways that could be understood if scientists just studied the means of

communication instead of nuclear weaponry. The feverish pronouncement, important

79

due to its style rather than its content, feels much the same as Paterniti’s account of the
brief interaction with Burroughs. A current of unconventional history runs through the
Burroughs-inspired talks in both Kerouac and Patemiti’s texts: the references to a cultural
continuum of past actions leading to the present, as well as the accompanying
extrapolation into the improbable future through mad prophet-style predictions, and,
ﬁnally, the fact that the outlandish dialogue was recorded at all as a kind of historical
preservation of a conversational discourse before the one-way extension of time proved
the predictions wrong. The importance is all in the curious conflation of inﬂuences, not
that the moment could ﬁt into any sort of conventional historical framework.

Despite Paterniti’s narrative propelling onward to the showdown between Thomas
Harvey and Evelyn Einstein over the formaldehyde soup of leftover brain chunks, the
crux of the book, as I read it—a subtle homage to both the Beat writers and Albert
Einstein as “the original cosmic slacker”——-lies in Harvey’s misunderstanding of
Burroughs, which he admits in what amounts to a throwaway gag for Paterniti’s purposes
(Patemiti 46). Everything about the interaction between Burroughs and Harvey suggests
completely crossed communication paths—from Harvey misconstruing Burroughs as deaf
to Burroughs renaming Harvey “Dr. Senegal” to the failed discussion the two have about
the nature of addiction—but in the middle of the doctor’s house visit at the Burroughs
residence, Patemiti reveals that: “Prior to our arrival here, Harvey confessed that he tried
to read one of Burroughs’s books—Naked Lunch or Junky, he can’t remember which——
but had no luck. ‘Couldn’t make sense of it,’ says Harvey. ‘But they tell me he’s some

,a”

kind of genius (88). With Harvey’s offhand revelation, he raises the slippery point on

which all of his dubious notoriety is based: the nature of genius.

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Just as Harvey may or may not hold the key to investigating human intelligence in
the aromatic Tupperware casually ignored for so many years in his basement, he also
cannot recognize the nature or appeal of Burroughs’s work, admitting only: “But they tell
me he’s some kind of genius.” There is a kind of acknowledgement in Harvey’s
statement of the social forces that construe genius as a kind of cultural popularity rather
than a kind of intelligence that can be widely understood or redistributed. Harvey’s
rhetorical shoulder-shrugging recalls Barthes’s conception of Einstein as mythic, genius
being genius precisely because of its unintelligibility to the average person. The way
Barthes phrases it, mortality requires that genius be cut short, “since the world is still
going on, since research is proliferating, and on the other hand since God’s share must be
preserved, some failure on the part of Einstein is necessary: Einstein died, it is said,
without having been able to verify ‘the equation in which the secret of the world was
enclosed’” (70). Although Burroughs and Einstein are in part responsible for the very trip
Harvey ﬁnds himself on, he does not understand their genius fully, but neither ﬁgure was
smart enough to ﬁgure everything out, so Harvey can console himself with the knowledge
that, in a Darwinian sense, he beat both of them. As the doctor who has Einstein’s brain,
Harvey’s quirky set of “coincidences” have catapulted him to a unique position of power.
He has achieved his standing not through his own genius but through a cultural trading on
the nature of intelligence as it pertains to materiality. After all, as Patemiti writes:

Is it that genius is really nothing more than a matter of seeing as simply as

possible, that somewhere in this world the image already exists waiting for

the camera, or the profound idea already exists waiting for the mind to

happen on it? After all, from a falling body Einstein pulled out relativity.
And Harvey’s genius? He survives and he has the brain. (126)

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Harvey’s genius is the genius of the collector, the right—place-at-the-right-time cultural
archivist whose primary strength relies on the fact that he knows how to survive, and this
bizarre blend of genetic and memetic aptitude, from a certain Darwinian vantage point,

constitutes perhaps the greatest intelligence there is.

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Chapter Two: The Viral Spiral: Tracing the Transference of a Cross-Cultural
Media Virus through the Ring Texts

l. The Ring Opens Up

The core of the story is familiar to many, even those who are only on the
periphery of exposure. There is a videotape containing disturbing images that somehow
infect the viewer, ensuring death within seven days, and the only escape from that terrible
fate (at the ghostly hands of a psychotic, drowned young woman) is to make a copy of the
tape and pass it on, making the curse spread through the population like a virus.
Throughout all of its various textual incarnations, the basic premise of Koji Suzuki’s
epidemiological horror novel Ring remains intact, but the circumstances of the text morph
and mutate as the story moves through a variety of media in multiple cultures—graphic
novel, video game, Japanese movie, Korean movie, American movie, sequels, etc.
Despite Suzuki’s central conceit raising many critical questions about the roles of media
and technology in an increasingly alienated society, the author’s viral idea has
transformed into further removed iterations that spread just as quickly as the urban
legend/ghost story at its core, drowning the implicit criticism below the success of the
medium as the message. Paradoxically, the novel’s successful reception, successful
cross-marketing, and successful adaptation all serve to complicate (and possibly
invalidate) Suzuki’s underlying criticism of various forms of media.

Through a reading of this text’s internal success (its metaphorical and rhetorical
power) and its external success (additional adaptations and ﬁnancial prosperity), as well
as the possibility for dissonance between the two, this chapter seeks to create a

groundwork for the viral model that explains this series of textual adaptations and others

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like it. The viral structure pervades a wide variety of media in contemporary culture, and,
unlike the components of the synaptic model discussed in the previous chapter, the
progression within the viral model is largely sequential and traceable, though it presents
problems in that the ultimate, absolutist roots of its origins, along with its ﬁnal
extensions, are, like the paths of viruses, basically impossible to determine with certainty.
Also, unlike the synaptic model’s relatively dynamic arcing across seemingly
disconnected texts, the viral model presents much more rigidity in its sequential adaptive
progression and viral transmission across cultural spaces. The viral model is, after all,
inherently spatial in that viruses do not persevere over time in an unchanging form; given
that viruses often mutate rapidly within a series of generations, the Ring-related media is
particularly ﬁtting, as it has thus far spread globally within a single generation. This
chapter explores the tensions between unlimited textual proliferation and copyright—based
quarantine, as well as how the texts’ invocations of traumatic origin complicate the
discovery and narrativization of a conﬁned, totalizing source. Following this analysis of
the conceptual parallels between meme theory and trauma theory, I then explicate the
fashions through which Suzuki’s text explodes outward like a pandemic caused by a
highly adaptive, easily transferred virus, as well as how this proliferation relies on the

- current pressure between the analog and the digital as a means for assisting this spread.
Finally, this chapter explores how the viral text moves across cultures, time, and space
thanks in part to the virus-like strategies the text itself encourages in the marketing and
advertising campaigns used to promote its adaptive diffusion, bringing the argument back
to the inherent paradoxes within Suzuki’s original text, which compromise the efﬁcacy of

that text’s critical stance and underlying commentary.

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In Ring, there is a vein of criticism against the ever-expanding role media forms
play in contemporary life, leading to subjects’ alienation and dissatisfaction. Ring tells
the story of a reporter named Asakawa who uncovers a videotape that kills those who
watch it, unless those victims victimize others by copying the video and passing it on,
effectively helping the diseased media spread. Although the villain behind this viral
video is not a corporate nemesis or media conglomerate, the novel’s characters suggest
that this horror is simply a magniﬁcation of the media’s sinister usurpation of human
experience, with which consumers around the globe are already complicit from their
couches. In spite of this underlying critique, the core storyline has been successfully
adapted into several different media forms in multiple international markets, creating
minor dissonance between and within the adaptive texts. Suzuki himself is partially to
blame for the discord between his novel’s intrinsic message and its successful entry into
the same consumeristic media market that serves simultaneously as Ring’s critical target
and its bogeyman. Asakawa confronts a similar dilemma when he ﬁnds that the media
industry is both directly and indirectly responsible for the videotape’s epidemic by ruining
the life of a young woman named Sadako. Although Asakawa’s media connections have
made his discovery possible, his knee-jerk reaction to learning that the parasitic media

6“

prompted Sadako’s quest for vengeance is to sputter: But that’s no reason to arrange an
indiscriminate attack like this!’ Asakawa’s objection was made in full consciousness of
the fact that he himself belonged to the media. In his heart he was making excuses—he
was pleading. Hey, I'm just as critical of the media ’s tendencies as you are” (198, italics

in original). This passage’s self-reflexivity furnishes a winking admission that although

media forms are the novel’s critical targets—as carriers of the viral curse—Suzuki is just

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as implicated as his (anti)hero by contributing to such media. The only way for Asakawa
to free himself from the infectious videotape’s curse is to copy it and pass it along,
morally entangling him in the video’s transmission.

Asakawa relentlessly pieces together the clues contained within the videotape’s
form and content, but, long before he discovers why four teenagers die a week after
watching the video, Asakawa assumes he is tracking a virus. Early in his search, he
hypothesizes about the deaths:

Maybe there was some secret that only the four of them knew, and they’d

been killed for it. Asakawa tried out a more scientiﬁc explanation with

himself: perhaps the four of them had been in the same place at the same

time, and all four had been infected with a virus that attacks the heart

Sure. He’d try thinking of it as a kind of virus for a while. Not that this

would satisfy all his doubts If he were to pursue this hypothesis further,

he could deduct that the fact that there hadn’t been any other victims yet

meant that the virus was not airborne. It was either blood-borne, like

AIDS, or was fairly noncontagious. But more importantly, where had

these four picked it up? (37-8)

In this passage, Asakawa moves his hypothesis deftly to its logical conclusions: from the
cause of death being a shared secret to being a virus to being “blood-borne, like AIDS.”
Asakawa retains this viral discourse, and the videotape’s curse in turn behaves much like
a retrovirus such as HIV, altering hosts’ genetic code to program them for death. As
noted above, the catch is that the hosts can spare themselves by spreading the disease to
others, thus helping the viral video reproduce, a feat that the video, as “organism,” is
incapable of doing without its host’s help.

This passage of the videotape from subject to subject—passing on its content as

a disease—closely mirrors the meme theory trope of the virus of the mind, a phrase ﬁrst

coined by Richard Dawkins and then popularized by ﬁgures such as Richard Brodie.

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Although many authors conceptualize memes as virus-like, few explore the tensions
created in transferring such a literal conceptual framework into a metaphorical framework
only to map out afterward onto literal cultural phenomena. Similarly, the viral model
assumes that the relationship between subjects and texts is largely passive, allowing only
limited interpretive interventions for readers. Most proponents of meme theory use
virology only loosely as a kind of inanimate contagion that requires a host to promote it
through reproduction. Richard Brodie, for example, draws on his background as a
motivational speaker to emphasize the meme—based importance of popularizing ideas so
as to make them catchier and then evangelizing them to large populations. Brodie
explains in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme that:

In a future where mind viruses proliferate, the kinds of viruses I personally

want to see win are viruses that raise people’s quality of life. The way to

make such viruses win is twofold: ﬁrst, evangelize, evangelize,

evangelize! When you come across memes you like, spread them

consciously! Silence is death, to memes. Second, make a point of tying

together all the button-pushing memes you can with the memes that raise

quality of life. Point out how they help our children! Remind people this

is a crisis! Serve them food! Offer them sex! Well, whatever. (210)
These thoughts sufﬁce for a simplistic metaphor regarding how to think like a marketer,
but Brodie’s formulation does not provide much more than a commonsensical approach
to texts and information, nor does it really explore how viruses work within his schema.
One of the central ﬂaws seems to be the conceptual dissonance between intention and
uncontrollability, at least as far as the virus analogy is concerned; a person cannot simply
will a virus to behave a certain way. Also, Brodie’s conceptualization of “Spreading

consciously” the “memes you like” seems problematic because the personality in question

that the ideas appeal to is likewise founded on socially constructed ideas. The virus

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metaphor quickly breaks down as a pragmatic representation; but the rougher aspects of
Brodie’s model, however, do not invalidate a viral model for understandng information,
texts, or culture. Scholars such as David L. Hull reﬁne meme theory to incorporate viral
characteristics in more meaningful and accurate ways, making cultural trends less about
personal agency and more about systematic evolutionary change.

Part of the academic appeal of analogizing the elusive meme as a virus is that
viruses represent horizontal transmission rather than vertical transmission. As David L.
Hull explains in his essay “Taking Memetics Seriously: Memetics Will Be What We
Make It,” when scientists and theorists deal with gene-based selection in biological
evolution, they distinguish between vertical transmission and horizontal transmission;
moreover, Hull writes:

In vertical transmission, genes are passed down from parents to their

offspring regardless of whether the form of inheritance is sexual or

asexual. Any other form of transmission is horizontal. In biological

evolution the only form of genetic transfer that seems in the least

horizontal is infection by viruses. A virus can pass from one organism to

another in two ways: during the reproduction of its host and independent

of that reproduction. In the ﬁrst instance, this transmission might be

termed ‘vertical’. After all, it is proceeding from parent to offspring.

When it is transmitted to any other organisms, including organisms that

belong to different species, this transmission is horizontal. However, all

of the preceding comments are made from the perspective of the host, not

the virus. From the perspective of the virus, all of its genetic transmission

is vertical, and with respect to the ﬁtness of the virus, this is the

perspective that counts. (57)

With Hull’s deﬁnitions and theoretical formulations in mind, memes—and, by extension,
the texts carrying them—that transfer through horizontal means work like propagating

viruses. Such entities do not have a will or a consciousness aside from their own self-

proliferating genetic code, but, as Hull points out, they still strive to perpetuate that

88

code’s transmission. This transference, from our perspective, is horizontal, but from the
viruses’ perspective—assuming they had one—it is vertical because it moves their strain
to a new generation.

Part of the underlying chill of Ring lies in this glimpse of the viral perspective,
which can hardly be considered “alive” by most deﬁnitions and which prioritizes
reproduction at any cost; what amounts to human death and disease through our
horizontal transmission is their survival through vertical transmission. The ring virus at
its basic level frightens us because, from the microscopic viewpoint, our infection is its
sex. Moreover, since the ring virus parallels HIV in many ways, sex and death are mixed
up on higher levels as well; spreading the victorious ring virus involves performing a kind
of reproduction, although it takes the innocent and intimate form of bootlegging a
videotape for a friend. Even though this video reproduction is not a directly sexual act,
the metaphorical paradigm of Ring, in creating a supernatural version of the AIDS
epidemic, requires an analog for sex, and analog video provides a model rich with
meaning. Individual survival (which must inherently be selﬁsh) relies on proliferating the
virus, and proliferating the virus means creating a bootleg copy of the video, and
bootlegging the video means a non-organic kind of sex. For Asakawa and others who
have already watched the video, the options, vis-a-vis the videotape virus, boil down to

fuck or be fucked.

2. Getting a Bootleg Up
Because Koji Suzuki’s Ring concerns the imbedded information in both analog

video and genetic code, it is appropriate that the urban legend style threat that drives most

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of the fear in the tale relies on intersecting, multivalent codes within videotape as
representations. The video virus mostly closely resembles HIV (and Suzuki regularly
evokes this connection and the stakes involved in a global pandemic), and the damage
that the video perpetrates works speciﬁcally like a retrovirus. Most viruses use the
material within a host cell to replicate their own DNA until the cell lyses and unleashes
the newly created viruses outward, but the retrovirus reverses the typical transcription of
DNA into RNA by inserting its own RNA into a host cell in order to change into DNA
within that cell’s nucleus. In other words, the virus uses the material at hand in the cell to
unzip its own code and transpose it within the cell. The novel’s complicated central
metaphor of the videotape virus retains characteristics of a retrovirus itself, in that the
information it contains reinscribes our current understanding of video reproduction as a
social signifying act.

The bootleg reproduction of the video virus presents thorny iSsues of
interpretation. While many critics read video piracy as operating within an underground,
anti—corporate realm of alternative entertainment, or at least a slightly subversive form of
black market capitalism, the copying of the plague—ridden video in Ring is not merely
rebellion against copyright ownership and mass media monopolies. Although Asakawa
earns a temporary inoculation against the virus for his troubles in copying and distributing
the videotape, this vaccine represents the spread of an infectious disease. Sadako’s video
seems almost entirely outside of the standard parameters of the dominant capitalist
market, existing as it does in a boxless, unlabeled form, neither bought nor sold. Copying
this unusual media product does not subvert codes of consumer passivity in the traditional

sense, except that those who copy the video survive. As Catherine Grant and Tahani

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Nadim note in their essay “‘Working Things Out Together’: The Joys of Bootlegging,
Bartering, and Collectivity,” channels of media distribution that do not ﬁlter through
traditional corporate distribution provide a kind of egalitarian system of entertainment
sharing; as the authors write: “The network of bootlegging is a way of relating to
collaborators, audiences and guests that is as constitutive of the participants as it is a
means to distribute artwork” (53).2 The newly formed social network represented by
those who have seen Sadako’s viral video, however, rather than working like the illicit
family-like community of those who share underground media, serves to alienate the
various members, as the link that unites them represents a desire to pass the deadly curse
outward, whether consciously or subconsciously.

The moral dilemma at the heart of the bootlegging in Ring is not the standard
opposition between media powerholders and media proles in which we normally ﬁnd
contraband media reproduction framed; instead, bootlegging in the paradoxical ethics of
the Ring universe aligns participants not against media monopolies but against humanity
itself. In this light, bootlegging is not merely a nagging issue of properly adhering to
copyright conduct or preserving the purity of intellectual property; the act of transcribing
the virus to another videotape and passing it along is the social equivalent of knowingly
spreading a sexually transmitted infection.

One of the central problems with analogizing a videotape to a virus, in both
Suzuki’s text and in the viral model I am employing here, is that, despite the many rich
parallels Suzuki and others draw between the two, videos are much more ephemeral than

viruses in their material structure in terms of the replication and transmission of

The types of bootleg communities under discussmn in Grant and Nadim s essay rely on mutual trust in the

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information. Viruses are c0pied with very high fidelity, their coded information often
looking exactly the same across many generations, but, as anyone who has tried to make a
copy of a copied video knows, the material breakdown involved in vertical transmission
from one video generation to the next increases exponentially. With both infomiation-
based media forms, such structural, material change uncoils randomly, unless some
outside agent manipulates the data in either the virus’s genetic code or the video’s
magnetic tape. When there is no agent evincing such change, there is no predicting how
the mutations will occur. In Touch." Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura U.
Marks analyzes the particularities of how ﬁlm and video compositions present different
sensory experiences as they decompose. Any given video’s decay is, she points out, as
individual as a snowflake’s pattern, producing random colors, lines, or, most
appropriately, “TV snow.” Marks details, in an essay entitled “Loving a Disappearing
Image,” how these disappearances through decay imprint a singular aura on the text,
writing that:

With disappearance, the work accumulates aura. Mechanically reproduced

images supposedly lack aura, but as images decay they become unique

again The scratches and unintentional jump cuts on our prints of X ﬁlm

are ours alone, and even video decays individually, in response to

temperature, humidity, and the idiosyncrasies of playback machines. Of

course, independent, experimental, and rare ﬁlms and videos are already

auratic, as anyone knows who has tried to replace lost home movies.

Works that are not widely distributed are more like bodies that we protect

assiduously than like simulacra. (92)
The instability of the video in Suzuki’s Ring, its susceptibility to “temperature, humidity,

and the idiosyncrasies of playback machines,” means that Asakawa’s original, from

which he copies a bootleg and thus saves himself, becomes a precious, fetishized object.

 

copying and trading, not on cash ﬂow of the more anonymous black market purchase of bootlegs for proﬁt.

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Moreover, he tries to reclaim some of the imagistic informational loss that has taken
place on the tape; he mourns the irreversibility of the decay and additional recorded
imprinting. His grief over the transience of the video (the catalyst for his investigation)
points to the larger limitations of the book’s central metaphor as well as the analytical
potential of the viral model. How can the permanence of viral information replicate and
proliferate when it depends on unreliable material transmission?

While the videotape format has less ﬁdelity and permanence than virus forms, the
survival mechanism for the viral curse’s code is essentially the same: prolonging “life” by
reproducing. This constant transference might risk losing the curse’s clarity—through
unfaithful copying or deterioration of image and sound—but the promise of sustained
existence through replication outweighs the threat of inaccurate duplication. Video
reproduction through bootlegging leads to deterioration of the tape, but that does not
prevent those who want to disperse a video text. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel
Dennett theorizes that informational forms—like Sadako’s ghost or curse or virus or
video, or the self—perpetuating idea of all of these things—must stay in circulation
through transference across and among media in order to guarantee the information’s
immortality. He writes:

Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and

replicate at rates that make even fruit ﬂies and yeast cells look glacial in

comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from

medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable.

Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend

on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in

the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively

permanent, and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but

unless these are under the protection of human conservators, they tend to
dissolve in time. (205, italics in original)

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According to Dennett’s passage, the viral model is one that always requires outside
energy for its preservation and transmission, just like inanimate viruses must rely on hosts
for perpetuation, transportation, and transplantation. Texts and viruses may be
“potentially immortal” or “relatively permanent,” but they have no inherent guarantee
within themselves to such durability, no safeguard against physical breakdown or
extinction save for the dependable transfer of hosts who disseminate them. Perhaps such
absolute parasitism is what makes viruses so scary (and thus the subject of a horror novel
like Ring), since, despite viruses being the direct cause of certain diseases, the carrier of
the virus is also partially to blame. This concept of virality applies both to a single text’s
spread within a culture as well as textual adaptations. Although the behaviors that spread
viruses may appear involuntary or benign, there is conceivably some mechanism of
desire, however subconscious or sub-cellular, that wants to spread the infection outward.
The twist with Ring is that distributing the viral video’s disease is always voluntary.3

For those who want to pass the c0pied videotape onward in order to survive,
options are limited by social constraints. Decomm typically prohibits the passage of a
video from one individual to another outside of traditional economic transactions. Few
people would accept a videotape from a stranger on the street and watch it within seven
days, especially when the content is unknown. Thus, the most likely method of
transferring the virus comes through an appropriation of social or familial relations for the

purposes of a bootleg-sharing community.4 Normally, such communities of circulation—

 

3 And yet, voluntary spread can contain accidental elements. Asakawa asks his friend Ryuji for help with
analyzing the tape, and Ryuji requests a copy so he can study the video at home. Asakawa dubs the tape for
Ryuji, saves himself, and indirectly kills his friend, all without any conscious malice.

4 There are, of course, exceptions where individuals might watch an unknown videotape, one provocative
example including the marketing campaigns for The Ring and The Ring Two, which I will discuss in the

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relying as they do in this context not on cash flow but on trust and collective aesthetic

enjoyment—foster an appreciation of certain sorts of bootleg aesthetics applied in the

illicit copying, but in Ring each additional copy blurs and obscures the instructions the
video contains for avoiding death.

In an essay about Todd Haynes’s short ﬁlm Superstar: The Karen Carpenter
Story—banned for its copyright violation but kept alive through bootleg networks—Lucas
Hilderbrand analyzes standard spectatorial relationships and bootleg aesthetics. He
writes:

Analog reproduction of the text, rather than destroying the

original’s aura, actually reconstructs it. Materially, the fallout of the image

and sound mark each successive copy as an illicit object, a forbidden

pleasure watched and shared and loved to exhaustion. Furthermore, the

deresolution of the tapes formally becomes expressed on the tapes’

surfaces, even as deterioration obscures the visual and audio information,

thus frustrating standard spectatorial engagement with the narrative. (71)

As Hilderbrand notes, the spread of copies serves to deteriorate the quality of image and
sound, demonstrating that the video is watched and copied fetishistically, making it
“loved to exhaustion.” The Ring videotape fosters deep-seated hatred rather than love, as
its existence before the spectator represents a very direct death threat, but Asakawa
watches the tape repeatedly, looking for clues to escape that threat, ﬁnding that the
deteriorated copy he has watched “obscures the visual and audio information, thus
frustrating standard spectatorial engagement.” Asakawa’s version of the videotape is
flawed, replicated imperfectly by teenagers playing a prank on all subsequent viewers.

Their peculiar “joke” contains layers of forbidden behavior: they are watching what they

should not witness and recording over what they should not obscure. Their re—recorded

 

following section.

95

   

 

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version mutates the virus’s information, and, as a result of the dubbing distortion, the
video’s ending promises the means of redemption without delivering:

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact

hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you mustfollow these
instructions exactly. . .

Asakawa gulped and stared wide«eyed at the television. But then
the scene changed yet again. A complete and utter change. A commercial
came on, a perfectly, ordinary, common television commercial A
commercial for mosquito-repelling coils. After about thirty seconds the
commercial ended, and just as another scene was about to start, the screen
returned to its previous state. Darkness, with the last afterglow of faded
words. Then the sound of static as the tape ended There was nothing
else to say. One unintelligible scene after another, and the only thing he’d
comprehended was that anybody who watched would die in exactly a

week. And the part which told how to avoid this fate had been taped over
with a commercial. (82)

In Ring, the analog reproduction, to use Hilderbrand’s words, “rather than destroying the
original’s aura, actually reconstructs it,” though in a distinctly different sense than
Hilderbrand’s application of the phrase. This meta-illicit dubbing obscures the tape’s
original information by accomplishing a reconstruction of the original’s aura both through
the capturing of intent (as a transmittable trauma) and through the use of a dubbed
broadcast commercial (as a reference back to the power hierarchy of mass media). These
reconstructions of video text require some unpacking, but I will approach the signiﬁcance
of the video re-writing before reviewing the reconstructed intentions lurking behind it.
This nasty trick of recording over the instructions with irrelevant information—-
which ﬁgures prominently in Suzuki’s sequel Spiral as an irreversible mutation on the
virus’s genetic code, replicating to the next generation of copies—is one particular to
video’s malleable format. In the case of the recorded commercial, the original aura of

malicious intent comes across not through a deterioration of the existing material but

96

 

 

 

through a positive inscription onto the video. The fact that video allows such possibilities
represents, as Dennis Redmond notes: “a deeply plebeian and democratic art form.
Designed for maximum accessibility to a multinational audience, they display many of
the best features of the global aesthetic commodities they both occasionally mimic and
savagely critique: ﬂexibility, ease of use, and sheer entertainment value” (5). Although
the cursed videotape’s entertainment value is dubious at best, Redmond’s commentary
applies not just to the passive reception of the video by viewers but to the active
engagement in recording new material onto the videotape as well. The democratization
implicit in the video format means that viewers can participate actively in intensifying the
odds against survival for future watchers who fall victim to the tape’s horizontal
transmission. And yet, such obscuring of the information, however democratic and
creative it may be, results in the same interpretation and reception by new viewers,

demonstrating that the virus is still passed along.

The replication-with-a-difference of the dubbing can involve the insertion of any
new information, even if that insertion performs a violent erasure to vital parts of the old
information in exchange for this new memetic proliferation. Given the imperfect

condition of the videotape Asakawa ﬁnds, Ring posits him as a kind of memetic
detective, working backwards to trace the mysterious virus to its origins, his task being
more difﬁcult because of the commercial disruption. As Hull notes, this kind of
investigative reading of cultural objects—pulling apart form, content, and the different
levels of data contained in both—proves troublesome to information theorists since such
a “messiyj problem turns on the asymmetry between the ease of reading the information

contained in a meme into some application and the difﬁculty of the opposite inference.

97

 

  
    

 
   

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Copying instructions is relatively easy. Inferring the instructions from the product is
extremely difﬁcult” (59). Asakawa must trace the video virus’s genealogy backwards to
search for clues on how to negativize its code within his system, and executing such an
examination entails drawing a series of necessary distinctions between the video’s form
and content, linking the material history of its bootlegging lineage and the memetic
history of the images, sounds, and ideas of its conceptual ancestry. Asakawa’s training
and background in investigative journalism, along with his various professional contacts,
help him, but, as is usually the case with a detective narrative, Asakawa always already
assumes that there is a pattern present for him to detect. Sadako, as the original impetus
for the video transfer of disease and suffering, becomes the Typhoid Mary Asakawa must
seek to uncover, but in order for him to trace the creation of the circulating bootleg video
back to her, Asakawa investigates the traumatic cycle that led to Sadako’s psychic
broadcast, making himself into a detective of sources operating at once in the materialist,
epidemiological, and psychological realms.

Part of the research difﬁculty for Asakawa (as well as for the roughly
interchangeable “Asakawa ﬁgures” in the successive adaptations and sequels) lies in the
fact that video as a medium allows for certain sorts of access while elusively withholding
others. The search for origins through video is ephemeral, always beyond the grasp of
perception. Tetsuo Kogawa explains this sensorial slipperiness in “Video: The Access
Medium,” where he writes that:

The transmitter does not bring anything, but it does relay
something. It literally re—Iays something in a different context. Even in
the transmission of a very simple image, innumerable information units

are relayed, producing meanings that are both different from and similar to
the source material. There is no original for the resulting similar

98

 

 

 

(transmitted) images because the transmitter does not carry away anything

intact. Instead, the transmitter does erase the origin. It substitutes an

eternal circulation for origin. (57, emphases in original)

With Kogawa’s formulation of video transmission in mind, Asakawa’s investigation is
doomed from the beginning because, much like the void of meaning within viruses
themselves, video’s form does not necessarily have any connection to its content, and
vice-versa. Still, despite the video’s bootleg distortion, over—dubbed “instructions,” and
the “eternal circulation for origin” inherent in the cursed tape’s form, Asakawa manages
to trace the transmission back to Sadako, demonstrating that the viral model assumes a
certain transparency of form and interpretation within the act of reading, on both the part
of producers and the part of consumers. While this assumption of transparency limits the
viral model in ways I will address later, I ﬁrst want to explore how the obfuscation
possible within the rewritable videotape form impact-s Ring’s diegesis before analyzing
these implications in a more general sense.

The fact that the tape’s “instructions” for postponing death have been recorded
over by a commercial reproduces the random malice made by a deadly videotape virus in
the ﬁrst place, but the resultant new video replicates this hostility in a fashion that
complicates the novel’s central metaphor about the viral spread of media. While theorists
such as Grant, Nadim, and Hilderbrand posit that not—for-proﬁt bootlegs—and the semi—
utopian communal ideals which are extrapolated from them—have a largely progressive,
anti-capitalist valence, bootlegging is more ambivalent in Ring. On the one hand, the
protagonist discovers that dubbing new copies of the videotape is the means to save
himself and his family, which aligns bootlegging with a kind of heroism, but, perhaps

more importantly, the bootlegging simultaneously represents a kind of betrayal not just to

99

 

 

 

the unwitting viewers who receive the viral spread but to humanity in general. The text
creates a relationship to the commercial realm through this use of bootlegging and the
recording of a commercial over the key segment of the tape, but that relationship has its
own level of ambivalence. How exactly are we to read this re—taping? Although the teens
recording over the original, author-ized video text serves to destabilize its message
through a kind of de’tournement, the fact that the appropriation is of an advertisement
reminds us where consumer options originate for most video watchers. What initially
seems like a prank reveals that the commercial politics of the bootleggers are only
operating within a limited framework of media choices. The rebellious kids will not
topple any existing media structures; they are only promoting further manipulation. After
all, for those who have witnessed the viral video, like Asakawa, survival comes at the
expense of extending a species-wide threat, giving the video virus’s carriers and copiers a
terriﬁc sense of survivor’s guilt, which seems to have been Sadako’s intention in mentally

projecting the images in the ﬁrst place.

3. The Ring Bearer

What exactly Sadako’s willful intentions are—as well as what particular recipe
leads to the possibility of enacting them—remains a part of the mystery that audiences
must interpret as much as the texts’ protagonists themselves. Clearly, there is undeniable
malice, but how and why does it work? While the American movie versions (and, to a
lesser extent, the Japanese movie versions) gloss over the issue of how the videotape was
created in the ﬁrst place, Suzuki’s Ring unveils how Sadako gained the powers necessary

to create a fatal video designed to spread itself through piracy. Such a process is,

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naturally, complicated—-—it is not every day that people create killer video viruses, after
all—and Asakawa must assemble the pieces of Sadako’s re’sumé qualiﬁcations for
bioterrorist video production over the course of the novel, leading to the ﬁnal shocking
climax, revealed at the story’s end as well as the end of Sadako’s miserable life.
Although my approach lacks the dramatic revelations of a mystery unfolding, I
will provide these narrative chunks all at once. Sadako is capable of creating a viral
videotape (and wants to do so in the ﬁrst place) because: 1) she is psychic; 2) her psychic
abilities helped her mother achieve national success until the media brought the family
low by trumped—up charges of fraud, spurring Sadako’s mother’s suicide—by jumping
into a live volcano—and Sadako’s developing hatred for humanity; 3) her psychic
abilities also allow her to project mental images onto photographic ﬁlm, which she
becomes so adept at doing that she builds her talents to 24 frames per second, allowing
her head to transform into a dual video recorder and broadcast tower; 4) during a brief
stint in an acting troupe, Sadako discovered that her psychic powers were strong enough
to kill peOple, which she did to a few of the troupe’s members, whetting her desire for
destruction; 5) after Sadako’s adventures in the big city, she was raped by a rural
sanatorium’s doctor (who, years later, claims he was compelled by supernatural forces
against his will), who was infected with the smallpox virus, which he passed on to her
just before killing her and dumping her down an old well; 6) through some mysterious
process, the smallpox virus fused with Sadako, and their shared desire to destroy
humanity somehow deﬁes extinction; 7) ﬁnally, immediately before he raped her, the
doctor noticed that Sadako was a hermaphrodite, a factor that, according to the book,

makes her suited for being genetically combined with a sexless virus and wreaking havoc

lOl

 

 

 

on humanity. Following such a bizarre trajectory, Sadako’s consciousness somehow
remained intact while trapped at the bottom of the well, and developers eventually built a
hotel over the sanatorium’s grounds, including one cabin directly over the ill-fated well.
While on vacation, a boy inserted a videotape into the hotel’s VCR, directly above the
well, and Sadako’s undead, psychic consciousness transmitted a virus onto the magnetic
tape. The boy never watched the tape, his family left, and the unfortunate teenagers
stumbled across the unmarked videotape, which brings us back to the beginning of Ring.
Thus, should readers want to replicate Sadako’s success with replication of diseased
videos, they simply need to be abused psychic hermaphrodite rape victims with
overwhelming hatred for humankind dumped down a well above which someone
someday will leave a videotape.

The ﬁlm versions wisely do not allow themselves the time for such weighty
exposition of all these details, though the Korean version keeps its supernatural villain
hermaphroditic. Instead, the core of these ideas is whittled down to a vague sense that a
young girl’s hatred or insanity or unmediated evil could produce such a videotape. This
ﬁnal detail in the list above, the one the doctor/rapist reveals to Asakawa decades after
the fact, leading to the speculation—it all makes sense now—that the smallpox virus
crawled into Sadako’s strands of DNA, which wormed its way into the spools of
videotape, provides one of the novel’s more unusual elements. Suzuki’s narrative
revelation serves to conﬂate several social phobias into a single, concentrated danger;
Sadako represents a threat through her alignment with deadly disease and pervasive
technology as much as through her alignment with an ambiguous gender identiﬁcation.

When Asakawa and his friend (and fellow video virus victim) Ryuji confront the now

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withered doctor, he confesses to the rape, which he discusses with the detachment of his
profession as well as the detachment he claims by being paranormally compelled to his
actions; he describes the scene:

“A ray of sunlight fell on the point where her thighs converged, clearly

illuminating a small, blackish lump. I raised my eyes to her chest——

beautifully-shaped breasts. Then I looked down again. Within her pubic

mound, covered with hair, was a pair of perfectly developed testicles.

“Had I not been a doctor, I probably would have been shocked

silly. But I knew of cases such as this from photos in medical texts.

Testicular feminization syndrome. It’s an extremely rare syndrome. I

never thought I’d see one outside of a textbook—much less in a situation

such as that. Testicular feminization is a type of male

pseudohermaphroditism. Externally the person seems to be completely

female, having breasts and a vagina, but usually not a uterus.

Chromosomally the person is XY, however—male. And for some reason

people with the condition are all beautiful.” (224)
As an individual with “testicular feminization syndrome,” Sadako is very literally not
what she appears; not capable of sexual reproduction, she merges with the asexual form
of the smallpox virus, reproducing through the video, though through means that are still
unclear. Although this passage appears as the ﬁnal revelation about Sadako’s past, what
is perhaps more shocking is the sterile language the doctor uses as he claims that he
“never thought [he’d] see one outside of a textbook—much less in a situation such as
that.” While this revelation is unexpected, it allows for a kind of symmetry to the text.
The balance of creation and destruction, male and female, sex and death, all add to the
text’s generation and perpetuation of its own mythology.

To explain how Sadako’s mythic ring of terror originated, Asakawa recaps on

how her multivalent power position transformed into the current menace terrorizing him

and his family:

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A woman’s resentment toward the masses who had hounded her
father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus’s resentment
toward the human ingenuity that had driven it to the brink of extinction
had fused together in the body of a singular person named Sadako
Yamamura, and had reappeared in the world in an unexpected, unimagined
form.

Asakawa, his family, everybody who had seen the video had been
subconsciously infected with this virus. They were carriers. And viruses
burrowed directly into the genes, the core of life. There was no telling yet
what would result from this, how it would change human history—~human
evolution. (281)

This passage emphasizes the transformative nature of viruses as horizontal transmission,
the possibility of mutating on such a broad scale as to reshape human evolution from “an
unexpected, unimagined form.” Here, the metaphorical construct of texts operating as
viruses becomes literalized on yet another adaptive level; the videos as texts could
reshape the course of human genetic evolution, stemming outward from a rare genetic
condition that typically results in sterility rather than such wide-spreading fecundity and
adaptation.

Unfortunately, Asakawa only understands the nature of the video virus after his
friend Ryuji has succumbed to it and died; together, the two of them believed they had
solved Sadako’s riddle by tracing her past to the well that became her grave. They
believed that uncovering her remains for proper burial was the key to releasing her
unhappy consciousness, restoring the natural order of things, and breaking the curse of
the virus they both harbored in their bodies. After Ryuji dies (past Asakawa’s seven-day
deadline), Asakawa contemplates what he did to break the curse inadvertently that Ryuji
did not, the answer being that Asakawa made a copy and passed it on to his friend.

Because Asakawa works so hard to uncover Sadako’s backstory—and Koji Suzuki works

so hard in creating it and integrating it into the narrative—Rin g evinces a misplaced

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obsession with origins. The “solving” of the tape’s mysterious beginning provides no
resolution, no cathartic release that brings everything back to “normal.” The question of
origins, the issue of helping Sadako rest peacefully, isa .fat red herring swimming through
the spools of videotape and thus through Suzuki’s novel. What Asakawa overlooks in
completing his investigative probe of the videotape’s historical origins was that, from the
viral perspective, origins are unimportant; viruses do not think about from whence they
came, precisely because they do not think. Instead, it is the pattern of the process—where
the virus now stands in its Chromosomally programmed efforts to map its interior code
ever outward—that matters.

Similarly, the subsequent adaptations do not necessarily point to their originary
text. We can trace the chain of textual adaptation from one text to another, but the
changes and similarities are much less signiﬁcant than the structural pattern in which the
narrative passes, virus-like, from one form to another, mimicking its subject matter in the
process of transitioning between and among forms. Examining how the original
videotape in the original story came to be is ultimately a futile process, as the artifact
gestures outward to other origins before it, “re-lay[ing] something in a different context”
while ultimately slipping past scrutiny. Beyond a certain point, the cause—and—effect
narrativization breaks down, much like the clearest transmission of a viral chain can only
be traced back so far. Still, in Ring, Asakawa understandably falls victim to the story of
the tape’s origin. Given such a video, especially with a literal deadline for decoding its

meaning, an obvious ﬁrst step to contextualize its text, narrativizing the narrative’s
history. That Asakawa is tricked into thinking Sadako is the key to escaping his doom is

not faulty logic on his part but an extension of the traditional narrative logic employed in

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most supernatural tales. In such stories, tracing their textual and psychological roots to
the Oedipus narrative, something has thrown off the natural balance, resulting in a
haunting or curse, and normalcy will return once that balance resumes, usually in the
form of some release or acknowledgement of the past. The logic powering the curse in
Ring is much less subject-centered—bearing the DNA imprint of a viral structure
imposed on an unfeeling technology, rather than a ghostly touch of a once—living
person—and, as a result, Asakawa’s investigation, relying as it does on the
psychoanalytic traditions of detective narratives, comes to a faulty conclusion as to how
to negativize the virus.

While those who have seen any of the movies now almost instinctively center on
the image of a dripping wet Sadako Yamamura (or Eun—suh Park or Samara Morgan, her
Korean and American counterparts, respectively) crawling out of a television set with her
hair obscuring her undead face, her victims in Ring all suffer only‘physiological effects,
not ghoulish attacks. The movies must rely on a visually represented threat, but the book
can convey the creepiness of a less tangible foe, such as a virus. Asakawa has difﬁculty
adjusting to such a threat, preferring to think of it in terms of a subject’s trauma, which
can be narrativized and thus subdued. It is seemingly Sadako’s consciousness, after all,
that puts Asakawa into this bitter double bind so as to spread the trauma she experienced
in life, replicating a Freudian melancholia that seemingly refuses to release from the
mourning of death.

In his psychoanalytic detective work, Asakawa pieces together the mental
suffering Sadako underwent during her lifetime; this theme replicates itself into all of the

movie versions as well, though not all of them explore to what degree she (or her

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international movie clones) must have suffered, or how disproportionate her revenge has
become. The videotape replicates a kind of witnessing along with its viral curse.
Sadako’s traumatic testimonial, as obscured as it maybe behind the trappings of the tape,
projects her narrative onto others, making them feel what she felt (literally, the tape gives
viewers haptic sensations and physiological reactions beyond its audio and visual
elements), while it infects viewers with survivor’s guilt at the same time. This aspect of
the tape is peculiarly speciﬁc in its transmission of aura; everyone who has borne witness
to the images and sounds on the tape has the virus and goes through the exact same set of
emotional and physiological reactions. In this way, the tape usurps any attempt at
interpretation or critical intervention, passing the virus along to passive victims.
All texts possess a certain degree of autonomy is that they can provoke a wide

array of unexpected reactions in their audiences, but here the affect produced is uniform
and beyond the receptive viewer’s control, the epitome of a viral reaction. While
Einstein’s textual information proved to be autonomous in the sense that it was beyond
his authorial control to inspire nuclear weapons (see Chapter One), here the video text
becomes autonomous both from its creator—who cannot control its distribution
directly—and its viewers—who cannot control their physical, bodily reactions to the tape.
This uncontrollable audience reaction mirrors Brian Massumi’s conception of the
autonomy of affect, as outlined in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Aﬁect, Sensation,
wherein he writes that:

Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally

limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The

autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its

openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes
conﬁnement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for

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interaction, it is. (35, emphases in original)

In analogous fashion to Massumi’s passage, Sadako’s home movie concerns itself
completely with its affective abilities to escape “conﬁnement in the particular body whose
vitality, or potential for interaction, it is.” The viral model is particularly effective for
meme theorists because it engages—sometimes rather obliquely—the notion of passing
emotion along with texts, not just information. In the case of the videotape in Ring, the
affect of Sadako’s physical sensations translate directly into the viewer’s experience,
while the affect of the fear of death prompts the viewer to pass the experiential text along,
robbing the next generation of viewers of their sensational autonomy just as easily as the
tape might rob them of their lives. Likewise, the cinematic adaptations conform to the
informational code while similarly attempting to spread the underlying fear. The code the
viral videotape transmits is absolute, treating the spectator as a blank state, devoid of
speciﬁcity in terms of both readerly comprehension and the ever-changing contexts of
time and space that unfold with each additional screening.

Regardless of the viewer’s agency, watching the tape bears witness to Sadako’s
trauma, making viewers into survivors, but those who bootleg the viral video become
two-time survivors, with survivor’s guilt for their complicity with diseased media. This
repetitive process of trauma, survival, and guilt conforms to Cathy Caruth’s Freudian
reading of survival in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, wherein

she writes:
Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is
forced, continually, to confront it over and over again. For consciousness
then, the act of survival, as the experience of trauma, is the repeated

confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to
one’s own life. It is because the mind cannot confront the possibility of its

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death directly that survival becomes for the human being, paradoxically,
an endless testimony to the impossibility of living. (62)

With Caruth’s framework in mind, the bootlegged video represents not simply an audio-
visual transmission or a viral transmission or even an informational transmission; the tape
also enables a transmission of affect, which remains imprinted in the minds of the guilty
survivors. Tracing the phenomenon back to its origins, in this particular case, is relatively
futile because, as noted earlier, the Oedipal detective work Asakawa performs has no
yield; there is no moment of revelation or release, only more guilt. There is a viral matrix
at work in the videos, but there is no singularity to point to as uniﬁed, problem-solving
origin. The pattern of the plurality is everything, while its origin is relatively
meaningless, just as the movie adaptations signify.

This conceptualization—~that the pattern of plurality trumps the issue of origin——
provides a critical parallel between meme theory and trauma theory. As many
contemporary theorists conceive of affect, the patterns that emerge from transferring
affect have much in common with the kinds of colonizations viruses perform. Deleuze
and Guattari observe, through a synecdoche that conﬂates various elements of
psychoanalysis into the single term of Oedipus, that “Oedipus is always colonization
pursued by other means, it is the interior colony...” (170). In this case, the
psychoanalytic model itself is revealed as a kind of pattern creating its own sense of
trauma. Thus, with the viral model, colonization takes place both within (as an extension

of a subject’s reception of a text) and outside (as a text “taking over” a given culture
through its infectious popularity). And yet, the viral model has certain epistemological

limitations on the subject of origin because the beginning point of memetic genealogies

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inherently involve moving to a kind of ur-past, understanding a “virus of the mind”
before there is a material record to trace.

In terms of understanding the process of adaptation, the viral model maps out a
Darwinian assemblage in that its focus depends more on patterns, relationships, and
systems rather than individual subjects, and, given this focus, creators and adapters are
not so much possible origins as they are components of a systemic environment. Thus,
while we can point to Suzuki as author of the Ring novels and progenitor of the whole
host of Ring-related textual adaptations, his role, from the perspective of the viral model,
is only a part within a complex system of inﬂuences, of ideas, narratives, and inspirations
that came before. Similarly, the viral video may trace back to Sadako, but she can trace
her own sort of viral genealogies back in multiple causal directions, which the adaptations
after Ring also do. Edward Said observes in Beginnings: Intention and Method that
investigating texts critically also necessitates struggles with the very notion of network,
something always beyond individual creators; he writes:

To what extent is a text itself not something passively attributable, as

effect is to cause, to a person? To what extent is a text do discontinuous a

series of subtexts or pre-texts or paratexts or surtexts as to beggar the idea

of an author as simply producer? If the text as unitary document is more

properly judged as a transindividual ﬁeld of dispersion where does it

begin if not in a “creative” or “producing” individuality? (58)

Thus, given complex systems—such as epidemiological, psychological, or textual
systems—the process of making meaning depends on an epistemological web that relies
on but moves beyond individual creators. The “transindividual ﬁeld” poses challenges in

that we have difficulty understanding environmental networks without ascribing

individual, subject-centered agency.

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Moreover, adaptations, as texts that always gesture beyond themselves to some
other origin, problematize the issue of origins because, no matter who does the adapting,
that text’s producer is not the creator; in many senses, the outside, original text is, even if
the texts’ author is the same. Adaptation depends on the original text’s success, separate
and distinct from the author, within the textual network; the original text must ﬂourish to
some degree (sparking some creative inspiration or, often, sparking merely the hopes of
further proﬁt) in order for someone to undertake the process of textual adaptation. Thus,
an adaptation is an investigation into the complex causes and origins found in the original
for the purposes of adapting them to another form, in order to create a new text that
ﬂourishes in its own right, just like Asakawa copying his own bootleg version of the
video. As Said, explains, however, this very concept of tracing back toward beginnings
and origins is engaging because of the difﬁculty (perhaps even impossibility) of utilizing
beginnings for meaning-making; he writes:

As a problem for study, “beginnings” are attractive, ﬁrst of all, because

while one can isolate a beginning analytically, the notion of beginning

itself is practically tied up in a whole complex of relations. Thus between

the word beginning and the word origin lies a constantly changing system

of meanings, most of them of course making ﬁrst one then the other word

convey greater priority, importance, explanatory power. (5—6, emphases in

original)

Many narratives directly or indirectly focus a return to a beginning—or at least the idea of
a beginning—to provide “explanatory power,” solving mysteries or uncovering secrets.

But the “whole complex of relations” involved in “the notion of beginning itself" applies
to the process of adaptation between and among narratives as well, given that, much like

the transmittable affect of the trauma-inducing videotape, the process of moving from one

textual form to another involves a more complicated process than what a preliminary

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investigation might indicate.

Textual adaptation requires interpretation. The creative investigation of the
original text allows the text to be transformed and prOliferated, but, like Asakawa and the
videotape, the adapter must know how such proliferation is performed. The viral model’s
limitations are that, on the theoretical level of the system, there is no sense of agency, no
interpretation need take place; the form is simply copied and watched, copied and
watched. According to Dawkins and Brodie’s conception of the mind virus notion,
individuals absorb and pass on memes without much active intervention. This conception
allows little room for alternate interpretations—~which is why such virality works in
explicating the Ring-related texts, dependent as they are on subjects watching a video
passively and arriving at a uniform “reading”——but does it still have merit as an
explanatory system for adaptation? The viral model illustrates how texts pass from one
form to another with a seeming transparency while also allowing Critics to expose that
such a viral passage assumes a kind of blanket interpretation on the part of its audiences’
reception. In other words, adaptations seem to ﬂow forth as a function of a successful
origin text, but such simplicity of transference is part of an illusion on the part of textual
producers for consumers to take in along with the texts themselves.

In the Ring-related texts, there is only one interpretation of the video; one must
follow its rules or die. The character of Noah in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring remarks,
after watching the tape at Rachel’s insistence, that the frightening video “was very student
ﬁlm,” adding after Rachel’s frustration, “I’m sure it’s a lot scarier at night.” Regardless
of Noah’s criticism—an interpretation that the videotape is not scary—the viral tape still

kills him when he does not make a copy. Likewise, through Verbinski’s adaptation for

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American audiences, there is also a seeming transparency; the American version is an
adaptive interpretation that brings the text to a new setting, where, as studio producers
anticipated, the cultural reception was similar to the success the earlier ﬁlm had in Japan.
While such a conservative conception as the viral model allows little room for ﬂuidity in
reception, interpretation, or adaptation, this viral pattern of transplanting one successful
text to another form—~of replicating “what works” while minimizing divergence—~43 the
most prevalent type of adaptation. Just as the videotape in Ring yields the same results no
matter who watches it (including Asakawa’s preliterate son), producers and adapters
typically assume that the process of adaptation is more about ﬁdelity than change,
exposing a new population to a similar product in hope of creating a similar outcome.

In terms of narrative interpretation, though, reception is hardly uniform.
Individuals’ critical comments could come from any number of perspectives. So, while
meme theorists may formulate textual transmission as paralleling viral spread, there are
explanatory gaps because adaptation and interpretation are neither transparent nor
absolute. As with the teens in Ring, reception and meaning-making allow texts’ readers
to map new signiﬁcance onto a text, whether metaphorically through interpretation or
literally through alteration to the material form. Likewise, in the case of the ring
videotape’s replication and proliferation, textual transmissions function both
metaphorically within the text (as the viral video’s distribution provides the novel’s
central drive) and literally outside of the text (as the novel has spawned several material
adaptations through movies, sequels, and remakes). This cross-cultural transference of
the fear-inspiring media virus takes Koji Suzuki’s textual anxieties about technology—

and the bootlegging metaphor that complicates them—and projects the ring of exposure

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outward to ever-expanding viral radii, performing an imitation of bootleg reproduction of

its own.

4. The Ring Pandemic

One primary difﬁculty in analyzing texts according to the viral model is that the
model’s parameters reconﬁgure many common conceptions about texts. For example, the
information—the code—of Sadako’s viral video, to the extent we can even ascribe it with
a sense of ownership now that it relies on the next generation of virus carriers, is not
singular. That viral code, as the prankster teens demonstrate, is highly malleable, capable
of mutating to the point where it no longer resembles the earlier generations’ versions;
and, due both to the problematic tracings of origin and to the multiple adaptive iterations,
the code is inherently plural. Such information is distributed, enduring as a fractious
multiplicity; none of the versions is complete unto itself. Likewise, Suzuki’s Ring can no
longer exist as an individual text; analyzing the novel invites analysis of the outward-
spiraling radii of texts that the novel generated. Ring now “lives” only as a scattering,
since it is also a part of the forms of Spiral, Loop, Ringu, Rasen, Ringu 2, Ring 0.:
Birthday, The Ring Virus, The Ring, The Ring Two, assorted short stories of Suzuki’s that
harken back to the imagined past before Ring, the graphic novels, the videogame version,
and the numerous spoofs, references, homages, and marketing-related media. We may
conceive of the textual virus contained in Ring as being the original, but that brand of
thinking overlooks the plurality of its existence, as elucidated above. Like the videotape
virus within the text, there is no singular strain we can point to as the source, and that

limited mode of thinking disregards the potency of the texts’ being as simultaneously

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outward to ever-expanding viral radii, performing an imitation of bootleg reproduction of

its own.

4. The Ring Pandemic

One primary difﬁculty in analyzing texts according to the viral model is that the
model’s parameters reconﬁgure many common conceptions about texts. For example, the
information—~the code-—-of Sadako’s viral video, to the extent we can even ascribe it with
a sense of ownership now that it relies on the next generation of virus carriers, is not
singular. That viral code, as the prankster teens demonstrate, is highly malleable, capable
of mutating to the point where it no longer resembles the earlier generations’ versions;
and, due both to the problematic tracings of origin and to the multiple adaptive iterations,
the code is inherently plural. Such information is distributed, enduring as a fractious
multiplicity; none of the versions is complete unto itself. Likewise, Suzuki’s Ring can no
longer exist as an individual text; analyzing the novel invites analysis of the outward-
spiraling radii of texts that the novel generated. Ring now “lives” only as a scattering,
since it is also a part of the forms of Spiral, Loop, Ringu, Rasen, Ringu 2, Ring 0:
Birthday, The Ring Virus, The Ring, The Ring Two, assorted short stories of Suzuki’s that
harken back to the imagined past before Ring, the graphic novels, the videogame version,
and the numerous spoofs, references, homages, and marketing—related media. We may
conceive of the textual virus contained in Ring as being the original, but that brand of
thinking overlooks the plurality of its existence, as elucidated above. Like the videotape
virus within the text, there is no singular strain we can point to as the source, and that

limited mode of thinking disregards the potency of the texts’ being as simultaneously

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distributed, both culturally and materially.

Moreover, when we examine the Ring-related phenomena, the apparent origin of
Ring as a text draws parallels (possibly serving as multiple points of originary inspiration)
from such texts as David Cronenberg’s movie Videodrome, Christopher Fowler’s novel
Rune, and, perhaps most obviously of all, Japanese folklore. Not only does the text spiral
backwards in time from its publication date, the existence of Ring, like any virus, spreads
through the plural; by virtue of its publication, the text manifested itself materially as an
explosive memetic phenomenon. Like Sadako’s videotape, this information could not
spread fast enough—or proﬁtably enough—in a singular form, which is why producers
distribute as many copies as they think will rake in sales. Although when discussing
novels or movies we usually say “I read that, too,” or “I saw that, too,” when almost
always mean that we, too, have been exposed to a different copy, existing in a separate
and distinct material space though most often technically the same, in terms of narrative.

In Spiral, Koji Suzuki’s sequel to Ring, the author grapples with just such a
plurality to the threat within the text, as does his anti-heroic protagonist Ando. The
storyline of Spiral picks up almost exactly where Ring left off; Asakawa is driving with
his wife and child to dub a new copy of the tape and save their lives when he crashes the
car. Ando, as the local forensic pathologist, encounters the same anomalies in the
patterns of death that Asakawa found with his niece and her teenage friends, only he
scrutinizes the phenomenon with the help of the hospital’s microscopes, employing
empirical medical science rather than Asakawa’s investigative reporting tactics. Spiral
occasionally fudges the scientiﬁc accuracy of its microbiology and forensic pathology,

covering a few plot holes with the blanket of the supernatural by attributing certain

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impossibilities to “Sadako’s extraordinary power,” but Ando’s application of the
scientiﬁc method is fairly accurate and consistent (129). Ando notices that the sarcomas
he discovers in the corpses of those infected by the videotape virus bear similarities to the
smallpox virus, and he races to prevent a global smallpox pandemic, slowly uncovering
the connections between the virus, the video, and Sadako Yamamura. Eventually, he

pieces together the nature of the curse:

Ando looked again at the photos of the ring virus. Vast numbers of
them, piled on one another. When several specimens overlapped, they
looked like unspooled, tangled-up videotape. The psychic Sadako

Yamamura, on the brink of death, had converted information into images,

leaving some sort of energy at the bottom of that well. The video had been

born as a result of the detonation of that energy. It wasn’t matter that was

spreading, but information, as recorded on videotape and DNA. (204)
As Ando crystallizes the information he has assembled about the deaths of the virus-
infected victims, he realizes that the culprit is “some sort of energy,” which has been
transmuted into “information, as recorded on videotape and DNA.” With time, Ando
traces the videotapes down, ﬁnding that, with the deaths of their victims, the virus ought
to be extinct. But, as he exposes the pathological roots of the tape in another search for
origins, Ando ﬁnds that the virus can survive through mutating, through evolving into
forms even more plastic than video. Thus, in a new way, the threat is multiple, even at its
source.

These multiple origins, however, do not keep the virus from mutating into other
media forms, much like the ﬁrst novel began its outward spiral in leaping from print to
ﬁlm. In the course of Spiral ’s narrative, Ando discovers that Asakawa’s reportage, stored

in ﬁles on a disk, describe the videotape’s bizarre sequences so accurately as to recreate

their experience for the reader literally, “interpreting” the experience so effectively as to

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recreate it. Using this high—ﬁdelity writing (which leaves out the possibility for
misinterpretation), the virus jumps from video to print in order to make fresh victims out
of readers. After Asakawa dies, his greedy brother transforms the joumalist’s reportage

into a (very familiar-sounding) horror novel, reshaping the events as ﬁction or, in this

case, meta-ﬁction. Ando discusses the implications of this media spread with Ryuji, who,

thanks to Sadako’s power, is resurrected as a clone to reprise his role as devil’s advocate

from the previous novel. Their dialogue is grimly self-reﬂexive:

“Ring’s sold over a million copies.”
“A million-seller, huh?” Ando already knew this. He’d seen it in

newspapers. The book had already been through several reprints, a fact
that was trumpeted in its marketing. But every time Ando saw the word
“reprint” it made him think “replication.” Ring had been able to effect a
near-instantaneous mass reproduction of itself. There were now more than

a million people carrying the virus.
“They’re even making it into a movie.”

“A movie? Ring?”
“Mm-hmm. They cast the part of Sadako through an open casting

call.”
“An open casting call?” Ando found himself reduced to repeating

after Ryuji.
The resurrected man broke into laughter. “That’s right, an open

casting call. And who do you think nailed the part of Sadako?”
Ando didn’t keep up on show-business news. “Tell me,” he said.

How was he to know who’s passed the audition?
Ryuji was almost doubled over with laughter. “Don’t be such a

dullard. You know her quite well.”
“Sadako. . .herself?” (275)

In this somewhat goofy and ironic fashion, the ring virus’s unfurling narrative parallels
the memetic journey of its own literary source material. It may be frightening to think of
a deadly virus as somehow beyond containment, beyond media quarantine, but that
frightening feat would be impossible without the parasitic human element within the

various media industries who beneﬁt from selling this diseased product to the masses.

“7

 

 

 

The individuals who help the virus are as scary if not scarier than the virus itself, even
when the part they play is unintentional.

While those who pass the videotape on engage in a kind of metaphorical rape,
Spiral’s mutated version of the virus literalizes its predecessor’s central menace by
multiplying and inserting its genetic information into its female viewer victims’
unfertilized eggs, performing a bizarre rape from within as each attacking virus contains a
segment of Sadako’s DNA. The victims then speed through an accelerated pregnancy——
fast-forwarded to ﬁt the viral video’s seven-day deadline—and give birth to a Sadako
clone, who emerges as asexual yet now ready to reproduce, yet another virus analog. The
endpoint of this relentless attack on humanity will lead to the loss of genetic diversity as
more and more people “watch” the tape—audiences dying or becoming impregnated or
helping spread the tape’s code at exponential rates—allowing Sadako to breed with the
media to snuff out humankind. Ryuji explains it all to Ando, saying:

“Just think how huge the media industry is, and how many people in it

have already been in contact with the virus. Even if Ring itself is

destroyed, the media is going to be transformed by people who have

contracted the ring virus. Just as that videotape mutated into a book, it’s

going to get into every stream: music, video games, computer networks.

New media will cross-breed with Sadako and produce more new media,

and every ovulating woman who comes in contact with them will give

birth to Sadako.” (276)

While this totalizing and apocalyptic spin on the ﬁrst book follows a central kind of viral
pattern to its logical conclusion, it also manages to produce a corny extremism that feels
more like laughable B-movie material than something that taps into an audience’s primal

fears.

Japanese moviegoers agreed. When Ring was adapted into a movie titled Ringu,

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audiences loved it.5 The movie departed from the novel, but not to such an extent that
most of the book’s fans would mind too much, holding true to the viral model of
adaptation. Asakawa was changed from a male reporter to a female one; Sadako was
changed from an adult hermaphrodite to a little girl; and Ryuji was changed from
Asakawa’s boyhood friend who is secretly a virgin and teaches as a bitter philosophy
instructor to Asakawa’s former lover who is secretly the father of Asakawa’s child and
teaches as a womanizing video production instructor. While such gender—bending textual
changes may seem unusual, they follow typical horror conventions to have a female
protagonist to play the role Carol Clover titles “the ﬁnal girl,” and, as mentioned above,
audiences loved this narrative’s viral recombination and adaptation of the novel. On the
other hand, Spiral’s movie adaptation—titled Rasen—was panned by audiences and
critics alike. The mutation could not thrive and so went extinct. Like Spiral, Rasen
killed off Ringu’s characters, offering instead a bizarre science ﬁCtion villain and an
equally bizarre forensic pathologist protagonist. Ringu loses Suzuki’s hermaphrodite
angle and never mentions a virus, whereas Rasen seems to revel in clinical details such as
these. Ringu 2 was the solution, giving audiences more of the same characters they had
enjoyed before, continuing the storyline more “faithfully” from where it left off. This
version is “faithful” at least in the sense that the same characters continue the same
conﬂict from the ﬁrst movie, although this choice violates the internal narrative logic—of
infection, replication, and immunity—established in the ﬁrst movie.

Since Asakawa has already confronted the viral video, unlocked the nature of its

code, there is really no possibility for any additional encounters or adventures, according

 

5 . . . , . . ._, . . . . . .
For srmplrcrty s sake. 1 Will rcler to Suzuki 3 books as Ring and Spiral, while calling their corresponding

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to typical narrative conventions anyhow. Ringu 2 solves this problem with a fairly
artiﬁcial extension that abandons both the videotape and the viral infection it transmits,
grafting on dopey family drama as the spirit of Sadako begins to possess Asakawa’s child,
leading to the climactic moment when Asakawa must kill the child in order to save it.
The American version, The Ring Two, replicates the cinematic storyline and basic feel—-
even keeping the same director, Hideo Nakata—for another trip to the well, so to speak.
And, while Ringu 2 and The Ring Two were not lauded with as much praise as their
predecessor movies, neither was as viliﬁed as Rasen. The narrative in Spiral (and thus
Rasen) mutates the virus for a different cast of characters to discover and investigate, with
the narrative ending as the apocalypse approaches; the narrative in Ringu 2 (and thus The
Ring Two) extends the conﬂict between Asakawa and Sadako (or their counterparts
Rachel and Samara) separate and distinct from the viral framework of the video curse,
ending with goodness and life triumphing over evil and death, at least for now. At the
end, both strains of the narrative seem to have more or less hit dead ends in terms of their
potential to generate further narratives beyond the boundaries established at their endings.
Of course, as many movie franchises have demonstrated, the end never necessarily needs
to be the end. As Isabel Cristina Pinedo notes: “violating narrative closure has become de
rigueur for the postmodern genre. The ﬁlm may come to an end, but it is an open ending”
(29). Extending the narrative either in the direction of further viral complications (the
Spiral route) or in the direction of further conﬂict with Sadako/Samara (the Ringu 2
route) is a fairly elementary exercise, despite these narratives appearing to have more

complete closure than the average postmodern horror genre exercise. Thus far, the only

 

movies Ringu and Rasen, even though the titles translate as the same words.

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follow-up narrative we have does not quite go in either of these direction; rather, the
narrative cyclically twists back in on itself in Koji Suzuki’s Loop.

In Loop, Suzuki cheats. He utilizes a narrative escape hatch for the apocalyptic
corner he has written himself into through evoking virtual reality, mutating his video
virus into a computer virus. Although the plot of Loop, like those of Ring and Spiral, is
somewhat resistant to summary, the events center around a character named Kaoru, who
lives in a world gripped by the ever-spreading Metastatic Human Cancer virus, which
spreads like HIV through the population even as it spreads cancer cells in the host body
faster than surgeons can cut them out. Worse still, the virus has adapted to other life
forms, threatening to destroy all life on Earth. Early in the novel, Kaoru falls in love with
a young mother who has the MHC virus—her son, who is further along with his MHC
infection, is being treated in the hospital where Kaoru works—and the tragic couple
eventually have sex (oddly enough on the little boy’s hospital bed while he is gone for
treatments and they have some time alone), guaranteeing the virus’s transmission into
Kaoru’s system. Now, like the previous two Suzuki books, the protagonist has a viral
deadline to beat; he must ﬁgure out how to beat the virus before it can claim his life or
the life of his newfound love (the boy conveniently commits suicide). Kaoru follows
some convoluted clues to the American Southwest, and, long novel short, he uncovers an
underground virtual reality center named the Loop that has been simulating artiﬁcial life
for decades and studying the resulting data patterns that emerge, including details on the
artiﬁcial constructs of entities such as Asakawa, Ryuji, and Sadako. The video virus,
which, up until this point, might have been supernatural but was always “real” now

becomes “virtually real” as a computer virus that managed to escape the computer

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program when a large chunk of data was exported. Kaoru discovers that he brought the
ring virus out into the “real” world when his consciousness was extracted from the virtual
reality program and given human form; he is the reincarnation of the virtual reality
character of Ryuji. The reason Ryuji was capable of returning from the dead in Spiral
was not that he was a villain; he was trying to help mankind by re—entering the program to
extract the virus’s pure form for the Loop team to study it and effect a cure to save the
world.

The ring virus, no matter what form of transmission it takes, relies on the
uniformity of interpretation discussed above; the viral model of adaptation applies here
because, no matter how the virus adapts to new vehicles and environments, it yields the
same results in textual recipients. This third installment of the Ring series is deﬁnitely
the most hare—brained, but its kooky plot retains the viral threat through technology. And,
unlike the previous books and movies, Loop manages to sidestep'some of the former
texts’ narrative limitations. While Kaoru travels through plot holes as easily as he travels
through virtual reality rabbit holes, his existence in textual form proves that the world still
allows for more horizontal transmission of the viral products of Ring as a generative
source. Suzuki’s original novel continues to spawn mutated viral offshoots of narrative
because consumers have proven themselves to be still susceptible; the media virus will

not succumb to extinction until its popularity is no longer proﬁtable.

5. Nostalgia for Impossible Origins, Preparations for an Impossible Future
Throughout all of Suzuki’s books—as well as most of the movies based on them

or derived from them—there is a constant striving backward to an origin that proves to be

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either impossible or somehow unsatisfactory; likewise, their endings gesture toward
futures that make narrative almost impossible by destroying humanity. The Ring Virus,
the Korean movie version of Ring (and also the novel’s most exact replication in adapted
form), ends with Sun—joo—Asakawa’s female, Korean counterpart—~driving under a sky
roiling with dark clouds that cast thick, ominous shadows over the landscape, implying
that her choices may destroy an unsuspecting world. But, really, whether the story ends
with the looming apocalypse or the global restoration of health, exploring the next step,
besides representing a radical shift in tone and characterization, would not likely prove
provocative for a narrative; these are endings.

Although these texts seem to achieve closure, they still adapt in new forms,
though with mixed success. For example, after directing Ringu 2, Hideo Nakata shot a
prequel called Ring 0 based on one of Suzuki’s short stories, and even the title itself
signals an impossible return to a mythic originary source, hitting the narrative zero. The
storyline focuses on an adult Sadako protagonist who struggles in an amateur acting
troupe whose members keep mysteriously dying at the hands of a long-haired young girl
who looks exactly like the Sadako fans recognize from the other two movies; Sadako
investigates the phenomenon, only to discover that, when she was younger, her father
somehow split her into two so as to contain her evil and prevent it from growing through
administering drugs, making Sadako her own evil twin and ramming abandoned well-
sized plot holes into the larger narrative while clarifying nothing. In adopting this
narrative concentration, Ring 0 obsessively mutates and recreates Sadako’s origins, giving

her multiple origins another divergent thread. The events in Loop, on the other hand,

extend the possibilities from the impossible past of Ring 0 to an impossible future

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instead, one where the history established in the ﬁrst two books is ﬁctional even to
Loop’s ﬁctional inhabitants. Loop demonstrates through its infected virtual reality the
(im)possibility to loop back to a time before the virus was unleashed, replacing horror
(which focuses on portraying the everyday juxtaposed with something uncanny and
terrifying) with the pre-stretched feasibility of science ﬁction (which allows for the
Mobius strips of possibilities found in the virtual realities of Loop).

To keep earning proﬁts, Suzuki must keep proliferating mutations of his viral
narrative franchise, aiming for Dennett’s “potential” immortality. Thus, Suzuki
propagates his viral narratives pathologically, the texts feeding off social anxieties about
diseases such as AIDS and cancer. Suzuki appears aware of his role as the biohazard
bogeyman, as Loop explores the potential immortality of both cancer and virus forms:

Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas

cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a ﬂat,

orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional,

disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of

times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.

Immortality.
Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immortality, the
object of man’s deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the

possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men. (65)

If Kaoru understands the irony of cancer’s immortality, so too does Suzuki, who, in
mutating his viral threat to graft onto cultural anxieties about carcinogens, seeks to
reverse various epidemics’ parasitism in his favor; his texts aim to override the “natural
limit,” seeking to “go on dividing forever,” as those involved with the promotion of a
series secretly hopes. In other words, Suzuki wants his texts to have just a fraction of the

global fame attained by AIDS or cancer.

The unfortunate result of these reproductions on Suzuki’s part, however, is the

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same fate as that which ensues from the incessant duplicating of the viral video itself:
deterioration of quality. Despite Suzuki updating the video virus as a computer virus,
Loop is still a copy of a copy. I am not suggesting that sequels are never successful;
instead, the implications here are that by constantly trying to reproduce an innovative idea
through cloning and re—cloning its formula to bring it “back from the dead,” much of the
original innovation is lost. The basic genetic metaphor of the viral model becomes
muddled at this point because it is difﬁcult to quantify elements of fresh creativity. We
might suggest reversing this genetically modiﬁed inbreeding by injecting Suzuki’s series
with new blood, but what exactly would that be in this case? From a critical perspective,
continually reproducing the genetic makeup of the original text feels decidedly inferior;
from the perspective of meme theory, the texts’ popularity observes the law of
diminishing returns over time. Not long after positing the concept of the meme in The
Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins ﬂeshes out the limits of genetic and memetic immortality:

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and

memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes.

But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations Our genes

may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound

to crumble away We should not seek immortality in reproduction.

But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good

idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, it may live on,

intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. (199,

italics in original)
Clearly, Suzuki’s work has “contribute[d] to the world’s culture,” but his novels—as well
as the other associated media they inspired—are unlikely to achieve cultural immortality,
mostly because the texts are linked to a technology that appears to be fading away.

As video is transferring into obsolescence as a medium, the scare factor behind

the Ring texts, which revolve around video, become less and less everyday and more and

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more quaintly antiquated. Given that all of the video games, movies, graphic novels, and
novels rely directly or indirectly on video, even when they are transferred to DVD and
even though video as a medium has fallen into disuse, these texts indulge in a form of
what Laura Marks calls “analog nostalgia.” As Marks notes in Touch: Sensuous Theory
and Multisensory Media: “Paradoxically, the age of so—called virtual media has hastened
the desire for indexicality Among digital videornakers, one of the manifestations of the
desire for indexicality is what I call analog nostalgia, a retrospective fondness for the
‘problems’ of decay and generational loss that analog video posed” (152). Once again,
even in the texts’ concerns over material form, there is a sense that they are gesturing ever
backwards, using this “analog nostalgia,” to evoke a now-impossible past of all-analog
origins (we cannot go back to an exclusive video culture), while also indicating an
impossible future (we will never have an all-digital, analog-free culture). This mourning
of a perishable past, a nostalgia for “‘problems’ of decay and generational loss,” lies at
the heart of Suzuki’s leap outward with the diegesis of L00p; his narrative can no longer
hinge on video technology if it is to remain current with readers.

Other texts in Ring’s string of viral vectors make similar signals toward the now—
outdated status of a threat carried on videotape. On the DVD version of Gore Verbinski’s
The Ring, analog features bleed into the digital. Suggestively, hissing static and blurry
tracking lines buzz onto the standard warning screen about federal laws prohibiting the
illicit reproduction of the following movie, as though the videotape’s elements could
somehow bootleg themselves into a digital transfer. Such distorting effects are the result
of videotape demagnetizing, and, as such, will never plague deteriorating digital video in

exactly the same fashion. The fact that these crackles cover the federal prohibition in part

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indicate the following narrative’s obsessions with illicit reproduction, while also snapping
the viewer out of the lull normally associated with the dull federal warnings, the scratches
performing an Althusserian hailing of the bootlegging subject. But, although this
momentary static smudge might expose certain subversive, underlying afﬁnities with
“bootleg aesthetics,” its effect in the end is to reinforce the federal warning since, as I
discussed earlier, the logic of the narrative mostly opposes bootlegging, associating it
with the spread of irresponsibility, disease, and, ultimately, death.

After the tracking glitches during the federal warning, the DVD then proceeds to
the DreamWorks logo, presenting more hisses and hitches, even a ﬂickering image of the
moon in the logo forming the ﬁrst of the movie’s many ring-based images, a threatening
cue that, like the characters, perhaps we are about to die for having seen the ring. This
visual in-reference works best only with those viewers who are already familiar with The
King’s narrative to catch on to this almost subliminal insertion, a gesture to a kind of
impossible origin. After all, there is the possibility that viewers recognize the ring image
from the movie’s marketing or the previous Japanese or Korean incarnations, but, then
the logic of the “scare” is reversed; if viewers have already “seen the ring,” they know it
is not fatal. Likewise, this opening depicts an omen for an impossible future, one wherein
those who see the ring eventually die as a result. Beginning the movie with this
dissonant, paradoxical reference replicates the viral logic behind the movie’s source
material without openly stating it: The virus’s past is unknowable, mired as it is in the
analog, and the extension of its totalizing future, wherein the virus has succeeded

absolutely and destroyed humanity, is similarly unknowable to any human eyewitnesses.

127

This video—style decay, right at the opening, the ﬂoating moment of the movie that
exists before the movie, gestures toward a past as well as a future mired in death,
illustrating how the medium of video itself is suffering and dying as a result. As Laura
Marks notes in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses:

Both ﬁlm and video become more haptic as they die. Every time
we watch a ﬁlm, we witness its gradual decay: another scratch, more
fading as it is exposed to the light, and chemical deterioration, especially
with color ﬁlm. Video decays more rapidly than ﬁlm, quickly becoming a

trace, a lingering aroma with few visual referents remaining. As the tape

demagnetizes, lines drop out, and in analog video color becomes distorted.
(172)

In this passage, given that it explicates video’s “gradual decay,” Marks posits that works
on ﬁlm and video are inherently about becoming “more haptic as they die,” even when
they do not signify such messages directly. The Ring, however, features a representation
of such deterioration in a medium that breaks down in completely different fashion,
gesturing back to a time when the movie’s central threat——videotape-—-—was the dominant
medium, a moment that has already passed by virtue of the fact that the movie itself
appears in digital. Thus, through The Ring, the viral videotape is doubly fetishized, in the
senses of both Freud and Marx, even before the movie proper begins; there is a perverse,
sexualized quality about the tape’s capacity for reproduction, as well as a
commodiﬁcation of sorts that stems back to analog nostalgia.

Because The Ring was released when it was as a viral adaptation, it positions itself
in the transitional space between analog and digital, much like the problematic
representation of the virus. As a form, viruses are difﬁcult to characterize, let alone
analogize or narrativize; they do not ﬁt into the binaristic logic of the digital (alive or

dead?), nor do they conform to the format of the analog (what are they analogs of, besides

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themselves?), and, though they seem to have strategies in their mutations or
disseminations, they seem to function only as empty form. Despite this blank echoing of
signiﬁcation at the core of the central viral metaphor in the Ring series, the texts do
implicitly posit the superiority of the analog over the digital, though not in absolute terms.
Instead, the texts indicate the ever-changing ﬂux that distinguishes the relationship
between analog and digital, as explored by Brian Massumi in a chapter of Parables for
the Virtual titled “On the Superiority of the Analog,” where he writes that:
The “superiority of the analog” over the digital alluded to in the

title does not contradict this closing call to think the two together. It refers

to the fact that the paths of their co-operation—transformative integration,

translation, and relay—are themselves analog operations. There is always

an excess of the analog over the digital, because it perpetually fringes,

synesthetically dopplers, umbilically backgrounds, and insensibly recedes

to a virtual center immanent at every point along the path—all in the same

contortionist motion. It is most twisted. The analog and the digital must

be thought together, asymmetrically. Because the analog is always a fold
ahead. (143)

Given the perspective of Massumi’s formulation, the impossible future nearly every entry
into the viral matrix depicts, even at its most bleak, must rely on the analog. Even when
Suzuki hypothesizes the apocalyptic end of global humanity in Spiral, he still returns to
the analog, paradoxically, through the digital system found in Loop, where the virtual
environment (and its infestation by a computer virus) “perpetually fringes, synesthetically
dopplers, umbilically backgrounds, and insensibly recedes to a virtual center immanent at
every point along the path.”

It is precisely because the Metastatic Human Cancer virus—which originates from
the Sadako computer virus, which is itself mysteriously free from origins in that nobody

knows who created it—appropriately enough for a viral extension of previous texts, ﬁnds

 

 

a way to bleed from one reality into another, infecting wider and wider rings. Even in
Suzuki’s imagined, impossible future, the digital and analog must enter a dialogue
wherein the two are “thought together, asymmetrically.” Moreover, as Massumi also

writes:

Certainly, if there is one day a directly virtual digitality, it will have

become that by integrating the analog into itself (biomuscular robots and

the like), by translating itself into the analog (neural nets and other

evolutionary systems), or again by multiplying and intensifying its relays

into and out of the analog (ubiquitous computing). The potential for this

becoming of the digital is missed as long as the relationship between the

digital and the analog is construed in mutually exclusive terms, as if one

entirely replaced the other. (142-3)
This interdependent evolution of digital and analog, operating in both Suzuki and
Massumi’s work, relies on the continuing interaction between the two conceptions,
which, as Massumi notes, are not mutually exclusive terms. Thus, “analog nostalgia” is
still a function of analog, a mourning that cannot take place in a solely digital landscape.

With this interactive context between analog and digital, the virus form within the
texts’ metaphors performs a kind of disruption; the viral does not ﬁt, slipping past the
quarantining barriers of conceptualization to erupt and infect elsewhere, making the
narrativization of both its absolute past and absolute future impossible. The textual
anxieties about technology and media focalize on the possibilities of viruses to defeat our
defenses, carrying an affect of malice that both isolates social subjects and connects them
in a ring of transferred infection. It is thus ﬁtting that the viral narrative should spread
across international borders like an pandemic. When Hollywood adapts foreign ﬁlms for

the purposes of remaking them into a more palatable form for American audiences, this

cross-cultural transfer normally bears the mark of cultural imperialism; but, while The

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Ring still smacks of American hegemonic domination, the transfer here also signiﬁes
Hollywood’s welcoming desire to spread fatal disease, at least on the metaphorical level.
And, although this viral adaptation was hardly viewed as malevolent by the excited
American consumers buying into the phenomenon wholeheartedly, the marketing styles

and strategies similarly adapted themselves to patterns of virality.

6. Viruses for Sale

For the latest installment in the procession of Ring—based books, movies, sequels,
and remakes—~the American movie The Ring Two—DreamWorks created a multi-faceted
marketing campaign wherein certain inﬂuential individuals were sent videotapes to
promote the upcoming movie. Such promotions are not unusual, but the method of this
campaign was: rather than sending the tapes to reviewers to woo kind words, these tapes
went to several people not overtly afﬁliated with publications but who would be likely to
spread the word. This video was an unmarked, unlabeled tape containing the mutated
video virus featured in the second movie. The video contains a series of disturbing
images and sounds (which, true to the logic of movie sequels, are both new and yet
somehow familiar), and they culminate in an image of a young woman crawling out of a
well, followed by loud static, indicating the end of the tape.

The tape, of course, does not cut off there; a website ﬂashes onto the screen,
providing viewers with a gameplan of what to do next. Despite this video, as well as the
movie it promotes, being several degrees removed from Suzuki’s novel, it recreates the
recreated aura of the commercial cutting off the instructions. This commercial is not

selected from television broadcasts, but it is a commercial nonetheless, pulling viewers

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out of the diegesis of the spooky, unnerving succession of images quite suddenly. If the
previous minute and a half of footage was confusing or alien, this ﬂash of the web
address clearly revorients viewers into a commercial framework. This tape is a
promotion, but, like the teens in Ring who record a commercial over the instructions to
avoid death, the aura is one of a malicious prank. Viewers have been tricked, and the
commercial has crept into their consciousness so covertly that they might not recognize
the role they play in the infectious hype. But the logic of this marketing campaign is such
that, by appealing to ground—level consumers instead of just reviewers, word of mouth
will move the marketing campaign along because the design represents a departure from
traditional advertising.

The implication here is not that media-savvy consumers are more or less
susceptible to marketing campaigns in general; instead, the idea is that a unique campaign
will breach their “defenses” against the traditions of corporate marketing departments. In
an essay titled “The Evolution of the Meme,” Kevin N. Laland and John Odling—Smee
explore how subjects screen out parts of the daily barrage of information to focus on that
which interests them; they write:

What determines whether a meme will spread? For Dawkins (1976),

memes, like all replicators, spread if they have ﬁdelity, fecundity, and

longevity. In memetic discussions, each of these properties is usually

treated as if it is an intrinsic characteristic of the meme In spite of an

explicit analogy between memes and viruses (Dawkins 1976), memetics as

a discipline has tended to concentrate almost exclusively on
‘infectiousness’ as the factor most responsible for why memes spread.
However, the success of a virus depends not only on its iry’ectiousness, but
also on the susceptibility of its hosts, and on whether the social

environment promotes contact between hosts. (134)

When discussing a text’s power to latch onto consciousness, some discussion of

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“infectiousness” instead of “the susceptibility of its hosts” indulges in an either/or debate
akin to pondering the chicken or the egg, but these adaptive marketing messages are more
infectious because they are aimed at susceptible hosts: everyday consumers. Moreover,
“the social environment promotes contact between hosts” because the consumers’ peers
have similarly low barriers.

Although watching this tape—according to the logic established for American
audiences in The Ring—means certain death within seven days, receipt of the tape is
ﬂattery: this viewer has been deemed someone both hip and trustworthy to pass on the
message about the new movie. The implicit promise is that The Ring Two will be just as
trippy and fun and cool and scary as the anonymous tape, but the studio also implicitly
recognizes that none of these adjectives would apply if the studio itself applied them.

This campaign is designed for media-savvy consumers who recognize conventional

media promotion and respect deviations from it. The irony of this position, however, is
that the approach is essentially the same as other marketing campaigns, just with the twist
that the studio is aiming at the lower rungs of the hierarchy instead of just the reviewers.
This strategy, of course, mirrors not only other marketing campaigns (including the
marketing campaign for the ﬁrst American version, which included stacks of unlabeled
videotapes below a sign pleading “Watch these in seven days or I die”); it replicates the
pattern of distribution that the ring virus itself takes through its own video dissemination.

But the anonymous tape was just one facet of the promotional campaign. The
special promotional DVD copies of The Ring for sale just before the release of The Ring
Two also included a bonus publicity video, titled “Rings.” The content of this video,

much like the unnamed tape sent out to potential inﬂuential parties, similarly implies an

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underground community of those who are “in the know,” positing a group of young,
rebellious thrill-seekers who watch the ring videotape to see how long they can endure its
effects before caving in and exposing the tape to someone, else. These groups .form rings
of members to pass the tape along, the catch being that the last person in the ring has no
escape hatch and needs to start a new ring. The video is likened to a drug, and the
nightmarish hallucinations of the original American version—Gore Verbinski’s The
Ring—are thus just part of the trip. The implicit logic of the marketing campaign is that
creating a unique urban legend mythology will generate buzz through word-of—mouth
channels—or through word-of-mouse channels via the Internet (which features
prominently in “Rings”). In still another prong of the marketing campaign, DreamWorks
commissioned New Media Maze to construct a website for the international release of
The Ring Two, wherein users provided the e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers of
ﬁve of their friends; when the friends visited the site to watch a promotional video, their
cell phones would ring, and a raspy voice would whisper, “Seven days,” a reference that
those familiar with the storyline would recognize. From there, those who had been on the
receiving end of this cross-referential multimedia prank could enter their own contacts,
generating exponential buzz for the movie wherein the consumers were marketing to
themselves. Appropriately enough, this new arsenal of grass-roots tactics for media
publicity is known as viral marketing.

In what has proved to be the most proﬁtable (that is, best-selling) articulation of
viral marketing, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,

Malcolm Gladwell details how social behaviors parallel the patterns of epidemics.6

 

6 See also Viral Marketing: Get Your Audience to Do Your Marketing for You by Russell Goldsmith,

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Although Gladwell does not invoke the term “meme,” his metaphorical framework
mirrors the tropes of meme theorists. In describing his project, Gladwell states:

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple.

It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashions, trends, the

ebb and ﬂow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of

unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the

phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious

changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas

and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. (7)
Throughout the book, Gladwell utilizes this viral discourse to discuss how and why
certain trends succeed. While Gladwell does not bill himself as a viral marketing theorist,
viewing marketing texts as agents of contagion has spread infectiously, making Gladwell
a success through the same methods he analyzes. Although Gladwell writes about how to
apply his book’s tactics to such socially beneﬁcial ends as increasing literacy and curbing
teenage smoking, the book is shelved in the marketing section, indicating which readers
would beneﬁt from it the most and, thus, how sales of the book would beneﬁt the most.
Gladwell claims: “I wrote my book without any clear expectation of who would read it, or
what, if anything, it would be useful for. It seemed presumptuous to think otherwise”
(262). Fortunately for the supposedly ingenuous Gladwell, the marketing department at
Back Bay Books knew enough to market the book to marketers. As Gladwell illustrates
both directly and indirectly, the ﬁgurative models behind new conceptions of word-of-
mouth advertising rely on epidemic rhetoric, on thinking about how to pair maximize
exposure with concepts that break down their receivers’ resistance.

In essence, the idea behind this style of marketing is building a better virus, some

idea so captivating and contagious that it inhabits the consumer’s consciousness and

 

Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, and Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz, and Word of Month

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appropriates that individual communication channels for the purposes of disseminating
information about the service or product in question. Gladwell explains, however, that
consumers become skeptical when hyper-proliferation takes place. The key, then, to
successful viral marketing—much like the most successful model for proliferating a
virus—lies with manipulating subjects into transmitting the infectious agents either
without realizing the level of manipulation or without being able to resist. Gladwell calls
such resistance “immunity,” and he writes that:

Epidemics create networks as well: a virus moves from one person to

another, spreading through a community, and the more people a virus

infects, the more “powerful” the epidemic is. But this is also why

epidemics so often come to a crashing halt. Once you’ve had a particular

strain of the ﬂu, or the measles, you develop an immunity to it, and when

too many people get immunity to a particular virus, the epidemic comes to

an end. I think that when we talk about social epidemics, we give far too

little attention to the problems of immunity. (272-3)
In other words, the more pervasive marketing becomes in our everyday lives, the more
resistant we will all become to its various lures and threats. Consequently, viral
marketing posits that the best conduits for spreading information to consumers are their
social channels, as consumers believe these communication paths are uncorrupted. With
viral marketing, businesses try to outwit the increasingly savvy consumer who avoids
hype, but has weak spots in his or her social interactions. Of course, if Gladwell’s theory
holds true, eventually “immunity” will kick in, making consumers just as leery of word—
of—mouth hype as they are of shameless publicity and leading them to the society of
individuals who are increasingly frustrated and alienated by media technologies, much
like Suzuki depicts critically in Ring.

Revolution, edited by Justin Kirby and Paul Marsden.

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At the time of The Ring Two’s release, however, consumers seemed happy to play
along with the media marketers’ games, provided they view the process as a game, not as
a shrewd application of viral marketing. The New Media Maze campaign that combined
an Internet preview and the ominous cell phone message caught on because it facilitated a
frightening, fun game among friends. Like the teens in the original novel, in order for the
marketing campaign to work effectively, its target audience would want to interact in the
replication as a sort of forbidden prank. My claim here does not, of course, hold true for
all viral marketing (there are many successful campaigns that are mostly undisguised
pyramid schemes), but, in the case of promoting The Ring Two, the intended audiences—
cynical young media junkies—demanded a bit more sophistication to carry the advertised
message to their friends.

Dave Smith, the director of New Media Maze, explains the campaign’s logic:
“Once they’ve experienced the terror of the viral, we ‘reveal’ that in this instance it was
just a wind up by their friend, and invite them to spread the fear by entering the details of
ﬁve of their friends. In this way we create a viral effect”
(www.imediaconnection.com/content/6672.asp). The marketing of the movie thus
appropriates the same framework of systematic spread (and the latent paranoia about
media and technology) that the movie contains within its diegesis, adapted from its
predecessors all the way back to Koji Suzuki’s novel. Although consumer/participants
may have experienced “the terror of the viral,” most likely only a few of them appreciated
the multiplicity of this viral structure’s lineage.

The anxieties behind “the terror of the viral” lie at the core of Ring, and since the

viral spread of the narrative to other adaptations replicates the novel’s structure as well as

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its aura, the subsequent versions gesture toward similar apprehensions. And, though such
fears somewhat change their signiﬁcance as they shift from one cultural milieu to another,
they demonstrate that this pattern of media proliferation exists throughout this global
generational moment. In other words, the textual adaptations’ technophobia and
underlying media dread strike a chord with audiences as being relevant to this particular
moment in time. Within a few years—a single generation for the human species—the
media virus has transmitted itself horizontally, mimicking the kind of epidemic spread
that bioterrorist cells, media publishing empires, and marketing departments alike all
crave. The viral model is the common link that unites them. The numerous Ring—related
texts’ inherent fears of spreading the video virus all center on the effect it will have on the
global community; as Asakawa considers passing the video on in Ring, he thinks:

What eﬂect is this going to have? With my wife’s copy and my daughter’s
copy, this virus is going to be set free in two directions—how’s it going to
spread from there? He could imagine people making copies and passing
them on to people who’d already seen it before, trying to keep the thing
contained within a limited circle so it wouldn’t spread As the secret
traveled by word of mouth, it would be added to: “You have to show it to
someone who hasn’t seen it before.” And as the tape propagated the
week’s lag time would probably be shortened. People who were shown
the tape wouldn’t wait a week to make a copy and show it to someone
else. How far would this ring expand? People would be driven by an
instinctual fear of disease, and this pestilential videotape would no doubt
spread throughout society in the blink of an eye. And, driven by fear,
people would start to spread crazy rumors. Such as: Once you’ve seen it
you have to make at least two copies, and show them to at least two
diﬂerent people. It’d turn into a pyramid scheme, spreading incomparably
faster than it would just one tape at a time. In the space of half a year,
everybody in Japan would have become a carrier, and the infection would
spread overseas. (280-1, emphases in original)

Asakawa’s horrifying hypotheticals are the exact same global pattern of distribution

marketing departments could only hope for as they strive to create messages capable of

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“spread[ing] throughout society in the blink of an eye,” propelled by word-of-mouth
“tum[ed] into a pyramid scheme.” This virulent prOpagation is exactly what marketers
want, even utilizing a negatively charged discourse of pestilence and parasitism that
promotes consumers “experience[ing] the terror of the viral” and “invit[ing] them to
spread the fear.” Viewers might wind up scared by the content of these media viruses,
but few of them even consider the form, in which, if the viral marketing works, they will
play a direct role in disseminating themselves as carriers. True to the viral model, the
spread works best when interpretation is static and uniform.

The viral marketing campaigns of The Ring Two, however, represent only the
most recent phase of the phenomenon of viral adaptation started by Koji Suzuki’s Ring,
since the media lineage includes Suzuki’s two sequel novels, seven movies, a line of
graphic novels, and an American video game. Moreover, the viral marketing campaign
serves as a kind of microcosmic version of the patterns for cross-cultural viral media
dispersal that the other media adaptations and serializations form. This series of
adaptations, remakes, sequels, and prequels—as the media equivalent of a global
pandemic—parallels both the marketing campaign consciously adopted by executives as
well as the paradigms of distribution the viral videotape creates with each of the texts
themselves. This movement from within the text to extra-textual proliferation and
adaptation follows the model of viral contagion, moving from bodies to cultures.

This ﬁdelity of pattern repetition reﬂects Francesco Casetti’s theoretical analysis
of textual transformations in ﬁlm and literature titled “Adaptation and Mis-adaptations:
Film, Literature, and Social Discourses,” wherein he writes that:

[B]oth ﬁlm and literature can also be considered as sites of production and

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the circulation of discourses; that is, as symbolic constructions that refer

to a cluster of meanings that a society considers possible (thinkable) and

feasible (legitimate). Consequently, ﬁlm and literature are more revealing

of the ways in which subjects interact with each other as either addressers

or addressees, than of an author’s ability to express him or herself. (82,

italics in original)

The patterning in this passage is that texts create a discourse within themselves that
reﬂects the larger schema of the contexts in which they ﬁnd themselves. Thus, as the
appropriately named Cassetti explains, the video cassettes bearing Sadako’s curse project
themselves outward in the same ways that other media franchises do, through subjects
passing along their recommendations. Of course, Suzuki could only insert this pattern
into his own text; he could not guarantee in advance that his novel would have such
sweeping success. Moreover, Suzuki’s text—while being a part of “the media” itself, just
as the character of Asakawa is—seems to have a vested interest in merging the concept of
media saturation with a sort of unholy terror. Thus, in the fusion of fear and media
technologies, Suzuki appears to have a critical valence, reﬂecting a society obsessed with
ever—expanding media permeation, but, given the prevailing adaptations of Suzuki’s
work, the text reads not as a critical reﬂection of contemporary trends but as an uncritical
promotion of those trends in service of the narrative’s marketability.

As with the synaptic model of the previous chapter, the viral model allows for
certain forms of indirect address by authors through multiple generations of textual
iteration and adaptation; and, just like the contextual redeﬁnition of intentionality that
takes place with the works of Albert Einstein in the synaptic model (wherein Einstein’s

textual calculations, despite his paciﬁsm, are transformed into the possibilities of atomic

weapons and the Cold War), the viral model applies to Koji Suzuki’s work by redeﬁning

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his initial ideas through patterns of textual proliferation. As in the example above,
Suzuki criticizes the media although he manipulates contemporary anxieties to effect his
own success, so that the critical aspects lodged within theindividual text of Ring may in
fact be at odds with the eventual pattern adopted by the succession of Ring-related texts.
What remains intact through all of the Ring-related texts is an underlying sense of sadism
in the original text and its adaptations that, like many horror texts, seems to address
audiences in ways that are emotionally, intellectually, and/or economically exploitative.
Audiences are excited about paying to be a part of a viral spread, taking the “virus of the
mind” in and passing it on to friends. If the experience leads to something less than fear,
then the consumers are less than survivors, and thus, horror texts often aim, during the
“fright” moments, to minimize the possibilities for alternative interpretations and
reactions. Like Sadako’s viral videotape, the goal is producing terror, which means that
there is an underlying animosity within Suzuki’s textual progeny that his audiences
eagerly devour. Carol J. Clover reﬂects on this almost cruel relationship between horror
creators and horror consumers in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film, demonstrating that, of all ﬁlm genres, horror achieves perhaps the most
direct form of address to theater audiences, writing that:

Judged by plot alone, the patterns of cheering and booing seem

indiscriminate or unmotivated or both. It is when they are judged by the

success or failure of the ﬁlm to catch the audience by surprise (or gross

out) that the patterns of cheering and booing fall into place. At such

moments, the diegesis is all but short-circuited, and the horror ﬁlmmaker

and the competent horror viewer come remarkably close to addressing one

another directly—the viewer by shouting out his approval or disapproval

not to the on-screen characters but to the people who put them there

And, of course, horror ﬁlms do attack their audiences. The attack is

palpable; we take it in the eye. For just as the audience can be invited by
the camera to assault, so it can be physically assaulted by the projected

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image—by sudden ﬂashes of light, violent movement (of images plunging

outward, for example), fast-cut or exploded images. These are the stock—

in—trade of horror. (202-3, italics in original)

As Clover demonstrates in this passage, the aim of the horror movie is to attack, to
produce a visceral reaction from the form and content of the horror ﬁlm. And, clearly,
the Ring-derived ﬁlms rely on the tactics of visual assault that are “the stock-in-trade of
horror.” But, while less directly visual, Suzuki’s Ring similarly depends on suspense and
shock in its structure; the text tries to transmit affect of similar sorts to Sadako’s tape.
The attempt is a textual assault. Like Asakawa, Suzuki will survive and ﬂourish by
projecting this affect outward onto others.

It is hard to blame either Suzuki or his character Asakawa for their choices; few of
us would choose sacriﬁce over success in the name of some abstract, lofty sentiments
about what is best for humanity. Instead, Suzuki has written or collaborated on several
more projects that expand Sadako’s narrative ring, at the cost of the initial text’s critical
efﬁcacy as well as the initial concept’s metaphorical effectiveness. Most critics agree that
the subsequent remakes work well, while the sequel novels and movies do not, or, to put
it in the terms of the viral model threaded through this chapter, the mutations of the
original strain are inferior replicators. In any case, as the multi-national media tie-ins
indicate, Koji Suzuki has cashed in on a global scale, becoming part of the media rather
than a subtle critic of it, and, to extrapolate the viral paradigm of Ring itself—resonant as

it is with analogs of sex and HIV—to apply to the indirect form of address adopted by its

creator, Suzuki has fucked over people across the globe.

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Chapter Three: Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Evolve, Monkey Write

Screenplay: Symbiotic Textual Evolution in Adaptation

1. Symbiosis: So Happy Together

If you have seen Adaptation, then you know the process of writer’s block,
, procrastination, and self doubt I faced in writing this chapter. Adaptation (directed by
Spike Jonze, based on a screenplay credited to Charlie Kaufman and his ﬁctional twin
brother Donald) presents the stuttering, halting, frustrating process of creating an idea
from a synthesis of other ideas, which is what I am attempting here through exploring a
variety of theoretical lenses for understanding the movie and a symbiotic version of
adaptation itself. One of the ﬁlm’s multi-layered moments features Charlie’s ﬁctional
twin Donald singing The Turtles’ “Happy Together” while the two prepare to spy on
Susan Orlean as part of the “research” they are doing in the process of adapting her
nonﬁction travel memoir The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession into a
screenplay. On one level, Donald’s singing recalls and enacts screenwriting guru Robert
McKee’s generic advice to write theme songs into mainstream movie scripts to break up
the tension, but the lyrics, about being “so happy together,” underscore how disconnected
and unhappy the brothers are (Adaptation). This disconnection stems in part from the
philosophies that separate their approaches to screenwriting (Donald attempts to write no-
brainer blockbuster thrillers while Charlie attempts more thought-provoking material),
making the twin brothers separate from each other. More importantly, they remain
similarly distant from Susan Orlean, both textually—this scene occurs right before

Adaptation’s story veers off nearly as far as possible from The Orchid Thief 5 source

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material—and physically, as their voyeurism takes place from a safe distance. Yet,
despite these complicated separations, Adaptation regularly demonstrates and explores
the interconnections implicit in the process of textual and biological adaptation in that
symbiotic associations emerge in both the form and content, which I utilize here as the
theoretical basis for constructing a symbiotic model for understanding textual adaptation.

In contrast to the rigidity of the previous chapter’s viral model, wherein the
transmission presupposes a kind of uniformity of adaptation, a theoretical model based on
symbiosis presents greater ﬂexibility, as symbiosis itself represents a kind of slippage
between absolute categories and the methodical iterations and replications found in the
viral model. The media transmissions of the Ring-related texts are concerned with high-
ﬁdelity replication, as, for the most part, the adaptations are. But Adaptation’s Charlie
Kaufman character avoids the reductive task of formulaic transmission and textual
translation, and the diegesis Kaufman pens likewise bears little resemblance to The
Orchid Thief. Instead, like the characters within Adaptation, the relationship between
The Orchid Thief and Adaptation is one of coexistence with mutual beneﬁt, an example
of symbiosis. For example, parts of Adaptation are taken wholesale from The Orchid
Thief, while a new edition of The Orchid Thief connects to the movie through a cover
photo and a Charlie Kaufman-esque textual addition in which Susan Orlean interviews
herself about how the process of adaptation has affected her and her work.

Thus, Adaptation and The Orchid Thief inﬂuence one another in a dialogical
fashion, but what exactly is symbiosis? In its most basic deﬁnition, symbiosis is simply
“living together,” though such a relationship does not necessarily mean that the

cohabitants involved are “so happy together.” Instead, the umbrella term symbiosis

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contains a wide range of relationship types, both positive and negative, unlike the almost
exclusively negative relationship between a virus and a host. Lynn Margulis and Dorion
Sagan—the mother—son team whose books have been very inﬂuential in promoting
different biological facets of symbiotic theory—define symbiosis in their 2002 book
Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species with the following:

Symbiosis is simply the living together of organisms that are different

from each other Symbioses are long-term physical associations.

Different types of organisms stick together and fuse to make a third kind

of organism. The fusion is not random. Symbiotic relationships occur

under speciﬁc environmental conditions. In some of these relationships,

one partner in the symbiosis feeds off the other to its detriment and even

death. Such exploitative associations are called “parasitic” or

“pathogenic.” They tend to be highly sensitive to environmental stress.

The parasite that invariably and virulently kills its partner kills itself. With

time and circumstance the nature of associations tends to change. ( 12)
While the authors’ deﬁnition here appears fairly basic,7 the concept of symbiosis in its
broader application has been criticized heavily for its departure from the long-standing
traditions of Darwinian thought about how species adapt, relying as those traditions do on
change almost exclusively through natural selection. Symbiosis presents an alternative to

genetic shufﬂing and generational change—and, as theorists like Luciana Parisi note, an

alternative to sexual reproduction itself as a means of adaptation—a departure from most

 

7 In many of the instances in which I use symbiosis in this chapter and the next, I am applying it as a kind of
shorthand for an evolutionary model based on inter-species cooperation and cohabitation, which is,
technically, a misapplication, as Margulis and Sagan’s deﬁnition illustrates. Given that symbiotic processes
mean simply “long-term physical associations,” there is nothing that suggests cooperation. Instead, the two
major forms of symbiosis break down as follows: endosymbiosis, or a relationship wherein one organism
resides within the body of the other, and ectosymbiosis, or a relationship wherein the two organisms are
physically separate from one another, connecting only at the surface of the body. Likewise, the coding of
different types of symbiosis are: parasitism, an association that is beneﬁcial to one organism and harmful to
the other; mutualism, an association that beneﬁts both organisms involved; commensalism, an association in
which one organism beneﬁts while the other is not affected; amenalism, an association that is harmful to one
organism while the other is unaffected; and neutralism, in which both organisms are unaffected by their
association. For the most part, when various authors, myself included, speak of symbiosis as being a
cooperative union between two organisms, they are typically referring to symbiosis as a kind of mutualisrn.

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interpretations of the works of Charles Darwing. And yet, in terms of the project I have
undertaken here to create and reﬁne new and distinct models for textual interpretation
based on principles of adaptation and proliferation, the rich abstractions and productive
analogies generate more ﬂexible patterns for analysis than the stricter Darwinian tenets of
the viral model.

As I have already discussed, symbiosis is both a complicated process and
complicated concept; in order to distinguish between how I am using symbiosis to discuss
Adaptation and The Orchid Thief and how I use symbiosis to analyze the chain of War of
the Worlds texts in the next chapter, I utilize the theoretical shorthand of “symbiosis”
versus “macrosymbiosis.” These terms have nothing to do with the size of the agents
involved in the symbiotic relationship; instead, they refer to the scale and durability of
that symbiotic relationship. In other words, the symbiosis taking place in the case of
Adaptation is fairly limited in that it involves just a few ﬁgures and texts, as well as a
limited, synchronic sense of scope, whereas the War of the Worlds texts rely on both a
global and extraterrestrial cast, as well as a slew of texts, indicating a more systemic
relationship across diachronic time. In the previous chapter’s analysis of virality, the
scale moves smoothly from local to global scope without substantial differences, with the
exception of scale. In order to understand symbiosis on both lower and higher levels,
however, we need to explore the distinctly different fashions in which symbiotic
relationships work when they involve either individual agents or systemic populations,

even though both cases fall under the larger category of symbiosis.

 

This assertion does not imply, of course, that crrtrcal understandings of Darwrn are ﬁxed and unrlateral,
and I explore an alternative re-interpretation of the ending of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species through my
reading of Adaptation later in this chapter.

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Due to the complicated symbiotic interweavings within Adaptation, the movie
seems almost to defy summarization; any framing of it seems to oversimplify the
ambiguities and ironies implicit in its deadpan delivery of cliché elements in the third act.
Still, by way of providing orientation to those not familiar with the movie, Adaptation
mixes ﬁctional elements with nonﬁctional personalities, turning the screenwriter Charlie
Kaufman into a character with a ﬁctional twin brother Donald and including “real” people
such as Susan Orlean, a writer for The New Yorker, John Laroche, a collector of rare
orchids and small—time schemer, and Robert McKee, a screenwriting seminar speaker and
author. The literal and associational relationships between and among personalities
develop into more than the sum of their parts because, through their textual cohabitation
within Adaptation, the symbiotic connections and tensions of their dialogue and actions
reveal various insights about evolution and adaptation. The movie is not so much a
cinematic adaptation in the traditional sense as it is a meditation on adaptation as a
process, personally, biologically, and textually. Ostensibly based on Susan Orlean’s book
The Orchid Thief, Adaptation extends far beyond the scope of Orlean’s material to
ﬁctionalize the text’s author, her subject (John Laroche), and even her adapter himself
(screenwriter Charlie Kaufman), departing far from the scope and/or intention of the
book. The three “characters” become ensnared in the narrative muddle of three
overlapping storylines: 1) Orlean’s material about orchids, Laroche, and living
passionately; 2) the neurotic process Kaufman employs while adapting, deconstructing,
and reconstructing that material; and 3) the alternate ﬁctional future for these characters
(brimming with drugs, car chases, and guns) that Adaptation projects as the “natural”

extension of their interdependent evolutionary development. While the bulk of the ﬁlm’s

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narrative concerns itself with ﬁctionalizing the process of adapting a nonﬁction literary
text into a mainstream movie, the ending indulges in a slew of cliche’ Hollywood
conventions which, earlier in the story, some characters extol and other characters
denounce, making Adaptation both self-aware and critical of blockbuster traditions. Such
traditions as selling mindless, entertaining spectacles like commodities on the movie
market seem to invade Adaptation itself, taking over the more pensive meditations with
the high-energy chase sequence at the ﬁlm’s end, thus destroying Charlie Kaufman’s
frustrating, muddling process of writer’s block, his blockbuster-loving “twin” Donald, as
well as the limitless sprawl of his story itself.

Because Adaptation contains such clouds of meta-awareness, along with
commentary on the evolution of personalities, species, and texts, it is an exemplary case
for a meditation on how meme theory works; Kaufman almost makes this connection
explicit by titled the feature Adaptation in that the story is about both biological and
textual mutability. And, although there are certain tensions between the theories
proposed by Richard Dawkins and Lynn Margulis in terms of what factors primarily drive
evolution, I augment meme theory here with the threads of symbiotic evolutionary theory
developed by Margulis, Dorion Sagan, and Tom Wakeford. These lenses reveal the
symbiotic properties within Adaptation’s form and content, untangling some of the
complicated threads of Adaptation’s criticism of Hollywood while also providing
commentary on how texts such as Susan Orlean’s book, Charlie Kaufman’s script, and
Spike Jonze’s movie approach adaptation. Because the storyline of Adaptation stoops to
the cliche’ ideas it criticizes, the movie synthesizes the process of adaptation that both

Kaufman’s script and his character are trying to explore and understand. In order to study

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this process—much like the form and content of Adaptation are concerned with
symbiotically fusing complex, evolving ideas—I link these theories to allow access into
the complicated patterns by which ideas and texts evolve symbiotically, how they can be

“so happy together.”

2. Adaptation in Adaptation

As I have noted in the previous chapters, meme theory provides a conceptual
framework for understanding the ever-shifting, discrete ideological particles involved in
cultural genetics, providing a way of discussing culture and cultural products in terms
quite similar to the study of evolution in populations of a given species. Much like the
genes within a given pool, memes can mutate, adapt, and proliferate, spreading cultural
DNA from text to text and person to person, changing meaning through different contexts
andinterpretations as they move through space and time. In The Selﬁsh Gene, Dawkins
writes that: “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although
basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution Language seems to
‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than
genetic evolution” (189). Yet even as he attempts to reﬁne the concept of evolution in a
realm other than biology, Dawkins compresses culture and language together in a way
that blurs rather than clariﬁes the distinctions, as the deﬁnition itself shows the
dependence we have on language both literally and figuratively as the means for
understanding how we think about the ideas we formulate. Given the interconnections of
language and culture, it seems as though Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian model leaves

something to be desired in that it suggests certain kinds of cooperation instead of

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exclusively competition or antagonistic struggle for survival. Moreover, it is this same
slipperiness between and among texts, cultures, and their meaning(s) that lies at the heart
of the ﬁctional Charlie Kaufman’s struggle with his writing process.

Throughout Adaptation, Kaufman as character attempts to adapt The Orchid
Thief, meeting disappointment time after time as he tries to fulﬁll the role of textual
translator. Of course, to the extent that these failures provide comic, interesting material
for audiences, Kaufman as screenwriter succeeds in every instance where Kaufman the
character fails. As a ﬁctional character, Charlie Kaufman has immense trouble adapting
Orlean’s text, in part because he cannot see the cultural forest of Orlean’s book because
of the verbal trees. His task, after all, is not about replicating the text with ﬁdelity; he
must adapt it to a more cinematic form. The gaps between the emotions Orlean’s book
creates in him and the task he has of forming those feelings into a Hollywood movie
script with a coherent beginning, middle, and end illustrate how difﬁcult the process of
adapting a text from one medium to another can be.

Kaufman’s task of adapting The Orchid Thief proves to be impossible if he is to
leave Orlean’s nonﬁction book in its current, scattered, storyless form. A successful
adaptation in this particular case means signiﬁcantly altering the material; moving the
text from one medium to another inherently does violence to it. At the same time,
however, the character of Charlie Kaufman initially claims that he wants to avoid
mutating the “purity” of Orlean’s work at all costs. He wants to preserve facets of the
book that defy the trends of contemporary mainstream Hollywood movies. What
Orlean’s book evokes in him and other readers is not an experience that “plays” well on

ﬁlm, concerned as The Orchid Thief is with what Kaufman in frustration calls “sprawling

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New Yorker shit,” in other words, ideas with a more difﬁcult, complicated, and expansive
sense of narrative than the timeframe of a feature-length ﬁlm can address (Adaptation).
Conceptually, the book is unﬁlmable; the characters are fascinating, but they do not do
much in the sense of a Hollywood script and thus are difﬁcult to adapt. At ﬁrst, Kaufman
believes these limitations to be assets; he initially claims during a conversation with
producer Valerie Thomas that The Orchid Thief is “great, sprawling New Yorker stuff,
and Iwant to remain true to that.” Through the process of adaptation, Kaufman’s source
material initially feels to him like “great stuff” and then slowly transforms into “shit”
as he does not know how to incorporate these musings into a ﬁlm. While Orlean’s
meandering narrative strategies eventually frustrate his attempts at structure, Kaufman’s
original thoughts are that these features will mean that his script will out of necessity be
provocative and fascinating.

To a large extent, Adaptation creates its symbiotic muddle of a narrative as a kind
of middle. There are snippets of Orlean’s thoughtful meditations, and they seem to grow
and spill over organically onto the Kaufman—centered material around them, largely
keeping what makes them provocative and fascinating to Kaufman. Controlling and
limiting this sprawl appears to be Kaufman’s chief anxiety, even though, as the opening
voiceover announces, Kaufman has a slew of anxieties to choose from. In fact, Charlie
Kaufman’s interior monologue also suggests that this narrative middle has no beginning,
either. We seem to start in the darkness of Kaufman’s thoughts, mid-rant, and much of
the movie devotes itself to obsessing with how to begin, which overwhelms Kaufman as

the tensions between control and its loss, as depicted here, may in fact be as old as

evolution and adaptation themselves. Existence, according to Charlie Kaufman, is just so

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much digression. The cliche’ Hollywood ending is something of a necessary evil because,
as artiﬁcial as its tropes are, the interactions of the texts and characters seem like fertile
creative terrain but contain no real “action” that can endin a satisfyingly cinematic way.
Orlean’s material from The Orchid Thief, which Kaufman works so hard to keep “pure,”
is all about sprawl, or narrative middle. In fact, even when Kaufman reads The Orchid
Thief to screenwriting guru Robert McKee, he misplaces the book’s ending; once again,
this textual slippage seems to be for dramatic purposes.9

But this nit-picking about the purity and ﬁdelity of adaptation constitutes a
digression of my own, without addressing the symbiotic valence of the digression itself as
a strategy. Adaptation’s focus on the wandering of a narrative middle—as an interpretive
adaptation of The Orchid Thief 8 style and structure—performs a subversive articulation
of conventional Hollywood narrative. By putting the “sprawling New Yorker shit/stuff”
into a screenplay (and thus indirectly onto the screen) and talking extensively and
critically about both the virtues and values of this style and structure, Kaufman satirizes
the conventional Hollywood mode of discourse. More than just skewering Hollywood,
though, Adaptation violates our expectations of how narrative presents itself. In
Loiterature, Ross Chambers explores how narrative middles mimic the ﬂanerie of the
wandering, loitering subject, which in turn implicitly communicates a certain

reassessment of values. The ﬂdneur subverts through a form of wastefulness, through not

 

9 Although The Orchid Thief ends without Susan Orlean ever seeing a ghost orchid, as Charlie Kaufman
observes in Adaptation, he misquotes the ending to McKee, reading .. but a little fantastic and ﬂeeting
and out of reach” (Adaptation). This passage appears in the ﬁrst ﬁfty of The Orchid Thief 5 282 pages,
nowhere near the text’s end. It does, however, link up with Orlean’s claim that she wants to see a ghost
orchid before the end of her story’s research, as the passage is part of her observation that orchid thief John
Laroche’s “life seemed to be ﬁlled with things that were just like the ghost orchid—wonderful to imagine
and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic and ﬂeeting and out of reach” (41). The passage is a
meditation as much on the fascinating obsessions of Laroche’s life as it is about the appeal of the ghost

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hurrying in beelines to destinations, and thus the digressive middle space of the loitering
ﬁgure and loitering narrative can be productive, like the Charlie Kaufman character, from
getting lost, getting turned around, getting unfocused and dilatory. In fact, Chambers
conceives of such digressions as symbiotic, writing that what emerges from a study of
digressive texts : “appears to be a vision of discourse, of human subjectivity, and of
culture itself as sites neither of perfect order nor of absolute chaos but of a symbiotic and
oxymoronic embrace of the orderly and disorderly, such that what deﬁnes them is a
problematics of disjunction and aporia” (112). By balancing the writing’s simultaneous
wandering and pacing, Kaufman’s adaptation of Orlean’s sprawling narrative creates a
“symbiotic and oxymoronic embrace” of tightly structured Hollywood screenwriting and
the more erudite “sprawling New Yorker stuff.” And, as a result, at many points in
Adaptation, Kaufman can speak about how a movie version of The Orchid Thief will
produce truth and beauty, things that, in Kaufman’s view, Hollywood desperately needs
more of to keep from appealing solely to the mass market’s lowest common denominator.
In yet another symbiotic connection between disjunctive elements, Kaufman’s
own voiceover snippets intersperse Kaufman’s base, lowbrow concerns with all of his
concerns about inserting cultural sophistication into a Hollywood movie. His inner
monologue concerns itself just as much with evolution on the individual biological level
(how Charlie can be a successful sexual subject) as his script narrates evolutionary history
in macrocosmic strata (how life on Earth evolved into its present state). Through the
course ofAdaptation’s unfolding, Kaufman’s thoughts supposedly turn to higher orders

of cultural adaptation, such as the purity of ideas, even though the movie’s opening line is

 

orchid, which Kaufman loses in context of the dialogue with McKee.

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voiceover on a plain black screen, wherein Kaufman wonders: “Do 1 have an original
thought in my head? My bald head?” (Adaptation). Such a question implies that, in
terms of cultural inﬂuences, “originality” extends backward through human history via
memetic transfers difﬁcult to trace, and yet the after-question challenges not just the
success of Kaufman’s ideas but his social and sexual success as a lustful heterosexual
male. The rest of his interior monologue continues in this vein of Kaufman’s mind
wrapping around his own genetic survival, his DNA’s endurance through sex.

Through a series of neurotic observations about his own appearance vis-a-vis the
likelihood of obtaining sexual happiness and fulﬁllment, Charlie Kaufman worries about
his potential success, in evolutionary terms, for obtaining a mate and thus ensuring the
generational survival of his own genetic code. These observations on his personal
appearance and social awkwardness mirror the professional difﬁculties he experiences in
adapting Susan Orlean’s work into his own version of a screenplay. Kaufman constantly
evaluates himself, reﬂecting on the disharmony between his personal cultural choices and
their ineffectual results in ﬁnding him sexual fulfillment, as he continues with his
observations during the ﬁlm’s opening:

“Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence?
Maybe it’s bad brain chemistry. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me, had
chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical
imbalanace or some kind of misﬁring synapses. I need to get help for that.
But I’ll still be ugly, though. Nothing’s going to change that.”
His thinking concerns his own thinking, and we see that the potential success of both his
memes and his genes relies on a “self” that is no more than a collection of randomly

ﬁring synapses, ideas and genetic code that push and pull in their own respective

directions.

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As the story of Adaptation grows and develops, the focuslessness of Kaufman’s
work, goals, and even identity spins him and his writing out of control until he confesses
to his ﬁctional brother that he has written himself—faults and all—into his own
screenplay. Both “brothers” ﬁnd such seemingly uncontrollable creation to be “weird,”
though it might better be described as schiZOphrenic in that Charlie feels his actions are
somehow beyond his control (not to mention that the twin brother is also ﬁctional and

similarly seems to be beyond his control). This lack of control seeps throughout Charlie’s
life; his writing career mirrors his sexual exploits, spinning him around in unproductive,
masturbatory circles as he tries to transfer the memetic ideas of Orlean’s book into a
script of his own. The only thing seemingly within his control is getting a grip on
himself, quite literally through masturbation.

For most of the movie, we see Kaufman almost exclusively as a struggling, lonely
screenwriter, and, instead of cultural success in the form of a completed screenplay or
sexual success in the form of copulation, Kaufman’s only reprieve from professional and
sexual frustration seems to come from masturbation, a self-satisfying act that essentially
admits his own failure. Likewise, Kaufman’s private fantasies, which fuel his starved
libido, represent ﬂeeting, escapist inclusions of cinematic sex, something which Kaufman
openly criticizes as pathetic superﬁciality in artistic terms and thus not worth having in
his adaptation of The Orchid Thief. Charlie Kaufman claims that pandering to audiences’

desire to see sex in movies lowers Susan Orlean’s noble and beautiful prose, that putting
in such low—culture material would compromise her ideas, even though Kaufman indulges
in these sorts of sexual daydreams every chance he gets, including a masturbation fantasy

about having sex with Susan Orlean herself.

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Despite Kaufman’s ﬁtful sexual desire for Susan Orlean when he is alone with the
book jacket for The Orchid Thief, the ideas and language inside the book are what he
originally found attractive. Orlean’s complex portrayal of the beauty of pure ideas is
initially what prompts Kaufman to undertake the movie project. In the course of her
nonfiction account, Orlean ﬁnds graceful splendor in such diverse sources as orchids,
passions, obsessions, and Laroche’s fascinating process of zealous serial commitment to
fads and schemes he quickly outgrows. Finding these fascinations fascinating himself,
Kaufman wants to adapt The Orchid Thief because its simplicity and purity escape such
common cultural tendencies as relying on base consumer instincts and impulses to shufﬂe
through shabby ideas. Orlean’s prose avoids the slick trends most books depend on, such
as the perennial reliance on gratuitous sex and violence to sell critically unchallenging
texts to a numbly apathetic market, trends that are even more obvious in mainstream
movies than the literary marketplace.

Kaufman thus attempts a critical stance of his own profession because he is
disillusioned with the formulaic obsessions of Hollywood. His character holds nothing
but disdain for rigid, marketing-based formulas such as Robert McKee’s system of genre
storytelling, and Kaufman claims that he does not want to “cram in sex or guns or car
chases you know or characters, you know having profound life lessons. Or
growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end, you
know? Imean, the book isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. You know, itjust isn’t.
And I feel very strongly about this.” Kaufman’s adaptation, then, at the beginning of
the ﬁlm, aims at higher, nobler goals of bringing intellectual respectability to a

commercial ﬁlm as a means of rebelling against the lowbrow standards of the spectacle-

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oriented, consumer-based drivel he sees in the sell-outs all around him. For those who
enjoy the easy cultural handholds of Hollywood stereotypes, however, movies’ “life
lessons” generally make life more manageable. For example, John Laroche, Orlean and
Kaufman’s supposed subject, ﬁnds order and simplicity in his life through collectinO,
making his life “better” as he obtains more material things, like a Hollywood quest plot.
Laroche’s narrow focus provides an artiﬁcial sense of purpose, whittling down the world
to a more manageable size.

Such a process of narrowing the world down to basic ideas and simple material
goods, like Laroche does, depends on both a conservative perspective as well as an
attitude of competition. In order for an idea to receive an individual’s exclusive focus, it
must beat all other competing ideas, revealing a kind of Darwinian pattern of existence as
struggle, a pattern Richard Dawkins explicitly evokes in his formulation of the meme
concept. Charles Darwin, after all, presents all of life as violent conﬂict in On the Origin
of Species, where he writes:

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at

which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its

natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction

during some period of its life otherwise, on the principle of geometrical

increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no

country could support the product. Hence there must in every case be a

struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same

species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical

conditions of life. (63)

Because Dawkins theorizes the meme in a Darwinian frame, ideas, concepts, images, and
sounds (as well as the individuals who produce and proﬁt off these things) all battle in

ﬁerce competition, “a struggle for existence.” And yet, as I mentioned above, an

exclusive focus on competition negates the potential for symbiotic cooperation and the

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interconnected relationships established between Charlie Kaufman and Susan Orlean,
both on the textual level as the authors of Adaptation and The Orchid Thief and the
ﬁctional level as characters within the movie.

On the surface, Adaptation initially conforms to the stark, Darwinian model of
competition. John Laroche competes with other orchid collectors and businessmen,
succeeding through open theft on a state wildlife preserve; Susan Orlean competes with
other journalists and writers, succeeding through contracting a book and movie deal while
stealing Laroche’s story; and Charlie Kaufman competes with other screenwriters and
filmmakers, succeeding through exclusive script contracts such as adapting The Orchid
Thief, a kind of intellectual plundering in service of Hollywood. All three of these central
ﬁgures proﬁt through their aggressive, competitive strategies, getting ahead either in the
literal marketplace or in the marketplace of ideas by beating other potential rivals.

Although most contemporary evolutionary theorists now assume that evolution
does not have a particular goal or endpoint, Darwin claims that perpetual competition will
eventually lead to absolute individual ﬂawlessness, writing that “as natural selection
works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will
tend to progress towards perfection” (489). This particular snippet of Darwin’s writing,
again from On the Origin of Species, even makes its way into Adaptation directly, as the
character of John Laroche listens to Darwin’s works on tape in his van when he ﬁrst
appears in the movie. From this very brief insertion of Darwin’s thought, Adaptation as a
text appears to align itself with this problematic conception of natural selection’s
paradigm of competition progressively leading towards perfection. While we may detect

certain trends within evolution that seem to be improvements on what came before, not

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all biological adaptations prove beneﬁcial, let alone progressive over time. Certainly on
the level of texts we do not observe such a bias toward hierarchical or progressive trends;
few critics would argue that each textual adaptation is always better than the previous
version. Instead of tending toward “perfection,” textual adaptation may not be an
improvement at all, or, as in the case of Adaptation, the result might be so different that
there is no easy way to compare the literary text with the cinematic text, making notions
like progress and competition unusually difﬁcult to apply, given how categorically
different the two texts are.

The tape recording of Darwin’s writing in Adaptation stops not long after the
quotation provided above, including only a few words from the next sentence before
fading away as Laroche and his crew of Seminoles enter into the alligator-ﬁlled swamps
of the Fakahatchee State Wildlife Preserve. These words begin the ﬁnal paragraph of
Darwin’s book, but they also introduce an idea explored only peripherally within the rest
of the widely inﬂuential text, reading:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with

many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various

insects ﬂitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,

and to reﬂect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from

each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all

been produced by laws acting around us. (My emphasis)

Within this passage, Darwin introduces an idea that appears to be a departure from his
prior conception of life as “a struggle for existence” by writing instead that bank teeming
with diverse organisms might somehow be “dependent on each other” rather than

exclusively locked in a savage competition.

For many decades after Darwin, scientists and theorists have clung to the

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r" aﬁ._

paradigm of competition as the fundamental tendency of life, but, more recently, some
authors have revised this notion, exploring how the bases of existence and adaptive
evolution may trace their intertwined roots back to cooperation. As Lynn Margulis writes
in Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution:

Symbiosis, the system in which members of different species live in

physical contact, strikes us as an arcane concept and a specialized

biological term. This is because of our lack of awareness of its prevalence

We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can ﬁnd

symbiosis everywhere. Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for

many differing kinds of life. (5)

In other words, although existence may entail certain kinds of competition, symbiotic
exchanges are everywhere (Margulis details many of the relationships we rely on with the
microorganisms inside us in our everyday lives), and, like the “entangled bank” Darwin
discusses, there simply is not enough space for organisms to exist in absolute isolation
from one another. We obviously cannot compete with all others; some level of
cooperation or coexistence is mandatory, “a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing
kinds of life.”

Although this chapter’s shift from more orthodox neo-Darwinism to symbiotic
theory has a distinctly political ﬂavor to it—favoring as it does cooperation over
competition—such ideological capital is largely due more to the associations critics have
given to the ideas than to the ideas themselves. As Tom Wakeford writes of symbiosis as
it exists in the political realm of scientiﬁc theory in his 2001 book Liaisons of Life: From
Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution:

Historians of science have puzzled over why these fundamental

[symbiotic] insights took so long to receive recognition. Primitive

analytical tools, Pasteurian paranoia, and intellectual inertia are part of the
explanation. But, tragically, the study of symbiosis also fell foul of global

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politics: world wars, nationalism, and anticommunism, to name a few.

Symbiosis was invented as a purely scientiﬁc term, but it was fatally

bracketed in the minds of its enemies with dangerous political movements

Symbiosis became an international pariah subject, the victim of tacit

textbook censorship and McCarthy-like witch-hunts among professional

scientists. (17)

While we might take exception to such phrasings as labeling symbiosis “a purely
scientiﬁc term,” Wakeford’s historicization illustrates how and why the intellectual
outline of symbiotic evolutionary theory has been the scientiﬁc community’s underdog.
Much like Hollywood movies inherently support violent competition through the “sex or
guns or car chases” of all-American capitalism and its blockbuster entertainments, so,
too, is most of evolutionary theory predicated on a staunch adherence to a biological
models that favor competition over cooperation. Symbiosis between and among
organisms, however, represents a driving evolutionary force that obviates competition
between agents who partner up, and, similarly, Adaptation seeks an alternative in which
the movie adaptation of a book is neither “better” nor “worse” but distinctly different and
mutually dependent.

Instead of manufacturing another adaptation designed only to compete along the
pre-existing, traditional lines of the competitive Hollywood marketplace (and the larger
system of American capitalism which John Laroche also subscribes to), Charlie Kaufman
attempts something much more complicated: a symbiotic approach. Kaufman claims that
he wants to revise the typical Hollywood tendencies toward dummying down and selling
out (ideas which seem to be at the heart of Hollywood’s obsession with box ofﬁce

recei ts as well as what elements in movies hel them to succeed or fail). And, as a
9

result of Kaufman’s focus, the story of Adaptation moves along unusual lines that

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symbiotically reshape boundaries and categories that mainstream Hollywood movies

typically leave clear and unambiguous.

3. Successful Failure and Critical Stupidity

The concept of symbiosis—as a way of theorizing biological linkages—is also
linked to certain representational ambiguities; the term disturbs both the borders of our
categorical concepts and the permanence of biological boundaries that we rely on to
formulate the evolution of discrete entities. Whether analyzing symbiosis or employing
symbiosis as a theoretical tool for analyzing something else, there seems to be certain
subtle shiftings that take place, a kind of symbiotic slippage. The idea of symbiotic
slippage requires a ﬂexible sense of subjectivity, a kind of living in the plural that most of
us are ill-equipped to understand; such connectedness, whether across space or time,
seems to trouble the comfort of the categories we need to make sense of temporality,
causation, and competition. Within the context of Adaptation, this inherent
interconnectedness manifests in unusual ways, such as Charlie Kaufman ranting about
how his script must cover all of evolutionary history from the beginning of life on Earth
up to the present, as well as through a cinema-friendly, visual way of understanding
existence in the plural: the concept of two twins living together in a symbiotic
relationship that alternates roles of “parasite” and “host” so that each beneﬁts at different
points in time.

Because Orlean’s The Orchid Thief relies so much on the insertion of Susan
Orlean’s voice and herself as a “character” in the nonﬁction reportage on Laroche—

making the text a symbiosis of Laroche’s experience and Orlean’s experience—Kaufman

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similarly inserts himself into Adaptation. Kaufman claims that his focus in bringing
Orlean’s book to the screen takes on a bolder adaptive task of looking at the larger
superstructure within which he ﬁnds his symbiotic subject matter, as his voiceover
narration states during a series of sped-up cuts:

“It’s a journey of evolution. Adaptation. The journey we all take. A

journey that unites each and every one of us. Darwin writes that we all

come from the very ﬁrst single-cell organism. Yet, here I am. And there’s

Laroche. There’s Orlean. And there’s the ghost orchid. All trapped in our

own bodies in moments in history. That’s it. That’s what I need to do: tie

all of history together.” (Adaptation)

He then narrates all of evolutionary history as a montage, which mirrors the montage the
ﬁlm has already shown near the beginning in response to Kaufman’s pondering why he
“is even here at all.” Kaufman’s narration describes the ﬁnal product almost exactly (as
we have already seen it earlier in the movie). But this larger focus eventually
overwhelms him, and he abandons this approach, though both sequences remain in the
ﬁlm.

Such an inclusion of what Kaufman initially labels a failure, as well as his process
of revision and the ﬁnal cinematic product (though not in that order), suggests that, for
Kaufman to “tie all of history together,” he must necessarily appropriate materials that
seem to be unhelpful or irrelevant to him and his story. Such appropriation parallels the
complex process of a symbiotic relationship, where, from a certain vantage point, such
inclusions would be detrimental, “parasitic” or “pathogenic,” but, when viewed with a
larger sense of scope in mind, these elements complement each other extremely well.

Because Adaptation exposes the shifting, uncertain process of textual adaptation itself,

instead of simply presenting the ﬁnal product for the audience’s approval, the method

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seems to be symbiotic at its very core. Kaufman must include not just his life story along
with Laroche’s and Orlean’s, but he feels obligated to throw in the life story of the planet
as well, what is labeled as “Hollywood, California: Four Billion and Forty Years Earlier.”
Because the individual organisms bound up in the “journey of evolution. Adaptation.
The journey we all take” are necessarily, as Darwin puts it, “dependent on each other in
so complex a manner,” telling the story of plants and humans who are “[a]ll trapped in
our own bodies in moments in history” without indicating the larger scope of
evolutionary development across time and space does not provide the whole, symbiotic
story Charlie Kaufman wants his movie script to tell.

Some of the limitations of thinking in terms of Darwinian competition follow
from rating interactions between individuals solely as either positive or negative. For
example, when Charlie Kaufman rejects the traditions of Hollywood adaptation, saying “I
don’t wanna ruin [The Orchid Thief] by making it a Hollywood thing. Like an orchid
heist movie or something, you know? Or changing the orchids into poppies and making
it about drug running, you know? Why can’t there be a movie simply about ﬂowers?” he
makes an explicit, negative judgment against Hollywood movies and their conventions.
And yet, by the movie’s end, Kaufman’s script has incorporated all of these cliché
elements. Though such story components are inserted in the service of straight-faced,
subversive irony, Adaptation appropriates the ideas it initially criticizes, showing that, as
a text, the movie is capable of the same process of adaptation Kaufman and the orchids
undergo over time. Because the wave of Hollywood schlock engulfs nearly all of
Adaptation’s third act—and precisely because the movie offers it without the customary

wink or nudge Hollywood movies typically use to announce to the audiences that they are

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kidding—the movie presents complications in the realm of interpretation.

The gradual shift in Adaptation’s style, tone, and message as the movie progresses
into more and more trite territory near its end represents a challenge for critics,
particularly if their interpretation relies, as mine has thus far in part, on the thorny
language of evaluation, of “good” and “bad.” Because Adaptation enacts a kind of
textual symbiosis, the competition implied by “good” and “bad” criticism becomes
confused, if it can be applied at all. After all, if we read the ending as “bad,” does that
mean that the ﬁrst two-thirds were “good”? Since the Kaufman character explains that he
wants to avoid a neat and tidy Hollywood ending, does the “sellout” ending of Adaptation
become entirely ironic? Kaufman’s richly complicated, symbiotic approach perplexes
questions such as these, with their focus on “goodness,” “badness,” and irony. In a more
straightforward, standard mainstream movie, such issues would be easier for
interpretations to approach, but by focusing on symbiotic adaptation and incorporating it
into the process of narrative adaptation, Kaufman turns his focus to large-scale systemic
change rather than solely positive and negative evaluation.

The concept of symbiosis allows for a categorically different vocabulary, as Tom
Wakeford observes about symbiosis in Liaisons of Life: “Symbiosis is such a useful word
because it avoids the need to determine whether just one or both of the symbionts, such as
the plant or the fungus, is the net beneﬁciary in any given situation” (129). Are the
Hollywood cliches cohabiting with Charlie Kaufman’s criticism as parasites, or vice-
versa? Likewise, is Donald Charlie’s parasite, or vice-versa? ls Adaptation parasitically
leeching off of The Orchid Thief, or is its effect beneﬁcial? The questions of which ideas,

ﬁgures, or texts beneﬁt more from their respective pairings becomes less important than

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the fact that these concepts are symbionts, or singular entities locked into a symbiotic
relationship. Here, too, Ross Chambers provides a sense of direction without conforming
to traditional valuations of “parasites” as exclusively negative”), instead favoring the
parasite’s ability to muddle and problematize convention. Chambers writes that:

The parasite disturbs the conventional order of things, as the representative

of everything that is other to it. But the parasite also—as in the classical

ﬁgure of the parasitus—makes the party “go.” Otherness, when it is seen

as forming part of a given community, stands for all the mediations that

are other than the community’s business but without which its business

could not get done; it’s the intermediary through which social interchanges

inevitably pass; and in that sense the parasite is indispensable. (41-2)
This “intermediary” function of the parasite strikes at the center of adaptation as a
process; the screenwriter performing the textual adaptation—most often from literary to
cinematic form—is often viewed as a marginal ﬁgure, however “indispensable.” At the
beginning of Adaptation we see Charlie Kaufman kicked off the set of Being John
Malkovich, providing a visual allegory about how Kaufman occupies a peripheral,
uncertain role, as much in his career as in his personal life. And, although Adaptation
focuses on a dramatization of Kaufman’s life, putting the marginal ﬁgure in the center
only serves to add another level to the movie’s other symbioses.

Still, as I mentioned above, perhaps the closest yet most indirect parallel to the
symbiotic exchange of “parasite” and “host” lies in the relationship dynamics of Charlie
and Donald Kaufman. The beginning of Adaptation presents Donald leeching off of his

twin brother with no hope of leaving their shared living space except through the long-

shot, quixotic plan of becoming a screenwriter like Charlie, but the unfolding story

 

r . . . . . .

0 In Lorterature, Ross Chambers theorizes the parasrte as a socral agent rather than a biological one,
although the metaphorization deﬁnitely seems to suggest a relationship to the problematic formulation of
symbionts as falling into the categories of “host” and “parasite.”

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reverses the power dynamic in that Charlie relies on Donald’s help to break out of his
writer’s block and literally wrestle with the subjects of Susan Orlean and John Laroche in
the wilds of Florida’s swampland. The form of the storyline likewise mirrors this
adaptive transformation of their relationship, as the structure itself shifts from Charlie’s
initial focus on a sprawling, more artistically authentic script to Donald’s cliche
Hollywood obsessions with drug-running, car chases, and a violent dens ex nrachina, all
indicative of “cheap” writing or narrative “cheats.”“ Perhaps the most suggestive
insertion of Donald’s inﬂuence comes not through the twins’ dialogue or the gradual
mutation of the narrative style and structure but through the words on the screen after
Adaptation ’s credits.

Throughout the movie, Donald brags to Charlie about the inﬂuence McKee’s
seminar has had in helping Donald write his horribly cliché script, in which a 00p, killer,
and victim all turn out to be the same person, and, when Charlie asks how to solve the
impossibility of such a spatial dynamic (the victim being tied up in a basement while the
ofﬁcer remains at the police station), Donald explains that such conundrums can be
solved by “trick photography.” In the course of Adaptation’s events, Donald sells his
script, about which we have only heard only the briefest and trashiest summaries, but,
after the death of his character, we ﬁnally get a sample of Donald’s writing. After the
credits, the screen reads:

“We’re all one thing, Lieutenant. That’s what I’ve come to realize. Like

cells in a body. ’Cept we can’t see the body. The way ﬁsh can’t see the
ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other.

 

“ For a more thorough reading of narrative “cheats,” please see David H. Richter’s “Your Cheatin’ Art:
Double Dealing in Cinematic Narrative” in Narrative 13.1 (2005) “-28. Although the article only brieﬂy
addresses Adaptation, Richter writes extensively on narrative authenticity vis-a-vis audiences’ collective
expectations.

167

How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.”
— Cassie from The Three

Following this excerpt, the words “In Loving Memory of Donald Kaufman” appear
before the ﬁnal fade to black. Much like Charlie’s attempts to “tie all of history
together,” Donald’s script, as corny as it is, alludes to a larger framework of existence that
allows for symbiotic slippage and unﬁxed identity. Much like the “cells in a body”
analogy, the twins are both connected through their experiences in Adaptation, both to
each other and to John Laroche and Susan Orlean, even though such encounters are
ﬁctional, self-reﬂexively self-indul gent, and poorly written. Yet even within this
supposedly stupid script, there is this passage which reﬂects on the symbiotic
interconnections between what might otherwise seem wildly disparate parties. There is a
kind of larger sense of adaptive criticism to Donald’s Optimistic stupidity. After all, a
movie cannot satirize something it does not address or include; Adaptation simply goes

’9,

one step further by including “cliche Hollywood writing alongside the “sprawling New
Yorker shit” in a way that not only presents such material in the content but also in the
form through Adaptation’s style and structure, which mutates as easily and ﬂuidly as any
of Laroche’s greenhouse plants.

The adaptive style of Kaufman’s writing (or perhaps more accurately the
Kaufmans’ shared writing)—both as a process described in the ﬁlm and as a product
demonstrated by the ﬁlm——-rightly concentrates on establishing symbiotic links between
disparate personalities, ideas, and structures. This linking strategy seems to work both

because the concept of adaptation proves central to what Kaufman, Orlean, and Laroche

are all attempting with their work and because symbiotic adaptation mirrors what orchids

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themselves do, orchids also being central to Kaufman, Orlean, and Laroche’s work. In
Liaisons of Life, Tom Wakeford’s early examples of how and why symbiosis works focus
primarily on how orchids operate symbiotically with the fungi on their roots. He writes:
When it comes to making the most of [symbiotic] root-fungus

alliances, orchids are perhaps the champions. Orchid seeds are so small

that a million of them weigh just two grams. They contain nothing apart

from an embryo and an aspiration to meet the right mold. For without the

participation of their own dedicated species of fungal associate, orchid

seeds cannot even successfully germinate in the wild.

Even when fully mature, the orchid’s root system appears

pathetically small. Yet its fungal symbiont forms a large and dynamic

foraging web that ensures the orchid’s nutritional needs are fully met. In

turn, it may receive small amounts of vitamins and nitrogen compounds

from the plant. The orchid’s generosity has well-deﬁned limits, however.

The plant keeps the fungus in check with natural fungicides, should it

show signs of attempting to stray upward from its normal home inside the

roots, to colonize the orchid’s stern. (38-39)
As Wakeford demonstrates, orchids symbolize evolution’s potential for extreme
speciﬁcity, as well as one of the world’s best adaptations in terms of creating a symbiotic
relationship with another species. And, although Charlie Kaufman does not wind up
making the “movie simply about ﬂowers” that he initially claims to want from his efforts,
Adaptation is in many ways following the conceptual model of the various symbiotic
orchid species. The linkages Kaufman creates between his script and Orlean’s book have
a ﬂowing, interactive quality about them akin to symbiosis, suggested in part by the fact
that the different stories presented in Adaptation seem to bleed into one another
seamlessly and form the types of alliances of which “orchids are perhaps the champions.”
Moreover, the symbiotic relationship established between Kaufman and Orlean, despite

their limited personal interaction, parallels the symbiotic connections between Orlean and

Laroche, as well as between Laroche and his orchid business, not just between orchids

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and the existence they share with biological symbionts.

If Charlie Kaufman “feeds” off of source material originating from Susan Orlean
and Susan Orlean “feeds” off of source material originating from John Laroche, Laroche
seems to recognize his symbiotic role in the creative process, even if only obliquely and
metaphorically. In one of the many interactions between Susan Orlean and John Laroche
in The Orchid Thief that Charlie Kaufman captures through a revised paraphrase in
Adaptation’s script, Orlean talks with Laroche about the loneliness of plant lovers, which
leads to a conversation about why Laroche loves plants. In Orlean’s version of the
discussion, she writes:

The image of this loneliness seemed to daunt him. He stopped talking

about it and then started explaining to me why he loved plants. He said he

admired how adaptable and mutable they are, how they have ﬁgured out

how to survive in the world. He said that plants range in size more than

any other living species, and then he asked if I was familiar with the plant

that has the largest bloom in the world, which lives parasitically in the

roots of a tree. As the giant ﬂower grows it slowly devours and kills the

host tree. “When I had my own nursery I sometimes felt like all the people

swarming around were going to eat me alive,” Laroche said. “I felt like
they were that gigantic parasitic plant and I was the dying host tree.” (18-

9)

Although Laroche describes himself in language that evokes “exploitative associations,”
he also recognizes himself as part of a symbiotic relationship. And, despite the fact that
Laroche sees this relationship solely in the terms of Darwinian competition by claiming
that “all the people swarming around were going to eat me alive,” wherein success for
one organism comes only at the direct or indirect expense of another, this association
between Laroche and his nursery workers also metaphorically illustrates the association
between Orlean and Laroche. They are mutually dependent. She relies on him if she

wants to get a story for The New Yorker (and, eventually, her own book The Orchid

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Thief), and he relies on her if he wants to have his side of the story told to a wide
audience. Laroche may be the source for this story, but the relationship is not quite as
stark as the host/parasite image he invokes; theirs is a mutually beneﬁcial symbiosis.

Much like Charlie Kaufman and his attempt to broaden his scope to “tie all of
history together,” Susan Orlean also stretches the concept of evolution seen in Laroche
and his orchids to the larger picture, which, in her case, is narrower than “all of history”
but still fairly large: Florida. Throughout The Orchid Thief, Orlean portrays Florida as a
kind of evolutionary hothouse, mutating without end, as if the ﬂuid relationship of the
organisms living there could emerge in a higher, macroscopic pattern reﬂecting its
microscopic components.12 In one of her many meditations on the nature of Florida,
Orlean writes:

The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both,

though, are always in ﬂux: The developed places are just little clearings in

the jungle, but since jungle is unstoppably fertile, it tries to reclaim a piece

of developed Florida every day. At the same time the wilderness

disappears before your eyes: ﬁfty acres of Everglades dry up each day, new

houses sprout on sand dunes, every year a welt of new highway rises.

Nothing seems hard or permanent; everything is always changing or

washing away. Transition and mutation merge into each other, a fusion of

wetness and dryness and unruliness and orderliness, nature and artiﬁce.

Strong singular qualities are engaging, but hybrids like Florida are more

compelling because they are exceptional and strange. (9)
The “exceptional and strange” qualities of Florida surface throughout Orlean’s prose in
The Orchid Thief and, in fact, inform the structure of the book, which is itself a hybrid
and thus close to but not quite: crime tale, autobiography, pOpular science, biography, and

travel narrative all rolled into one. In this way, the form and the content of the book are

both adaptive, even before the scope of a movie script was ﬁrst considered by studio

 

12 . . . -
For a more thorough dlSCUSSlOn of emergence in complex systems, please see chapter live.

171

executives or Charlie Kaufman.

These diverse, disparate genres of writing, like the relationships between fungus
and orchid, orchid and Laroche, Laroche and Orlean, integrate all through The Orchid
Thief in ways where “[t]ransition and mutation merge into each other,” making the book
difﬁcult to grasp when reading it, let alone adapting it. As Susan Orlean writes in the
foreward to Adaptation: The Shooting Script (credited to Charlie Kaufman and the
ﬁctional Donald Kaufman)”, she faced many of the same challenges that Charlie
Kaufman, as screenwriter and as character, faced in the writing of his script. She explains
her position:

It was not the easiest book to write. I was far away from home,

lonely, hot, and worried. What was the book about? Was it about

orchids? Was it the biography of John Laroche, orchid thief? Was it

about passion in general? If that were the case, how could you write a

book about something abstract like passion? There were times when I was

driving across the pancake-ﬂat Florida scrub land in my rental car, when I

really wondered what I had gotten myself into. It would be easier to write

a genre book—a murder story, a memoir, a crime tale—anything with a

conventional narrative are that followed logical and predictable steps

toward climax. Why didn’t I do that kind of book? Was it too late to

scrap this orchid folly and do something more normal? (viii)

The book as a whole is much more ambitious—for both its author and its readers—for
not being “a genre book” that would produce “something more normal.” The structure of
Susan Orlean’s writing reﬂects the ever-shifting, symbiotic nature of her subject matter,
and, in order to adapt that same relationship (even while extending beyond the content),

Charlie Kaufman’s script—writing likewise transforms and adapts in similarly intricate and

tangled patterns.

 

‘3 u 59 ' ,“ ' ' , ' . ‘ ‘
To date, Donald Kaufman rs the only fictional personality to receive an Academy Award nomination.

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4. The Hollywood Ecosystem

The personalities of Charlie Kaufman, Susan Orlean, and John Laroche are not the
only “real~life” characters to be symbiotically absorbed by Adaptation’s script as major
players; the tendency of Hollywood genre movies to pander and oversimplify gets its
personiﬁcation in the screenwriting guru Robert McKee, who helps both of the Kaufman
brothers with their blocked writing processes with some good, old-fashioned formulaic
advice. McKee appears ﬂamboyantly in Adaptation as the feverish messiah to an excited,
desperate cult of would-be screenwriters, promising easy answers for cracking the cliche
codes of Hollywood movies, right down to providing his own set of Ten Commandments
for writers. For example, when Charlie Kaufman confesses to Robert McKee in
Adaptation that he wants to present The Orchid Thief “simply, without big character arcs
or sensationalizing the story,” McKee responds with his own brand of whispered wisdom:
“I’ll tell you a secret. The last act makes a ﬁlm. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit
Find an ending. But don’t cheat. And don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina.
Your characters must change, and the change must come from them. Do that and you’ll
be ﬁne.” Part of the irony of this dialogue lies in the fact that, at the very ending, an
alligator jumps out of the swamp and kills John Laroche, who is about to kill Charlie
Kaufman, thus fulﬁlling both the “wow” at the end and the deus ex machina McKee
warns against. But this irony is trumped by the fact that McKee’s advice itself is a deus
ex machina, too. McKee passes on a life lesson, both announcing to Kaufman how to
cheat and letting him get away with not changing his character from within himself. So,
despite Kaufman’s initial resistance to the formulas of Hollywood genres and the advice

of so-called “insiders” like McKee, the plot of Adaptation still privileges McKee’s

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knowledge and treats his conﬁdential tip as the turning point for Kaufman’s bizarre
writing process, the ideas beneﬁting Kaufman even though he initially resisted them,
enacting a kind of symbiotic synthesis.

Unlike the conception of memes as viruses—which are always malignant and
parasitic—this chapter’s symbiotic model provides a wider set of metaphorical tools for
understanding the cultural particles transmitted through texts, not coded exclusively as
positive or negative. With these possibilites in mind, Daniel Dennett’s formulation of
memes as neutral representations ﬁts more accurately my discussion of the various
symbiotic relationships within and connected to Adaptation. In Consciousness
Explained, Dennett writes that:

To human beings each meme vehicle is a potential friend or foe,
bearing a gift that will enhance our powers or a gift horse that will distract

us, burden our memories, derange our judgment. We may compare these

airborne invaders of our eyes and ears to the parasites that enter our bodies

by other routes: there are the beneﬁcial parasites such as the bacteria in our

digestive systems without which we could not digest our food, the

tolerable parasites, not worth the trouble of eliminating (all the denizens of

our skin and scalps, for instance), and the pernicious invaders that are

harder to eradicate (204)

Although Dennett’s conceptualization here seems to be more tolerant than Richard
Dawkins’s theorization of memes as “viruses of the mind,” Dennett still falls back on the
language of “beneﬁcial parasites” rather than on much more synergetic and cooperative
language, such as considering memes to be symbiotic helpers. It is this kind of double
occupancy in terms of valence that informs the relationship Charlie Kaufman has with the
ideas of Robert McKee.

True to the pattern within symbiosis that allows for the mutual beneﬁt of both

individuals involved, McKee beneﬁts as much from Kaufman’s insertion of his

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ﬁctionalized persona into Adaptation as Kaufman does. Adaptation provides an
enormous advertisement for Robert McKee’s Story books and seminars. And, by the
ﬁlm’s end, the movie has reinforced McKee as guru and softened its earlier portrayal of
him as a buffoon scarnming desperate losers seeking fame and fortune as Hollywood
screenwriters. In fact, McKee seems either to disregard or to misinterpret the role he
plays in Kaufman’s screenplay, as he writes in the “Critical Commentary” at the end of
the shooting script that the nonﬁction characters in Adaptation (such as himself) were
“hijacked and epitomized to play various roles in the chaotic drama of Kaufman’s psychic
life” (132). Moreover, not only does McKee understand himself as being literally
appropriated into Charlie Kaufman’s mind in a reversal of Kaufman’s earlier Being John
Malkovich, McKee believes that he is the ultimate authority ruling over Kaufman’s
psyche: “his Super-ego, his nagging conscience” (133). Given this framework, McKee
does not perceive himself as a symbiotic equal, as his version of Hollywood is
characterized in gradations of winners and. losers. Instead of a neutral symbiotic
synthesis, McKee’s framework appears more concerned with Darwinian competition; he
has entered Kaufman’s script as the authoritarian ruler, putting McKee higher on the
Darwinian food chain of Hollywood competition, not any sort of symbiotic equal but
instead “his nagging conscience,” capable of dispensing inﬂuence yet unwilling to absorb
it. Yet, with symbiotic relationships, the process of symbiosis wins out, not necessarily
one party or the other, a notion McKee overtly eschews in his own writing.

In order for Robert McKee to solidify the notion of textual adaptation as
competition rather than symbiosis (which overlooks many of the complications and

ambiguities Charlie Kaufman explores in his script as a writer and as a character), McKee

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writes in his “screenwriter’s bible,” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles
of Screenwriting, that adaptations are essentially about competitions between the creator
in one medium and the creator in another. In Story’s section about cinematic adaptation,
for example, McKee addresses the impossibility of translating “pure” ideas from one text
to another, explaining that:
Attempts to adapt “pure” literature fail for two reasons: One is

aesthetic impossibility. Image is prelinguistic; no cinematic equivalences

or even approximations exist for conﬂicts buried in the extravagant

language of master novelists and playwrights. Two, when a lesser talent

attempts to adapt genius, which is more likely? Will a lesser talent rise to

the level of genius, or will genius be dragged down to the level of the

adaptor? (367)
For McKee, adaptations are always coded as positive or negative, “a lesser talent ris[ing]
to the level of genius” or “genius be[ing] dragged down to the level of the adaptor.”
Adaptation, with its inclusion of the conventions of “lesser” talents and a certain “level of
genius” without explicitly judging or announcing this transition, appears to be an entirely
different species of adaptation from what McKee is writing about, something not so
competitive.

At the core of meme theory, there exists a gesture at a self-less subject moving in
a constant, ever-changing adaptive system. Individuals are collections of ideas pulled and
synthesized from other sources, all of which are in ﬂux. This abandonment of a singular,
unique, and unattached self can explain not only why Kaufman’s ﬁctional self, his
ﬁctional brother, and his non-cinematic self are all equally fallacious as single, “real”
identities, but also why, despite Kaufman’s initially rigid stance on resisting the

consumer-driven cultural trends of Hollywood, the ﬁlm indulges in its last third in the

cliché formulas of the worst genre movies. In the larger sense, Kaufman’s personal

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failures as an artist and his failures as a lust-driven, heterosexual single man fuse as part
of another adaptation and apprOpriation on the part of formulaic Hollywood capitalism.
In order to make this movie adaptation of The Orchid Thief, the source material must be
perverted, mutated in order to stay ﬁnancially competitive in the evolutionary soup of the
Hollywood mass market economy. So while the ideas of Orlean’s book have been
adapted into the script, Kaufman has adapted in a way that allows him to fuse his work
with the Hollywood formulas he despises, and, as an end result, his script succeeds.

The intermixing of traditional Hollywood ideas and nontraditional, anti-
Hollywood ideas within Adaptation gestures beyond the movie and indicates the capacity
for individual change as a sort of symbiotic adaptation. Earlier in the movie, in the
Kaufman—scripted paraphrase of the dialogue only hinted at by Orlean’s prose, John
Laroche muses at an orchid show with Susan Orlean, explaining his favorite feature about
plants: “You know why I like plants? Because they’re so mutable. Adaptation’s a
profound process. It means you ﬁgure out how to thrive in the world.” Although the
movie dialogue does not contain Laroche’s direct metaphor about being a host or source
or symbiotic player in any larger processes, Laroche’s conclusion that adaptation means
“you” learn how to thrive seems to mean that people can and should adapt along similar
lines to plants. Charlie Kaufman’s script—and Adaptation as a movie—has adapted to
Hollywood standards; it has “ﬁgure[d] out how to thrive in the world,” earning academy
awards and international acclaim.

As critical and snobby as Kaufman’s attitude toward Hollywood is throughout
Adaptation, he is still a Hollywood screenwriter, symbiotically bound to the very

moviemaking machine he condemns. His living depends on Hollywood, and Hollywood

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depends on him and other screenwriters for its living, as the all-encornpassing term
“living” here links ﬁnances to continued existence, or survival in evolutionary terms. The
Hollywood system, as a collaborative, corporate effort, sustains itself with symbiotic
relationships to all of the creative individuals who come together to make a movie, and,
by following the rules and traditions established by that system, Charlie Kaufman has
found a way to survive and thrive, as his ﬁnished script and the resulting ﬁnished movie
indicate. And yet Adaptation’s ending rings false for its total commitment to this brand
of Hollywood artiﬁciality, partially because such artiﬁciality has been so directly
criticized by the Kaufman character himself, recalling Susan Orlean’s response to
Laroche’s comment about the mutability of plants: “Yeah, but it’s easier for plants. They
have no memory. You know, they just move on to whatever’s next. But a person, now,
adapting’s almost shameful. I mean, it’s like running away.” The symbiotic adaptation
of Adaptation, embracing as it does a sensibility opposed to Kaufman’s early stance,
seems “like running away” because the total falseness of its Hollywood escapism seems
incompatible with the more subtle intellectualism of the rest of the movie.

But this mingling of “good” and “bad” movie concepts is precisely the point of
how and why movies mutate in the ﬁrst place: to appeal to audiences’ tastes, to succeed,
“to thrive in the world.” In a way, the ending of Adaptation implicates the viewer as
much as it does Hollywood. The formulaic rules of moviemaking are based on what
appeals to mainstream audiences, and, if the products of those rules were not popular,
moviemakers would adapt. Adaptation’s ending reminds viewers that Hollywood’s
conventional practices are based primarily on box ofﬁce receipts, which is an implication

of movie—going audiences as much as it is an implication of niche-driven studio

178

production and marketing. If we as consumers did not pay to see movies with “bad”
endings and the cliche’ ingredients discussed earlier, Hollywood would stop making them.
Hollywood studios, producers, moviemakers, and agents are all connected to the ticket-
buying public in a web of symbiotic relationships. Moreover, these Hollywood power
brokers are perhaps even more connected to their audiences than they are to the
screenwriters, their subjects, or their subjects’ subjects, as is the case with Kaufman,
Orlean, and Laroche. The nice and neat closure Adaptation provides can serve as a
critical reminder to audiences that, if they do not like such “bad” endings, they should
stop voting with their dollars for those types of endings to succeed. The early criticism
within the movie’s dialogue helps establish the irony later in the movie, and, as a result,
the audience is free to observe the action with the detachment of a critic who might
criticize audiences’ tastes as much as the moviemakers’ choices to cater to them.
Because Adaptation calls attention to movie conventions, its “bad” ending, the
failure on Kaufman’s behalf as a writer, does not ring true. The movie encourages us to
be more aware through its unfolding, suggests that we can adapt and question the movie
cliche’s that audiences typically absorb much more passively. The characters’ choices
within Adaptation stretch beyond the scope of their originally deﬁned personalities,
making us suspect each of their personal adaptations. Orlean is not a drug-abuser;
Laroche is not a Hollywood anti-hero; Kaufman is not an intrepid protagonist trailed by
his loveable, goofy sidekick twin brother. To intensify these characters through an
artiﬁcial conﬂict to the death in the metaphorical murk of Florida’s fertile, ever-changing
swampland is to allow audiences to realize that the various narrative failures at

Adaptation’s end might somehow transcend themselves.

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The characters become so extreme, so over-the-top, so “Hollywood” that they
transform into caricatures capable of deconstructing themselves. The ending feels like an
appropriation by cookie-cutter studio marketing in that it formulaically applies all the
corny tropes of mass-minded, superﬁcial entertainment. But, in adapting the characters
from the personalities we have come to care about over the course of the ﬁlm into the
cardboard archetypes of low—rent Hollywood action movies, Kaufman and the other
ﬁlmmakers show that the ﬁlm’s ending is an intentional artistic artiﬁce. The ﬁlm serves
as a representation of an artistic failure of an artistic failure. The movie Adaptation
delivers the “wow” ﬁnish that executives and audiences clamor for, even as it undermines
that desire by exposing it for the superﬁcial, unsatisfying outcome it truly is, an absolute,

industry-wide mockery that can only take place when delivered with a straight face.

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Chapter Four: Invasion of the Bacteria: Larger Symbiotic Orders in The War of the
Worlds and Its Adaptive Textual Legacy

1. When Aliens Attack

One cannot approach The War of the Worlds without discussing aliens. In this
section, however, I hope to complicate and fuse the various meanings of “alien” so as to
synthesize a new, multivalent understanding of the word that accurately reﬂects the
macrosymbiotic focus I invoke here. Unlike the previous chapter, which dealt with
symbiosis mostly on the level of individual textual and social symbionts (John Laroche,
Susan Orlean, Donald and Charlie Kaufman, as well as The Orchid Thief and
Adaptation), this chapter explores the concept of symbiosis on the systemic, population-
wide level, as the term “alien” itself suggests. Although this chapter centers primarily on
texts directly and symbiotically connected to H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds,
many of the comments can extend outward to inﬂect the subsequent homages, parodies,
and reconﬁgurations of the alien invasion narrative as a kind of population in and of
itself. In some senses, now that we have multiple versions of The War of the Worlds in
varying different contexts, it is almost as though such textual iterations cannot be
separated from a reading of the original novel, as though the meanings from new texts,
like bacteria, infect backwards through time as well as the more conventional, linear
string of inﬂuence, reinforcing the concept that symbiosis, especially on the macro level,
has the capacity to trouble otherwise ﬁxed borders and boundaries through its implicit
ambiguity and instability.

Given this framework where texts’ significations can bleed backwards across

diachronic time and accumulate more meaning into the original version than an author

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could have conceptualized given his own limitations of time and space, the latter day
texts serve as “aliens” capable of invading the original and coloring its reception in
diverse contexts. Within these texts, however, “alien” does not exclusively hear such
extra-textual reference. Instead, I propose here that, when examining The War of the
Worlds and several of its adaptations—primarily the 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air
radio play, the 1953 Byron Haskin/George Pal movie, the late 19805 television series, and
the 2005 Steven Spielberg movieM—the term “alien” can still move ﬂuidly among
various registers of meaning, shifting in conceptual space and scope. After all, regardless
of the magniﬁcation with which we view the “aliens,” they are always “space invaders,”
whether operating on interplanetary, global, or microscopic scales. “Alien,” as I utilize it
in the service of a symbiotic reading of these texts, means concurrently: foreign to planet
Earth, foreign to a given nation or dominant culture, and foreign to the human body.
Perhaps one of the best reasons for the long-lived popularity of Wells’s novel is
that, like the word “alien” itself, the core metaphor of The War of the Worlds—its
aliens—has rich cultural resonance precisely due to its ambiguity. Like Wells’s narrator,
we “scarcely know how to speak of it” because the representations of the aliens are
always mysterious, tense, and unknown (146). If humans could study the alien culture
more fully, if diplomatic communication were possible, then the aliens would not be quite

such a menace beyond the barriers of our comprehension. In Alien Chic: Posthumanism

 

H I have scaled down the list of texts under examination to create a more manageable analysis. Some of the
texts that I regretfully leave out are the two other 2005 War of the Worlds movies, Jeff Wayne’s 1978 rock
musical version, the computer game based on Jeff Wayne’s musical, the numerous illustrated versions,
graphic novel adaptations, and comic book versions. Likewise, I could not incorporate all of the movies
directly or indirectly inspired by The War of the Worlds, either, such as the spoofs, recontextualizations, and
homages found in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Invaders from Mars, Independence Day, Signs, Mars
Attacks.’, etc., not to mention the countless other novels, movies, video games, and television shows
inﬂuenced by Wells’s invasion narrative.

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and the Other Within, Neil Badmington writes that the contemporary shift in popular
culture from aliens as fearful monsters to aliens as nostalgic, pleasant creatures still
serves to separate and distinguish what is “alien” .from what is truly “human,” even
though it has the veneer of a more loving relationship, or “chic” (which he adapts from
Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers as a way of allegedly
supporting an ideological concept while still holding it at a distance). Badmington writes:
Alien Chic, then, is a defence mechanism, a trend with which ‘we’
reassure ‘ourselves’ about who ‘we’ are at a moment of immense

uncertainty. When ‘our difference from machines and animals is no

longer obvious, ‘we’ turn to the alien for its instant difference ‘We’

love ‘Them’, and loving ‘Them’ as a ‘Them’ conﬁrms ‘Us’ as ‘ourselves’

‘Alien love’, in the end, is structurally similar to ‘alien hatred’ in its

carving up of the world into binary oppositions Alien Chic is a

humanism. (90)

Given this framework, there is always a subtle, hostile dialogue between what is alien and
“Us,” even though such dialogue appears to be normalized through familiarity.

“Alien,” then, is always in ﬂux across cultural space and time. The aliens invade
and colonize the hapless Earthlings, while simultaneously being colonized by orders of
meaning by the natives. In Wells’s narrative, the aliens are Martians. These Martian
invaders, before dying from the microbial invasion of Earth’s own bacteria into their alien
systems, can effectively map onto all sorts of contemporary cultural anxieties, from the
threat of world war in both H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds and in Orson
Welles’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation, to Soviets destroying California during the
Cold War in Byron Haskin and George Pal’s 1953 ﬁlm version, to terrorists attacking

New York in the wake of September 11lh in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 ﬁlm version. The

model of these adaptations’ cultural transference, while having parallels to the infectious

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disease that lays the aliens low in every single version, does not work like the viral model
of chapter two. Whereas viruses tend to work within a single generation and spread
quickly through space, bacteria work through both horizontal and vertical transmission,
making their invasion across both space and time. And yet, as I mentioned above,
invoking bacteria as a metaphor brings a unique set ofcomplications in that, unlike
viruses, the concept of bacteria can hardly be so starkly positive or negative. In other
words, if the adaptation of War of the Worlds texts literalizes the bacterial metaphor and
language within Wells’s text, that process of literalization produces a much more
ambiguous lineage that complicates our understanding of the basic units of change in
evolution. Through the following readings of War of the Worlds texts, there is a ﬂux of
meaning between the two evolutionary paradigms of Darwinian competition and
symbiotic cooperation, as their application often relies on interpretation, much like the
concept of “alien” itself, which, as mentioned above, can signify on multiple levels of
magniﬁcation, from the microscopic to the global.

With these multiple connotations in mind for “alien,” the term invites an
ascription of absolute otherness, a concept that seems to serve as metaphor or analog for
something else that the readers or audiences ﬁnd threatening. In fact, the aliens transform
over time and through multiple textual iterations from Martians in Wells’s novel to aliens
from far more vague and unknown reaches of the universe in the television series and
Spielberg’s film version, making the threat more ambiguous and thus more malleable for
audiences’ interpretations. Even within Wells’s source text, the Martians are so “alien”
that they appear beyond description, so menacing that they threaten to escape even our

most basic defenses of language. In The War of the Worlds, Wells’s anonymous narrator

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attempts to depict the Martians as:

the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge

round bodies—rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body

having in front of it a face In the back of this head or body—I scarcely

know how to speak of it—was the single tight tympanic surface, since

known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless

in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost

whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches

have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist,

Professor Howes, the hands. (146, italics in original)
The anatomy and appearance of the Martians is so completely foreign that Wells’s
narrator ﬁnds himself almost unable to communicate this alienness coherently, relying
instead on structural stumblings in his sentences to convey his inability to write rationally
about something so alien. We only have a vague sense of what the Martians are—or even
look like—because Wells leaves the narrative report open to the horrors of his readers’
imaginations, putting the burden on them to ﬁgure out “the most unearthly creatures it is
possible to conceive.” The words seem to reﬂect the unknowable, something so insidious
that the concept can move beyond our understanding so that, even with our inability to
perceive or conceive of the creatures, they can still destroy us, much like the infecting

microbes that have so long bothered microbiologists all the way back to Louis Pasteur,

even though (or, perhaps, because) so few others could similarly “see” the danger.

2. Antiseptic Cultures, Symbiotic Planet

The aliens under discussion in Wells’s narrative (and the novel’s adaptive
progeny) move ﬂuidly in their signiﬁcation from mirroring microscopic threats to
appearing as a threat to the entire planet; Wells’s aliens obviously originate from another

world, but their invasion parallels an infection. Kirsten Ostherr frames these parallels

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between body, nation, and planet in Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion
in the Discourse of World Health, where she discusses the 1953 cinematic adaptation of
The War of the Worlds and other alien invasion movies of the period, writing that: “In this
discourse, bodily invasion is collapsed with geopolitical invasion, and both are treated as
processes of contagion” (.121). Ostherr theorizes that, overall, such a collapse serves an
inherently conservative function, explaining that: “the question of whether a foreign
(immigrant) body would be treated as human or alien has long been at the core of
discourses of immigration and disease,” making the “alien” as a “foreign (immigrant)
body” always already a potential source of death and destruction (98). The background of
Ostherr’s readings of invasion narratives, couched as it is within the framework of world
health, stems from a critical reading of the prevalent discourse about disease and infection
that has dominated most of twentieth century cultures’ attitudes microorganisms, as
rooted in the inﬂuential works of Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur.

Many texts on microbiology tend to be alarmist, cautioning against invisible
“alien” threats”, and this tone harkens back to an old intellectual alliance between the
theoretical models of Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin. Both thinkers conceptualize life
as a perpetual struggle for survival against adversaries both outside and within the
boundaries of species, a competition directly prompted by violence and indirectly

prompted by sex. More speciﬁcally, Darwin frames such efforts to outﬁght and outbreed

 

’5 To read more about the anxieties surrounding microbiology, see Philip M. Tierno's popular science book
The Secret Life of Germs: Observations and Lessons from a Microbe Hunter. Although Tierno also
indicates that “the cycle of life requires the action of germs at every stage” and that “germs were the initial
building blocks of evolution,” throughout much of the book he constructs alarmist hypotheticals, likening
everyday life to a deadly struggle of which we are mostly unaware (7). For example, Tierno writes in detail
about two hypothetical men entering a public bathroom, one washing his hands and living a happy, healthy
life and the other not washing his hands and contracting Ebola (12). And yet, despite Tierno’s mind-
boggling examples and nervous hypotheticals, the book’s central discourse relates to much larger patterns in

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competitors in On the Origin of Species, writing that:
A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at

which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its

natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction

during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year,

otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would

quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the

product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly

survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one

individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of

distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. (63)
In other words, organisms struggle because of physically limited resources; the only
prospects for organisms lie in competition. In Pasteur’s research, the issue of survival is
refocused to microscopic, positing that such struggles take place among competing
organisms within our bodies as well as without, invisible to the naked eye but deadly to
humans nonetheless.

Within the widely inﬂuential essay “The Germ Theory and Its Applications to
Medicine and Surgery,” Louis Pasteur explains, based on his research, that:

we are able to understand what has before seemed so obscure; we can see

how putrescible ﬂuids can be inoculated by the dust of the air, and how it

is that putrid diseases are permanent in the world [W]hat must be

insistently demanded? The absolute proof that there actually exist

transmissible, contagious, infectious diseases of which the cause lies

essentially and solely in the presence of microscopic organisms. (114)
Moreover, Pasteur observes: “that the germs of microscopic organisms abound in the
surface of all objects, in the air and in water” (110). Thus, with Pasteur’s insights,
Darwin’s “struggle for existence” takes place even on levels most humans never perceive.

The implications of combining Darwin and Pasteur’s scientiﬁc worldviews are that all of

life is a violent struggle for dominance, inter-species and intra-species, on both the

 

contemporary science about how life itself works.

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macroscopic and microscopic levels.

Pasteur was able to draw his discoveries back to the world outside the microsc0pe,
however, in that he perceived the political realm and the microbial realm as parallel. For
Pasteur, the discourse of bacterial infection was itself infectious and could be mapped
outward to parallel descriptions of the movements and behaviors of masses of people, and
such masses, when viewed from Pasteur’s conservative perspective, were themselves
invasions. As David Bodanis frames the cross-fertilizations of meaning between
Pasteur’s politics and his inﬂuential perspectives on microbiology, the parallels between
microbes and mobs were ever-present in the scientist’s mind. Bodanis writes in Web of
Words: The Ideas behind Politics that:

Pasteur had a horror of democracy. There was ordered society, which was

good, especially if led by a strong man, and there was also a curious anti-

society, a disordered thing of raw uncultivated bodies: the mob. That was

a collection of small infecting creatures that decent people didn’t

ordinarily see, but which was always there, ready to pounce, to enter our

society and take over and grow The language of Pasteur and

conservatives generally against the masses of the people was almost

exactly like the language Pasteur had developed to use against bacteria.

Both were everywhere, small swarming things ready to strike, to grow and

propagate. (16-7)

Throughout the rest of the book, Bodanis traces the rhetorical conﬂation of the masses
and bacteria over the course of the twentieth century, illustrating how much of the
political leadership on both the national and international level similarly posits that
people—when massed and therefore undesirable, whether poor or just “other” by virtue
of nation—are in need of a kind of antiseptic control, limiting them when eliminating

them outright is for one reason or another unfeasible. Although Wells’s narrator in The

War of the Worlds speaks before the dawn of the twentieth century, his perspective

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reﬂects a comparable paradigm. The global violence and nationalistic zeal of the
twentieth century does not analogize well with a model that posits webs of intersecting
cooperation within, between, and among species; indeed, political views have long
overshadowed symbiotic theory, especially the furthest reaching extension prOposed by
Lynn Margulis, as she champions her own version of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.
Although the basic idea behind the Gaia hypothesis is relatively simple—that
Earth’s various ecosystems can be collectively conceptualized as a global ecosystem
analogous to a single, living organism—theorists such as Margulis must work to clarify
the secularized, de-mystiﬁed versions of the Gala theory, separating it from popular
“Earth mother” misconceptions.l6 Margulis’s model of Gaia, as she points out, is simply
viewing symbiosis on the planetary scale. In the prologue to Symbiotic Planet: A New
Look at Evolution, Margulis quickly addresses “how symbiosis jibes with Gaia” by citing:
a wisecrack of a wonderful former student of mine named Greg Hinkle
Before receiving his Ph.D., Greg knew and taught that symbiosis is simply
the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species.
Partners in symbiosis, fellow symbionts abide in the same place at the
same time, literally touching each other or even inside each other Greg
quips, “Gaia is just symbiosis as seen from space”: all organisms are
touching because all are bathed in the same air and the same ﬂowing
water. (1-2)

From this framework—or, to use a more appropriate term, worldview—the

interconnected planetary ecosystem regulates itself in spite of, perhaps because of, its

 

 

’6 In fact, Margulis has written explicitly to counter the SBCUl'dF appropriation ofGaia as New Age gOddCSS’
stating in Symbiotic Planet that: “Gaia is neither vicious nor nurturing in “313110" ‘0 humanity; it is a
convenient name for an Earthwide phenomenon: the regulation of temperature, acidity/alkalinity, and gas
composition. Gaia is the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the
Earth’s surface. Period Life, especially bacterial life, is resilient. It has fed on disaster and destruction
from the beginning” (120).

189

 

 

constant ﬂux and change in ways that parallel the uniﬁed life functions of complex
individual organisms.

This assertion that the fundamental characterof life lies in interdependence,
however, is starkly at odds with the neo-Darwinian competition Richard Dawkins
explains is at the core of life. In The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene,
Dawkins again explores how DNA and algorithmic processes inform nearly all aspects of
behavior. While these “extended phenotypes” create conceptual webs that basically
encompass the globe in an ever-adapting matrix, Dawkins is quick to distinguish his
formulation from the problematic Gaia hypothesis.17 Dawkins holds so closely to his
neo-Darwinian convictions that, in order to treat the Earth as a uniﬁed whole, there must
be comparable competitors, other planetary organisms that either fail or succeed, thus
expanding the paradigm of the “survival of the ﬁttest.” According to Dawkins, the lack
of such evidence points to this perspective’s invalidity: “For the analogy to apply strictly,
there would have to have been a set of rival Gaias, presumably on different planets In
addition we would have to postulate some kind of reproduction, whereby successful
planets spawned copies of their life forms on new planets” (236). In this vein, Dawkins’s
conjecture-as-counter-argument depicts a kind of interplanetary Darwinism that resonates
with the War of the Worlds texts and, curiously enough, resembles Pasteur’s microscopic
universe.

In Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution, Lynn Margulis and

Gregory Hinkle respond to Dawkins’s assertions through an essay entitled “The Biota and

 

’7 Dawkins writes that: “There is a risk that such talk of adaptation on a global scale may call to the
reader’s mind the fashionable image of the ecological ‘web’, of which the most extreme manifestation is the
‘Gaia’ hypothesis of Lovelock The comparison could hardly be more misleading” (234-5).

190

Gaia: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Support for Environmental Sciences.” Here, they
assert that: “Richard Dawkins’ (1982) claim that the Gaia hypothesis cannot be true
because there is no evidence for competition between Earth, Venus, and Mars is reﬂective
of neo-Darwinism’s preoccupation with the romantic, Victorian conception of evolution
as a prolonged and bloody battle” (215). From this back—and-forth exchange, it would
seem as though there can be no dialogue between the theories of Dawkins and Margulis,
at least as those theories apply to the questions of competition and symbiosis.

However, the adaptive textual legacy of Wells’s writings, both in The War of the
Worlds and some of his nonﬁctional texts, demonstrates that we can utilize Dawkins’s
conception of the culturally evolving meme with Margulis’s expansion of symbiosis to a
global, macrosymbiotic level. This synthesis involves a theoretical symbiosis, allowing
us to examine multiple levels of textuality, moving from the microscopic metaphors
within a text to the symbiotic appropriations of cultural contexts between and among
texts over time. My analysis here details how H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds could
present “competition between Earth and Mars” as interconnected, holistic, planetary
ecosystems, while also reﬂecting a Darwinian “preoccupation with the romantic,
Victorian conception of evolution as a prolonged and bloody battle.” Within this
complicated, interconnected theoretical paradigm, the tensions between microscopic
threats and symbiotic linkages correlate that of cultural threats. In turn, Wells’s text and
the subsequent adaptations refocus the magniﬁcation of the established microbiological
discourse outward, zooming to global threats, moving along levels of alterity from body
to nation to planet.

This sense of microscopic mystique, aliens operating like bacterial masses on the

191

bodily, national, and global level, carries through many of the textual adaptations, picking
up on the strains of microbial anxiety ﬂoating below the surface of Wells’s novel, where
the aliens reproduce asexually, like bacteria, the narrator writing in awe of an incident
where a “young Martian was found attached to its parent, partially budded off” (148,
italics in original). The patterns of the aliens operating like a bacterial infection carry
through to the late 1980s War of the Worlds television show as well, which includes the
narration of Harrison Blackwood, in the ﬁrst season’s opening credit sequence, saying:
“In 1953, Earth experienced a war of the worlds. Common bacteria stopped the aliens,
but it didn’t kill them. Instead, the aliens lapsed into a state of deep hibernation. Now
the aliens have been resurrected, more terrifying than before. In 1953, aliens started
taking over the world. Today, they’re taking over our bodies” (War of the Worlds 1988).
The invasion of the aliens, within the diegetic universe of the television series at least, is
part of a diachronic planetary infection, as the television adaptation absorbs and includes
the mythology of previous adaptations into its own storyline; the 1953 movie represents
an earlier invasion by the aliens, which, because of the severity of this global trauma, no
one in the present remembers. This collective amnesia, coincidentally convenient for the
narrative logic of the series, also extends to the 1938 broadcast by Orson Welles and the
Mercury Theatre on the Air, and the events of the earlier movie and radio play bubble up
into some of the episodes’ central plotlines. Although such moments of intertextuality
are fun for the fans, this timeline indicates the adaptability of something “alien” to
contexts, showing how the alien infection affects diachronic culture. Moreover, the
particular type of invasiveness adhered to in the television show’s revision of the alien

menace serves to threaten identity not just on the planetary level. This threat is “taking

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over our bodies,” destabilizing the critical boundaries between “us” and “them,” on the
individual, corporeal level, as well as the national and global levels, because we can no
longer trust our fellow Americans, or even fellow humans, not to be carrying the invaders
within them.18
In Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie version, now titled simply War of the Worlds,
there are similar analogies to bodily and national invasion, though they take place before
the full-scale interplanetary interaction gets underway, through brief allusions connected
to the deadbeat dad protagonist Ray Ferrier’s estranged children. While dropping off
their son and daughter, Ray’s ex-wife tells him: “Robbie’s got a paper on the French
occupation of Algeria due Monday, which he’s yet to begin,” and, after Ray’s daughter
Rachel gets a splinter in her ﬁnger, she assures him that “When it’s ready, my body’ll just
push it out” (War of the Worlds 2005). These two ephemeral bits of dialogue provide
metaphorical parallels to the alien invasion about to take place in that, whether discussing
the struggle between the French colonial power and the Algerian insurgency or the
encounter between a sliver and the defenses of the body’s epidermis, the results are the
same: the local defenses will win out and expel the invasive enemy, as well as any threat
of possible colonization or infection. And, with both instances, it is not some decision-
making, hierarchical executive branch that dictates the expulsion; rather, the invaders are

repelled by the collective force of low—level agents operating defensively from the bottom

up rather than the top down, much like the microscopic strategies of bacteria. In other

 

’8 Because of the new dynamic of aliens physically taking over hurnans’ bodies, the television series owes
nearly as much to Invasion of the Body Snatchers as it does to The War of the Worlds. Moreover, as the
aliens and their covert, government-funded human counterparts are ﬁghting secretly in episodic, small
battles, the “war” of the title seems misleading, though “The Skirmishes of the Worlds” obviously does not
have the same ring to it.

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words, within the various War of the Worlds texts, the concept of individual human
agency is called into question both by the invaders and what kind of defenses it takes to
beat them, creating a kind of moral relativism that traces its roots back to the critical

focus found even in Wells’s novel.

3. “Darwin ex machina”

From the beginning of The War of the Worlds to its end, Wells relies on this
discourse of microscopic disease, a kind of bacterial language that he applies to both the
humans and the extraterrestrial aliens in his narrative, making the focus too broad for any
one identity and thus shifting the sc0pe to the “worlds” of the title as characters. The
humans in the novel are relatively superﬂuous, existing primarily as targets for the
Martians’ futuristic weapons and barbaric savagery. Almost all of the characters who
have the privilege of receiving names die horrible, grisly deaths, while the narrator, his
wife, and his brother all remain anonymous spectators whose narrative function is solely
to survive and witness the events. Obviously, many other anonymous characters are fated
to die, too. There is nothing particularly virtuous or unique about the characters to
survive; these ﬁgures may be resourceful at times, but so are other individuals who wind
up dead, replacing any conventional virtue with dumb luck.

The various protagonists in all the versions of The War of the Worlds do not
successfully combat or directly confront their alien enemies; they are saved by a deus ex
machina in the form of germs attacking and killing the invaders. These bacteria operate
in the greater service of humanity, though they clearly do not have the capacity to realize

the consequences of their actions. Rather than having a god step into the narrative to

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solve the cowering Earthlings’ problems at the end of The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells
creates an evolutionary deus ex machina, or a “Darwin ex machina”: the Martians die off
because they have not adapted to the bacteria inhabiting everyday humans, making Homo
sapiens the “ﬁttest” by default of surviving. While this ending poses a certain sort of
scientiﬁc realism, the effect of ending the narrative with germs as the ultimate victors
instead of the humans is somewhat less than satisfying by the typical conventions of
narrative. Wells announces this ﬁnal anti-climax in language that obscures his afﬁnity
for science over religion, 3 paraphrase of which enters into almost every adaptation of the
novel, regardless of its medium; in its original textual form, Wells writes:

And scattered about [the landscape], some in their overturned war-

machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them

stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the

putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were

unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s

devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put

upon this earth. (195, italics in original)
Although the rest of the passage—-and, indeed, the pages surrounding it—focuses on
subtle points about the roles bacteria have played in the evolution of humankind, there is
no avoiding the fact that Wells here puts “God, in his wisdom” behind everything,
making the Martian invasion play out like just another component in Intelligent Design.
In the Orson Welles/Mercury Theater on the Air radio broadcast, and in the Steven
Spielberg and Byron Haskin movies, this insertion of God is further emphasized by its
delivery being voiced by the voice-of-God narration of Orson Welles, Morgan Freeman,
and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, respectively, and the Haskin version goes so far as to stage

this ﬁnal revelation in a church and follow it with a heavenly choir singing “Amen.”

The “Darwin ex machina” that Wells writes into the ending of The War of the

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Worlds problematizes the narrative in several ways at once, as it appears to signify that
humans have some control over Earth’s fate through their ultimate survival, which the
rest of the novel questions severely. Humanity’s survival was never part of the “war” that
brought the Martians down; the bacteria were the only agents whose ﬁghting yielded any
results. Likewise, the competition implied by humans surviving while the Martians die,
even though the Martians prove to be superior in all other aspects, illustrates for Wells
that the only meaning behind humankind’s survival lies in the species diachronic survival
and coexistence with bacteria. The range of Wells’s evolutionary focus seems to leave
non-evolutionary conceptions of God out of his portrayal entirely by mentioning “our
prehuman ancestors” as part of an evolutionary continuum that makes humanity’s
survival in the face of invaders incapable of destroying native bacteria “inevitable.” If
humans are the “winners” of this interplanetary “war,” it is only because so many of them
died so long ago in the past that no one today has any memory of the ﬁght.

Although the “war” against the Martians is couched in the language of
competition, the “Darwin ex machina” I am applying eventually unravels itself because
the Darwinian focus is subsumed by symbiotic association. These bacteria, after all, have
killed billions of humans as well as many of “our prehuman ancestors,” and yet they are
now integrated into our systems, essential to the survival of our daily life functions. We
have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria, whom Wells calls “our microscopic
allies.” Moreover, the regulatory function of the bacteria in service to the global
ecosystem, despite Wells’s claim that such an ecosystem is humanity’s “birthright,” show
the Earth adjusting minute aspects of its environment with little overall impact felt by the

numerous human deaths recollected in the book. This macroscopic view, as well as the

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title itself, suggests that neither the bacteria nor humankind “win” the war, but that Earth
does after its planetary dominion has been threatened by an alien invasion. In other
words, the world saves itself. This extrapolation of the story to global implications traces
the symbiosis between humans and bacteria to the level of Gaia, echoing Margulis’s
claim in an essay titled “A Pox Called Man” in Slanted Truths that: “Gaian
environmental regulation is achieved largely by the origin, exponential growth, and
extinction of organisms” (255). The alien invaders threw off the planet’s environmental
balance, and so they met with the global ecosystem’s counterattack through the
microscopic defense of bacteria, much like the microorganisms within our bodies defend
the integrated whole. In The War of the Worlds, despite the Martians seeking to eliminate
the planet’s human occupants, the human casualties were simply caught in the crossﬁre
between the invaders and the bacteria seeking to destroy them. As Margulis continues on
in “A Pox Called Man,” “Many species, especially those in the four nonanimal kingdoms,
do not need humans to take care of them and would not blink if we drove ourselves to
extinction tomorrow” (257). This assertion brings us back to the complicated “Darwin ex
machina” structure of the novel’s ending in that the dumb luck of evolutionary survival is
apparently even more blind than Wells envisioned it. Although I have already established
that the characters survive regardless of the virtues they do or not do possess, from the
bacterial perspective, all of humanity’s virtues are moot.

Given that bacteria operate in microscopic masses without identifiable intentions,
it is ﬁtting that, at least in Wells’s novel, humans are largely indistinguishable from one
another. In a sense, there are no real characters in The War of the Worlds, just simplistic

vessels for enduring and transmitting affect, which moves, appropriately enough, through

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the population like a contagion. These contagions of affect—frequently coded with the
discourse of nationalism, such as when the masses call upon the military and the
government to destroy the invaders—mirror the microscopic movements of bacteria in
bodily systems as well as the macroscopic trends of the humans on the surface of the
Earth, who spend most of the novel losing to the interplanetary afﬂiction of the Martians.
For much of the narrative, Earth as a system is being invaded. While the alien attackers
seem to have a special interest in killing humans (as the self-proclaimed dominant
species), they annihilate pretty much everything they come into contact with, and, along
with their advance, they release the red weed. Wells’s narrator explains that:
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green

for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint. At any rate, the seeds

which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave

rise in all cases to red-coloured growths. Only that known popularly as the

red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial

forms. (150)
The Martian threat here is not limited solely to the violence inﬂicted by the Martian
machines; even the plants from their ecosystem are part of the environmental onslaught,
which even the narrator does not know whether the aliens do this “intentionally or
accidentally.” Thus, all of Earth as a collective ecosystem is threatened by this alien
presence, and the complex, interdependent organisms are thrown out of balance and
threatened with extinction by this biological warfare. Gaia as an entity, all of Earth, has
caught a cold from .Mars that is wiping out Earth’s native plants and animals at
tremendous rates, and the only things capable of destroying the invaders are more
invaders, though they work at the microscopic level as disease-spreading bacteria against

which humans have already developed immunity.

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From the Opening words of The War ofthe Worlds, Wells establishes the
narrative’s shifting scope across these orders of magniﬁcation (body to nation to planet),
and with such invocations the novel refr'ames humans and their experiential realm as
“other” by describing their patterns as though through a microscope. Wells famously
opens the story by stating that:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that

this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater

than man’s and yet as mortal as his own: that as men busied themselves

about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps

almost as narrowly as a man with a microsc0pe might scrutinise the

transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With

inﬁnite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little

affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible

that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a

thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or

thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or

improbable. (9)

Wells’s narrator ﬁrst announces that the alien threat has superior intelligence to

humankind, intelligence that allows the Martians to examine and study Earthlings with as
little sympathy as we might feel while observing “the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water” through a microscope ourselves. Humanity here is equated

with infusoria, bacteria as easily wiped out by “the older worlds of space” as the
microorganisms are which our bodies defend us from every day. Likewise, Wells’s
phrasing implicates humanity’s arrogance by bitterly doubting their “inﬁnite

complacency” while swarming “over this globe about their little affairs,” directly

invoking the nation through a parallel between the microscopic teeming masses and “their

assurance of their empire over matter.” Granted, this “empire” seems to relate to the

empirical observations of the sciences rather than the British Empire, but it is not long

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before the threads of colonialism emerge from the Martians’ invasion plan, which is
founded as much on the patterns of bacterial colonies as it is on the patterns of
international colonies.

Many critics, such as Julian Cornell, read Wells’s portrayal of the Martians nearly
conquering the Earth as a metaphorical indictment of British colonialism, the imperial
ideology being something which Wells’s criticized more openly and directly in other
texts. Because the foundations of colonizers’ perceived superiority over the indigenous
peoples of the world relied heavily on eugenicists’ mis-adaptation of Darwinism, the
colonial project was inherently bound up in a kind of racist, elitist Social Darwinism that
equated whatever “undesirable” categories the ruling powers found necessary to oppose
with the bacterial masses Pasteur so vehemently hated. H. G. Wells recognized this
appropriation of Darwin’s science as fallacious, and, in the course of the attempted
interplanetary colonization that takes place in The War of the Worlds, the colonizing
countryside of Great Britain is subjected to the violent rule of a superior nonnative power.
And yet, as the bacterial counter-colonization demonstrates, for Wells, biological
Darwinism trumps Social Darwinism. In “All’s Wells that Ends Wells: Apocalypse and
Empire in The War of the Worlds,” Cornell writes that:

Throughout the text, Wells expands upon these themes [opposing

Social Darwinism], attempting to undermine the reader’s belief in the

supremacy and invulnerability of the British war machine, by placing him

or her in a position subordinate to its might. The narrator’s point of view,

as expressed through his vivid recounting of his ﬂight from the aliens’

onslaught, is from the vantage point of the oppressed, of the colonized

subject’s helplessness before a technologically superior military force.

Thus, The War of the Worlds is involved, through its spectacle of Martian

bombardment, in examining the use and display of political power,

speciﬁcally in relation to the formation, and perpetuation, of empire.
(426)

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Because Wells’s novel shifts so easily from one level of magnitude to another, the text
complicates the established tenets of what is right and good in both body and nation while
spinning his yarn about the fate of the planet. After’all, from the Pasteurian perspective,
within each of these levels (body, nation, and planet), whatever is outside of the deﬁnition
of “us” is a threat, and, conversely, whatever is a threat is therefore by deﬁnition “alien.”
Instead, Wells puts us, through the narrator’s point of view, into “the vantage point of the
oppressed,” allowing a complicated process of identiﬁcation to take place that also
eventually allows us to perceive bacterial diseases as “our microscopic allies.” These
binary reversals of perspective allow us as readers to participate in Wells’s reimagining of
the globe as a symbiotic system to such an extent that, given a focus macroscopic enough,
killing our enemies amounts to killing ourselves.

By fusing Julian Cornell’s reading of Wells’s critique of the politics of
nationalism and colonialism along with my current reading of the micropolitics of
bacterial infection and symbiosis, a new theoretical lens emerges wherein H. G. Wells’s
text reveals the same sorts of discourse strategies employed by Louis Pasteur and, as
David Bodanis notes, many writers who followed Pasteur’s rhetoric. Although those who
supported British colonialism also typically supported the notion that the superiority of
white, Western civilization justiﬁed invasion and domination, Wells’s novel positions all
of humanity as inferior to the aliens, making Great Britain—and the reader, by
extension—part of the “infusoria,” the insigniﬁcant teeming masses that are easily
exterminated by outside intruders. Bodanis notes that, according to rhetoric initiated by

Pasteur, the common thinking with respect to masses of “bacteria—like” people was:

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If unpleasant entities such as the people or bacteria had to exist, then they

must be kept ﬁrmly in their place. The people, and especially the workers,

were safe only if kept in passive Catholic trade unions, or state-run clubs,

or other trustworthy bureaucratic bounds. The bacteria, in all their

unpleasant and quick-to-grow varieties, were safe only if restricted to one

slot in the Great Chain of Being, that of the decomposer of dead bodies,

destroying order only after all life in it had naturally gone, and returning its

atoms to the soil for rebirth. Outside of that, though, and they were

terrible. (17)

With the type of thinking Bodanis describes in this passage—the rhetorical conﬂation of
the masses with the microbes in order to “shrink” both their enormity and their
signiﬁcance—~politicians create a kind of microscopic subaltern. Wells, as an outspoken
Socialist, inverts this political dynamic by depicting an extraterrestrial race of aliens
superior to all humans, relegating all of humanity into the microscopic subaltern that
Bodanis writes was initially developed by Pasteur and carried along by leaders as diverse
as Josef Stalin and Joseph McCarthy.

Wells applies this rhetorical strategy of “shrinking” opponents into the
microscopic subaltern, except that, instead of wielding these tactics against the nation’s
poor or the native peoples abroad, he directs it at all human beings, thus deconstructing
the imperialist claims that colonialism is a natural phenomenon merely unfolding in the
political realm. Obviously, few readers interpret the alien invasion as “right” and
“natural” due to the mental and technological superiority of the Martian race. By the end
of Wells’s narrative, however, “nature” unravels the aliens’ biological superiority. The
alien bodies have no defenses against alien bacteria, making the marauding Martians, in
the end, the microscopic subaltern, and, by doing so, Wells establishes a science ﬁction

tradition of ﬁguring the invading aliens as a contagious disease threatening to envelop

and infect the planet. Instead of the formerly helpless humans (or even the seemingly

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insigniﬁcant bacteria) being the microscopic subaltern, the Martians themselves end up as
the unknown, ambiguous, and powerless microscopic subaltern: threatening and deadly
during invasion, yet “safe if restricted to one slotin the Great Chain of Being.”
Although Wells’s novel proceeds along these different levels of magniﬁcation
from body to nation to planet, the coding available to the microscopic subaltern is always
by its very deﬁnition ambiguous; while Wells might label the germs in his novel “our
microscopic allies” or “putrefactive and disease bacteria,” the bacteria themselves do not
play a part in the signiﬁcation process, nor can the attacked humans fully comprehend the
exact intentions of the Martians with whom they have a severe communication barrier (as
Wells demonstrates with the release of the red weed discussed earlier). Likewise, does
Wells’s narrative represent the triumph of competition through the aliens’ death, or does
it portray the success of symbiosis in that human systems are biologically compatible
with—and even fundamentally dependent upon—bacteria, as well as the larger Earth
ecosystem of Gaia? The difﬁculty and confusion of these ideas lie largely in the realm of
interpretation and context. Depending on the theoretical framework we apply to The War
of the Worlds, the text yields support for disparate conceptions about the nature of
evolution. In part, this central ambivalence within Wells’s novel—which, like the
scattering of red weed seeds, may have been performed “intentionally or accidentally”—
undermines some of the social criticism that Cornell and others discover within the
narrative. After all, if the humans remain alive while the Martians die, conﬁning the
aliens to the microscopic subaltern, then the supremacy of human domination of the Earth

is threatened but ultimately victorious.

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Despite the fact that The War of the Worlds ends with the lowly bacteria saving
humankind, Earth’s humans are saved nonetheless; even though Wells illustrates
humanity’s “inﬁnite complacency” and arrogance throughout most of the novel, allowing
the alien colonizers to succeed in their conquest of the globe would have limited the
success of the novel, leading Wells’s ideas to extinction through unpopularity. Because
the ﬁrst-person, past-tense narrator is human, we know that the aliens must fail in
destroying the globe’s human population, and thus, because the complacent humans who
survive until the narrative’s end get to live complacently once again, the novel’s critical
parallels—between the aliens’ destructive invasion and the upper classes’ domination at
home and abroad—become muddled by the ﬁnal outcome. The narrator’s clearest
suggestion that humans may not always be the masters of the planet that they currently are
comes through an ambiguous conjecture in the epilogue (following a suggestion that
humans can—and shouldl—colonize other planets): “It may be, on the other hand, that
the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the
future ordained” (208). Although Mike Davis calls The War of the Worlds “Wells’s great
anti-imperialist allegory,” the ending creates problematic implications for Wells’s critique
of British colonialism, unleashing as the novel’s closure does a certain strain of ambiguity
with respect to humans’ relative places in the social and ecological pecking order (290).
In this way, the “Darwin ex machina” of the aliens’ defeat through bacterial infection may
be one of the few threads connecting the story’s closing with the criticism of human
complacency at the beginning: the novel informs readers that their individuality and
virtue have just as little to do with their salvation as they do with the seemingly random

threat that drops down on them from the sky. Their species just lucked out at the

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Darwinian crapshoot thousands of years ago, but that “moral” does not address directly or

indirectly the justiﬁcation for colonialism.

4. Microscopic Ambiguities, Macroscopic Implications

The fact that so much of Wells’s The War ofthe Worlds relies on the interpretive
stance of readers and critics to map out the meaning of the novel—through understanding
its open-ended metaphors, narrative movements, and rhetorical structures—provides
access to insights about how symbiosis plays out, even with respect to memes. More
speciﬁcally, although most current models of meme theory hypothesize that meme
consumption is largely passive, we have seen in the previous chapters that such a limited
model of exchange between a reader and a text does not fully encapsulate texts’ potential
for rich interaction with their audiences. Still, if we are to follow the lead of other meme
theorists’ discourse about memes as infections, then to what extent can a subject be
resistant to memes? As I have mentioned already, Richard Brodie suggests quarantine,
but such a method does not address strategies for opposing memes to which we have
already been exposed. We cannot “unread” a text or “unwatch” a movie. Texts we have
experienced are already parts, however large or small, of the collection of inﬂuences that
compose our minds. Much like the process of symbiosis, the text enters and becomes a
part of the subject, however antithetical that text may seem to any given subject’s
individual orientation.

With The War of the Worlds, for example, we have the two descriptions of
microbes as “putrefactive and disease bacteria” and as “our microscopic allies,” even

though the bacteria undergo no change in orientation, save that they occupy the bodies of

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the Martian invaders. Context, of course, must play a part, but so, too, does the act of
interpretation, the light within which we view these tiny life forms. If texts can operate
and adapt analogously to bacteria, then the process of resisting them lies in how we
interpret them because, as with the example discussed above of the microscopic
subalterns, memes do not “mean” anything without their hosts, just as texts are nothing
without readers. Interpretations serve their own function as a part of the continuum of
adaptation. In this way, my “adaptation” of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in this
chapter, while it may not be as famous as Steven Spielberg’s, operates along similar lines
of contextualization and interpretation, the process of absorbing the original and
synthesizing a new symbiotic product by adapting it with my own mental material.
Certain aspects of intention and theme may be lost or mutated, but such observations
about those aspects’ changing elements require yet another interpretation and, thus,
further adaptation.

Without the polyphonous dialogue of interpretation-as—adaptation, a limitation of
readings allows for certain ﬁgures to assume more power by their interpretations being
more “right” or more “ofﬁcial” merely by the default of other voices not being heard,
giving those few interpretations a sort of memetic “Darwin ex machina” by letting them
survive through no particular virtue of their own. Because the ﬂux of such interpretations
is limited by the critical lack of dialogue, the ideas stagnate. And, as John Stuart Mill has
observed, stagnant ideas are dangerous ideas if for no other reason than that they continue
on unchallenged; Mill writes: “However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion
may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the

consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly

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discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth” (37). With Mill’s
formulation, the “living truth” of an idea relies heavily on its continued circulation.
Limitations on dialogue, interpretation, and adaptation, then, serve an essentially
conservative function, much like Pasteur’s conception of a hierarchical leader controlling
and limiting both masses and microbes. David Bodanis explains that fear of the unknown
and alien microbial masses—whether foreign enemies, foreign diseases, or foreign
ideas—inherently depends on authoritative ﬁgures, writing:

That’s what is special, and eternally dangerous, about Pasteur’s bacteria.

They are invisible. The enemies, the sources of evil that they predicate,

are ones which ordinary people cannot make out, however closely they

peer or stare. You need specialists to ﬁnd bacteria, men with microscopes

and university training. You also need specialists to ﬁnd the conceptual

taint, conceptual threat, and its possible sources of infection. (38)

Along with the distrust of the masses Bodanis describes here is of course a faith in a
strong central power, capable of limiting dissent by limiting alternative interpretations
and thus keeping possibly threatening ideas from forming discordant adaptations
(potential “living truths”) to that power’s otherwise unquestioned “dead dogma.”

Of course, to the extent that we can extrapolate theories about microscopic
behavior for application to analyses of macroscopic social and political patterns, the
symbiotic model undermines the notion that there are singular selves disconnected from
other subjects and capable of being “specialists” to rule over “ordinary people.” Instead,
there exists a certain kind of conceptual relativism allowing for potentially antithetical
parties to coexist, even mutually beneﬁt, not just on the level of social entities but also on

the level of their texts. Tom Wakeford, explains how, through the symbiosis of bacterial

sex, even the bacterial species line is crossed, making potential partners for sexual

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merging and genetic exchange out of not just “competing” individual organisms but even
organisms classiﬁed as members of entirely different species. Wakeford elucidates that
this ﬂuidity of genetic exchange—both horizontal and vertical—allows for bacterial
masses to be linked according to complex levels of organization in ways that thinkers like
Pasteur never recognized; he writes that:

To take a radical view, bacteria may one day be found to be so genetically

cross-linked as to make them all members of a single species. This

megaspecies would therefore possess just one global genome, which

transferred itself ﬂuidly between its different constituent types. Whether

or not this stretches the concept of a species too far, local bacterial

communities certainly employ genetic and metabolic mechanisms, almost

like a collective brain, which enable them to ﬁnd solutions to almost every

ecological problem. Genes favorable to a particular niche are genetically

shunted to strains that survive only if they receive the genetic information

on time. (.151, my emphasis)
Given Wakeford’s model for complex bacterial exchanges on the microscopic level,
symbiosis has the capacity for a kind of aggregated thought or collective brain. And, as
with the ideas espoused by Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, symbiotic connections
between and among texts ought to have similar implications for patterns on the
macroscopic level as well. But what would the textual equivalent of the Gaia global
ecosystem look like, exactly? The answer depends on how we conceive of “Gaia” to
begin with since, as Lynn Margulis points out in S ymbiotic Planet, there are “weak” and
“strong” versions of the theory, as she writes:

Physiological chemistry, what we call metabolism, results from the

activity of living beings. Just how closely linked the chemical systems of

Gaia are remains a matter of debate. “Weak Gaia” holds that the

environment and life are coupled; they coevolve. Few disagree. Many

scientists dismiss this idea as old news. “Strong Gaia” states that the

planet with its life, a single living system, is regulated in certain aspects by
that life. (123-4)

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Much like the diverse interpretations of Gaia, there have been many intellectual forays
into how we can conceive of information or texts on a global systemic level, some of
them even incorporating the Gaia metaphor in their very conception.

Peter Russell is one such theorist of the global information network, who indulges
considerably in the Gaia spiritualism against which Margulis has spoken so vehemently.
In The Global Brain Awakens: Our Next Evolutionary Leap, for instance, Russell
discusses how the speed with which contemporary technologies deliver texts across the
globe will eventually allow the networks of humankind to emerge as a functioning
collective brain for Gaia. In the book’s epilogue, titled “Beyond Gaia,” Russell writes
that: “If humanity were to evolve into a healthy, integrated, social superorganism, this
transformation could signal the maturation and awakening of the global nervous system.
Gaia might then achieve her own equivalent of self—reﬂective consciousness, and a new
level of evolution, the Gaiaﬁeld, might emerge” (315-6). Although Russell posits his
informational variation on the Gala hypothesis as a sort of futurist conjecture (and a
bizarrely anthropomorphic and eccentric one at that), the “Gaiaﬁeld” provides an
interesting counterpart to the theoretical discussion here about the possibility for textual
symbiosis. In other words, the concept of a “Gaiaﬁeld,” as a textual/informational term,
mirrors the global component to the symbiotic model under discussion.

The idea that there are possibilities (some might even argue necessities) for a
global informational network is not new, despite Russell’s unique adaptation of the Gaia
hypothesis to theorize an emergent superorganism based on collective humanity; in fact,
H. G. Wells himself explores the notion of a worldwide web of encyclopedic information

in World Brain. Within this text, a collection of essays and lectures about creating a

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global information system or “World Encyclopaedia,” Wells explains, in a 1937 speech
entitled “The Brain Organization of the Modern World,” that: “A World Encyclopaedia
will have by its very nature to be what is called liberal. An Encyc10paedia appealing to
all mankind can admit no narrowing dogmas without at the same time admitting
corrective criticism” (78). Once again, as with Mill, we observe the invocation of
“dogma” as crippling the ﬂow of ideas, regardless of its individual worth; a concept as
ﬂuid and dynamic as a “Gaiafield” or a “World Brain” or a “World Encyclopaedia,” no
matter which ideas are included and regardless of which forces within the collective drive
the most change, must inherently be mutable enough to undergo constant adaptation
through conceptual linkages, perpetual inclusion of new ideas, and ceaseless re-
evaluation and skepticism of its own source materials. As a result of these models for
global information systems relying on progressive principles, the emergent forms, despite
their utopianism or impracticality, contain a kind of organic interactivity; humans, their
technologies, and their information will all be similarly merged through the next step of
terrestrial evolution and leave behind the restrictive limitations of the past, so the
reasoning goes. This lithe, almost mercurial framework for organic informational
exchange, in both Wells and Russell’s variations, provides a superstructural system that
parallels bacterial symbiosis, while also furnishing a metaphorical framework for
analyzing the uniquely interdependent relationship between texts and contexts within a
given cultural moment. After all, as a logical extension of the notion that texts’ readers
perform individual interpretations-as-adaptations, the concept of an informational
“Gaiaﬁeld” allows texts to emerge both as products of their cultural context and shapers

of that context.

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As I have demonstrated through an analysis of the viral model of adaptation, part
of the anxiety behind meme theory is the issue of ﬁdelity during the process of textual
transfer—the tension between the intention of texts’ authors and their textual offerings’
capacity for being mis-adapted, misinterpreted, or otherwise misapplied—but, within this
framework of a global informational system, reliant on the collective interpretations of
the masses to determine meaning, texts as cultural products are determined much more by
their popular reception than by the alleged intentions of their creators. Given this
symbiotic paradigm, the example of Wells’s The War of the Worlds serves the part of
microbial invader into the planetary cultural/informational network, and, as a result, the
text is subject to the ever-changing revisionary contexts of the global culture. Thus,
much like Margulis’s representation of “Strong Gaia,” the symbiotic understanding of
texts supposes that the global culture is regulated by its texts and, conversely, inﬂects
those texts with new meaning by the constant ﬂux of collective reinterpretation. Through
this symbiotic interaction on the macroscopic level, Wells’s text—with its anti-
colonialism, its scientiﬁc focus, and its anonymous narrator—can be adapted and
reinterpreted into other versions that are fully supportive of globalization (otherwise
known as Arnericanization, the cultural imperialism of the United States), organized
religion, and protagonists who stand out as wholly individualistic and disconnected from
the chaotic masses of humanity as microscopic subaltern. These changes to the scope,
content, and ideological orientation of Wells’s The War of the Worlds demonstrate the
process of cultural symbiosis in textual adaptations across differing temporal contexts,
and such alterations mirror, in their own way, the bacterial invasion of the planetary

invaders, a textual subversion operating from within. In other words, one of the ﬁrst

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narratives of a hyper-aggressive alien invasion—attacking social institutions as violently
as the invaders themselves did—has since evolved through various textual adaptations
into a tale existing in symbiotic harmony with the very institutions it once denounced,

which, appropriately enough for such a bacterial focus, is enough to make you sick.

5. The Right to Bear Germs

While symbiosis clearly has a spatial component, there are temporal elements as
well, especially as the concept of macrosymbiosis within and between the War of the
Worlds texts demonstrates how the symbiotic relationships adapt over diachronic time.
After all, in order for us to deﬁne a relationship as symbiotic, there must be some sort of
extended temporal durability, or else the brief interaction could hardly be labeled a
relationship. With The War of the Worlds, which has remained in print since Wells ﬁrst
published it in 1898, we have an excellent example of a textual entry into the larger social
matrix that has succeeded by demonstrating its durability over diachronic time; the
novel’s central concept provides something worthwhile enough to the rest of the global
textual system—which I am using in place of such complicated and possibly overlapping
terms such as “Gaiaﬁeld,” “World Brain,” or “Textual Society,” even though these terms
also contain different levels of scale—that two exist in a mutually beneﬁcial symbiotic
relationship. Likewise, The War of the Worlds serves speciﬁc cultural functions through
its many adaptations in various media by providing ongoing commentary on both global
politics and technology, largely due to the highly malleable concepts at the core of
Wells’s text. Although the textual adaptations may redirect the critical commentary or

ideological orientation established in Wells’s novel (redirections that, in some instances,

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appear antithetical to the foundations of Wells’s original text), these changes have
allowed the permutations of the text to survive and ﬂourish, while still providing critical
cultural assessments of their own. This section’s explication of how and why many of
these textual modiﬁcations occur—along with what types of insights these changes
provide for understanding the interactions between cultures and texts, as well as
understanding the symbiotic model itself—ﬁrst requires that I begin with an exploration
of how the temporal conﬁguration within the narrative structure of Wells’s The War of
the Worlds has allowed the text to succeed across diachronic temporality through the
narrative’s potential adaptability.

Within any potential, uninitiated symbiosis, there exists also a possible threat, as
the two parties involved are unknown to one another. This complicated dynamic, which,
by its very nature, relies on time in order for the interconnected agents to understand
whether the symbiotic relationship is positive or negative, is illustrated on multiple levels
throughout Wells’s The War of the Worlds and its various progeny. For example, in all of
the versions, the people of Earth do not know at ﬁrst how to respond to the appearance of
extraterrestrial life; some are eager to hate and fear the alien species, some want to
welcome them with peace and acceptance, but the majority are wary to appraise the
arrival too soon, preferring to “wait and see.” The key factor to the critical assessment of
the characters within the different War of the Worlds texts is time to reﬂect, combined
with evidence beyond the simple ﬁrst impression, and this concept applies also to the
criticism of these texts themselves, despite the trumpeting of “instant classics.” Most
symbiotic relationships—unless they are ended by environmental strain or other factors

that intensify the antagonism between the involved parties, causing one party to destroy

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the other—are judged as symbiotic primarily through their ability to withstand the test of
time. The uncertainty evidenced at the beginning of War of the Worlds texts, however
brief, resonates because humanity does not know whether it is dealing with friend or foe,
much like, during the immediacy involved in an initial encounter, microbes do not know
any more about what to expect from one another than readers can say what they think of
texts.

This uncertain initial encounter between the texts’ characters (casts which, thus
far, are primarily British or American) and the aliens mirrors the ambiguity and instability
with which we typically encounter the unknown; this indeterminate state, which is a
function of both inadequate information and insufﬁcient time, is the source of many, if
not most, narratives’ tension. The ﬁgure of the alien, as the previous section
demonstrated, evokes potential symbiotic meldings on the bodily, national, and global
levels—whether such symbioses are thought of as threatening loss of identity or as
beneﬁcial enhancement of identity——-and thus constitutes a redeﬁnition of identity on
some spatial level. The ﬁrst tentative interactions with something “alien,” however, also
represent the overlapping temporal matrices of present and future. In The Science Fiction
of H. G. Wells, Frank McConnell observes that, despite the past tense narration of Wells’s
novel, for the diegetic reality of The War of the Worlds, the “Martians represent not just
an invasion from space, but an invasion from time, from the future of man himself” (128).
These textual projections into the future, wherever and whenever the various versions of
War of the Worlds occur, allows the text and its adaptations to speculate on the potential

threats of “superior technology,” nor matter what technological developments are

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underway in the contemporary culture.19 This clash can be perpetual, not just because the
future never arrives, but because it is always removed from what “we” believe now.
These creatures are alien because they are somehow “beyond our time,” as Julian Cornell
writes:

By transporting his bloodthirsty agents of our hypothetical future into the

bourgeois present, Wells seeks to confront the reader with the political

implications Of empire building. The ambiguous use of temporality, of

time as place, leaves the reader with the sense that the future is still

undecided, still Open to reorientation and reinterpretation. In the ﬁlm

version and its progeny, the Martians do not typically represent our pre-

ordained future but imagine an Other in our present who needs to be

vanquished in order to afﬁrm “our” values. (427)
As Cornell asserts, the speculative futurity of the ever-adapting texts taps into the fearful
possibilities of what contemporary cultures want to deem as hostile, colonizing forces: a
threatening symbiosis with an “other” outside of “our” humanity (which is, of course,
culturally determined), a concept on which to hang our metaphors for cultural outsiders
such as the Germans plotting World Wars I and H as implied in H. G. Wells’s novel and
Orson Welles’s radio broadcast, the communists menacing nuclear annihilation
throughout the Cold War as alluded to in the 1953 Byron Haskin ﬁlm version, and
terrorists among us planning to destroy us from within as suggested in the 2005 Steven
Spielberg ﬁlm version.

The apprehensions at the foundation of The War of the Worlds are easily

adaptable to a variety of cultural circumstances, and the various adaptations Of the

 

’9 The primary exception to this assertion about commentary on contemporary culture stems from the 2005
Timothy Hines movie version, titled H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which places the temporal frame
ofthe action in Wells’s Victorian England. While this instance theoretically seems like an intriguing
anomaly worth analyzing, the shoddy, low-budget execution of the Pendragon Pictures movie is far from
engaging, despite its fanatical ﬁdelity to Wells’s novel. I leave the task Of its explication to some other,
more forgiving critic, and I will just summarize my views on the movie by stating only that the acting,
cinematography, and special effects contain a level of quality so low as to be on par with the work of Ed

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novel—from movie to comic book to video game to radio play tO television to homage to
parody to rock Opera—precisely because of their ambiguity and uncertainty about what is
“superior” to the contemporary moment. These adaptations tap into the technological and
ideological phobias speciﬁc tO each Of the adaptations’ contemporary culture at the time
of their creation and release. For example, the heat-ray Wells describes in his novel has
molded itself into both the 1953 and 2005 movie versions quite effectively to demonstrate
the invasive fears infecting the populace at large. Wells describes the Martians’ heat-ray
as a spinning mirror, writing that:

Forthwith ﬂashes of actual ﬂame, a bright glare leaping from one to

another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some

invisible jet impinged upon them and ﬂashed into white ﬂame. It was as if

each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to ﬁre.

Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering

and falling, and their supporters turning to run. (31)

What precisely happens in this passage is unclear, sufﬁce it to say that the heat-ray
somehow burns people to a crisp. This ambiguity works well to keep the narrative
recurring in its many different adaptations since this terrifying technology can substitute
easily into other forms.

In George Pal and Byron Haskin’s 1953 version Of The War of the Worlds, the
heat-ray evokes nuclear anxieties as the three men it kills at the beginning leave behind
only discolored shadows of ash, not entirely unlike the streaking shadows left in the wake
of the American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These menacing
Martians echo the intense paranoia and all-American jingoism Of the Cold War, where the

fears about Soviet nukes prompted Americans to build essentially worthless bomb

shelters and teach their children the likewise pointless duck—and-cover drills which Dr.

_

Wood, though lacking Ed Wood’s enthusiasm and entertainment value.
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Forrester and the rural Californian sheriff employ in order to evade the ﬂashing waves Of
atomic heat delivered by the alien spacecraft, Forrester shouting: “Jump! Get under
cover!” In an entirely different context, though still fraught with strains of both
patriotism and paranoia, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version projects the heat-ray into a
distinctly different set of cultural circumstances. Ray Ferrier’s wide-eyed daughter
Rachel asks him if the aliens are terrorists, and, while the answer is no, the movie does its
best to solidify that analogy. The heat-ray in Spielberg’s movie transforms human bodies
into ash instantly, leaving poor Ray to run around the streets Of New York while
accumulating layer after layer of gray dust, and thus Spielberg summons images of 2001’s
terrorist attacks on the same city to maximize the movie’s ability to terrorize audiences.
Even while gesturing toward futurity, these adaptations reﬂect their contemporary
cultures as part of a temporal chain linking all the way back to Wells’s novel, while also,
of course, shaping their contemporary cultures to some degree by updating the Wells’s
text and commenting on the present time. To a certain degree, all texts perform this
function Of both reﬂecting and shaping their cultural contexts, which Edwina Taborsky
explains in The Textual Society while describing how we use texts as conduits for forms
of social energy and change; she writes: “The means of changing a group logic is by the
input and subsequent organization of more energy Therefore, literature must be
considered a method of both expressing current reality and accessing generative energy.
As such, it must be capable of expressing the normative and using those same norms to
bypass its regular meanings” (22). While these comments apply to “literature” in general,
adaptations, speciﬁcally those that follow the tenets of the symbiotic model I am

constructing and applying in this chapter, have a unique relationship in that their dialogue

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is not just between text and social institutions but between text and source as well; again,
to some extent, all texts are contextual and intertextual, but with adaptations those ties are
codiﬁed more overtly. In the case of War of the Worlds texts, the adaptive iterations
grapple with the tension of the temporal gap between source text and offshoot by taking
the novel’s aliens out of their environment of past futurity and projecting them forward
technologically, often using the most sophisticated audio-visual technologies available at
the present moment Of production. These adaptations occur across a wide variety of
cultural and temporal moments, but, given their subject matter, they are in some ways
about time itself, as even the original structure employed in Wells’s novel implies a
degree of temporal paradox, at least as the unknown pertains to the tensions Of a ﬁrst-
person text obviously narrated by a survivor.

The uncanny reassurance built into the narrative structure Of Wells’s novel is that
the narrator speaks Of events in the past tense; given the manner of speaking this narrator
employs, we as readers know that he must have survived to tell his tale, meaning that the
Martians must not have been entirely victorious in their conquest Of the Earth. Still,
despite the assumptions we can infer early on in the text, the novel creates a signiﬁcant
amount of tension by ﬂirting with the total destruction of humankind as we know it. This
tension within the War of the Worlds texts stems from the narrative stripping away the
power and efﬁcacy of nearly all Of the institutions on which we rely, temporarily
undermining the conﬁdence audiences normally have in everyday establishments. While
the texts subvert this faith in society at large, the narrative form simultaneously indicates
that normalcy will return eventually, a subtle promise that reassurance will in time be

restored. Mostly, this narrative guarantee to reestablish conﬁdence—giving the audiences

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back their “inﬁnite complacency”——results from audience recognition of the formulas
applied within the War of the Worlds narrative structure, recognizing that this structure
promises a dramatic tum-around for the underdog Earthlings. Moreover, if audiences do
not recognize the narrative codes, they can still enjoy themselves because, in order for the
text—whether movie, novel, television show, or comic book—to be bound within a
certain scripted timeframe, there has to be an ending already established for humanity’s
fate, and the audience members know that there was no alien invasion underway when
they ﬁrst started the text. Of course, this temporal narrative conundrum, as well as the
“inﬁnite complacency” it allows audiences, is not absolute across forms; after all, Orson
Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air famously circumvented it in their 1938 radio
broadcast of Howard Koch’s adaptation of The War of the Worlds.

Although cultures across the globe now treat almost all of their various media
with greater skepticism as a direct or indirect result of the famous Halloween broadcast,
this initial experiment in the mockurnentary form provided a way around the
chronological limitations of narrating the end of the world, as well as a way tO adapt the
H. G. Wells text by updating the narrative context to the technological innovations of
contemporary society in both the form (the radio transmission bringing the text into
homes across America) and content (the humans ﬁght back with their most sophisticated
army bombing planes from Langham Field). Orson Welles’s broadcast, especially
because it took the form of a news broadcast interrupting an entertainment radio
broadcast, allowed for a sort of perpetual present tense for encounters with the Martians.
The radio play’s design carefully involves the listeners as part Of the action, to the extent

that one witness, Mr. Wilmuth who owns the farm where the ﬁrst alien cylinder crashes,

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admits that, much like the listeners at home who have been subjected to the lulling effects
of a boring Princeton academic droning on about Mars, he “was listening to the radio and
kinda drowsin’, that professor fellow was talkin’ about Mars, so I was half dozin’ and
half. . (“The War of the Worlds” 1938). TO be fair tO boring academics everywhere, the
character of Professor Pierson (who is voiced by Orson Welles and eventually becomes
the ﬁrst-person, past tense narrator Of the broadcast, after the excitement Of Mars
practically destroying Earth) is helped by RamOn Raquello and his orchestra in lulling
listeners into “half dozin’ and half...” The very design Of the broadcast is paced in such a
way that listeners “tune out,” either literally or ﬁguratively, only to tune back in to hear
that alien lifeforms are destroying Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and are well on their way to
mowing through the rest Of the world.

By including this bit of self—reﬂexive awareness, the radio broadcast
acknowledges its own content, ostensibly giving audience members a “real” person who,
like them, was just listening to the radio until an alien invasion transformed passive
listeners into the active protagonists in an interplanetary war. Moreover, if Mr. Wilmuth
is a sympathetic character ——Or if Carl Phillips, the radio announcer interviewer who
serves as a narrator for the action, can be a ﬁgure for audiences tO identify with—there is
no foregone conclusion for the war between Earth and Mars, as the temporality Of a past
tense survivor narrative is replaced by the present tense of the radio broadcast, during
which both Wilmuth and Phillips are killed. The Mercury Theatre on the Air similarly
exploited the opportunities of form that radio allowed their production, not just by telling
the story with a mortal narrator, but by updating The War of the Worlds to the exact

moment of the present, a temporal impossibility in the text’s original print version.

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The present tense, contained within the script’s improvisational style of dialogue
and the actors’ naturalistic delivery, further suggested the “reality” Of radio news
broadcasts, stimulating the audience’s imagination as much with lines depicting the aliens
like “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. Ican hardly force myself to keep looking
at it, it’s so awful” as Wells does by similarly claiming the Martians are so alien as to be
beyond verbal description (citation). The ambiguity Of the radio report allows the
audience to imagine the worst. Because of the broadcast’s urgency, however, conveyed
by the present-tense reportage and accentuated by Phillips fumbling and admitting he
“can’t ﬁnd words,” the threat becomes much more frightening in that the relentless
present tense of the broadcast allows for less control, less time for reﬂection, which
makes the “monster or whatever it is” a Rorschach-like reﬂection of what the listeners
fear most. Perhaps the moment in the radio play that is most shocking for its tension of
. indeterminacy, though, is Carl Phillips narrating his own death; rather than hearing him
die, the audiences at home were subjected instead to abrupt silence, following an
announcement by Carl Phillips that the ﬂames sparked by the Martian heat-ray were
rapidly spreading toward him. The narrative design encourages listeners to believe the
worst, and this assumption is supported by the reverse psychology Of the announcer at the
studio claiming “circumstances beyond our control” and “difﬁculty with our ﬁeld
transmission” while transitioning to a piano interlude, professional calming techniques
that would ring false for listeners. Much like the assertions Of Professor Pierson near the
beginning of the broadcast stating that there is no life on Mars and that all of the evidence
the announcers continue to bring up is coincidental, the denial of the radio staff is

overdetermined, indirectly encouraging audiences to believe the opposite and imagine the

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worst precisely because they were hearing that the worst was not happening.

Because Welles’s production Of The War of the Worlds trusted its audiences’
distrust of “the ofﬁcial story” from radio newsmen, listeners’ skepticism worked to make
the broadcast more “real” instead of suspect. Given that the heat-ray demonstrates certain
contemporary concerns in the two ﬁlm versions discussed above (the Cold War threat of
atomic weapons destroying the West Coast and the terrorist menace capable Of coating
New York in the ash of dead bodies), the technological concerns wrapped within the
radio version of The War of the Worlds appear to be about the potential anxiety within the
form of radio itself. Through the radio play, the capacity for terror contained by radio as
a medium demonstrated that the “alien invasion” was in fact carried by the textual form
Of the broadcast, capable Of invading homes across America as effectively as any Martian
technology described in Wells’s novel or Welles’s program. In fact, at the end of the
Halloween broadcast, Welles confesses that the dramatic radio adaptation just performed
was the Mercury Theatre’s “own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out
of a bush and saying ‘Boo!”’ and that, because they could not “soap all your windows and
steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night we did the next best thing. We
annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be
relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still Open for
business.” With his characteristic dry wit, Orson Welles informs listeners that this
destruction is all a Halloween prank and makes a satirical jab at the Columbia
Broadcasting System; within this gesture, though, whatever implicit or overt criticism we
may detect, Welles serves to reify the form Of radio, the very medium of terror he has just

directed at his own audience, giving “the CBS.” as much power and solidity as the world

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itself since “both institutions are still Open for business,” equating the two through
lumping them together and beginning the trend taken by other adaptations of The War of
the Worlds: undercutting the social criticism by championing the institutions and the
global power structures which the texts previously “destroyed.”

With this pattern of temporal unfolding in place, the initial “threat” of the text
eventually proves to be favorable, even friendly, by the narrative’s end, demonstrating
that, given the right temporal frame, this erratic text—whether invading audiences’
consciousness through print, radio, television, or cinema—proves to be just as symbiotic
and beneﬁcial to the world’s existing institutions as the invading bacteria taken out Of
humankind’s threatening past to become their “microscopic allies” in the present’s
precarious encounter with the future. Because the adaptations Of The War of the Worlds
play with the temporal groundwork laid in Wells’s novel, the uncertainty Of the text as a
threat mirrors the metaphorical paradigm Of memes I have been using to analyze the
novel and its adaptations. Both the theoretical framework and the texts themselves posit
that encounters with “aliens” are ambiguous interactions forcing us to “wait and see” in
order to assess the utility of the content in question.

But where does this drafting of a symbiotic model for memes get us in terms of
The War of the Worlds? The diachronic transmission of War of the Worlds texts itself
mirrors systemic bacterial evolution, as the adaptations Of the text emerge and re-emerge
as entertainment that both distracts audiences from the contemporary paranoia while also
transmitting such anxiety into the narrative’s Open-ended metaphors. As the example Of
the heat-ray demonstrates, the stresses of the political and cultural realms translate into

the aggression within the text, much like Margulis’s bacteria attack primarily when the

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outside environment is most hostile. Unlike viruses, which transmit horizontally across
space through a single generation, Wells’s space invaders paradoxically transmit across
time through several generations, in a similar fashion tO the numerous generations of
bacteria that remain in both Earth’s ecosystem and the bacterially dependent systems of
our own human bodies. Even though the various textual versions of The War of the
Worlds each portray destruction on a global scale as entertainment, the adaptations almost
always have the effect of unifying the audience and solidifying its oversimpliﬁed
collective beliefs by giving it an enemy that always remains “alien” and outside of
humanity.

Whether on the level of body, nation, or planet, there is always a dialogue
between and among collectivities, and, for those interested in keeping strict boundaries,
the inherent competition made possible by adapting Wells’s narrative—and the “alien”
metaphors that go along with it—serves the function Of reinforcing the illusory concept Of
absolute boundaries, paradoxically through a kind Of diachronic cultural symbiosis. The
War of the Worlds textual concept, which carries the illusion of opposition through its
“alien” enemies, has been incorporated as part of the textual organism because it allows
for the perpetuation of certain sorts of the nationalism (sometimes masquerading in the
form of “planet as nation,” or globalization, which usually means Americanization
anyway). Taborsky discusses the capacity for texts to serve these sorts of normative
functions, writing that: “Society is a dialogical text A key function of the text is its
establishment Of common, which thereby means social, deﬁnitions Of reality” (161). And
if texts and contexts are in constant dialogue, The War of the Worlds seems to keep

coming up in conversation because of its unique ability to engage the fascinations and

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fears we have about a unified identity, whether deﬁning “reality” as a body, a nation, or a
world.

War of the Worlds texts play with that process of identiﬁcation by exploring the
potential, as well as potential threat, found at the edges of a given culture’s conceptual
framework of spatial and temporal boundaries, and these areas of instability form the
zone of potential symbiosis, which is a new “becoming” between different species, a way
to break down the concept of species altogether by undoing it. In a sense, this process, by
which The War of the Worlds becomes more than a single text and its adaptations all
feature distinctly different characters, plot events, and settings, describes a kind of
symbiotic evolution, but, as Margulis and others have explained, this evolution is not
deﬁned in the sense Of a linear, progressive history as evolution is usually framed in
Darwinian terms. This form Of evolution is something else. The symbiotic process,
which is somehow both more and yet less than the product, is deﬁned by time, and thus
the dialogue established by the reappearance Of War of the Worlds texts centers on why
we need to come together now, in response to some identity-exploding threat. In A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
elucidate that this Operation Of destabilizing and redeﬁning identity, this “becoming” is:

not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and ﬁliation.

Becoming produces nothing by ﬁliation; all ﬁliation is imaginary.

Becoming is always of a different order than ﬁliation. It concerns alliance.

If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of

symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and

kingdoms, with no possible ﬁliation If there is originality in
neoevolutionism, it is attributable in part to phenomena of this kind in
which it ceases to be a hereditary ﬁliative evolution, becoming

communicative or contagious. (238, italics in original)

With Deleuze and Guattari in mind, War of the Worlds texts operate like this

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“communicative or contagious” evolution, like the symbioses the texts lay out as part of
the relationship between bacteria and human body, human body and society, society and
planet. This “becoming” features many of the same temporal uncertainties of “alien”
encounters, in that both are not always teleologically determined; instead, “becoming,” as
an encounter between identity and alien, engages in the tensions of creating a perpetual
present. Although my analysis here does not entirely eschew the ﬁliation and linear
historicization Deleuze and Guattari condemn, the component I have tried to emphasize is
the alliance and interdependence which is unique to symbiosis and alien to the
narrativization Of evolution solely as a competitive project.

To some extent, symbiosis undermines even these deﬁnitional categories of
competition and cooperation, as the biological process transforms from time tO time along
this spectrum; we have seen this modiﬁcation within the War of the Worlds texts
themselves, wherein the hostile “alien” is incorporated in order to serve distinct cultural
and symbolic functions. This process of incorporation, of “becoming” as discussed by
Deleuze and Guattari, operates simultaneously along biological, textual, and political
lines, which we see Operating within War of the Worlds texts and within their interactions
with cultural contexts, creating and sustaining the tension between competition and
symbiosis. H. G. Wells himself noted in The Science of Life, which he co-wrote with
Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells, that, with the right kind of perspective, the very concept
of symbiosis contains the potential for antagonism; the authors write that:

The phrase “hostile symbiosis” has been used to describe the state Of our

own tissues—all of the same parentage, all thriving best when working for

the common good, and yet each ready to take advantage of the rest, should

Opportunity offer Every symbiosis is in its degree underlain with
hostility, and only by proper regulation and Often elaborate adjustment can

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the state Of mutual beneﬁt be maintained. Even in human affairs,

partnerships for mutual beneﬁt are not easily kept up, in spite of men

being endowed with intelligence and so being able to grasp the meaning of

such a relation. (932)

This passage moves ﬂuidly from a discussion Of symbiosis between lower lifeforms and
the relationship between human beings, much like the commentary within The War of the
Worlds, as I have endeavored to show, ﬂows between and among microscopic and
macroscopic levels, jumping between individuals and collectives to illustrate the
connectivity. Similarly, later in The Science of Life, the authors explain that: “The truth is
that animals or plants can no more live in ‘splendid isolation’ than can nations. Every
organism is part of a network of relationships, biologically tied tO a host Of Others” (935).
Clearly, this scientiﬁc concept has implications for the political realm—or, perhaps
instead, is inﬂected by it—and the connectivity of the global environment is undeniable,
no matter how much nations may want to overlook it in favor of the “splendid isolation”
that the illusion of impermeable borders Offer.

Although Wells (along with his co-authors) discusses biological interconnections
in The Science of Life, the discourse also gestures outward to social and political
ramifications, crystallizing similar patterns to those which he formulated in the textual
interconnections of World Brain. The global textual network he envisions in World Brain
also seeks to break down the deceptive intellectual boundaries we have established;
instead, Wells calls for a symbiotic synthesis Of ideas, no matter how “alien,” for the
purposes of creating:

a reconditioned and more powerful Public Opinion. In a universal

organization and clariﬁcation of knowledge and ideas, in a closer synthesis

Of what I have here called a World Brain, operating by an enhanced
educational system through the whole body of mankind, a World Brain

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which will replace our multitude of unco-ordinated ganglia, our powerless

miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose,

national educational systems and the like We do not want dictators, we

do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world

intelligence conscious of itself. (xvi)

Just as the biological components Of Wells’s formulation of symbiosis gesture toward a
global system of interconnectivity, so tOO do the ramiﬁcations of informational and
textual organization in Wells’s writing expand to the worldwide level with the hopes Of
strengthening the collective experience Of humanity. Moreover, Wells stresses that this
experience, in properly symbiotic fashion, must be organized from the bottom up, not top
down. In other words, this “World Brain,” the informational equivalent of a biological
Gaia, must Operate, like the bacterial masses Pasteur feared and Wells transformed into
the hero of his novel, according to structures of organization and power emerging from
the democratic strategies of symbiotic micropolitics. In other words, according to Wells,
this symbiotic process, viewed as part of a larger system, can generate more effective
order than competitive hierarchies, no matter how “alien” this process might initially
seem to those who have been led by antagonistic authorities for so long.

Finally, in addition to biological and textual versions Of order through cooperative
synthesis, Wells also formulates such a global conceptualization of symbiosis in the
political realm, under the banner of socialism. For Wells, the idea of humanity-as-
organism applies as much to textual and political levels as it does to the biological realm.
The species, he seems to suggest, ought to acknowledge its inherently interconnected
nature and promote the potentiality of symbiotic relationships for the purposes of

maximizing the social good. For example, in First and Last Things: A Confession of

Faith and a Rule of Life, Wells writes that: “The essentialfact in man’s history to my

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sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of
co-Operations leading to scarce-dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the species
a common general purpose out of a present confusion” (92, italics in original). Despite
Wells’s claim that his thoughts are neither “sentimental [n]or mystical,” this formulation
appears to be Of a somewhat spiritual nature, as even the title of the book indicates. At
the same time, though, thinking of humanity as a collective organism corresponds to
political possibilities that, despite a utOpian lack of pragmatism, would allow for
symbiosis as a global system.

As with the biological deﬁnition Wells puts forth in The Science of Life, a
symbiotic global order would still involve competition. In First and Last Thing. Wells
also explains that:

Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life Perhaps

in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human synthesis I have not

sufﬁciently insisted upon the part played by competition in that synthesis

I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition that is

passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful, Idesire to

see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and devoted, men and

women doing their utmost with themselves and making their utmost

contribution to the speciﬁc accumulation, but in the end content to abide

by a verdict. (218-9)

Wells does not continue on to explain how to maintain the tensions of competition
without letting such competition slip into “cruel, clumsy and wasteful” forms. Much as
we have seen with the deﬁning boundaries of bodies and nations, the problem with
Wells’s global orders is that they do not generate competitive friction with any sort Of
“alien.”

Like the America capable Of creating aliens within the 1953 The War of the

Worlds movie as part Of a Cold War context of communism vs. capitalism and like the

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America capable of creating aliens within the 2005 War of the Worlds movie within the
context of globalization which pits terrorism vs. freedom, Wells’s orders Of global
symbiotic synthesis—on the biological, textual, and political levels—seem to require an
outside antagonist for the symbiotic synthesis to work. The central Obstacle to Wells’s
theorizations of humanity-as-organism, an idea that still requires the cultivation of
competition, is that he does not provide an outside competitor or enemy against which
humanity can compete. Thus, for the global order to be complete and still compete, we
need an outsider. If we adhere to Wells’s logic, realizing humanity’s full collective
potential requires something “alien” to our global order—-call it “Gaia” or “Gaiaﬁeld” or
“World Brain” or simply “Earth”——for the purposes of maintaining competition, bringing
the Gaia concept full circle to Richard Dawkins’s idea that: “For the analogy to apply
strictly, there would have to have been a set of rival Gaias, presumably on different
planets.” In order for the global order to accomplish its full potential, it needs an “alien”
outsider with which to compete, which is perhaps the peril and the promise inherently
couched within Wells’s novel and the numerous adaptations and why we regularly return

to the inﬂuential notion of inciting a war of the worlds.

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Chapter Five: Complexity, Emergence, and the Adaptive Serial Iterations of George

Romero’s “Brainless” Zombie Movies

1. The Zombie Paradigm

The foundational premise of George Romero’s zombie movies—Night of the
Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead—appears to be
simplicity itself: the re—animated dead are trying to kill the living, who are trying to
survive. Despite international popularity and critical acclaim, the idea Of the zombie
movie, even in Romero’s case, always seems to have little “brainpower” behind it. The
enjoyment these ﬁlms Offer appears to be exclusively visceral: content concerned with
literal viscera as well as visceral affect for the audience’s consumption. And yet
Romero’s zombie movies Offer such meta-critical examinations of such visceral pleasure
in that Romero’s most negative characterizations go to the racist, ignorant rustics who
enjoy killing zombies for sport. All four Of Romero’s Dead movies provide disapproving
commentary on people who kill for pleasure, as if to indicate that the movies’
audiences—if they engage with Romero’s movies on no more complicated a level than
merely visceral spectacle—are no better than the depraved, violent rednecks. Such
damning portrayals Of violent zombie killers, even though these characters typically do
not command much time on screen, invites us as viewers to analyze the texts before us
more carefully. Indeed, through the lens of a critical and collective reading Of Romero’s
Dead series, these zombie movies reveal a system of aggregated thought and adaptive,
emergent evolution.

As noted above, the apparent simplicity Of zombie movies depends on the

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deﬁnitional boundaries of the categories presented (dead, undead, and alive) as well as
the relatively unsophisticated behavior Of the undead. Although the deﬁnition of
“zombie” changes slightly throughout the Dead series—and shifts almost completely
when deﬁned across other zombie movies——my usage of the term here refers to the
reanimated dead who have minimal motor skills and communicative functions; zombies
can be destroyed only through damage to the brain, and they seek to consume otherwise
healthy humans. Yet Romero’s series regularly problematizes these absolute
classiﬁcations; the living characters quickly and unceremoniously die or transform into
zombies from as little as a single bite from an existing zombie, and the zombies regularly
exhibit characteristics of the living, particularly in their collective problem-solving skills.
Part of the inherent terror in all of the Dead movies erupts, not from the zombie attacks
themselves, but from the chilling, almost reﬂective moments when we as an audience
have time to consider an undead character’s approximation of humanity. For example,
when Fran looks through the department store’s glass door in Dawn of the Dead to watch
a paciﬁed zombie stare back at her as though through a mirror, the two of them sit on the
ﬂoor, merely looking. There is no actual scare or shock, but the moment appears as a

time of self-deﬁnition via interaction with a member of an outside category, which itself
invites a sense of the uncanny.

Although all of Romero’s zombie movies present a nihilistic world where political
order and nearly all social institutions have eroded, the survivors are always negotiating
and debating about their situation, and, while the discussions may not often be
philosophically circumspect, this interactive deliberation reinstates a kind of new political

order. As Fran learns later in Dawn of the Dead, the remaining humans constitute a much

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greater threat than the slow-moving zombie mall—walkers. This climate of negotiation
about approaches to managing categorically different types of groups parallels the
deﬁnitions of political power Giorgio Agamben analyzes in Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, wherein the fundamental political distinctions between forms of
humanity stem from the differences between “bare life” and the good, just life, a life
fundamentally deﬁned by the political realm. In the case of the Dead movies, the “bare
life,” that which is excluded from humanity, becomes more Obvious; the stakes involved
in ascribing these deﬁnitions are higher, even as the terms in which they are deﬁned
become much more crude. As Agamben outlines these political distinctions, this project
relies upon “the exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life [una
esclusione (che e, nella stessa misura, un'im-plicazione) della nuda vita]” (7). In other
words, the terms of political power rely at their core on this tension of exclusion/inclusion
between political life and a powerless, speechless, and undifferentiated subaltern, milling
about in living dead without language. With Romero’s Dead movies, the bare life
becomes still more bare, stripped down to the most basic, essentialized instinct with no
apparent organization.

Andrew Norris explores Agamben’s formulations in an essay entitled “Giorgio
Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” which, despite its title and its inclusion in
the present discussion, has nothing to do with zombies. Norris explains of the ever-
changing, relational nature of bare life to political life that: “Politics thus entails the
constant negotiation of the threshold between itself and the bare life that is both included
within and excluded from its body. But such a threshold is hopelessly unstable, as is

signaled by the fact that politics is both the passage from bare life to itself and what lies

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beyond this passage” (45). Given this reframing Of Agamben, Norris explains that the
threshold between bare life and political life ﬂuctuates. Such oscillation may appear to be
a one-way movement in Romero’s series, as we primarily see undead characters get killed
and living characters move to dead or undead categories; yet the collective actions of the
zombies characters, viewed across Romero’s cinematic installments, attain a greater sense
of sophistication akin to the higher cognitive functions of those in the living category.
Such complexity and increased capacity becomes possible not through the isolated,
individual actions of the zombie characters, but, in terms of the movies’ intertextuality
and adaptability as well as in terms of the movie characters’ collective behavior, the
collective elements demonstrate emergence.

Unlike either of the symbiotic theoretical models of the previous two chapters,
emergence is not necessarily a phenomenon that negotiates between members Of different
species. Instead, at its most basic level, emergence means multiple agents working
independently yet adding up to a larger, more complicated collective that contains
features and patterns that derive from its individual constituents and yet proves to be
unpredictable at the lowest levels Of organization, given those constituents’
Characteristics. Emergence is similar to symbiosis in that both involve multiple agents
somehow working in tandem—through the unique conditions and tensions that arise from
an interaction that is neither quite cooperation nor quite competition—to achieve
something none of the parties involved could accomplish as singular, disconnected
entities, though emergence is by deﬁnition more complex than that.

Given that the common usage of some of the terms Iutilize in this chapter, as

' ' ' ' ' ' ms I am usin0 here,
conceptual conﬂatrons, conﬂicts With the intended meaning of the ter D

234

I need to clarify, with outside support, the terms “complexity,” “self—organization,” and
“emergence” as well as how they relate to one another and what zombies have to do with
them. To begin with, complexity is something that most people understand intuitively, as
it directly or indirectly affects nearly all facets of their everyday experience. We take
complexity for granted. A complex system is one which is not simply understood
through the properties Of its components; instead, through the interactions of agents in a
complex system, we can observe something new, some aspect of the larger design that
was not inherent in the initial arrangement or composition of the smaller parts. In
Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, Paul Cilliers explains
that, although we blur the meanings of complex and complicated in common parlance,
the two concepts are categorically different; in order to elucidate the differences between
“complex” and “complicated,” Cilliers writes that:

If a system—despite the fact that it may consist of a huge number Of

components—can be given a complete description in terms of its

individual constituents, such a system is merely complicated. Things like

jumbo jets or computers are complicated. In a complex system, on the

other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the

interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature

that the system as a whole cannot be fully understood simply by analysrng

its components. Moreover, these relationships are not ﬁxed, but shift and

change, often as a result of self-organisation. This can result in novel

features, usually referred to in terms Of emergent properties. The brain,
natural language and social systems are complex. (VIII-1X, italics in

original)
Although this passage already indicates the interconnected nature of complexity, self-
organization, and emergence, the Opening formulations of Cilliers’s book help to explain
that understanding complexity means understanding a kind Of plurality. Complexity can

only exist on the individual level to the extent that we misunderstand “individual,” as

235

Cilliers demonstrates by labeling the brain as a complex system of cells rather than a
singular entity or identity. Thus, the rudiments of synaptic model Of adaptation I
formulate in the ﬁrst chapter contrast with the larger pattern of complexity in emergent
adaptation I discuss here. The exchanges between any two neurons is not complex
because the neurons, as agents within a complex system, are interacting locally, but the
patterns of neural activity that result from such small, local connections have larger
implications on the brain as a complex system. In fact, most explanations of emergence,
in order to maximize clarity, rely on the constituent parts being simple, even “relatively
stupid elements,” according to Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of
Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (18).

It is while discussing about the crystallization of complexities in city
neighborhoods and human brain that Johnson writes:

What features do all these systems share? In the simplest terms, they solve

problems by drawing on masses Of relatively stupid elements, rather than a

single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not

top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical

language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent

behavior The movement from low-level rules to higher-level

sophistication is what we call emergence. (18)
The simple rules of zombie existence allow for just such “bottom-up” emergence of

intelligence; there are no hierarchical structures.20 In fact, it is in this structural realm

where the zombies actually excel: as a threat, they are nothing if not “relatively stupid,”

 

20 As additional examples of emergent patterns, Johnson analyzes how the adaptive “learning" of pattern
formation inserted in such technologies as TiVo and the recommendation program for Amazoncom also
demonstrate emergence (21 1-6). As consumers choose their favorites, these technologies draw up
correlates to predict “recommendations” based on the consumer choices Of the past. Such correlation may
effectively conform to genre lines (consumers who like certain horror movies statistically tend to like other
horror movies), or it may be inexplicable by conventional means (consumers who like Day of the Dead
might statistically also enjoy The Sound of Music), but the important thing to remember about these
emergent patterns, whether they seem like a “ﬂuke” or not, is that the networking patterns represent self-

236

and yet their lurching, brainless strategies provide them with a certain level of
adaptability, allowing them access to a certain kind of collective, problem-solving brain.
For example, a single, lonely zombie does not pose much of a threat, but a whole horde of
them is a formidable obstacle.

Romero’s zombies are clearly without an “executive branch,” instead being a
“bottom-up” system that represents an overall lack Of overarching control. As Jamie
Russell writes Of this nihilistic dissipation in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead: “Romero
paints this world as increasingly ‘headless’: law and order have vanished; the television
and radio signals have been switched off; no one is in control anymore” (93). The lack of
tOp-down direction conforms to the deﬁnitions presented by Cilliers, Johnson, and others
for a complex system, as the agents are directed by their simplistic interior rules rather
than an imposed sense of order. Despite critics such as James B. Twitchell claiming that
“The zombie myth seems ﬂawed by its lack Of complexity,” the zombies are close to
deﬁning examples of uncomplicated agents in a complex, self-organizing system (261).
None of the zombies are complex or complicated unto themselves, but as a collective
system, they are; similarly, any one of Romero’s movies is not complex in isolation, but

collectively they carry a greater sense of complex patterning.

2. Emergence from Beyond the Grave!
One of the central problems in discussing how any text does what it does is that
texts do not and can not do much of anything. Despite critics—including myself—often

referring to texts as having strategies and voices, even the broadest deﬁnition of “text”

 

organization in a complex system: emergence.

237

typically does not allow for such a sense of independent subjectivity on the part of the
text in question; rather, it is the relationship between a text and its reader that transcends
the lifelessness of representation. Audiences animate texts. And, given this kind of
resuscitation through the reading of a representation, we thus treat texts as being the
origins for the affect we trick ourselves into feeling through ignoring representational
limits. In other words, our collective attitude toward texts is that of them being inanimate
Objects capable of moving us, not entirely unlike any one of the pOpularly represented
undead, returning to life and empowered somehow by the vitality of those already living.
This Observation is not to say that we ought to avoid the common trope of assuming texts
perform certain tasks despite their status as inanimate Objects; instead, I invoke this
representational instability as a means to address the tensions inherent in analogizing
texts to living organisms, which I do throughout this dissertation. After all, how can texts
evolve when they are wholly dependent on their creators and audiences, incapable of
doing anything, let alone changing? Because texts occupy this kind of liminal Space
between active, animate status and passive, inanimate status, they Operate in similar
fashion to the category-defying undead, and, because of this metonymical and
metaphorical connection between the undead and the texts that depict them, I read certain
sorts of textual evolution as paralleling a sort of zombie evolution.

As the basis for my commentary on adaptive textuality as it pertains to the long
evolutionary lineage of the undead, I choose to discuss the highly popular canon of
George Romero’s zombie movies: the uniquely aternporal Dead series of Night of the

Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead.21 Through

 

2r . . . . . . . .. .
In addrtron, Romero wrll release Diary ofthe Dead In 2007, and 11118 installment also presents difﬁculties

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these ﬁlms, we can observe a kind of unfolding of order, a type of pattern formation akin
to emergent evolution. At the end of Night of the Living Dead, a ﬁeld reporter interviews
Sheriff McClelland about the nature of the zombie threat, asking “Are they slow-moving,
chief.” McClelland replies by saying “Yeah, they’re dead. They’re all messed up.”
Moreover, the sheriff claims that the individual zombies present “no problem,”
explaining that “If you have a gun, shoot ’em in the head. That’s a sure way to kill ’em.
If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em. They go up pretty
easy” (Night of the Living Dead).

The zombies present few difficulties as individuals—they are “slow-moving,” “all
messed up,” and “pretty easy” to kill—whereas when they congregate, their local
interactions add up to a more structurally sophisticated challenge to human opponents.
Through the idea of an emergent system, however, this relatively high level Of individual
mortality has little effect on the life of the larger patterns of emergence. As Johnson
notes, “The persistence of the whole over time—the global behavior that outlasts any of
its component parts—is one of the deﬁning characteristics of complex systems.
Generations of ants come and go, and yet the colony itself matures, grows more stable,
more organized” (82). In other words, killing zombies has little impact on the overall
effectiveness of their adaptive, collective, little potential to change the emergent patterns.
Because the zombies are a collective intimidation, the nature of their menace invites
analogies to a species-wide danger threatening the environment of other species
competing for the same resources: in other words, the human characters. Similarly,

despite the fact that Romero focuses on certain key zombies as memorable for their look

 

of temporal classiﬁcation as it revisits Night ofthe Living Dead from the perspective of a different set Of

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or function, there is no single zombie leader. The closest ﬁgures we have are “Bub” from
Day of the Dead and “Big Daddy” from Land of the Dead, without whom it would be
difﬁcult to narrativize patterns of emergent behavior.

These “hero” zombies more or less serve the function Of demonstrating for
audiences how the zombies adapt over time, something difﬁcult or perhaps even
impossible to illustrate in different editing sequences without a single ﬁgure to provide
visual continuity. If we were to see different zombies progressing through different
stages of adaptive learning, we might not recognize that any sort Of adaptation to the local
environment is in fact taking place. Paradoxically, we need to see something like the
moments of realization for “Big Daddy” as an individual to stand in for collective
learning. After all, his learning patterns stand in for the undifferentiated mob when, in
different contexts, “Big Daddy” slowly pieces together information while he 1) picks up a
machine gun, 2) accidentally ﬁres it, 3) intentionally ﬁres it, 4) teaches a fellow zombie
how to ﬁre it and aim it at enemies.

At different points in all of the movies, we witness zombies ﬁnding new pathways
and overcoming Obstacles, primarily through trial and error, but we might mistake all of
these minor successes as random, disconnected, and coincidental, if they were not
presented within the framework of an individual’s development, recognizable only
through making certain speciﬁc agents within the collective recognizable. And while
different ﬁgures within the zombies masses serve as temporary “leaders” for those around
them to imitate, the strength is that such “leaders” are inherently replaceable because the

model of emergent behavior through distributed intelligence is not hierarchical. In each

Characters.

240

 

movie, some bumbling zombie—not solely Big Daddy or Bub—discovers something
while obeying the unsophisticated internal rules all zombies follow, after which the rest
of the horde follows suit. In other words, the uncomplicated behaviors add up to a savvy
collective brain system, much like the undirected actions of ants lead to advanced models
Of stark mathematical accuracy. And this distributed intelligence, through its ever-
increasing complexity of design, becomes more structurally sophisticated as the agents
making up the system both become more numerous and become more experienced. In
other words, the system evolves and adapts, even though any given iterative interaction is
relatively simple.

When we discuss evolution, we are inherently discussing complexity on both the
microscopic and macroscopic levels. The relationships of the components—which, as
Cilliers notes, are “not ﬁxed, but shift and change result[ing] in novel features”—may
allow for something new, actualizing something previously virtual, but that does not
mean that evolution or increasing complexity are necessarily progressive. For example, if
a zombie wanders off alone into unexplored territory—as is the case with the
bespectacled Hare Krishna zombie22 in Dawn of the Dead, who shufﬂes through the door
of the human protagonists’ hideout in the mall—the result might be the discovery of a
fresh victim, or it might mean death. In the example from Dawn of the Dead, the Hare
Krishna zombie does in fact discover Fran, who is alone and frightened, although he is

killed before he succeeds in his attempts to bite her, showing that his exploratory efforts

 

22 George Romero’s zombies are always a diverse cross-section of society, transformed into zombies
wearing an eclectic mix of outﬁts suggesting their backstories: clown costumes, bridal gowns, football
uniforms, etc. Likewise, the zombies exhibit a wide spectrum of ages, weights, and races. The breadth of
this variety in backgrounds seems to suggest the same randomness that also constitutes the zombies’
behavior; the collective’s conduct is as diverse, undirected, and unstructured as the backgrounds of its

241

are neither progressive for his collective nor himself. All four of the movies in question
feature repeated incidents where the zombies fail and are killed, often with gruesome
violence, but this overall lack Of evolutionary ﬁtness seems thus to call additional
attention to the various adaptive successes of the collective horde.

One of the key features of complexity is that changes resulting from a complex
system are impossible to predict in advance, and, as such, any claims to “progress” result
from a narrativization of the process after the fact. Obviously, because the ﬁlms in
question are narratives themselves, not accurate depictions of evolutionary phenomenon,
they demonstrate “progress” in the course Of their exposition, even if such “progress” is
colored by Romero’s bleak and sometimes humorous nihilism. And, despite the
popularity Of claims that evolution is inherently progressive, I hope to avoid such
oversimpliﬁcations in my own analyses and explications here. Again, I must reiterate
that evolution, even in its earliest formulations, resists progressive logic, allowing as it

does for dead ends in evolutionary ﬁtness, such as extinction, domestication, and

unhelpful aberration.

Re’my Lestienne, in “Chance, Progress and Complexity in Biological Evolution,’

explains that evolution is not the teleological project that many misinterpret it to be,

writing that:

We are in the habit of attributing the triumph of the idea of progress in
evolution to Darwinism, just as it’s sometimes said that Darwinism is the
chance of variations, plus selection. Such abbreviated versions are
caricatures, and very unfair to Darwin. In fact, he harbored an instinctive
distrust of the idea of progress Darwin advocates systemic chance. For
him, there is not water-tight partition between Chance variations and
selection, or, more precisely, this partition is only impermeable in one
direction. Selection has not inﬂuence over variations; variations are not

constituents.

242

brought about by a tendency toward “progress.” On the other hand,

variations can and do strongly inﬂuence the conditions of selection. Thus

if the conditions of selection impose from the outside a rigid and evolutive

framework, what can result is an evolution that takes on the appearance of

progress, despite the completely random nature of the variations. (42,

italics in original)

As Lestienne illustrates, the Darwinian system relies on certain sorts of random chance,
from which orders of complexity may emerge. In this sense, “selection” is somewhat
misleading, as are many terms utilized in discussions Of evolution—including, perhaps,
“evolution” itself—though common vocabularies may not currently possess commonly
shared alternatives. Zombies, or any other given population, may evolve without
necessarily becoming more complex. The vocabulary for communicating about
complexity and emergence has several constraints, given that complexity requires
discussion that must be thought I) in terms of certain sorts of plurality; 2) without the
direct, linear, and temporal logic of cause and effect; and 3) as a series Of constant,
hovering interactions between actualities and virtualities. But, hopefully, as Cilliers
demonstrates with “[t]he brain, natural language and social systems,” this discussion will
prove beneﬁcial, illustrating emergence through the explanation.

Moreover, separate and distinct from my textual analysis, this exploration
demonstrates its own entry into the complex system of texts as actualities and virtualities.
After all, the fate of the discussion Ibegin here does not ultimately lie in my own hands;
instead, its success as a text relies on the self-organizing properties of the textual matrix it
enters. In other words, if these ideas in this chapter spark a trend within a larger, complex

textual collective, that trend may illustrate that such the system within which it operates is

self-organizin g. Much like the paradox of meme theory, wherein the success of a

243

particular meme is almost always divorced from the standing of its author, the paradox of
explaining complexity is that I am severely limited in my abilities to direct the reception
of my ideas. As N. Katherine Hayles writes of the meme metaphor, “If the idea Of a
meme is itself a meme this means that [Richard] Dawkins creates an idea that he
claims has an agency Of its own, and the success of his individual creation is ensured by
erasing his role as creator” (157). In other words, a larger, complex collective determines
the concept’s adaptive success, not the origin.

One cannot willfully initiate self-organization within a system. Despite the well-
meaning efforts of the living humans in Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead,
attempting to teach, domesticate, or otherwise control the zombies proves futile. The
zombies as a systemic force do not always learn what they are taught, and many of them
learn more than their instructors want them to understand. Rather than being directed,
complex systems engage in self—organization in order to change their internal structure
either spontaneously or adaptively, through the interactions of their constituent parts, as a
means of managing or responding to the environment. Once again, Cilliers clariﬁes how
self-organization relates to complexity, writing that:

Self-organising systems increase in complexity. Since they have to

“learn” from experience, they have to “remember” previously encountered

situations and compare them with new ones. If more “previous

information” can be stored, the system will be able to make better

comparisons. This increase in complexity implies a local reversal of

entropy, which necessitates a ﬂow of energy or information through the

systems. (92, italics in original)

What Cilliers’s overview of self-organization indicates is that, on occasion, given that

9, ‘6

self—organizing systems can “remember, make better comparisons,” and “tend to age,”

they exhibit behavior that appears to give the system a kind of agency, despite the fact

244

that the system itself is made up of agents. Thus, the self—organizing system at times
behaves like an organism itself (much like how the collective zombie system often
Operates as a single, sprawling unit). At other times, a complex, self-organizing system
may Operate within a single organism, such as the human brain’s neurons engaging in
local energy exchanges to deveIOp larger patterns (much like how one individual human
brain can “out-think” the zombie mob because it requires less time for the trial and error
process of the “brainless” zombies acting out repetitive). The principles of both the
human brain and the zombie collective, however, rely on the exact same processes.

So, through the lens of evolution, species can function like a self-organizing
system, illustrating how, often after many generations, species “learn” something (how to
ﬂy, use tools, weave webs, etc.) that no single organism within that species could have
ever really learned in a single lifetime. Self-organization can occur on multiple levels,
leading self-organizing systems to create additional self-organizing systems, all the while
ascending ladders of complexity through the process of emergence. Likewise, if we are
to treat each of George Romero’s Dead movies as a kind of generation unto itself, we can
observe systemic changes and the resulting complexity from these changes. Although
these four movies form a “series,” they hardly suggest a sequential nature (except for the
progression inherent in their titles, moving from Night to Dawn to Day) as none of the
movies recognizes any of the other movies’ characters, any overarching timeline, or any
clear-cut spatial continuity. As such, the movies seem to defy neat categorization; they
are not exactly sequels, nor quite adaptations, and they hardly fit the label of being

.,
remakes.”3

 

23 ' ' ‘ ‘ ' is ' 3 ' ’ on
Similar problems of sequential orderings emerge from such series ’ as Sergio Leone 5 so-called Man

245

There is a kind of paradoxical repetition to this “non-sequential series,” as the
audience consumes the same narrative which is simultaneously wholly new and distinct.
Most movie sequels and series avoid this episode approach, the exceptions being certain
episodic and monadistic movie series, such as the James Bond franchise or Philip
Marlowe movies, which are as much adaptations of what worked in the previous movie
as they are adaptations Of the novels of Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler, respectively.
Events in these episodic series rarely link over to current texts from predecessor texts, and
it is not unusual for characters to be swapped in or out, or be played by different actors.
Yet unlike the Bond and Marlowe movies, Romero’s Dead series, we do not really even
feature the same characters at all. The only sense of perpetuation we have from one text
to the next stems from the collective ﬁgure of interest—whether viewed as group
protagonist or mob antagonist24—is the zombie.

The Dead movies occupy that peculiar temporal unfolding that is already
familiar—yet uncanny—to audiences familiar with most of the “series” from comic
books or radio and television shows, where time passes and yet the beginning of each
entry in the “series” starts in the same place. The initial situation in each Dead movie is

already a given set of circumstances familiar to viewers (with the possible exception of

 

with No Name Trilogy”: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly; Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, and Army of Darkness; and Robert
Rodriguez’s take on Leone’s spaghetti westerns: El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in
Mexico. In their own ways, the entries within each of these textual lineages depicts more Of an emergent
repetition with variations than new adaptations, remakes, or sequels.

2" Clearly, an ambiguity of identiﬁcation underscores the curious pleasures of the zombie movie, as the
climactic visuals center almost as often on the violent destruction of humans as on the violent destruction of
the zombies. Given that this violence is some of the most extreme and most popular gore depicted in the
cinema, the vicarious thrill Of the special effects-powered bodily destruction (of zombie and human alike)
seems, like Badmington’s “alien chic” from the previous chapter, to have the ability of transforming the
gruesome zombies into champions of sorts for being the catalysts for the violent struggle we have the
pleasure to witness, whether they win or lose.

246

someone wholly uninitiated watching Night of the Living Dead), so the setup, no matter
how grimly apocalyptic, bears a kind of nostalgia, a gesture to a past that is also somehow
disconnected from the text in question. This kind of “setting as resetting” is, as I have
mentioned, a familiar trope in various contexts such as ﬁlm franchises, series, television
shows, and comic books. In analyzing “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco addresses
this phenomenon of “resetting” the narrative scenario and how such an engagement with
a narrative produces a kind of pleasure; he writes that:

Narrative of a redundant nature would appear as an indulgent invitation

to repose, the only occasion of true relaxation Offered to the consumer Is

it not also natural that the cultured person who in moments of intellectual

tension seeks a stimulus in an action painting or in a piece of serial music

should in moments Of relaxation (healthy and indispensable) tend toward

triumphant infantile laziness and turn to the consumer product for

paciﬁcation in an orgy of redundance? (21)
In this passage, Eco addresses how “an orgy of redundance” can placate a narrative’s
consumers, precisely because its formulas and tropes are already all too familiar. On the
other hand, this supposed “paciﬁcation” through repetitive narrative “resetting” can carry
with it certain amounts of “intellectual tension” as well because, while a critic like Eco
might argue that overfamiliarity of zombie movies’ redundant settings turns audiences
into zombies themselves, these numerous iterations allow patterns of emergence to unfold
from the plurality of understanding the texts’ collectivity. Texts such as Romero’s Dead
series, as seemingly simplistic, uncomplicated components of a system, prove to be
deceptive in that they are adaptive while retaining the veneer of being thoughtless
“org[ies] of redundance.” In fact, the supposed simplicity, the nonsequential

interchangeability of Romero’s zombie movies is what allows them to “get their smarts

from below” through the emergence of complex patterns.

247

Moreover, Eco addresses the narrative holding patterns of repetitive series—-
through the lens of Superman comic books—by examining the paradox of character
actions. Even though characters in textual series undergo changes and developments, the
paradoxical demands of the narrative require characters to balance this development
through absolute cornpartrnentalization, leaving the episode relatively disconnected from
the “resetting” that is always taking place. Eco writes that any time a figure within an
episodic serial narrative accomplishes something, such as Superman overcoming an
obstacle, “the character has made a gesture which is inscribed in his past and weighs upon
his future. He has taken a step toward death, he has gotten Older, if only by an hour; his
storehouse of personal experiences has irreversibly enlarged. To act, then means to
‘consume’ himself” (16, italics in original). The peculiar possibilities allowed by the
structure of the zombie narrative, however, reverse this paradigm in that the zombie
characters, while they may decay, cannot take any additional “step[s] toward death.”
Instead, the possibilities Of their narrative suspension prove absolute by their categorical
deﬁance of mortality. While most serial characters, consume themselves through the
unfolding of events, the zombie, appropriately enough, utilizes the narrative event as an
Opportunity to consume others, both ﬁguratively through the passage Of narrative time
Eco cites and, of course, literally through the spectacles—decaying bodies devouring still
living bodies—that have become the gory trademark of zombie movies, within the
Romero canon and outside of it.

This cannibalistic consumption taking place within zombie movies serves to
metaphorize the tensions exposed in the narrative Obstacles of the “non-sequential series.”

How can the narrative be adapted or remade or serialized without simply “cannibalizing”

248

it, consuming it and killing it through repetition? After all, audiences may have certain
sorts of nostalgia for what has come before in a narrative series, but a text that is too
directly repetitive becomes dull. To appease the consumers both of the narrative and
within the narrative, textual series need to figure out the appropriate amount Of fresh
blood. Thus, the emergent variations within Romero’s Dead series seem to gesture
toward the problematic aspects of the narrative logic of sequels and prequels; unless
authors conceive of their texts as structured into multiple parts (and perhaps even then),
their attempts at sequels serve only to recapture some of the success of the original text.
This kind of recapitulation concerns a kind of adaptation. The sequel in many senses
adapts the original. By revisiting the same characters or settings or situation, the follow-
up text adapts the narrative into something new yet always already familiar. However,
with the problem narratives Of “non-sequential” series like Romero’s Dead movies, this
kind of logic based on familiarity is disturbed. Does Dawn of the Dead really take place
at the dawn following Night of the Living Dead? Despite the evidence of the titles, the
visual cues tell us Otherwise, as there is a ten-year gap between the characters of the two
movies in terms of fashion and hairstyle, as well as social and cultural changes, like the
popular development of “one of those new indoor malls” (Dawn of the Dead). While
these cues are subtle, they still cast doubt on the temporal structure implicit in the series,
which seems to be more episodic than linear, following as it does an entirely different set
of characters in an entirely different location.

George Romero’s zombie movies do not unfold in linear fashion the way we most
Often conceive of any textual series; there is no sense of progression through cause and

effect. Nothing that any Of the human characters do in one movie has any impact on the

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events of the others. The zombies may change, but, even when they do, we only observe

a handful of individuals that distinguishable from the rest of the collective, and they also
do not carry over from one movie to the next, which might indicate some kind of
progression. In fact, Romero has spoken out against the paradigms of social or political
meaning in which critics often frame his ﬁlms, particularly the ﬁrst: Night of the Living
Dead, claiming that he “never meant to preach anything” and going so far as to assert that
there are no “new thoughts, certainly no solutions, and not even any new questions in my
ﬁlms” (quoted in Gagne 5). Romero’s assertions, however, serve as a strong foundation
for the allegedly “mindless” ways in which evolution itself works. As mentioned above,
evolution is not by deﬁnition progressive; it cannot be teleological, as “evolution” only
signiﬁes algorithmic change over sequential iterations. That said, the Dead series
conforms to a different kind of transmission, one in which we do not witness characters
undergo life changes through a historical stretch of sequels. Romero’s zombie movies are
more like repetitions with variations, a suitable scope for examining how change can
produce patterns through ordering processes that gradually unfold. And yet the collective
zombie character goes through subtle yet key metamorphoses from ﬁlm to ﬁlm, adapting
and evolving as though it is mutating and evolving over time, “learning” as a species
through emergence. The stakes in my reading of the zombies “learning” involve
developing a sense of how we understand textual evolution in a series of seemingly
disconnected movies, as well as a way of tracing emergent patterns in seemingly random
data through examining the changes undertaken by a collective character in multiple
textual settings, moving from instinct to memory to trainability to independent learning.

Before exploring this model of emergent textual evolution wherein adaptation works, like

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the different levels of symbiosis, as an explanatory framework for conceptualizing a
matrix based on plurality rather than individuality, however, we should examine the

larger textual matrix within which Romero’s Dead series operates.

3. The Complicated Genealogy Of the Dead

Generally, critics do not frame zombies as relating to any larger sort of evolution,
either in terms of textual adaptation or biological adaptation. Jamie Russell explains that:

For all their lack Of ﬁnesse or style the living dead have been a constant

presence in horror ﬁlms since the 1930s with a ﬁlmography that includes

many critically-acclaimed and popular ﬁlms SO why hasn’t the zombie

even been treated seriously? Partly it’s because the living dead lack an

established literary heritage. Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde and even the Wolf Man can boast a lineage that stretches

back to Gothic ﬁction, European folklore and ancient legends. (7)
As Russell explains, zombies exhibit an overall lack of literary predecessors; early written
texts about zombies are nonﬁction rather than horror novels, such as William Seabrook’s
anthropological accounts of Haitian culture in his 1929 text The Magic Island. Also, in
Russell’s list of more “legitimate” monsters—“Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster,” etc.—
the threat is singular and iconic rather than distributed and undifferentiated, which
somewhat accounts for the zombie’s second-class status as a monster. It is as though the
patterns created by mystical oral accounts of Caribbean zombies developed into ﬁctional
ﬁlmic accounts through a cultural analog of emergence itself. In any case, we can trace
the textual genealogy of Romero’s Dead movies through both its material distribution and

its textual adaptation, both tracings involving a more substantive connection to the

emergent model of evolution.

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As with any text or series Of texts, Romero’s Dead series exists within a larger
matrix of meaning, and, when we examine this kind Of textual genealogy in terms of its
inﬂuences and imitators, starting with the relationship between Night of the Living Dead
and I Am Legend, the lineage incorporates all Of the models proposed by this dissertation.
The previous section’s assertions about the relationships between and among the different
models for describing and theorizing textual adaptation and evolution do not by any
means imply that any of the models proposed in this dissertation are mutually exclusive.
Synapses, after all, operate individually and as a system, much like individual symbionts
can Operate systemically through large-scale symbiosis. Likewise, viral movement can
function on the local, individual level as an infection or on the global level as a pandemic,
spiraling outward from cells to organisms to pOpulations to continents. In the case of
Romero’s Dead movies themselves, the movement of the series most directly relates to an
emergent model of evolution, which, as detailed above, can connect back to the brain-
based synaptic model to the extent that individual, local synapses comprise a larger sense
of emergent, systemic behavior.

Romero’s movies serve as exemplary cases for understanding emergence because
they demonstrate emergence in the collective actions of the zombie multitude and in the
collectivity of the series, but, in the case of Night of the Living Dead, even the ﬁlm’s legal
and material distribution provides an example of emergence. Like the unpredictable
behaviors of the zombie masses, Night of the Living Dead as a text can be unearthed
almost anywhere; Night freely turns up in television programming, midnight movie
screenings, and video bargain bins everywhere, much moreso than most mainstream

movies. Night of the Living Dead is so widely accessible because the movie is now part

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of the public domain. When the ﬁlm’s distributor, Continental Releasing, changed the
ﬁlm’s title from The Night of Anubis to Night of the Living Dead very late in the post—
production schedule, the title card on the release prints did not contain a copyright notice,
allowing any distributor to release it as part of their public domain Offerings and thus
cannibalistically feed off Of Romero’s success. Kevin Heffernan explains the dilemma in
an article titled “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the
Living Dead (1968),” where he writes that:

To Romero‘s horror, the ﬁlm seemed to pass into the public domain after

Continental folded in the 19703 In the 19808, at the dawn of the video

era, the ﬁlm turned up in virtually every public-domain video catalog. The

years of lost revenue attributable to this oversight were responsible for the

ﬁlmmakers' decision to regroup for a color remake in 1990 and a rescored

DVD release of the original black-and-white version in 1999. (75)

Although the ﬁlmmakers never saw the full proﬁts of their enterprise as a result of this
copyright error, Night of the Living Dead’s virtual omnipresence through this error has
played a positive role in the movie’s visibility and its ability to influence larger trends
within the horror genre.

Yet even before the video market boomed, Night of the Living Dead seemed to
erupt in movie theaters as well, as the movie spread into most of local theaters’ available
timeslots as part of Continental’s attempts to saturate the market. As Heffernan also
recounts, audiences and critics such as Roger Ebert were very distraught that Night of the
Living Dead was playing to matinee audiences ﬁlled with young children who found
themselves traumatized by the horror displayed on the screen. Due to distribution

shortages, many smaller local theaters, especially those that served inner city populations,

tried to ﬁght back, as Heffernan writes:

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with an eclectic mix of programming that included not only subsequent

runs but kiddie matinees, huge multitheater saturation openings Of genre

ﬁlms, and ﬁlms from the nascent “adults—only” distribution network. The

controversy surrounding the initial release of Night of the Living Dead was

the result of Continental’s misguided efforts to place the ﬁlm in the inner-

city [neighborhood theaters], horror-matinee, and multiple-opening

situations simultaneously. (60)

In other words, because there were so many screenings of Night of the Living Dead
available to potential viewers, what might have been a limited, local popularity spread
throughout a much greater, more diversiﬁed population, giving more access to like,
dislike, or ignore the movie, much the same as the copyright problems allowed greater
access. And, because Night of the Living Dead’s content Offered a vastly different
experience from the horror movies that came before it—prominent gruesome violence, a
relatively uncomprornised black protagonist, and a nihilistic environment where heroic
characters without dignity and for no real reason, meaning that no one was safe—the
popularity of Night of the Living Dead managed to change the genre of horror, which, like
the movie-going population that heartily ate up Night’s unconventional offerings, is, after
all, a complex system.

Because the zombie concept is inherently bound up in issues of population,
control, and proliferation, the ironies of Romero’s debut ﬁlm marketing, distribution, and
loss of proﬁts to the public domain resonate all the more sharply. Such resonance,
however, does not imply any sort Of cause and effect; the fact that Night of the Living
Dead mirrors aspects of its content in the market history of its distribution does not
gesture toward some endemic connection. Similarly, a text’s saturation of access does

not necessarily lead to emergence. Instead, the parallels from the examples of Night’s

copyright and screening debacles offer a context for the collective reading of the Dead

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series and the emergence it contains in its form and content, which follows in the next
section. Prior to this explication, however, it is important to contextualize in similar
fashion the larger textual network of inﬂuences within which George Romero’s zombie
series Operates, not because it pertains to the framework of emergence but because this
much larger scope includes components conforming to all of the adaptive models I
discuss in previous chapters. The larger textual lineage of Dead series~texts that it
inﬂuenced and texts it claims as inﬂuences— incorporates all of the models Idiscuss in
this project, primarily when we examine the connections between George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead and Richard Matheson’s novel [Am Legend.

Although Romero’s movie franchise has developed its own distinct rules and
style, the concept of the zombie movie did not originate with Night of the Living Dead;
while the Dead series resists a single explanation or conﬁned location for the zombie
outbreak, earlier ﬁlms—such as White Zombie, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Plague
of the Zombies—focus on voodoo and witchcraft as causes for the local, fairly contained
zombie encounters. Rather than cite these movies as the primary inﬂuence on Night of
the Living Dead, however, most sources connect Night with the novel I Am Legend. For
example, Paul R. Gagne explains in The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of
George A. Romero that:

It was Romero who came up with the idea for Night of the Living

Dead. A few years earlier, he’d written a short story loosely inspired by I

Am Legend, Richard Matheson’s novel about the last human in a desolate

world of plague-spawned, zombielike vampires Romero’s story has
never been published and was untitled when he wrote it. He has since
referred to it as “Anubis,” after the Egyptian god of the dead Romero

describes “Anubis” as an allegory about what happens when an incoming
revolutionary society—in this case, the mass return from the grave of the

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recently dead, whose sole purpose is to feast on the ﬂesh and blood of the
living—replaces an existing social order. (24)

As Gagne details, the undead antagonists of I Am Legend are vampires, not zombies, and
the most solid associations between Night of the Living Dead and I Am Legend appear
from the two texts sharing a contemporary timeframe instead of a gothic or exotic past,
their focus on pragmatic, science—based explanations with a minimum of mysticism, and
the antagonists attacking the severely outnumbered survivor(s) in a suburban American
residence.25 Nearly all other elements of the two texts are completely dissimilar, and, as
such, Romero’s “loosely inspired” short story and further removed movie adaptation
conform to the synaptic model. In other words, the subject matter, style, and structure of
Night of the Living Dead and I Am Legend may asymptotically approach one another, but
the differences—like those found between and among the texts discussed in the ﬁrst
chapter—suggest a textual evolution that does not conform to most conventional
deﬁnitions of “adaptation,” much like the entries in Romero’s Dead series seem not to ﬁt
into the established categories of adaptation, remake, revision, or sequel.

The extreme distinctions between the two texts, in fact, prompted Richard
Matheson to respond to Night of the Living Dead—for which he received no royalties, as
the “loosely inspired” nature of Romero’s movie did not require him to purchase the right
from Matheson—with a critical disavowal, claiming in an interview that he found Night
of the Living Dead “kind of cornball” (Weaver 307). Of course, Matheson’s judgment
aside, because Night of the Living Dead commands this synaptic relationship to I Am

Legend, Romero’s debut film—and, by extension, the rest of the Dead series—connects,

25 For additional commentary connecting Night of the Living Dead to I Am Legend. see John Russo’s The
Complete Night of the Living Dead F ilmbook (6-7) and J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight

256

however loosely, to I Am Legend’s own textual matrix. Aside from the "loosely inspired”
adaptation arising through Night of the Living Dead, Matheson’s novel thus far has two
more “Ofﬁcial” adaptations: 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, and
1971’s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, representing viral and symbiotic
adaptations, respectively.26

While Night ofthe Living Dead represents a synaptic adaptation of I Am Legend,
the other two adaptations conform to the other models I discuss in the earlier chapters;
The Last Man on Earth retains a viral faithfulness to Matheson’s novel, while Tire Omega
Man creates a more symbiotic relationship by grafting Matheson’s premise onto a quite
different story featuring infected antagonists who are neither quite vampires nor quite
zombies. Despite the close narrative relationship between I Am Legend and The Last
Man on Earth—stemming in part from Richard Matheson’s in writing the screenplay——
Richard Matheson also repudiates this seemingly viral replication, replacing his writing
credits with the pseudonym Logan Swanson. Matheson’s desire to dissociate himself
from The Last Man on Earth makes a bit more sense than his criticism Of Night of the
Living Dead, as The Last Man on Earth has not proven particularly successful with either
critics or popular audiences. Although Sidney Salkow’s direction of The Last Man on
Earth suffers from budgetary limitations and the attendant lip-synching difﬁculties of
dubbing dialogue onto footage of the predominantly Italian-speaking cast, the movie has

its moments of evocative grace such as the shufﬂing intruders bashing ineffectively at the

 

Movies.

26 The third cinematic adaptation ofIAm Legend will be released in 2007, starring Will Smith as the “last
man on Earth” character, which, interestingly enough, performs the same narrative revision George Romero
conducted in Night ofthe Living Dead by replacing Matheson’s white protagonist with an equally strong.
capable black character.

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door (echoed in Night of the Living Dead) and the abandoned public spaces strewn with
the occasional random corpse or now-useless material goods (referenced in Danny
Boyle’s post—9/ 11 reinvention of the zombie movie: 28 Days Later).

Additionally, [Am Legend extends back to its own set of textual inﬂuences,
primarily a symbiotic relationship to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which also extends
macrosymbiotically to a whole host of vampire legends, myths, and lore which inspired
Stoker’s text, as well as to the wide variety of dramatic and cinematic adaptations of
Dracula (from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror to Werner Herzog’s
Nosferatu the Vampyre to the Universal Studios Dracula movies to the Hammer Studios
Dracula movies to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as assorted
others) which were inspired by Stoker’s text in turn. Beyond these adaptive connections
through I Am Legend, Night of the Living Dead also provides its own textual legacy, not
just through the Dead series I have been discussing but also through inspiring other
zombie movies, some of which claim in their own ways to be connected to Night of the
Living Dead themselves. For example, John Russo, part of George Romero’s
creative/production team on Night of the Living Dead, splits off from Romero’s canon to
form his own series through producing Return of the Living Dead and that movie’s four
sequels. Likewise, when Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy with the new title
Zombi, it spawned its own imitators, starting with Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (sometimes
known in the United States as Zombies 2 or, more commonly, just Zombie) and
continuing with an additional two sequels. And, ﬁnally, as if this genealogy were not
complicated enough, there are two remakes of Night of the Living Dead (one directed by

Tom Savini and “authorized” by George Romero’s involvement and the other remake,

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shot in 3—D, unaffiliated with Romero, and made possible due only to the 1968 film’s
botched copyright ownership), a parodied version of Night of the Living Dead (featuring a
new recorded soundtrack also made possible by the original ﬁlm’s copyright debacle), a
remake of Dawn of the Dead, a parody in Shaun of the Dead, an “unofficial sequel” in
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, and numerous homages such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days
Later.27

What accounts for this extremely diverse network of textual adaptations and
connections? In part, the adaptability of the vampire and zombie traditions serves them
well in a variety Of contexts. Robert Neville, the hero and ﬁnal survivor of a global
plague of vampirism in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, muses on the phenomenon
himself, providing a form of meta-commentary on the origins of the novel in which he
un-self-consciously exists, reading directly from Dracula:

“The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.”

Thank you, Dr. Van Helsing, [Neville] thought, putting down his

copy of Dracula It was true. The book was a hodgepodge Of

superstitions and soap-opera cliches, but that line was true; no one had

believed in them, and how could they ﬁght something they didn’t even

beﬁevein?

That was what the situation had been. Something black and of the

night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no

framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and

ﬁgure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé,

Summers’ [sic] idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the

Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B—ﬁlm

factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century. (28-9, italics

in original)
Although Matheson cites Stoker claiming that vampires’ central strength is their

unbelievability, the laundry list of “superstitions and soap-opera cliches” and “grist for

the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-ﬁlm factories,” much like my previous list

¥

27 . . . . . .
Yet another remake rs also in the works; a new version of Day ofthe Dead wrll hit theaters m 2007.
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of texts directly and indirectly connected to Night of the Living Dead, holds that the real
success, from the perspective of textual evolution, is the popularity of the core myths
extending back all the way to the Middle Ages. Despite Count Dracula’s social status as
an aristocrat, Matheson’s characterization Of vampire tales is distinctly afﬁliated with
mass culture, neither high-class literature nor high-class cinema. George Romero
similarly aligns his zombies with the lower classes, claiming that “The zombie for me
was always the blue collar kind of monster. I mean, he was us” (American Nightmare).
While there have been other critical interpretations that read Romero’s zombies as
shambling allegories for the proletariat”, this apparent interconnection between zombies
and the undifferentiated masses proves pertinent—on the texts’ structural level rather
than solely through the movies’ representational content bearing metaphorical
resonances—to the project of understanding emergence.

In addition to zombies being “the blue collar kind of monster,” Romero asserts
that the problems he perceived with the older zombie ﬁlms was that “it was always, you
know, the [zombie] guy out doing the work while Lugosi was up in the castle. But what
always intrigued me was, well, you’re not going to be able to control them. You’re not
going to be able to get them to go take the garbage out for you” (American Nightmare).
Just as the long list of almost uncontrollable sequels, remakes, and “unauthorized” media
distributions demonstrates, just as the numerous returns of the repressed zombies
breaking through barriers and invading the humans’ shelters demonstrates, and just as the

narrative “rules” of the zombies are always in ﬂux and thus unclassiﬁable as the creatures

28 . . , . . . .
Most crrtrcs read Romero s polrtrcs as inherently progressrve, as suggested by Dawn of the Dead

channeling anti-consumerist rhetoric through its shopping mall setting, but in Pretend We’re Dead:

Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Annalee Newitz reads the zombie ﬁgure as the ultimate

260

learn through collective intelligence, the problem with these zombies is that “you’re not
going to be able to control them.” It is precisely because the zombies cannot be contained
by authoritative top—down systemic control—through any single “Lugosi” ﬁgure or even
through a group acting as the “executive branch”—-that the hordes work so effectively as
a collective species, both rnetonymically as analogs for the textual products in which they
appear and narratively as systemic catalysts for the action found in the storylines.

Through these collective characters of the zombie hordes, we can watch and
understand how the local interactions of individual agents add up to larger designs.
Johnson explicates the concept of emergence in the case of social insects by writing that:

While there’s no single key to the success Of the social insects, the

collective intelligence of the colony system certainly plays an essential

role. Call it swarm logic: ten thousand ants—each limited to a meager

vocabulary of pheromones and minimal cognitive skills—collectively

engage in nuanced and improvisational problem-solving Their knack

for engineering and social coordination can be downright spooky-—

particularly because none of the individual ants is actually “in charge” of

the overall operation Local turns out to be the key term in

understanding the power of swarm logic. We see emergent behavior in

systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay

attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from

above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action

produces global behavior. (74, italics in original)
Appropriately enough, these global patterns determined by local actions can be
“downright spooky,” and there is something both chilling and fascinating about watching
the zombie agents slowly overcome a particular Obstacle. This phenomenon, however, is
only increased when viewed within the context of an even larger scope, such as looking at

the series as a whole, where we can see the patterns undergo paradigm shifts between and

among the texts.

 

metaphorical underclass in both capitalist and colonialist frameworks (108-1 1).

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5. The Young and the Brainless

Return of the Living Dead 111, an entry in John Russo’s spinoff series from
Romero’s Dead movies, tells the Romeo and Juliet story of a young man who reanimates
his recently deceased girlfriend using secret government technology on his father’s cover
military base, only to undergo tragic suffering as the girlfriend slowly turns into a zombie
hungering for human brains. While the movie proves fairly peripheral to the corpus of
Romero’s zombie movies—following as it does the different narrative rules established
by Return of the Living Dead—one of the seemingly unimportant toward the end of the
movie proves critical. The teenager’s father, speaking with his fellow ofﬁcers about the
zombie girlfriend’s relatively intact subjectivity, says: “Colonel, the fact that she was
cognitive proves that the living dead aren’t just animated ﬂesh. It proves that they have
an inner life” (Return of the Living Dead III). The implications of this comment drive at
one of the thorny philosophical issues Daniel Dennett addresses along with various
aspects of meme theory in Consciousness Explained, where he writes that:

According to common agreement among philosophers, a zombie is or

would be a human being who exhibits perfectly natural, alert, loquacious,

vivacious behavior but is in fact not conscious at all, but rather some sort

of automaton. The whole point of the philosopher’s notion of zombie is

that you can’t tell a zombie from a normal person by examining external

behavior. Since that is all we ever get to see of our friends and neighbors,

some of your best friends may be zombies. (73, italics in original)
Dennett notes that philosopher’s zombies are not the shambling, mute, ﬂesh-eating
undead that populate movies such as Romero’s Dead series; instead, they are a kind of

inverted Turing test, wherein interrogators can only Observe exterior phenomena even

though there may be “no one home upstairs.” In other words, philosopher’s zombies

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exhibit no signals that they have no consciousness, that their brains are not exactly the
same as ours.

Dennett takes issue with philosophers like Thomas Nagel and epiphenomenalists
who propose the philosopher’s zombie as a hypothetical in order to demonstrate that any
other consciousness is something almost mystical and beyond the realm of Observation.29
And yet the problem with subjectivity, memes, and consciousness is that intentionality
remains destabilized, something not knowable in its absolute form. In fact, Dennett
himself observes earlier in the text that “the trouble with brains, it seems, is that [n]o
part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking and the whole brain appears to be
no better a candidate for that very special role. This is a slippery topic. Do brains think?
Do eyes see? Or do people see with their eyes and think with their brains? Is there a
difference?” (29). As Johnson has explained about the brain, the larger collective pattern
is emergent and indivisible if it is to remain intelligible as a pattern. The problems with
consciousness arrive with these disparate senses of scope; we cannot consider a neuron
conscious any more than we can consider a city neighborhood conscious, and yet, at the
same time, neither one is entirely divorced from consciousness. So, whether the entity in
question is a philosopher’s zombie appearing to be a regular human yet without
consciousness, or a Romero zombie mutely wandering and solving problems collectively,

or something in-between, like a Russo zombie from the Return of the Living Dead series

 

29 Dennett explains that, while it acceptable for philosophers to rely on ﬁctional hypotheticals (85), the
creation of the philosopher’s zombie opens up aggressively solipsistic presuppositions about the
consciousness of others (he cites similar assumptions that have led to discrimination against women and
Jews) (406). Thus, he ﬁnds the musings on the philosopher’s zombie to be bankrupt, except to disprove
them, writing that: “If we were to declare that in principle, a zombie is indistinguishable from a conscious
person, then we would be saying that genuine consciousness is epiphenomenal in the ridiculous sense. That
is just silly dangerously silly, for it echoes the sort of utterly unmotivated prejudices that have denied full
personhood to people on the basis of the color of their skin” (405, italics in original).

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squalling loudly for brains to consume (“Braaaaainsl”), the entity is categorically
different from a standard, conscious person, and yet the collective actions Of both
conscious people and brainless zombies can add up to adaptive emergence, a kind of
problem-solving brain in the plural.

Because the most basic deﬁnition Of emergence is the process by which simple
rules result in complex pattern formation, even the brainless can appear brainy if there are
enough of them performing repetitive tasks with even the slightest conceptual room for
variation within local actions. Within these most rudimentary parameters, emergence can
take place in a variety of spatial and temporal contexts, ranging from the diachronic,
global phenomenon of animate species’ evolution to the synchronic, microscopic
phenomenon of neurotransmitters ﬁring and forming thoughts. After all, as mentioned
above, both the workings Of the human brain and the workings Of a large collective of
human brains demonstrate emergence. On the level of texts, obviously individual authors
utilize the complex systems of their own brains, but narrative itself gestures toward larger
patterns as well, as any given example locates itself within some kind of textual collective
such as genre or contemporaneous periodization or another category of interdependence.
Self-organizing assemblages exist within textual and cultural systems just as much as
they emerge in all sorts of other complex systems, and, through examining examples, we
can observe the macroscopic patterns’ impact through individual texts, like those of
Romero’s “brainless” Dead movies. Likewise, just as complex systems can impact one
another on a spectrum of scales, the complex systems of zombie populations within one
of the series entries inﬂuence still higher levels of order through demonstrating

emergence through the textual system of the series as a complex collectivity.

264

The movies in question provide illustrations of how these orders of complexity
progress from one level to the next. Like the zombies, the texts superﬁcially appear to be
uncomplicated in their singular forms. For example, in Night of the Living Dead, the
zombies—called simply ghouls by the diegetic media within Night—possess only the
basic rudiments of instinct. They fear ﬁre, they want to attack and eat the living, and the
most sophisticated ones occasionally use simple tools. Yet already in this first movie we
have a conception of these individual agents as a collective system. One of the
newscasters announces that: “There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a
virtual army of unidentiﬁed assassins. The murders are taking place in villages and cities,
in rural homes and suburbs with no apparent pattern nor reason for the slayings. It seems
to be a sudden general explosion Of mass homicide.” By labeling the zombies as “an
epidemic” without any “apparent pattern,” the report seems to defy interpretation while
also inviting it. Although Night of the Living Dead contains the thin rationalization by
government scientists that all of the mayhem stems from something to do with a returned
probe from Venus, the other three movies in Romero’s Dead series wisely avoid such
simplistic cause-and-effect closure. Instead, like the bafﬂed reports, there is no singular
cause to explain the “sudden general explosion of mass homicide” without “apparent
pattern.”

Even with the seemingly random nature of the zombies’ distribution and
collective behavior, their simplistic actions have a cumulative effect when viewed across
the evolving steps each of Romero’s movies take. Essentially, these changes boil down
to patterns of emergent complexity, moving through movie to movie from instinct to

memory to trainability to independent learning. Each of the “Dead” series represents the

265

variations possible during the tension between one sort Of phase transition and another, as
with the zombies of Dawn of the Dead, who act based on collective memory, moving to
the zombies of Day of the Dead, who are trainable precisely due to their ability to
remember; each entry explores what happens at the edge of a paradigm shift for the
zombie agents as a species. Luciana Parisi elucidates how emergence works as an
adaptive strategy that moves beyond simple, linear generational change, writing that:
variations are not actualities accumulated and transmitted through sexual
reproduction. On the contrary, as recent theories of evolution that embrace

the molecular dynamics of organization argue, variations emerge through

the parallel networks between populations and territories poised at the

edge of a phase transition from one state to another. Selection does not

impose an order of ﬁtness on these networked relations. Rather, it is

immanent to their regulatory circuits because it acts at their differential

degrees of complexity. (33)

The emergence, according to Parisi, happens at the network level during these moments
of tension or stress between shifts. As [explained above, these shifts are both cognitive
and corporate; the zombie evolution requires us to think Of their'masses as a collective
brain.

In the gap between the first movie and the second, the zombies develop memory
systems, some sort of instinctual recall that reminds them that they want to go to the mall.
When Fran and Stephen look over the edge of the mall rooftop down to the zombies
milling around below, as though waiting for the Christmas shopping season to begin,
Fran asks: “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” Stephen replies: “Some kind
of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

The zombies’ behavior is still attributed to instinct, as with the ﬁrst movie, although the

rules underlying this behavior in Dawn of the Dead now incorporate some form of

266

memory, though that memory is deﬁned by and through social grouping. The individual
zombie agents at this point do not remember how to drive cars or program computers, but
they somehow remember that their herd likes to go to the mall. The bizarre, egomaniacal
scientist Dr. Millard Rausch characterizes these zombics’ collective abilities in a
television news broadcast, saying that:

“The normal question, the ﬁrst question is: are these cannibals? NO, they

are not. Cannibalism in the true sense of the word implies an interspecies

activity. These creatures cannot be considered human. They prey on

humans. They do not prey on each other; that's the difference. They

attack and they feed only on warm ﬂesh. Intelligence? Seemingly no

reasoning ability, but basic skills remain from a remembered everyday life.

There have been reports of these creatures using tools. But even these are

the most basic, the use of tools as bludgeons and so forth. Imight point

out that even animals have been known to adopt the use of tools in this

manner. These creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct.”
With this speech, then, Dr. Rausch distinguishes the zombies as an entirely separate
species, not intelligent but capable of memory, which, contradictorily, makes them
slightly more than “pure, motorized instinct.” As the ﬁnal climax illustrates, when a
zombiﬁed Stephen remembers how to get into his former group’s hideout in the mall and
leads the other zombies there, instinct gains a much more purposeful complexity when it
is directed by shared memory.

Romero explores and expands this capacity for memory in Day of the Dead,
where Dr. Logan spends his time training zombies to perform simple tasks, with the
hopes of eventually teaching them not to attack humans, his efforts working as an
alternative solution to military force. He justiﬁes his actions by saying that: “We don’t

have enough ammunition to shoot them all in the head. The time to have done that would

have been in the beginning. NO, we let them overrun us. We are in the minority now,

267

something like 400,000 to one by my calculation.” The cross-species problem of
competition for spatial resources needs a new solution, and Dr. Logan, known to the
derisive soldiers as “Frankenstein,” devises an alternative through exploiting the
zombies’ inherent trainability, which, appropriately enough given his nickname, ends not
in progress but in the eventual doom of the underground military base. Because the
zombie horde of Day of the Dead has such massive numbers, all possible of solving
simple tasks individually—as suggested by the Operant conditioning of “Bub” and Dr.
Logan’s other experiments—the rigidity of the extreme authoritarian military is no match
for the unpredictability and ﬂuid adaptability of its collective zombie antagonist. The
destruction comes not so much because the zombies can be taught to perform simple
tasks as it does through the overall arrogance Of the base team thinking that they as a
species could completely control another, supposedly inferior breed. Although the
zombies appear to be much slower and less intelligent—the soldiers routinely refer to
them as “dumbfucks” rather than zombies—they are capable of solving problems in the
plural in much more complex fashion than the fractious microcosm of human culture can.
Land of the Dead poses perhaps the strongest case for emergent intelligence
through collective behavior, as through the course of the movie’s events, the undead
hordes move beyond the need for top-down hierarchical training. Instead, they learn how
to learn independently and distribute that intelligence collectively throughout the groups
they form, making them a social network that, like the ant colony or the slime mold,
borders on being a distributed organism, or plural as singular. Riley accounts for the shift
by saying that: “They learned how to work together.” Although the development of this

trait of interconnectivity raises thorny issues for the consistency of Romero’s narrative

268

 

“rules” across the movies, the ever—shifting complexities of the zombie’s paradigmatic
patterns of behavior mirror diachronic evolution, not on the genetic level (Romero has
never led us to believe that the zombies propagate sexually)30 but on the plane of cultural
adaptation. Many times in these movies, there is a comparison, direct or indirect,
between the humans and the zombies, often accompanied by a character saying some
variation of Riley’s Observation that “They’re just looking for a place to go. Same as us.”
In that sense, these movies, when understood as a collective network, as I frame them
here, present patterns for thinking about how collective mass intelligence works in our
cultures and groups. These emergent complexities, while Offering, as Romero says, no
“new thoughts, certainly no solutions, and not even any new questions,” can present us
with new models for conceptualizing collective behavior.

Although Romero uses certain “hero zombies” that seem to lead the action in all
four movies for the purposes of following the steps of narrative logic, the collective
behavior of the zombies is key because Of its relative directionlessness. The use of
“Bub,” “Big Daddy,” “Zombie Stephen,” and other easily distinguished zombie
characters serves as a kind of cinematic shorthand to recognize the steps of the collective

swarm. Through the parallel editing, viewers might lose sight of where the zombies are

and what they are doing, without a ﬁgure to watch progress through space and time. In

 

30 Filmmakers other than George Romero have taken up the question of zombie sexual reproduction. Peter
Jackson’s absolutely abject, over-the-top zombie horror-comedy Dead Alive (originally titled Braindead in
his native New Zealand) depicts “zombie sex” between a zombiﬁed clergyman and a nearly decapitated
zombie nurse. The zombie nurse then gives birth to a zombie baby who provides some of the movie’s most
memorable comic relief, as well as its most horrific gore. Despite this case of “zombie sex,” the bizarre.
almost cartoonish narrative logic behind Jackson’s movie, however, seems to be the exception that proves
the rule as to the limits of many horror conventions, featuring as Dead Alive does: anthropomorphic,
crawling zombie viscera; a zornbifying Sumatran rat-monkey; and a gigantic zombie matriarch whose
oversized womb manages to devour her adult son only to have him emerge again in a victorious, bloody
second birth that would raise even Freud’s eyebrows.

269

other words, these ﬁgures serve as imagistic markers to help audiences recognize patterns
within mass behavior.

Even though overcoming obstacles may seem like some form of progress, the
patterns of evolutionary ﬁtness are not quite so simplistic, as there is always that tension
involved in the individuals’ evolutionary success. In other words, humans and/or
zombies may solve a puzzle without surviving longer than the next five minutes. Instead,
the progress, to the extent that we can even call it that, lies only in the increasing
complexity of the collective. Through this lens, the theories of evolution and complexity
present themselves through the examples of Romero’s zombie movies, and vice-versa.
All four movies contain little resolution on their own, but collectively they demonstrate
emergent change from low—level interactions leading to increasing systemic complexity.
SO, although critics have long championed Romero’s subtle employment of social
criticism in his zombie movies, these movies also reveal complex illustrations of cultural

and informational theory and evolution as well.

270

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