Potwór nie-my. Rzecz (o) zombie

• Authors: Marcela Mikołaj

Title variants

EN

MUTE MONSTERS. ON A ZOMBIE THING

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

In their first cinematic embodiment (in Halperin brothers’ film White Zombie) “the living dead” were presented, contrary to the later versions, as silent phantoms of people, whom they once were. Today, after George A. Romero’s and his followers’ films, they have become bloody monsters posing threat to mankind. In this context it is worth to recall the words of the film’s character Gabrien Van Helsing, whose remarks from the conversation with the Churchman go as follows: “For you they are monsters, only the evil which must be destroyed. I see them dying and becoming humans whom they once were.” Zombies are those monsters who make this visible: they are creatures, who ceased to be human, they once had been, and become mute “things” – the evil to be destroyed. A living dead remains mute (Pol. niemy), and becomes something that “we are not” (Pol. nie my). Slavoj Žižek states, that zombies are the dead which come back from their graves, since they are unable to find the place they deserve in the texts of culture, being the ones deprived of the right to tell their own stories. Somewhere else Žižek says that Mary Shalley’s Frankenstein is unique, since the author decides to give voice to the monster, letting him present his version of the story. Thus, according to Žižek, her monster ceases to be a sheer “thing” – and becomes a “subject”. It seems that the status of a monster in our culture is related to the fact that “monster” [le monster] is derived from the French verb “to show” [montrer], as Jacques Derrida suggested. Marina Warner indirectly refers to that, when she writes about a phantasmatic aspect of an anemy/monster: a monster, which in a way remains an image without history – the one which is perceived as a monster, a phantom, deprived of a human dimension. Taking that into accout we may pose a question: can the monster speak? Can we perceive anything more than just a mute “thing”? If yes, what an how does it speak to us?

Keywords

EN

MONSTERS; ZOMBIE; MOVIE

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Bielsko-Bialski
• Journal: Świat i Słowo
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1(18)
• Pages: 102-112

Dates

published

2012-10

Contributors

author

Marcela Mikołaj

• Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, Wydział Filologiczny, pl. Sejmu Śląskiego 1, 40-032 Katowice

References

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