After monster theory?: Gareth Edwards's Monsters. (July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Luckhurst, Roger
• Is Part Of: Science fiction film and television. Volume 13:Number 2(2020)
• Page Start: 269
• Page End: 290
• Publication Date: 2020-07
• Subjects: monster film -- monster theory -- Monsters -- Climate Crisis -- hermeneutics -- depth and surface reading; Science fiction films -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Science fiction television programs -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 791.43615
• DOI: 10.3828/sfftv.2020.14
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1754-3770

Abstract

Abstract : This essay suggests that the emergency conditions of the climate crisis in the twenty-first century necessarily demand a transformation of the kind of depth hermeneutics typically associated with the 'monster theory' that developed in the 1990s in the wake of queer theory. Using Gareth Edwards's 2010 film Monsters as its base text, this essay suggests we look to Latour's resistance to the hermeneutic, the allegorical and the sublime and instead commit to reading the networks of associations that are signalled on the surface of Monsters, a film that comes to be very precisely about the conditions of 'gore capitalism' at the US/Mexico border.