Neal Auch— Fascists, Ghouls, and Big Bouncing Boobs

A still from the 2008 horror/comedy *Zombie Strippers*.

The 2008 Jenna Jameson film Zombie Strippers takes place in a dystopian version of America. A Republican president has overstayed his term limit, surrounded himself with sycophants and relatives, treated undocumented immigrants like animals, codified conservative Christian values into law, and launched an invasion of Canada. This alarmingly prescient setting provides the backdrop for a film about how fascism spreads. I imagine some readers might be skeptical about my claim that a campy horror/comedy about pole-dancing zombies conceals any political depth whatsoever; rest assured, I am not being frivolous. Indeed, Zombie Strippers is a transparent reinterpretation of Eugene Ionesco’s classic anti-fascist play, Rhinoceros. Drawing from his own personal experiences, Ionesco deftly satirized the rhetorical tactics fascists use to downplay the very real threat posed by their hateful ideology. Echoes of Ionesco’s critique can be found, also, in Zombie Strippers. Typebar Magazine recently published my in-depth analysis of both stories; you can read the full piece here (still behind a paywall as of the time of writing).

David Breitbarth as Berenger in the American Conservatory Theatre’s 2019 production of Ionesco’s *Rhinoceros*.

In this short companion essay, I want to draw attention to several aspects of Zombie Strippers which I neglected to mention in my Typebar article. First off, I simply want to emphasize how shockingly accurate that film’s predictions turned out to be. Nearly two decades ago, a group of filmmakers set out to paint a picture of American fascism so unsubtle as to be legible to the target audience for a comedy about bouncing zombie boobies. The picture they arrived at was eerily similar to the America Trump and his supporters wish to create.

At this point, we might turn to scholars and experts for their insights into the MAGA ideology. Indeed, both historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Janson Stanley have already characterized Trumpism as American fascism. My point, however, is that we don’t need to get bogged down in theoretical considerations. Trump’s America is so cartoonishly fascist that the makers of Zombie Strippers already had it pegged seventeenth years ago…

To publicly describe the state of contemporary American politics in an honest way is to be met with a firehose of disingenuous distortions, outright lies, and baffling non sequiturs. Having little else to do with their time, fascists will gleefully derail any public conversation on the subject. Fear of falling prey to this particular tactic is part of the reason why mainstream media outlets often shroud their reporting with strange euphemisms and needless pedantry. Recall, for example, when Elon Musk did an obvious Nazi salute during the Trump inauguration. Fascists were quick to pretend they believed he was actually saying “my heart goes out to you.” At the same time, media outlets rushed to muddy the waters by calling the obvious Nazi salute a “one-armed gesture,” or some similar nonsense. All of this obscurantism is, to put it mildly, extremely frustrating. It is also straight out of the pages of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros…

There is one facet of Zombie Strippers which I neglected to discuss in my Typebar article but which, on reflection, I think is important: the film’s gratuitous use of nudity. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Zombie Strippers’ politics take a back seat to its obsession with the surgically-sculpted bodies of the titular undead dancers. Zombie Strippers’ celebration of all that is lewd and lascivious stands in stark contrast to the sex negativity and moral puritanism which characterize our contemporary political moment. At the time of writing, the very same right-wing politicians who once claimed to be free speech absolutists when it comes to hate speech against marginalized people are now actively trying to ban any online content that is “intended to arouse” (among other worrying infringements against political speech and artistic expression). There is, of course, a very long history of these kinds of obscenity laws being wielded as a cudgel against marginalized people, most notably sex workers and queer folks.

To be clear: I certainly am not going to argue that Zombie Strippers is an unimpeachable work of feminist art. The film’s many pole-dancing scenes are plainly intended to cater to the male gaze. Moreover, the idea that only ghouls with XX chromosomes retain their cognitive function seems both confusing and problematic in the context of the “zombies = fascists” metaphor which underpins the film. That being said, if we choose to view Zombie Strippers through the most charitable possible lens, its gleeful embrace of nudity might be construed as a rebuke against the fascist’s desire to micromanage the beautiful complexities of human sexuality.

Fascism is notoriously difficult to define with precision, in large part because the ideology is rife with inconsistencies and internal contradictions. As Umberto Eco wrote in his essay Ur-Fascism, fascism is an ideology “without quintessence.” Nonetheless, it seems to be true that all fascist movements are united in their hatred of both women and queer people. Once again quoting Eco: “Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”

If a disdain for women is integral to fascist ideology then it must be true that all sincere feminist art—including feminist pornography—is inherently anti-fascist. The same can be said about any art which celebrates queer bodies, queer sexuality, and queer love. This sentiment is part of the animating force for an upcoming change to my creative output. I’m not done with still life, mind you; I have some big news about an upcoming book and at least 3 or 4 more essays about death and transience in the pipeline. However, over the longer term, the trajectory of my creative output will likely bend away from the macabre and toward the erotic. To some extent this transformation is already underway; my last two published stories were both very queer and very sexually explicit. You can read my splatterpunk story Glory Hole for free at Nightmare Magazine right now. And my queer body horror piece Orange Frenzy was published by The Skull & Laurel Magazine (still behind a paywall as of the time of writing). Over the next year or so my visual art output will also follow suit, incorporating more and more erotic themes and imagery. (As I move forward with this I’ll also be on the lookout for models in the GTA; feel free to reach out if you think you might be interested in a collaboration.)

There is a long and rich history of anti-fascist art. Stories like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Camus’ The Plague have certainly done a lot to inform my own thinking over the years. And John Heartfield’s photomontage art was so threatening to the Nazi regime that he ended up on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list. As I argue in my Typebar article, the film Zombie Strippers is an amusing (if imperfect) addition to the canon of anti-fascist art. I will not try to weigh in on the political efficacy of such endeavours. It might well be that art and literature can offer only a feeble defence against the looming threat of fascism. That being said, my personal feeling on the matter is this: if I’m going to continue making art in such a political climate, you can be sure it will be anti-fascist art. And nothing upsets a fascist more than an unashamed embrace of queerness and sexuality.

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Fascists, Ghouls, and Big Bouncing Boobs