Commissioned Monsters
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About This Book
In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator's hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted clay and several days of labor into a working monster, and the figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for a fee. The specific contract has not survived. The architecture in which the contract was negotiated has survived, in thousands of cuneiform tablets across the major Mesopotamian archives. Commissioned Monsters opens with that mask and proceeds across four thousand years of the same architecture.
The book argues that every monster you have ever encountered was made by somebody, paid for by somebody, and continues to generate profit for somebody. There is no collective unconscious doing this work. There is labor, there is an invoice, and there is a beneficiary. Most cultural commentary of the last century has treated monstrous figures as expressions of some deep cultural psyche, which has the effect of letting the contractors who designed and sold those figures disappear into a fog of mystical attribution. Commissioned Monsters refuses the fog and works through twenty case studies, naming the contractors where the documentary record permits naming them: the temple administrators of Old Babylonia, the Salem prosecutors, the Penny Press editors, the Reagan campaign operatives, the daycare-prosecution attorneys, the cable-news producers, and the contemporary digital-political operatives still at work.
The architecture has not changed. The labor has not changed. Only the throughput has changed.
The Argument
For most of the past century, when scholars asked where monsters come from, the answer they reached for was some version of the collective unconscious. The argument runs that the monster expresses what a culture cannot name in plain speech. A witch figure encodes anxiety about female autonomy. A vampire stands for contagion or sexuality, a zombie for consumer capitalism, or so the literature has argued at various points. That argument has value within its limits, because cultures do encode anxieties in figures. What the argument has consistently left out is the labor.
Every monster you have ever encountered was made by somebody. A person sat down at a desk or a workbench or an editing bay and made decisions about what the monster would look like, what it would do, and who would be afraid of it. That person was paid for those decisions. Other people then profited from the figure once it was in circulation. Once you start asking who wrote the invoice, the figure starts to look different.
Our own moment is dense with monster commissioning. The cycle has accelerated. Where a single Old Babylonian mask once required several days of skilled artisan labor, contemporary media operations produce dozens of monstrous figures per news cycle. The architecture has stayed consistent across four thousand years. A contractor designs the figure, an invoice changes hands, a beneficiary collects on the panic that follows. Throughput is what has changed.
Commissioned Monsters traces the architecture from the Old Babylonian temple economy to the contemporary American immigration debate, naming the contractors at every stage the documentary record permits. The argument is structural, not partisan. The framework operates identically across the political spectrum, and the cases the book examines come from every coded direction the contemporary political landscape contains.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Unnamed Contractor
Part One: Conception
Chapter 1: Who Paid for Humbaba
Chapter 2: The Bestiary as Catalog
Chapter 3: Designing the Witch
Chapter 4: Designer Monsters in the Mass-Persuasion Industries
Part Two: Release
Chapter 5: Salem as Release Engineering
Chapter 6: The Penny Press and the Mass-Market Monster
Chapter 7: The Welfare Queen on Broadcast
Part Three: Maintenance
Chapter 8: The Black Male Predator and the Central Park Case
Chapter 9: The Satanic Panic and the Daycare Prosecutions
Chapter 10: The Immigrant Invader from Chinese Exclusion to the Border
Chapter 11: The Religious Other from Anti-Catholic Maryland to the Muslim Ban
Chapter 12: The Superpredator and the Retracted Design
Part Four: Domestication
Chapter 13: The Vampire from Stoker to Twilight
Chapter 14: The Zombie from Romero to The Walking Dead
Chapter 15: The Werewolf from Wolf Man to Paranormal Romance
Chapter 16: Slender Man and the Waukesha Stabbing
Part Five: Burial and Resurrection
Chapter 17: The Yellow Peril from Fu Manchu to Anti-China Discourse
Chapter 18: The Sleeper Agent from Cold War to Russian Interference
Chapter 19: The Refinanced Migrant from 2008 Crisis to Contemporary Immigration Politics
Chapter 20: The Monsterless Society
Conclusion: The Last Invoice
Glossary · Acronyms & Abbreviations · Bibliography · Notes · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"He who has seen the deep, the foundation of the country, who knew the secret ways, was wise in all matters."
Epic of Gilgamesh, Standard Babylonian version, Tablet I, lines 1 to 2 (Andrew George translation, Penguin Books, 2003)
"Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return."
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)," in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
What the Book Traces
From a clay mask in the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, through the medieval witch manuals and their architectural commissioning by the late-medieval inquisitorial bureaucracy, through the Salem witch-trial prosecutorial apparatus, through the Penny Press's commercialization of urban monstrous figures, through the daguerreotype-era criminal portraiture that supplied the visual register, through the McMartin daycare prosecution and the Satanic Panic apparatus that wrapped around it, through the Welfare Queen's commissioning by the 1976 Reagan campaign and its operationalization across the following half-century, through the Central Park Case and the documentary commissioning of the Black-male-predator figure across the post-civil-rights period, through the Yellow Peril novels and their adaptation to the contemporary anti-China policy debate, through the McCarthyite sleeper-agent figure and its twenty-first-century redeployment in the Russian-interference discourse, through the post-2008 refinanced-migrant figure operating across rural and urban media, through the contemporary Slender Man case and the Waukesha stabbing it produced, through the Twilight-era domesticated vampire and the Romero-era domesticated zombie, to the closing meditation on whether a society could organize itself without commissioning monstrous figures at all. The cases span four thousand years. Architecture is constant. The contractors are recoverable. Naming them is the work of the book.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book arguing that every monster has a contractor, an invoice, and a beneficiary should not be locked behind a paywall that proves its own thesis. The free PDF is a fully formatted US Letter reading edition with all five fonts embedded and subsetted, an auto-generated table of contents with dot leaders and hyperlinked entries, a PDF outline pane for chapter and section navigation, running headers showing book title and current chapter, roman-numeral front matter pages transitioning to arabic body pages, and the complete text including the introduction, the conclusion, the glossary, the acronyms list, the bibliography, the full Notes apparatus with all one hundred and five footnotes, and the closing colophon. Download it, read it, argue with it.
Dedication
For Janna, and for the named.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The Grain That Paid for the Mask (Prairie Voice) · What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters (Boles Blogs) · Feeding the Genius Monsters (Boles Blogs) · Intellectual Elitism: The Fake Foreign Policy Genius List (Boles Blogs) · Human, Universal, Beautiful · Beautiful Numbness · Ischia is Burning · The Apothecary of Mantua · Ideas & Inquiry · About David Boles