"This essay examines certain films wherein naturally occurring species appear (recorded in their original state), and are transformed into a mutated or monstrous form, replete with a repertoire of monstrous behaviors, are then identified, and subsequently dispatched. The working premise is that the cinematic register provides a unique and privileged field of inquiry containing primary data on extremely short-lived aberrant species. In almost all such films one finds embedded classifications and embedded theories of aberration which isolate and define a given species at the point of its emergence. These occur as enunciations, vocal traces produced by actants within the film, interacting in various ways with representative taxa. In a sense, the cinematic data theorizes itself, though this must be taken with no small amount of skepticism.
It is, nonetheless, a consistent phenomenon, across a large number of
cinematic data-sets, that films providing evidence of monsters also find it
necessary to enunciate theories for the generative conditions of monstrosity.
This is what is defined as an embedded theory of the mechanism for induced
aberration. In most cases, the base-species is identified in an embedded
classification which serves as intra-cinematic evidence for the embedded
theory/mechanism.This identification, or embedded classification of the taxon,
may be a precise and detailed scientific or quasi-scientific speculation, or it
may be something as simple as defining a species as Уunknown,Ф and replacing
actual evidence with a montage of fissioning cells, rapid edits, or verbal
disputations on the nature of a given Сmonster.Та While specimens are
occasionally misclassified, or misrecognized, both embedded theories and
embedded classifications are important evidentiary traces of the processes of
cinematic aberration. In the following excerpt a short theoretical preface is
followed by three case studies, and related tables, diagrams, and images, with
a reference section and guide to films organized according to the standard
Linnean taxonomic system for biota. Notes and complete bibliography have been
deleted for this publication." -- from What the Hell is That, Abstract
1 COPY IN THE NEXT
Published in 2001 by BeeHive in Volume 4, Issue 2.
Dr. Talan Memmott and J. Patrick Forden gave this copy of the work to the Electronic Literature Lab in Summer 2018.
PUBLICATION TYPE
Journal