Biopolitical scandal on four feet: the image of the wolves in the american cinema

Abstract

The article examines the image of the werewolf in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American cinema as one of the most expressive figures of the biopolitical imagination in popular culture. The werewolf is considered not merely as a traditional horror character, but as a symbol of bodily otherness that disrupts the boundaries between the human and the animal, norm and deviance, illness and crime, treatment and destruction. The theoretical framework of the study draws on the concepts of biopower, bare life, the immunitary protection of society, and neoliberal self-management of the body. The article shows that cinematic lycanthropy makes it possible to reveal cultural mechanisms of disciplining, isolation, normalization, and symbolic elimination of bodies that do not fit into the established social order. Special attention is paid to the evolution of the werewolf image: from a tragic subject doomed to death for the sake of restoring the norm to an ambivalent figure of infection, biological enhancement, gender autonomy, and social threat. It is concluded that werewolf films produce a specific biopolitical mythology through which popular culture reflects on fears of uncontrolled human nature, the collapse of bodily normativity, and the limits of a humanistic understanding of the human.