both dead and not dead

[arynash]

So, I had this conversation with some people from my Phil Art class. Wow, that class was fun! (I've been auditing classes for about 2 years over at the UNC Phil department.) We had all gone to Hell (it's a dive on Rosemary that the phil ppl seem to have taken over) after Jesse's showing of Breathless. Anyway, we were discussing "the undead". (Do

Comments

[jeanibeen]

Hi Aryn! How do Frankenstein-type creatures work exactly? Do they eat? Do they have "living" tissue or just that green corpse-like stuff? What about Buffy? Was she resurrected into the same body?

Ghosts are interesting too -- Casper the Friendly Ghost and the ghosts from Harry Potter do interact with the living in such a way that might suggest "undeadness", but ghosts from The Sixth Sense, who are mostly invisible, not so much.

Ooh, what about the cursed pirates from Pirates of the Carribean? I guess they're not really "standard monsters" but they are definitely undead.

[easwaran]

I think it's not totally clear what Frankenstein reanimation is supposed to entail. There are suggestions that you need a full body with an intact brain in order to do it, and that some electricity can spark the body and brain back into life. This sounds basically like CPR, but slightly weirder. I think there are also suggestions that somehow injuries don't matter as much, as if the body is being controlled, rather than being alive. But there may just be too much conceptual confusion in the Frankenstein case (it is fictional after all) to properly settle the question of whether it counts as undead.