Monstrous Thesis @ MLA

It’s hard to say what is more astounding in academe: the projects academics get emotionally attached to or the odd disconnect their finished products have with reality.

For example, Daniel T. Anderson of Emmanuel College has made something of a life’s work of studying the 1981 film, “An American Werewolf in London.” In that movie, he found profound metaphors for “Assimilation as Nightmare: An American Werewolf in London and the Jewish American experience.”

At the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this year, during a panel discussion on “Jewish Monsters,” he elaborated on these:

• “David Kessler, the film’s tragic protagonist, is not only an American but a Jewish American;”
• “The pub he and his friend stop in is called The Slaughtered Lamb;” and
• “David’s ‘Wandering Jew’ hiking equipment.”

“In the final scene, David is riddled with bullets,” Anderson noted. “I would say he is a stand-in for Christ.”

Finally, Anderson asserted that “The dream sequence of Nazi werewolves gunning down David’s family shows the danger of assimilation.”

It is hard to find any of this symbolism in tracing the available notes on the production of this film. Instead, we learn from the Internet Movie Data Base,  that the director, “John Landis wrote the screenplay for this film following an incident while shooting Kelly’s Heroes (1970) (while he was a go-fer) in the countryside of Yugoslavia. While driving along a country road with a colleague, Landis encountered a gypsy funeral. The body was being buried in a massively deep grave, feet first, while wrapped in garlic, so as he would not rise from the dead.”