Last night I had the opportunity to present our anthropology learning community the Canadian indie linguistics-themed horror film, Pontypool. As I was born a short drive from the central Ontario village of that name, where the film is set, I’ve always had a soft spot for the film, especially given that it is surely the best Canadian film of any genre to have an explicitly linguistic theme. Anyway, I think the students liked it! For those who may be interested, below is the text of the introduction I gave to the film, followed by the short talk I gave afterwards. It is a very simplified account of some ideas in cultural transmission and semiotics, because of time constraints and because there is no assumption that the attendees will have any background whatsoever. But I thought it might be interesting to some of you.
Introduction
The year is 1974. A baby is born in the wilds of central Ontario, his wails giving no sign of his future. The child, whose identity will soon be known to you, is raised in the shadow of the tiny village of Pontypool.
The year is 2008. A perplexing film is born in the tradition of Canadian independent horror. Its screenwriter, trained at the University of Toronto in semiotics and linguistics, spins a semiotic labyrinth wrapped in that same small town – the strange-yet-familiar streets of Pontypool.
The year is 2024. A terrified gaggle of anthropology students congregates, unsure what to expect. Their linguistics professor – who was once that very same baby at the beginning of the tale – tells them nothing, except this: shut up or die. Prepare yourselves … for Pontypool, Pontypool, Pontypool…
—Spoilers abound beyond this point! Venture no further if you are unprepared!—
Memes, Genes, and Screams: The Semiotic Underpinnings of Pontypool
Kill is kiss, kill is kiss, kill is kiss …
At the end of Pontypool, Grant Mazzy’s ‘cure’ for the virus affecting the English language leads us to reflect on the nature of linguistic meaning itself. What does it mean to engage in this sort of linguistic transformation? Tonight, I want to reflect on the ways that words mean things, what gives them their power or deprives them of power.
The central conceit of the film is that the English language has been affected by a virus, something injected into it to cause certain words to twist minds of speakers. These words worm their way into and infect the language, then infect the speakers themselves and turn them into languageless mindless creatures capable only of repetition (not unlike a speech disorder known as echolalia), and ultimately, the infected eat their way through the mouths of others.
Pontypool offers an ironic commentary on the power of language and discourse to affect us, especially through the media. It is not a coincidence that it takes place in a radio station. It reflects our inability to remain isolated from the influence of words and ideas that saturate our world. We literally cannot ‘shut up or die’. And yet, these terms of endearment: kiss, love – can we be truly human without them?
The pathologization and weaponization of language in Pontypool leads us to ask: in what ways are words like viruses, and in what ways not? The ideas are somewhat evocative of those of biologist Richard Dawkins, whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene was one of the most important evolutionary theory texts of the 20th century. Whereas earlier evolutionary theorists were mainly interested in the individual (organism) or population, Dawkins suggested that we should focus on replicators: things that reproduce and are transmitted, and thus, the focus in biology should be on genes. Dawkins then noted that not only genes replicate and transmit, but also ideas. Thus, he developed the concept of the meme as a unit of cultural replication and transmission, and memetics as the science of idea replication just as genetics is the science of biological replication.
Famously, the concept of a meme itself became a meme: today we know them as amusing Internet images that go ‘viral’ (a metaphor intentionally chosen) and that are supposed to spread unchecked, until eventually they become unfashionable and die out. But cultural transmission studies didn’t start with meme theory. Both in anthropology, studying the rise and fall of ideas or cultural ‘traits’, and in linguistics, the analysis of the spread of words and linguistic features, has a long history.
The linguist Erev Lieberman and colleagues published a paper a few years ago on how irregular verbs change into regular ones. We might think of irregularity as cumbersome, and regularity as normal, but this study showed that in fact the most common verbs are most likely to be irregular and stay irregular: to be, to have, to go. Why? The answer, again, paralleling Pontypool, is repetition: we use them everyday, without thinking or needing to think about them, and everyone is exposed to these verbs hundreds of times a day. In contrast, the rarer an irregular verb, the more likely it is to become regular over time. Take the verb strive: what is the past tense? Strived or strove? If you weren’t sure, you are not alone, in which case, your default might be to just pick the regular form. Originally, strove was nearly universal, but over past 30 years, strived has become more and more common. Liberman predicts that it will take over, like an infection that comes into language, competes with strove and eventually becomes the standard.
But what is a word anyway? It is not just a series of sounds, or a set of letters, but a linguistic sign that has a specific meaning. Here Pontypool leads us to reflect on the theory of signs outlined by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. A sign consists of the signifier, the sounds of a word, an image, a representation, and the signified: the concept being represented. A word has meaning, under this model, because the signifier and signified come together into a single sign. This is a fundamental (if somewhat old-fashioned) insight of the discipline of semiotics, closely allied with both linguistics and anthropology, as the study of signs and their meanings.
We know this works because signifiers (such as spoken words) change their meanings all the time. We know about semantic shifts: such as how awesome and awful have each meant ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at different times in their history, and are still changing their meanings today. Pontypool builds on this idea in an inventive way explicitly with reference to language: through repetition, words gain new power over their speakers. Thus the central line – the thesis, almost, of the film: “It is when the word is understood that the virus takes hold, and it copies itself in our understanding.” Not the word alone, nor the understanding alone, but the word plus the understanding.
To change the meaning of ‘kill’ to ‘kiss’ is not preposterous. Words change their meanings all the time. Of course, mostly that is unconscious, but not inevitably: so, for instance, we have processes of linguistic reclamation where communities consciously choose to reclaim an existing slur or epithet in a new, more positive way. The only implausibility of ‘kill is kiss’ is the idea that you could do it at a moment’s notice while in deadly peril. But the process is real: you assign old words new meanings because it’s not the signifier alone (the sounds of the word) that holds power, but only the word in combination with its signified (its meaning) that constitutes a sign.
But this highlights a serious critique of Dawkins’ memetic or viral theory of language or ideas, in which (at least in its simplest analysis) the external form is what matters. The meme is not just a funny GIF image alone, but also the idea that spreads in association with it: signifier plus signified. What may start as a harmless comic character can be virally loaded by the alt-right nationalists, imbuing the sign with an altogether unpredictable meaning.
If we think of a virus alone, or a word alone, without considering its reception in a vulnerable body or a vulnerable English speaker, we make a mistake. What makes ‘kill’ or ‘sample’ or ‘breathe’ dangerous is not just the series of sounds – otherwise ‘kill is kiss’ does no good, in the movie or otherwise. The power of Grant Mazzy’s incantation is that it changes the host – it inoculates them against the meanings of kill that are viral. This criticism of meme theory is echoed by the cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber who, in his book Explaining Culture, notes that ideas are not transmitted from mind to mind unchanged, but are always affected by the experiences and mental representations of the speaker and hearer.
The power of words is not inherent in the words themselves, or in the pure world of ideas, but only in their use by speakers to mean particular things in particular contexts. Not only is this a fundamental insight to the discipline of semiotics, but it should also be a point well taken in the current political climate. A theory that does not consider the power of users of language and culture to repurpose and reconceptualise words is deeply incomplete. The wisdom of Pontypool is that ‘kill is kiss’ is not just a slogan, but a profound semiotic insight. And with that, I want to conclude by thanking the Anthropology Learning Community for this opportunity to share these few words and ideas with you, and wish you luck on your exams, exams, exams, exams, exams …
Lieberman, Erez, et al. “Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language.” Nature 449.7163 (2007): 713-716.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Sperber, Dan. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996.
Saussure, Ferdinand. Cours De Linguistique Générale. Lausanne: Payot, 1916.
Glossographia 