The Graveyard of Your Fucking Species: Wolfen: The End of the World by Wolves

“The most powerful aspect of Wolfen is not, then, its status as an exemplary and indeed essential period piece, but its unusual situation of contemporary New York City within the longue durée of colonial history and even geological time. It literalizes the then current (and implicitly racist) term ‘wilding,’ using the apocalyptic milieu of late 1970s New York to speculate more generally on the demise of civilization, the conquest of the ‘wild.'”

In 2003, the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Assn. made a brash and deliberately provocative claim: “One might reasonably view man’s entire development and creation of civilization as a process of fortifying against wolves.”1 A teleological rereading of civilization as lupicide: unsettling as a contemporary policy proposal, but not unreasonable as a retroactive description of the progress of human history, especially since its proto-capitalist phase. Hatred of wolves is an ancient passion, and the contemporary lupophobe is in august company. Here is the Comte de Buffon: “In fine, the wolf is consummately disagreeable; his aspect is base and savage, his voice dreadful, his odour insupportable, his disposition perverse, his manners ferocious; odious and destructive when living, and, when dead, he is perfectly useless.” Not just disagreeable but perverse: alien to the natural order of things, or more precisely, to the faux naturalism that sustained this precursor of capitalist realism. The wolf is not just “insupportable,” but is endowed with an almost Biblical evil. Teddy Roosevelt called it “the archetype of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.” The pioneer of offshore American imperialism had his predecessors in the early Republic; John Adams wrote that “the whole continent was one continued dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men. Now the forests are removed, the land covered with fields of corn, orchards bending with fruit and the magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.”2

The fence and the hedgerow are assertions of human supremacy, disavowals of human animality, and attempts to erase ecological configurations that have existed before the first cities. The wolf violates this fantasy – it perverts it, one might say. The wolf’s taste for cattle reveals the elided horror of civilized man: that man is a beast, competing for finite resources. The competition has been rather lopsided, of course. At one point the world’s most widely distributed land mammal second to ourselves, wolves (like indigenous peoples) have been slaughtered and forced into remote areas where they no longer pose a threat to human claims of sovereignty over the land. There have been no wolves in Manhattan since the early 18th century. The 1981 film Wolfen allows that repressed bestiality to return to the city’s streets as if they were the farms and enclosures of old, as erasures resuming their legibility on the palimpsest of history.

Capitalists as carrion. The end of the world by wolves.

In the beginning of 1979, screenwriter David Eyre and director Michael Wadleigh began working on an adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s novel The Wolfen, published the previous year. The film would eventually be released, sans definite article, in 1981,3 coinciding with a minor revival of werewolf cinema (An American Werewolf in London, The Howling). As we will see, though, the creatures are not werewolves, but something far more imaginative and bizarre; in the novel, a scientist dubs them Canis Lupis Sapiens.

The film begins as real estate tycoon Christopher Vanderveer heads over the Brooklyn Bridge in a limousine with his wife, happily snorting cocaine and downing champagne. They make a stop in Battery Park in the early morning – the hour of the wolf – where their late-night stroll is cut short as they and their driver are ambushed and brutally killed. The circumstances remain unclear for some time, and red herrings abound, but eventually it becomes clear that Vanderveer was assassinated by a pack of a hitherto unknown species of intelligent wolves so as to prevent him from building a massive luxury condo complex on the site of their “hunting ground” in the heart of the devastated South Bronx. Along the way to the final showdown between the “wolfen” and Detective Wilson, played by the marvelous Albert Finney (Tom Jones, Under the Volcano), the film manages to contemplate topics as various as Dutch colonialism, shape-shifting Native Americans, mammalian ecology, and international terrorism.

It might, at times, descend into what Vincent Canby criticized as “platitudinous mumbo jumbo,”4 but I’d like to see it not as merely a failed attempt at didacticism, but as an exercise in speculative excess and an engine of fruitful ambiguities. Its half-baked politics may on the surface be faded remnants, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, of the facile sixties liberalism Woodstock-director Wadleigh can be made to symbolize so neatly.5 But its many provocations and unresolved speculative gambits deserve and reward serious scrutiny.

Diane Verona and Albert Finney

We can begin with its imagination of space. Much of the film was shot on location in the South Bronx, the lightly trafficked wasteland around Charlotte Street being ideal for filming – and perfect to the extent that Wolfen is, as Evan Calder Williams writes, “a documentary horror film.”6 There is a shadow film about the horrors of capitalism here, the montage of Wall St. and Charlotte St. perfectly Eisensteinian in its visceral bluntness, with the tacit suggestion that these opposites are not merely adventitious, as in the representational tradition of liberal naturalism, but necessary components of one another. A character asks: “South Bronx and Wall Street. What’s the connection?” The answer: “They’re both dead.” Or cemeteries: the suited wolves of Wall Street traffic in dead labor (i.e., capital), the wolfen in the bodies of those in the city’s desolate margins, in a macabre allegory of slum clearance.

The shoot itself was a surreal intercession between reality and fantasy, bringing capital to the dead zone of the South Bronx only to capture its apparently total isolation. Despite the pretense of verisimilitude, the desolation was carefully choreographed: rubble and garbage were both cleared out and shipped in.7 The ruined church was not scouted for, but was built specifically for the film on an empty lot at Seabury Place and 172nd Street. As the New York Times wrote: “A major construction effort of the kind Charlotte Street has been unable to obtain in real life is proceeding, in the unreal world of the movies, on one of the most barren sites in the Bronx.”8

Local politicians and contractors celebrated the rare influx of revenue: the sham ruin was the only thing built in the area in years.

“As each neighborhood was stricken by this plague, it too came to be known as the South Bronx. Each year, the ‘South Bronx’ expanded.” – Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising

In 1977, Jimmy Carter made a perfunctory visit to Charlotte Street in the Bronx, stopping over in New York City at perhaps its lowest ebb in living memory. It had narrowly avoided bankruptcy two years earlier, but was still barely solvent. Once-thriving neighborhoods were saddled with unemployment rates that exceeded 80% in some places. The only visible public services in many areas were the fire trucks that futilely battled the blazes that scorched the city’s poor neighborhoods like the wrath of God.

Nineteen seventy-seven was not only a time of slow-burning malaise and civic melancholy, but also of fully theatrical, spectacular catastrophes – the serial killings of the Son of Sam, the riots and conflagrations that followed the blackout in mid-July – that themselves approached the quality of cinema.9 Consider the manifesto David Berkowitz mailed to the Daily News in May. It opens thusly:

Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.

This is not a statement of grievances, it’s an establishing shot – and it reads a lot like the functionally extraneous prose-poetry that embellishes the screenplay of Wolfen, complete with the deployment of abject animals as metaphors. In this age of panic and delirium, fact and fiction merged perversely; journalism took on the tone of eschatological fiction while fiction imitated documentary as it dragged itself through the sewers, famished with reality hunger, devouring the filth.

The borough of the Bronx, of course, was hit particularly hard – by crime, by drugs, by poverty, by civic neglect, and by the forces of physical decay that would lead Ronald Reagan to compare it to London after the Blitz (the script offers Dresden, Hiroshima, and “Hanoi the night it fell” as analogues). By the late 1970s there were seven different census tracts in the Bronx where more than 97 percent of buildings were lost to fire and abandonment.10 The area near Charlotte Street was charred entirely, and in time this otherwise obscure street would come to be identified as ground zero of the contagious infection called the “South Bronx.”

The local Engine Company was the city’s busiest. When an auxiliary company was formed to help relieve it, that second unit became the fourth busiest. Even the local antipoverty agency was burned down, leaving the police and firefighters as the only representatives of government left.11 The FDNY called these the “war years,” and the nearby 41st precinct of the NYPD in similarly militaristic style was known as “Fort Apache,” a stronghold in enemy territory. The nickname, of course, recalls the classic 1948 John Ford movie of the same name. In an instance of life imitating cinema, the margins of New York City were imagined as the desert wilderness of the cavalry western, teeming with hordes of racially alien enemies. (1981’s Fort Apache: The Bronx cemented the association, and provoked controversy with its depiction of the South Bronx as a mephitic purgatory populated almost entirely by vicious criminals.12)

When Carter made his trip to New York’s slums, it was an implicit critique of the anti-urban policies of the previous administration. Aides suggested visiting the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick or Bedford-Stuyvesant, the dividing line between which – Broadway – lay utterly in ruins in the aftermath of that summer’s blackout.13 Charlotte Street was spared the worst of that night’s chaos – if only because there was nothing left to steal.

Photographs reveal Carter and his staff walking across a charred and barren landscape that could be mistaken for the moon if it weren’t for the battered tenement buildings looming in the distance. The desolation Carter and the nation saw in the Bronx came to epitomize the seemingly irrevocable decline of urban America, and became a must-see for political hopefuls, including Carter’s opponent in the 1980 elections, B-movie star Ronald Reagan. Once ignored, Charlotte Street and the nebulously defined “South Bronx” were now infamous. Bob Schiefer called it “perhaps the worst slum in America.”14 The New York Times opined, with revealing hyperbole, that visiting the South Bronx was “as crucial to the understanding of American urban life as a visit to Auschwitz is to understanding Nazism.”15 The Bronx was once renowned as a stepping-stone for the upwardly mobile Jews and ethnic whites escaping the slums of Manhattan. Now it seemed to all observers like the harbinger of the apocalypse: the Auschwitz of the American dream.

The actual course of events over the coming decades was rather more pedestrian. The Bronx, like other marginal areas of the neoliberal city, is still blighted with inexcusable pockets of poverty and degradation. But Charlotte Street itself is now a pleasant, if somewhat bland, suburban-style enclave of unattached ranch houses. CNN called it “the greatest real estate turnaround ever.”16 The only signs of lingering dread are the apocalyptic but eerily beautiful hand-painted admonishments to repent or perish tacked to trees all along the Boston Road corridor.

By 1981, the year Wolfen was released, the wave of fires had crested and the real-estate market had begun a slow citywide recovery. Crime remained endemic – the homicide count didn’t peak until 199017 – but the terminal pessimism that marked much of the cultural output the previous decade abated as the city found itself awash in finance capital and a burgeoning professional class, and new scourges like AIDS and crack cocaine could for a time be safely ignored by the tabloids. The 1980s were not beholden to “the unquestioned assumption that major cities were at the Hobbesian forefront of societal deterioration,” as the blogger Greyhoos writes in a discussion of the film as “urban exploitation.”18

Wolfen represents a transitional moment in the history of New York cinema. As Max Page notes in The City’s End, it is one of the last of the many monochromatically apocalyptic portrayals so common in the 1970s. Films like Ghostbusters would soon bring an antic and feel-good Manhattan back to the screen.19 Celluloid Skyline also uses the film and the year of its release as a segue; after this point, New York “was no longer the ultimate symbol of urban decay,” as Los Angeles “firmly supplanted New York as the quintessential filmic dystopia.”20 These claims could be disputed; what is interesting is that the film seems inevitably to be interpreted as a hinge between eras.

Wolfen is far from a belated holdover, though; it is also prefigurative and at times eerily prescient, despite the screenplay’s ’70s origins. There is something distinctly ’80s, for instance, about its opening scenes, in which cocaine-snorting plutocrats take a joyride in their limousine en route to a luxury penthouse in the Financial District. And if Wolfen is haunted by decay, it is also paranoid about another, more contemporary bugbear: gentrification. Notably, the contrast between decay and “renewal” isn’t conceived of as adventitious or comic – they are simply different modes of urbicide. In this, the film differs substantially, as blogger Jeff Kinkle notes, from the classic “New York exploitation film,” where “the notion that the destruction of the South Bronx is clearing the way for something else is never considered.”21

Here, in the sort of first-as-tragedy, second-as-farce drama contemporary New Yorkers are all too familiar with, desolation is perversely pounced upon as a real estate opportunity. Detective Wilson finally realizes, after stumbling upon a promotional film in Vanderveer’s apartment, that he was murdered for “[building] a goddamn marina on top of their lair.”22 He had been warned earlier, by the Native American red-herring suspect “Eddie,” that the wolfen would “kill to protect their hunting ground.” As Max Page writes, somewhat playfully, they are “proto-antigentrification activists of the sort that would populate the musical Rent! In the 1990s.”23 (Evan Calder Williams, taking it a bit further, dedicated his book Combined and Uneven Apocalypse “to the anti-gentrification, abandoned zone-defending, yuppie-eating militant superwolves of Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen.”)

But unlike Rent!’s East Village hipsters, the wolfen have thrived on the raw edges of our cities for centuries, “understanding human society well enough to take only the abandoned, the weak, the isolated.” “After the slaughter came,” Eddie explains, “they went underground. Into the new wilderness: your cities. Into the great slum areas. The graveyards of your fucking species.” Their sudden discovery in our midst would eliminate their need for such secrecy. Such a breach would threaten to precipitate an unimaginable catastrophe. “A wave of terror would sweep the city and the world unlike anything known since the Middle Ages,” Strieber writes.24 He refers to what could be called the Golden Age of Lycanthropy, an era in Europe where the line between wolf and man was blurry, not only in folklore but within the law and the thinking of the Church.25 The rise of the wolfen implies the eclipse of the modern, and perhaps indeed the Anthropocene, era. It is “the end of the world by wolves,” to quote the “terrorist motto” of the Götterdämmerung, the urban guerrilla group that is made to serve as a scapegoat for the wolfen.

The most powerful aspect of Wolfen is not, then, its status as an exemplary and indeed essential period piece, but its unusual situation of contemporary New York City within the longue durée of colonial history and even geological time. It literalizes the then current (and implicitly racist) term “wilding,” using the apocalyptic milieu of late 1970s New York to speculate more generally on the demise of civilization, the conquest of the “wild.”

In striking contrast to New York-based fiction’s typical historical amnesia, Wolfen looks back to the moment of Dutch colonization as the origin of the crisis it dramatizes. Appropriately, Vanderveer stands in for both 1980s Wall Street and for the initial stamp of colonization. Vanderveer is a Dutch name, and he is killed within the limits of Dutch New Amsterdam. The action in this scene takes place around what a brief shot of a plaque reveals to be “A Replica of the First Windmill in America. A Dutch Horizontal Mill Erected on This Site in 1625 by Peter Vander Veer.”

The Dutch connection is subtle in the film as released, but plays a much bigger role in earlier versions of the script, which are tantalizingly even more unhinged than the movie, with long-winded digressions and wonderfully bizarre directions such as: “CLOSE UP: LUCIFER.”26 The name “wolfen” itself is said, in the second script, to derive from Dutch: “That’s what your Dutch forefathers called wolves. They hated them. They hated anything that stood in the way of their goddamn conquest.” More remarkably, the script begins on a night in New Amsterdam in 1660, a sight rarely if ever seen on the screen. There is a skirmish between Dutch Horsemen and an Indian chief, who is later brought to court with his wolf for “sedition and sorcery.” The next scene takes place in the distinctive wolfen point-of-view, as a Dutch colonist is stalked and killed.

Are the wolfen Native American shapeshifters, puppets, or merely allies? It’s never absolutely clear, but the film asserts a near-equivalence of wolves and Native Americans in any case (“Indians and wolves are one and the same”). As the film’s zoologist Dr. Ferguson (Tom Noonan) explains, there are no longer any wolves in the wild near New York: “We wiped them out around the turn of the century in the east. They went the way of the Indians and the buffalo, the genocide express. Used to be millions, now just a handful in the Rockies.” A 1638 Massachusetts law illustrates his point with painful succinctness: “Whoever shall [within the town] shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit 5 shillings for every shot.”27

The spurious identification of Native Americans with “nature” and Europe with “culture” is obviously misguided, but the film is unusual in even raising the issue of the Native American history of the New York area. They are both its original inhabitants and, we’re told, the people who built the bridges and skyscrapers that have made the city iconic. Such stereotypes could be, and have been, deconstructed in isolation; the more vital and fruitful aspects of the film involve the wolfen themselves, regardless of who presumes to act as their mouthpiece.

One of the early feats of recent humanity, which happened in both the Old and New Worlds, was the domestication of the wolf, the appropriation and reconfiguration of their genes to create the domestic dog.28 In Ferguson’s view, this was an abomination. Dogs are “neurotic, stupid animals”; when we started breeding them, “we fucked ’em up.”29 (Linneaus, interestingly, seemed to feel quite differently, as Garry Marvin explains: “[The name Canis Lupis] suggests that ‘dog’ is the basic species, with ‘wolf’ secondarily related to that. Thus it could be interpreted that the wolf has ‘gone wrong’ …”).30 Future interactions were less productive. The remaining wild wolves were, wherever possible, systematically exterminated as humans began to farm and build cities. They were eliminated from Manhattan by 1720.31

The broken mirrors in Vanderveer’s penthouse

Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf before founding Rome, relations between our respective species have collapsed. The return of wolves to Manhattan could only take place in the wake of our annihilation. If there is a strict positive correlation between the population density of the brown rat and the human being, that of human being and wolf is precisely the opposite. The wolfen – a parallel branch of the evolutionary chain previously unknown – have eluded our wrath by evolving intelligence and living in an ecological niche akin to that of the rat. They have not sought separate existence, but invisible coexistence. They are, in James Sanders’ words, “superrats,” who “scuttle through the crevices of the urban landscape.” Like the rat, the wolfen could only thrive as an epiphenomenon of urbanization; they feed and breed in the neglected and peripheral margins of the built environment. In less thoroughly urbanized times, the film tells us, they were mistaken for “werewolves,” because their cunning fooled medieval peasants into concocting the myth of lycanthropy. As Strieber writes in the novel, “People used to call them werewolves. Now they don’t call them anything because they’ve gotten so damn good at covering their tracks that there are no legends left.”32

The wolfen are actually more terrifying than werewolves, since they do not even approach the realm of the supernatural or the fantastic. Neither obviously “natural” nor truly supernatural, the wolfen nevertheless occupy the horrific category of “ontological impropriety” identified by Noël Carroll as a key generic component of horror. Wolfen‘s real assertion, though, is that capitalism and perhaps civilization itself is ontologically improper.

To one disaffected by the neoliberal order, though, the film offers some illicit pleasures. There’s that frisson of eschatological fantasy, the ticklish ambivalence in seeing the world’s most recognizable skyline through the cough-syrup eyes of a politicized carnivore. Wolfen is both a bizarre magnification of and a riposte to the concrete-and-steam realism of late ’70s New York cinema. Wolfen resurrects pre-modern imaginations of the supernatural and the bestial to darkly re-enchant the weary and legendless present. This is a crucial function of all horror, but Wolfen is successful largely due to that special camera effect that washes the familiar scenery of New York City into an uncanny, phantasmagoric haze. These anxious tableaux of oneiric predation encapsulate the film’s tone, and indeed, its theme: “All of history, mankind has been long in a dream, and now, suddenly, we’re about to discover reality.” At risk is a future in which humans will lose their presumed dominance and our cities will literally eat themselves.

The film’s finale, in which Wilson appeases the wolfen by smashing a model of Vanderveer Towers, would seem to have us avoid this fate. But it’s a pyrrhic victory: the wolfen will continue to feast on the lumpenproletariat, quietly, as long as we don’t disturb them by rebuilding ruined sectors of our cities. This is, as Kinkle calls it, “neoliberalism as horror.” But while the film is able to articulate this impasse, it is disturbingly unable and perhaps unwilling to transcend it, as if Wadleigh fell into the death drive and left it on cruise control.

Such pessimism – or, perhaps, frenzied anti-capitalist accelerationism – in the face of ostensible progress makes Wolfen a preemptive critique of the prevailing trends of the 1980s, and a rather bleak advertisement for the prospects of our ultimate survival. And the very last shot, framing Lower Manhattan from atop the Manhattan Bridge, fades into brilliant wolfen-vision, revealing that Wilson’s symbolic act of appeasement has not fundamentally removed the threat to the city’s core, which still totters on the edge of the abyss.