That Monster Over There: Silvia Kolbowski, Trump, and Allegory

This essay considers the ways in which Silvia Kolbowski's 2018 video That Monster: An Allegory addresses the psychical and political basis of Donald J. Trump's appeal in the 2016 US election. The video is crafted out of a collection of fragments from James Whale's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which Kolbowski plays first with a score by Philip Glass and then in silence. This article asks how such a format might illuminate resonances between certain psychoanalytic concepts and the postmodernist discourse of allegory as exemplified in the work of Paul de Man and Craig Owens. I argue that these theoretical frameworks help us to retain an open reading of Kolbowski's allegory which shifts an interpretive focus from questions of identity to problems of repetition, refusal, and erasure.