Virtually identical: The digital zombi(e/i) in Isa Mazzei’s Cam (2018)

Abstract

Perhaps due to its relatively recent release, Cam has suffered a significant lack of scholarly attention. Critical and popular reception has focused on the film as a meditation on the darker sides of the internet, adopting a realist paradigm in which the doppelgangers infecting online sex workers are deepfakes and the product of virtual surveillance. In this study, we propose that the post-cinematic ethos of the film both invites and defies a clear interpretive framework for naming the anxieties it highlights. Identification of the monstrous, moreover, is invariably aligned with particular, historically implicated epistemological structures. Ultimately, we propose zombieism, particularly Lauro and Embry’s posthuman zombii as a productive lens through which to recalibrate our indexing of the labouring, digital (un)dead.