Becoming-Monster in the Necropolitical Assemblage: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Critique of Queer/Crip Resistance in Don’t Breathe 2

 

Becoming-Monster in the Necropolitical Assemblage: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Critique of Queer/Crip Resistance in Don’t Breathe 2

Dr. Sabir Ahmed,

Independent Researcher,

West Bengal, India.

Abstract: This article presents a critical analysis of Rodo Sayagues’s Don’t Breathe 2 (2021), co-written with and produced by Fede Álvarez, arguing that the film’s protagonist, Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang), transcends conventional horror tropes of monstrosity to embody a dynamic assemblage of necropolitical power. This assemblage, composed of his militarized disabled body, a decaying urban environment, and a pathological form of care, materializes the neoliberal state’s production of debility (Puar). The film’s central conflict—a violent contest between Norman and a biological family seeking to harvest the organs of his ward, Phoenix—stages a clash between two oppressive paternalistic systems: one necropolitical (Mbembe) and the other biopolitical (Foucault). This article employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming and the line of flight to argue that Norman’s identity is not fixed but is a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that ruptures, and yet at times is captured by, normative codes of ability and kinship. Conversely, Phoenix’s ultimate ethical choice to save Norman and claim the name he gave her constitutes a molecular, crip resistance (McRuer) that refuses the two dominant paternalistic capture of her becoming. By synthesizing Mbembe’s necropolitics with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy and crip theory, this analysis reframes Don’t Breathe 2 as a diagnostic tool that exposes the violence of neoliberal abandonment and imagines a crip futurity built on chosen kinship and the radical, imperceptible power of self-determination.

Keywords: Becoming, Necropolitics, Assemblage, Crip Theory, Horror, Disability, Deleuze and Guattari, Line of Flight, Biopolitics.

Introduction

The horror genre has long functioned as a potent discursive space for the cultural processing of deep-seated societal anxieties, particularly those concerning the body, its capacities, and its place within social and familial structures. From its Gothic origins to contemporary cinema, this tradition has consistently cast physical and psychological disability as a primary signifier of monstrosity. This pervasive trope is a practice that scholars like Tobin Siebers critically frame within a disability aesthetics, a system wherein the non-normative body is rendered as an “othering other,” a diacritical marker that secures inferior status by provoking horror and disgust (Siebers 6). This aesthetic exploitation is matched by a narrative dependency, what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder term narrative prosthesis, arguing that disability operates as a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (Mitchell and Snyder 49).

Consequently, iconic figures from the limping Karloffian Monster and the disfigured Freddy Krueger to the psychologically fractured Norman Bates are framed through their bodily or cognitive differences, which are inextricably linked to their transgressive nature. This prosthetic dependency results in the reduction of disabled characters to metaphors for evil, lack, or moral failing. The visceral reactions these bodies elicit—fear, revulsion, abjection—are not incidental but constitutive, mirroring what Siebers identifies as the “blatant and persistent prejudices” that reduce disability to a spectacle of alienation (Siebers 15). By consistently conflating bodily and mental difference with menace, the horror genre has, historically, served to reinforce pervasive ableist ideologies under the guise of exploring them.

It is precisely this complex and problematic history that Don’t Breathe 2 (2021) consciously engages with and seeks to complicate in profound and theoretically rich ways.  A sequel to the financially successful and critically contentious 2016 thriller on capitalist allegory as has been critiqued by Wischert-Zielke (2021), the film reprises the role of Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang), the blind veteran whose horrific acts of coercive reproduction in the first film seemingly cemented his status as an irredeemable monster. However, the sequel performs a daring narrative pivot, recontextualizing Norman not as a straightforward antagonist but as a complex, albeit pathological, guardian. He is now the sole caretaker of a young girl, Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), whom he rescued as a toddler from a fire that consumed her neglectful, biological parents who were involved in manufacturing drugs. The film’s central conflict is ignited not by an external home invasion but by the arrival of Phoenix’s biological father, Raylan. The apparent rescue-turned-abduction mission later reveals a horrifying truth: Raylan’s wife, Phoenix’s mother, is dying from smoke inhalation-related illnesses sustained in the same fire, and they intend to harvest Phoenix’s heart for a transplant.

This narrative shift is not merely a plot contrivance; it is the film’s central theoretical gambit. It moves the horror from a simple scenario of defense to a violent epistemological and ethical clash over the very definitions of kinship, care, and sovereignty over a child’s body. Norman’s isolated world is meticulously framed as a necropolitical assemblage (Mbembe)—a dynamic convergence of his militarized, disabled body, a decaying urban environment explicitly abandoned by the state, and a paternalism forged in the crucible of trauma and profound loss. In stark contrast, the biological family represents a grotesque perversion of biopolitical logic, seeking to optimize the life of the mother through the literal consumption of the child’s body. This horrifying inversion of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism—where the figure of the Child is typically sacrificed symbolically for a heteronormative future—here becomes a literal sacrifice, a harvesting of the child’s body to sustain the parent (Edelman 11).

While theorists like Achille Mbembe, Jasbir Puar, and Robert McRuer provide indispensable diagnostic tools for analyzing the systemic violences that produce Norman and the oppressive structures that surround him, their frameworks can risk fixing him within a static, molar category—be it monster, victim, or symptom of debility. This article argues that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is necessary to adequately theorize the processual and dynamic nature of Norman’s subjectivity. He is not simply a monster; he is perpetually in a state of becoming-monster, a fluid and ambiguous process that both escapes and at times is recaptured by oppressive systems. Furthermore, his ward, Phoenix, is not merely a passive victim caught between two monstrous paternal figures; she initiates her own line of flight, a molecular movement of escape and creation. By placing Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy in sustained dialogue with crip and necropolitical theory, this analysis contends that Phoenix’s ultimate ethical choice—to save Norman and, after his death, to consciously claim the name he gave her—constitutes a powerful form of molecular crip resistance. It is a queer refusal of biological determinism and a transformative act of chosen kinship, forged not in spite of their shared trauma, but through it, pointing toward an imperceptible and radical model of crip futurity.

Necropolitics, Crip Theory, and the Deleuzo-Guattarian Machine

To fully unpack the complexities of Don’t Breathe 2, it is essential to establish the three interconnected theoretical pillars that support this analysis: the necropolitical diagnosis of Mbembe, the materialist critique of McRuer’s crip theory, and the process-oriented philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

Necropolitics and the Right to Maim

Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics arises from a deliberate critical departure from Foucault’s biopower. Mbembe contends that Foucault’s framework, focused on the administration of life, is insufficient to account for the character of contemporary political violence, where the primary objective is the literal and legitimized murder of the enemy. He argues that in our current era, politics often operates through the inverted logic of warfare—where war functions as a means to achieve sovereignty through the right to kill, thus subjugating “life to the power of death” (Mbembe 92).

This contemporary condition demands a new theorization of sovereignty, one that moves beyond the biopolitical mandate to “make live and let die” to articulate its ultimate expression: “the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (Mbembe 66). This mechanism which Mbembe terms necropower operates through the creation of “death-worlds,” or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the ‘living dead’” (92). Jasbir Puar’s concept of the “right to maim” further nuances this, describing a sovereign power that, in its contemporary neoliberal form, often seeks not to kill or foster life, but to deliberately debilitate—producing injury and “slow death” to render populations manageable, exploitable, and disposable (Puar xviii,2).

Crip Theory and Compulsory Able-Bodiedness

Emerging from disability studies and queer theory, crip theory, as advanced by scholars like Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer, offers a critical lens to examine the systemic enforcement of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. McRuer’s concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness” argues that able-bodiedness is a system of privilege that is produced and sustained in relation to its opposite, disability, which is systematically rendered abject and invisible (McRuer, Crip Theory 9). This system is intertwined with compulsory heterosexuality, and together they form a foundational logic of neoliberal capitalism. Crip theory seeks to “crip” this logic—to expose its contingencies, challenge its naturalization, and imagine otherwise possibilities for being and belonging. It moves beyond a rights-based discourse to a radical reimagining of the world from the perspective of body-minds that defy normative expectations.

Deleuze and Guattari: Becoming, Assemblages, and Lines of Flight

The philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari provide the foundation for this analysis, offering a dynamic vocabulary to map processes rather than fixed states. Their concept of the assemblage (agencement) is central. An assemblage is a contingent, non-totalizable constellation of heterogeneous elements—bodies, objects, discourses, affects, institutions—that come together in a productive alignment. It is a machine for affecting and being affected (Thousand Plateus 4, 30-31, 88-91). Norman’s world is not just a setting; it is a necropolitical assemblage.

Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari reject static identity in favor of “becoming.” A becoming is not an imitation or an evolution toward a form (becoming-a-monster in the case of Norman) but a dynamic, desire-driven process that forges unexpected connections and ruptures dominant codes. It is an alliance between heterogeneous terms that creates something new, moving through a milieu on a “line of flight”—a creative movement of destratification and escape from oppressive assemblages (Thousand Plateus 238-239). They also distinguish between molar and molecular forces. Molar lines are rigid, segmentary, and define stable identities (man/woman, human/monster). Molecular lines are fluid, micro-political flows of intensity that can destabilize molar formations.

This framework is essential for analyzing Norman and Phoenix. Norman is caught in a becoming-monster, a process that is both a pragmatic response to a death-world and a site of tragic reterritorialization. Phoenix, conversely, embarks on a molecular line of flight that allows her to escape the molar capture of both paternal assemblages. This synthesis of frameworks allows us to see Don’t Breathe 2 not as a story about fixed monsters and victims, but as a map of dynamic forces, captures, and potential escapes.

The Necropolitical Assemblage: Detroit as Death-World

The film’s setting is its first and potent theoretical statement, directly visualizing what Mbembe theorizes as a “death-world.” Norman’s existence is not situated in a generic location but in the specific, real-world necropolitical landscape of post-industrial Detroit. The opening sequence presents a stark preface to this logic: a child, (later known as Phoenix), collapses on a desolate street, with a burning house smoldering in the immediate background. This image is not one of random tragedy but of a calculated territorial exchange within the necropolitical assemblage. As the narrative later reveals, Norman did not save Phoenix from the fire; he exploited the chaos to steal her from her family. Her disoriented body on the lonely street thus marks a transition from one sovereignty to another—from a lost or failing domestic unit to Norman’s coercive and fortified world. His act of “rescue” is, from its origin, an act of capture, establishing the foundational violence upon which his necropolitical parenting is built. 

This is not a neutral backdrop; it is a direct visualization of what Mbembe theorizes as a “death-world.” These images testify to the necropolitical logic of racialized capitalism and deindustrialization, a process where the state and capital have withdrawn from a population, leaving its infrastructure and inhabitants to decay. The burning house at the opening scene (Álvarez 00:01:08-00:01:56) from which Phoenix fled—and from which Norman abducted her—is a perfect, localized eruption of this generalized condition. It is a micro-event within the macro-catastrophe of Detroit, a sign that the violence inherent in this landscape is not static but actively consumes and reproduces itself.

Norman’s fortified home is a microcosm of this larger reality. It is a schizoid space, a Body without Organs that has rigidified into a prison. For Norman, it functions as a smooth space of refuge, a territory de-stratified from the social codes of the outside world, which he controls absolutely. For Phoenix, however, this same space is a striated territory of confinement, a prison where every path is predetermined by Norman’s pathological desire. Surrounded by the skeletal remains of other, long-forlorn Oedipal houses, the property materializes this contradiction. The overgrown yard, rusted fences, and boarded-up windows are not mere set dressing; they are active components of the assemblage, materializing the systemic neglect and the schizoid withdrawal that define this existence vis-a-vis survival from a world that has already broken down. This environment territorializes Norman’s trauma, turning it outward into a fortress of isolation that ultimately re-territorializes both of them. Within this necropolitical assemblage, survival becomes a constant, active negotiation: for Norman, it is the negotiation of maintaining his control; for Phoenix, it is the negotiation of surviving within it, a reality that their entire lifestyles manifest and embody.

His relationship with Phoenix is the central organizing principle of this assemblage. It is fundamentally coercive, built on the foundational violence of the kidnapping and a pedagogy of paranoia and isolation. He territorializes her body and subjectivity, training her to navigate a world he has framed as perpetually hostile. This is a paternalism of the fortress, a pathological response to a world that has offered no care, only the imperative to survive at any cost. In the necropolitical assemblage, even family is a contested territory, and Norman’s “rescue” is the very act that enlists Phoenix into the same death-world he purportedly shields her from.

This coercive, for(ced)tress-paternalism within the home, however, is not an anomaly; it is a small-scale replica of the very state logic that produced Norman’s debility in the first place. His blindness is the core of his debility, but it is a debility produced by the state. As a veteran, his body was first instrumentalized for state violence in the Iraq and then abandoned without adequate support, left to adapt or perish. His military training, which should signify a debt owed by the state, becomes a necropolitical survival tactic—a set of skills repurposed for a life the state has deemed unworthy of protection. His heightened senses are not supernatural but are honed adaptations to a world that has rendered him hypervisible to threat (through his vulnerability) and invisible to protection (through state neglect).

The Biopolitical Counter-Assemblage: Organ-Harvesting and Reproductive Futurity

The film introduces its horrific counter-assemblage with the arrival of Raylan and his crew. They do not represent a liberatory alternative to Norman’s tyranny but a different, and in some ways more insidious, form of capture. If Norman’s world is built on the necropolitical reality of being left to die, their motive—to harvest Phoenix’s heart to save her biological mother—frames the family as a biopolitical institution that actively makes live through the calculated sacrifice of one of its own. This plot violently collapses the distinction between the home and the state-sanctioned clinic, revealing the family itself as a site where sovereign decisions over life and death are made.

This is a grotesque literalization and perversion of the familialism that Lee Edelman critiques in No Future. Edelman argues that the figure of the Child is perpetually invoked as a symbol of the future, and this “reproductive futurism” is used to justify oppressive social orders and police queer identities that are seen as rejecting this future (Edelman 11). In Don’t Breathe 2, this logic is twisted into a horrifying literalism. The “future” is no longer symbolized by the child but is literally the mother’s continued life. Phoenix is thus reduced to a mere means to that end, her symbolic value as The Child entirely consumed by her raw, biological use-value. Her personhood, desires, and potential are annihilated by a biopolitical calculus that optimizes the family unit by cannibalizing its youngest member.

This creates a stark dialectic of control. Norman’s necropolitical assemblage, born from state abandonment, operates on a logic of fortress-building, isolation, and a coercive parenting that mimics the hostility of the outside world. In contrast, the biological family’s assemblage operates on a biopolitical logic that speaks the language of care, sacrifice, and healing, yet its goal is to make live (the mother) by directly making die (the daughter). The terrifying brilliance of the film’s conflict is that it forces Phoenix to choose not between good and evil, but between two monstrous sovereigns: one who stole her to build a future around her in a death-world, and another who gave her life only to now demand it back in the name of a future that explicitly excludes her. Both systems, despite their opposing orientations, are ultimately concerned with the control and ownership of her body, demonstrating that under the conditions of the assemblage, both care and violence become inseparable modalities of power over life itself.

Becoming-Monster of Norman: Between Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Norman’s becoming-monster is the central process of his assemblage, a dynamic that a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens reveals in all its ambiguity. This becoming begins as an anti-Oedipal rupture: his trauma, isolation, and blindness first deterritorialize the normative codes of family and able-bodiedness, shattering the conventional Oedipal subject. However, this liberatory breakdown does not lead to a free flow of desire. Instead, Norman’s psyche attempts to re-territorialize this unmoored desire back into a familiar form—the family unit. His relationship with Phoenix is this very attempt, a violent parody of Oedipal kinship built on abduction. Yet, this re-territorializing impulse is irrevocably blocked. Trauma and death make a return to any normative family structure impossible. It is this blockage that forces his becoming down a monstrous path. No longer able to operate through filiation, it proceeds through alliance and contagion: a connection forged not by blood but by a shared existence in a schizoid space and their status as survivors of fire and loss—the very “catastrophes” that enable “unnatural participations” (Deleuze and Guattari, 241). Thus, his becoming-monster is the violent, creative outcome of a deterritorializing rupture that, finding its path to re-territorialization blocked, produces a new reality through monstrous alliance.

This logic of contagion extends beyond the social into the very fabric of perception, where Norman’s blindness operates as the key machine in his becoming. It is not a lack but a different mode of perception that actively deterritorializes the ableist, ocularcentric sensorium that dominates both society and conventional cinema. Norman’s resistance, however, operates on a fundamentally different sensorium, one that allows him to weaponize the environment through a crip expertise imperceptible to his ablers. In the semi-dark basement and pitch-black hotel sequences, Norman engineers what in McRuer’s terms can be called a crip(space)time—a tactical environment where non-visual senses are paramount. For Raylan’s crew, this darkness is a catastrophic sensory deprivation; their sight, the foundation of their ableist power, is nullified, reducing them to panicked silhouettes. For Norman, this same darkness is his element. He moves with a predatory fluency, using echolocation clicks to construct a precise auditory map. This is not merely adaptation; it is a becoming-bat, a line of flight into a sensory realm they cannot access.

This inversion of power is demonstrated with brutal precision. In the hotel, he does not merely hear footsteps in water; he reads the splashes and feels the ripples, calculating distance and movement to orchestrate an ambush to gun down three of his enemies within a few seconds (Álvarez 01:17:10-01:17:35). In an even more ingenious tactical move, he thrusts a jingling object into an enemy’s mouth, transforming the man’s own panicked movements into a sonar beacon. Norman then hammers down his location, guided purely by the sound he himself forced the enemy to produce (Álvarez 01:14:05-01:15:06). These are “crip tactics” (McRuer, Crip Times 57) in their purest form: improvisational, embodied ruses that poach on the invaders’ own territory and tools. He does not just disable his enemies; he disables his disablers by revealing the profound fragility of ableist perception and demonstrating a form of power that operates entirely outside its visual, normative frame.

However, this radical potential for a becoming-crip is often reterritorialized by the very genres and narratives that enable it. His line of flight is captured and redirected: the horror genre molarizes his adaptive skills into a predatory menace, and his trauma fuels a paternalism that curdles into necropolitical control. The film achieves this through a deliberate aesthetic contradiction: the same crip tactics that grant him mastery are framed as monstrous through classic horror codes. Extreme close-ups of his black blind eyes become jump-scare triggers, and his silent, efficient movements are punctuated by dissonant stings on the soundtrack (Álvarez 00:28:56-00:30:45). This reterritorialization is most violent in his relationship with Phoenix. His control over her body in the film’s opening sequence (first 12 minutes) is not care but a claim of ownership.

Yet, the system ultimately fails to fully capture his difference. The narrative orchestrates a final, profound deterritorialization of the very “monster” category it had built. In the climax, before receiving a mortal injury from Raylan, Norman confesses to Phoenix his monstrous past explicitly declaring “I am a monster” and releases her, a final act of self-sacrifice that breaks the cycle of control (Álvarez 01:25:50). Later as Norman lies dying, Phoenix defies her biological parents to choose him, declaring, “I can save you.” This does not redeem him back into normativity, but rather validates his complex becoming. His response—“You already have”—signals a fundamental transformation. He is not reterritorialized as a “saint” or a “father,” but transcends the molar category of “monster” altogether. He becomes a pure becoming-monster in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense—no longer a fixed identity but a transformative, ambiguous force of sacrifice and connection, existing in the intermezzo between destruction and care, forever outside the system’s final judgment.

Phoenix’s Line of Flight: Molecular Resistance and Crip Futurity

While Norman’s journey is a becoming-monster that is a processual liberation of the static “monster” category, Phoenix’s becoming may be defined by a no less successful, though tragic, line of flight. She is the molecular force that destabilizes the molar rigidities of both competing assemblages.

Phoenix is caught between two oppressive systems: Norman’s necropolitical paternalistic forces and her biological family’s biopolitical project of organ harvesting. The latter represents a horrific molar line that seeks to reduce her to pure biology, a resource to be consumed for the sake of the mother’s future. Her initial attempt to escape (Álvarez 00:50:40) both is a literal and metaphorical line of flight that fails, leading to her capture and the revelation of her intended fate.

The film’s true rupture is not a physical escape, but a profound ethical choice made by Phoenix. The climax, set in an abandoned hotel—a profound schizoid symbol where the very notion of “home” is revealed to be a necropolitical charade. This is the space where Phoenix is brought to her biological parents, only to have the foundational promise of familial care immediately shattered by the horrifying truth of her intended organ harvest. In this space where all symbolic structures of family and safety dissolve into the raw reality of the death-world, Phoenix is forced to decide between her biological father, Raylan, and Norman. She chooses Norman, killing Raylan to save him. However, Norman is mortally wounded from the fight, having been stabbed in the abdomen. As Phoenix desperately applies pressure to the laceration, in a profoundly moving exchange she tells him, “I can save you.” His reply, “You already have,” knowing he will die, forms the conceptual core of the entire film (Álvarez 01:26:31-01:29:08). Her salvation of him was not physical, but moral, achieved in the very act of choosing him.

This exchange is rich with meaning, representing a molecular line of flight from the molar assemblages that seek to claim her. On a molecular level, her act of choosing him—of affirming their bond despite its pathological and coercive origins—has already redeemed him. It has transformed their relationship from one of coercive capture to one of mutual, chosen recognition. She has, in that moment of choice, saved him from being solely a monster by acknowledging the complexity of their bond, the care that existed alongside the control. In the ultimate schizoid reversal, she rejects the “natural” filiation that would consume her body and, through a moment of pure alliance, chooses the “unnatural participation” that offered a perverse form of preservation. This is a molecular act of resistance that dismantles the binary offered by the two paternal assemblages. She refuses her role as the biopolitical sacrifice for her mother and begins to dismantle the necropolitical isolation of Norman’s world by offering a gesture of pure, uncalculated care.

Crip Futurity and the Affirmation of Chosen Kinship

The film’s conclusion powerfully affirms this line of flight and its implications for a crip futurity. The final scene at the foster house is not a conventional happy ending but the ultimate act of queer/crip world-making (McRuer, Crip Times 92). When Phoenix arrives at the foster house for shelter, a girl of Phoenix’s age asks her name. The camera holds on her face as she hesitates between her birth name, Tara, and the name Norman gave her (Álvarez 01:29:15). By resolutely choosing “Phoenix,” she performs a decisive act of self-territorialization that is also a profound act of chosen kinship. She does not reject the identity forged with Norman; she curates it, purging it of its coercive elements while consciously affirming the affective bond and their shared survival. She rises from the ashes of the two violent paternalistic systems that sought to claim her, but she carries forward a crucial ember from the schizoid space she inhabited with Norman—the name that marks her not as his victim, but as his ally and, ultimately, his savior. This act of self-naming is a powerful rejection of biological determinism and a claiming of a history that, however traumatic, is her own.

This is a powerful model of crip futurity. It does not overcome disability or trauma; it emerges from within it. It is a future built on the refusal of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory familialism (McRuer, Crip Theory 9). Phoenix’s resistance constitutes a decisive line of flight from the oppressive choices offered to her—the dutiful daughter or the solitary survivor. This escape is not a flight into invisibility, but a strategic becoming-imperceptible, achieved through what Halberstam terms a profound “refusal of legibility” (88). She quietly fractures the normative gaze by refusing the successful outcomes dictated by either side, embodying the queer art of failure as a form of critique that “refus[es] to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline” (Ibid.).

Her ultimate choice is the culmination of this line of flight: an “art of unbecoming” (Halberstam 88). By opting for the ambiguous potential of state care while retaining the name “Phoenix,” she performs a final, decisive act that makes her unreadable to the systems that tried to define her. She does not disappear; she becomes a paradox within the system, a singularité that “exploits the unpredictability of ideology” (Ibid). In doing so, she “imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (Ibid)—not a clean slate, but a new, complex assemblage. She chooses a name that forever marks her as the survivor of a becoming-monster and the architect of her own future, a living testament to a line of flight that successfully escaped capture.

Conclusion

Don’t Breathe 2 is a far more sophisticated film than its genre trappings might suggest. Through its horrific premise, it stages a penetrating critique of the violent logics—both biopolitical and necropolitical—that undergird contemporary notions of family, care, and the disabled body. While theorists like Mbembe and Puar provide the essential language to describe the world that produces a figure like Norman, it is the process-oriented philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari that allows us to truly map his becoming and Phoenix’s escape. Norman’s tragedy is that his becoming-monster, a necessary and adaptive response to a death-world, remains a closed circuit; it is a line of flight that turns back on itself, unable to envision a future beyond the fortress. Yet, in his final moments, this becoming is interrupted and transformed by a line of flight not his own — Phoenix’s molecular choice, which redeems the humanity within the monster without erasing the complexity of their bond.

Phoenix’s journey, conversely, illustrates the radical potential for a line of flight from within the most oppressive assemblages. Her decision to save Norman and to choose the name “Phoenix” constitutes a powerful act of crip and queer world-making. It is a refusal of the binary, an embrace of a chosen kinship forged in the context of trauma and disability. Don’t Breathe 2, therefore, ultimately moves beyond diagnosing necropolitical violence to offer a tentative, powerful vision of a futurity built not on biology or coercion, but on the radical, imperceptible power of becoming and the ethical choice to save, and in saving, to be saved. It suggests that resistance may lie not in grand victories, but in the small, molecular acts of care and self-definition that flourish in the ruins of the systems that failed us.

This analysis contributes to several scholarly conversations. Firstly, it advances disability media studies by offering a nuanced, process-oriented reading of a disabled character that avoids the traps of narrative prosthesis. Secondly, it contributes to the growing field of critical horror studies by demonstrating how the genre can be mobilized for sophisticated social and political critique, particularly of neoliberalism’s violence. Finally, it models a methodological synthesis, bringing Deleuzo-Guattarian theory into sustained conversation with crip and necropolitical theory, showing how these frameworks can productively inform and complicate one another. The film, and this reading of it, opens avenues for further research into the representation of chosen kinship, non-normative care, and the concept of “saving” in contemporary Gothic and horror narratives.

Works Cited

Alvarez, Fede, et al. Don’t Breathe 2. Edited by Jan Kovac, Directed by Rodo Sayagues, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2021.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke UP, 2019.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. NYU P, 2006.

---. Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. NYU P, 2018.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000.

Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. The University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Wischert-Zielke, Moritz. “The Impulse-Image of Vampiric Capital and the Politics of Vision and Disability: Evil and Horror in Don’t Breathe.” CINEJ Cinema Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 492–525, https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.382.