zombies are coming for you
by uzwi
You can hate them without feeling wrong. You can kill them like eating sweets. Then you’re hungry again & you can kill more. They’re fully dehumanised. There’s no off-season, no moral limitation. They’re the enemy. What’s not to love? They’re what we really want. The zombie is the ultimate other in a neoliberal society. They’re a rhetoric we all can use. Zombies aren’t just for the insane Right, or for adolescent boys. They’re for everyone. People who lean Left–who consider themselves adult & multicultural & would never be caught othering–will happily slaughter zombies. Zombies are the ultimate other: the act of othering they represent doesn’t just remain unsaid (as it would with the Right): it remains unthought. The ultimate in deniability. Zombies: motiveless, other, but without any traceable connection to a group in the real world, they will never embarrass you by revealing their humanity. To position themselves as killable, they don’t even have to parrot the twaddle of “evil”. They’re the pinnacle of Hollywood characterisation, actant & action as a single unit. Deeper down, they allow you to refuse rational motivation to your victim, while encouraging you to claim victimhood for yourself. I’m surprised it took so long to make something like World War Z.
the m john harrison blog 
This developed from my side of a Twitter conversation with @damienwalter.
The popularity of zombies as the monster of this age must surely be the result of over population. The constant sense of being crowded out makes one lapse into ‘othering’ everyone and wanting to start firing….
Joe: Do you think they have mutated so much, ideologically? The earliest film zombies can clearly be read as communists, and I have yet to see World War Z (although maybe I won’t), but I have a suspicion that they’re just a placeholder now for the “terrorist” of your choice.
Phoenix: Communist zombie films? Which ones? Would like to see them.
In Robin Woods’ “Return of the Repressed” essay, he sees the zombies in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as resurrected US soldiers returning from Vietnam; in Dawn of the Dead – as beleaguered, recession hit Ford-era US consumers. Fast forward to The Walking Dead where middle-class survivalists plink away at their former neighbours. Nowadays, zombie films seem to be all about the abject and the poor and the hungry. And they provide narratives with the cultural justifications to ignore and exterminate.
Orcs [takes cover]
Yeah… This is all well and good if you’re talking about the way that zombie shit is consumed in our culture at present (and why), but it clearly wasn’t always the case:
As far as I’m concerned, Romero was the first modern zombie story teller. The “they’re us” line was cut from the original film in 1968 and put back in the 1990 remake. And the sentiment has always been there in his work. Hell, in Land of the Dead, his archtypal Black Man/Blond Woman characters are zombies and the human characters are, for the most parts, degenerate assholes.
And his films were always full of absurdist socialist and anti-consumer subtext that had the subtlty of a sledgehammer and may as well just have been called above boards text.
These days though, the zombie genre has literalized the absurd. The socialist subtext has been replaced by (American) libertariansim in The Walking Dead and all the characters like to talk about property rights, gun rights, and stone age gender roles. And self proclaimed lefties gobble that shit up.
It’s clear who the zombies are. And it ain’t the zombies.
timcee: Not communist zombie films – rather film zombies as metaphors for communists. I was also thinking about (first & foremost) George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead from 1968 with its news footage aesthetic and playful constructs of “reality”. Has been read in a Cold War context before.
I like the juxtaposition with contemporary zombies… Should definitely watch more Walking Dead.
Glad it came out of Twitter – for a minute, I thought you were describing your new neighbours.
Colson Whitehead’s ‘Zone One’ deals with this glancingly, though its real terror is in showing that not even the apocalypse can undo neoliberalism. Undercuts the whole joy year one aspect of the end of the world.
I recently read Day of the Triffids, and I think it contains the bones of Romero’s zombie films. Just as the Triffids are not so much the immediate problem, but are waiting in the wings to take over once the problem of societal collapse ends humanity, so the zombies in Romero aren’t the focal problem; the focal problem is trying and failing to cooperate in the face of disaster. A bit of Lord of the Flies in there. But in Romero the zombies are, as DH points out, us; while Triffids are a return of the vegetal non-human world (plus maybe a Russky conspiracy spiraled out of control).
But yes, commodity zombies, X Box zombies, are guiltless kills for fat-free murder porn.
One more thing. Once at a party a tipsy guy took off his shirt and showed me his chest tattoo of Zombie Jesus. It was a familiar portrait of thorn-crowned suffering Jesus, but with added flesh decay. Zombie Jesus had not yet (as near as I can tell) become a banal Easter joke, so I was taken aback, and assumed it was a blasphemous joke. but no, he explained; he was a Baptist preacher, and a zombie nerd, and the tattoo was a heartfelt tribute to his love for Jesus, and zombie movies. I’m still not sure what to make of it.
The late lamented Richard Matheson does, of course, with I Am Legend force the reader to accept a sound motivation for the monster (vampire/zombie) and flings the protagonist and reader’s shared sense of victimhood right back in their face.
Rather than Communists per se, there’s been other arguments that Zombies represent the Other to capitalism generally – namely, the working class (Marx’s ‘gravediggers’ seen inverted by the visual filters of capitalism- since capitalist accumulation *must* be the only form of life, those who don’t or can’t must be the dead ones..).
Back in the 90s the brilliant artist collective BANK did a pop up show called ‘Zombie Golf’ in what was then a run down part of Shoreditch. In the installation, their papier mache zombies, modelled on themselves and their friends, lumbered round looking dolefully at ‘proper art’.
In the 70’s I lived near a U.S Air Force base in Puerto Rico, One day I tuned in my TV to the news broadcast scene of Romero’s zombie flick, only I thought that it was for real! I mean it was Armed Forces TV! Were we under attack? A few minutes later I realized it was a horror flick. Now its just boring.
Let’s crowdfund/kidnap his cat and force MJH to write a zombie novel.
See what happens with social media? It’s like an infection…
Barricade the cellar!
“I’m surprised it took so long to make something like World War Z.”
28 days later? 28 weeks later? Resident evil? Dawn of the dead? Any other of the many zombie films made?
I hate zombies for *exactly* that reason. And I heartily recommend BBC3’s In the Flesh, if you haven’t seen it already, precisely because it addresses that head-on. Total antithesis of The Walking Dead.
Hi Hal. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll give In the Flesh a go.
Also The Returned. French series that is profoundly human, profoundly unsettling and deals with the real emotional impact of what might happen if the dead came back. It’s superb.
Hi Simon. Ah, The Returned: only thing I watch on TV at the moment. The exact reverse of WWZ, humanity returned to the dead. But a lot more fish to fry than that, n’est-ce pas? The dead have returned, but more as a haunting than an infestation of walking corpses. Each haunting so accurately locates the exact psychological & emotional faultlines of the families involved that, to start with, I wasn’t sure the dead had returned–only been suddenly remembered, re-absorbed by the psychic structures that destroyed them in the first place. So my only problem with The Revenants (much better title) is: the more it hardens up as a story of revenance, the more the subtlety of its emotional dissection of the living is threatened. I hope it leaves plenty of loose ends in the rationale; also that the act of return doesn’t “solve” the emotional complications, or absolve the living…
Exactly. The dead as guilt walking. I’m hoping it won’t boil down to a neat summation – I’m loving the unease that comes with not being able to make an equation from it. This connection with the nightmare the living face from still being alive helped by a script and direction that allows for fantastic performances. The soundtrack is wonderful too.