Malthusian Nightmares
It seems that zombie apocalypses are everywhere these days. George Romero’s “Dead” series seems to have launched the genre – or reanimated it (pun intended!). After which, ... well here’s a little test for you. Click on this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_films
And then do a “search on this page” for the decades with “198” for the 80s, “199” for the 90s etc. By the time you get to the 2000s just watch the highlights multiply. By the 2010s you might start to get a migraine!
On TV, there has been a parallel phenomenon. We had Ash vs The Evil Dead, Z Nation, Black Summer, The Last of Us ....
But The Walking Dead is the biggie. An astonishingly successful and prolific series that just seemed to go on and on. And which has now produced seven spin offs. There’s (take a deep breath!) The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead, Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and The Ones Who Live. [1]
All the more remarkable when you consider that the WD franchise was based on an early decision to not go into the details of how the zombie plague started. At the end of the first season, the survivors end up in an underground laboratory where a scientist is trying to figure it all out. He doesn’t and sets a timer to blow the whole place up. The survivors manage to get out in time.
And no-one asks any questions after that. The dead come back as flesh eating monsters. And everyone just accepts it!
But before investigating zombie apocalypses, a few word about apocalypses in general.
Back to the Good Old Days
John Steppling made a few astute observations about the attraction of the apocalypse trope which I want to build on[2]. What follows are a list of details that embroider his comments.
First of all, there is an oddly antiseptic quality to these depictions. For all the gore and horror depicted in these shows, there is a curiously soft aspect. No one seems to be forced to deal with the realities of finding fresh water or maintaining the electricity supply. Instead the viewer is invited to muse on how wonderful it would be to have no more nagging spouse, no mortgage, indeed no money problems of any kind, no red tape, and, best of all, none of these irritating people who just get in the way and annoy you. There’s no stress at all – a totally stress free world in comparison to modern industrial societies.
(And although I want to save the zombie theme till later, I can’t resist quoting John’s humorous addition that, in this new world, all that is required is to go out and shoot up a few zombies!)
Furthermore, it’s an aspirational scenario in terms of real estate, you get to pick wherever you want to live, the wildlife comes back to the city. There is a feeling of reconstruction. Everyone starts over – but does it “the right way” this time.
The euphoria about abandoning that cumbersome demanding monetary system is embodied in 28 Days Later with a scene where the survivors go on a jaunt through a deserted supermarket raiding the shelves, and piling up the food and booze onto trolleys. When they roll their acquisitions out past the check out, one of the band leaves his bank card on the desk. Nice one!
But note how the electric lights were on all through the scene despite this happening sometime after the apocalypse struck. Imagine how different it would have been had it been filmed in the dark with the survivors crawling through the darkened aisles with torches. Not nice at all.
And so, continuing with the apocalypse theme alone, turning to Stephen King’s zombie-free novel, The Stand, provides an excellent overview. I have often took this to be a kind of “Ur-apocalypse” tale in the American mode.
A flu-like virus decimates the population and leaves a tiny amount of survivors. They eventually gather into a rural community led by an old African American woman (presumably King’s perfunctory nod to a liberal progressive air). The community has meetings that revolve around a lot of soul searching about “the right way to do things”. When they discuss what to do with certain people who sabotaged the group and someone suggests execution, we get a big spiel about how “that ain’t what Americans do”! As the critic S T Joshi wryly noted, King must be extremely ignorant about American history if he really believes this. [3]
But it is clear what this scenario signifies. In killing off the vast majority of the population, the plague has effectively reversed time and taken us back to some imagined Golden Age of pioneer homesteads when “the air was clean and you could see and folks were nice to you” as Randy Newman once sang with his customary irony.
As the novel unfolds, this community of plain down home honest folk meet up with their opposite – a hive of Evil People led by the demonic Randall Flagg. And a Battle of Good and Evil follows. The regression in societal form is mirrored in a regression in culture as we revert to a tale of mediaeval Biblical retribution.
A final remark on the King tale – though it applies to a few others too: Although we are led to believe the plague is global, there is no mention at all of life outside the states. These tales tend to be ferociously insular.
In a nutshell, tales of apocalypse are invariably reactionary.
The Dead Rise!
So now for the zombies. What are they? What do they represent?
To truly appreciate what zombies signify, it is helpful to go through a brief bestiary of supernatural archetypes with an eye to their symbolic meaning. Thus the history of these myths isn’t the main concern here – only their present symbolic significance. Though it is interesting to note that, though these concepts may have started out as magical and even religious concepts, they now demand some kind of pseudo-scientific validation.
And as a preliminary remark, it is interesting that, with one exception, the theme of contamination runs through these archetypes. The concept of disease is uppermost. This is actually logical when you consider that these supernatural beasts nearly always start out as regular humans. So they have to be “deformed”. This “corruption” takes place through the idea of infection. Someone already infected infects someone else – nearly always through biting. The parallel with plagues and pestilence is, I think, significant in itself.
The Vampire
Vampires are nocturnal and must avoid the sun. They are immortal but need to suck blood to maintain their youth. Although the other creatures under consideration are also created from infected blood, in no other archetype does the blood play such a major role. Vampires are all steeped in fluids. The exchange of fluid is key. Thus there is a strong erotic theme with vampires. They are undoubtedly the sexiest of the beasts.
The Werewolf
Werewolves are actually human for the greater part of the time. The only time they are monstrous is under a full moon when they turn into giant wolves. The horror lies in the matter of change. You don’t know who is and who isn’t one. The one you trust most and share intimate spaces with could be one!
Although they are never sexy in their wolf guise, they are powerful, full of animal vitality.
Frankenstein’s Monster
This is the exception in that the monster isn’t a former human. The monster is created by humans. Indeed this archetype is often presented in a benign form as robot or android – the robot from Lost in Space, Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. When malevolent, it can be HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the assassin from The Terminator. You could go as far as saying that every dystopian tale is a Frankenstein tale. 1984, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale are all in this category. These are ambiguous tales in that it is the creator humans who are, at least partly, the monsters. In The Stepford Wives, it is the male conspirators who are clearly the villains since the wives no longer exist.
The point about all the above is that each archetype can be humanised. Vampires act like people most of the time. Bloodthirsty – literally. But still they have personalities. And they are sexy. Werewolves are people for most of the time. The Frankenstein Monster can be good or bad. Data (example of the former) and HAL (the latter) have personalities. With HAL it’s a creepy personality, but still a personality.
But ...
The Zombie
Zombies are reanimated corpses with an insatiable appetite for living human flesh. That’s it! There is nothing else. [4]
My contention is that you cannot humanise zombies. There have been attempts. But the way they work out proves my point.
For example:
iZombie revolves around a young woman who may have been “turned into a zombie” but “(s)he discovers that if she does not periodically satisfy her new appetite for brains, she will turn into a stereotypically primitive and homicidal zombie”. (Wiki)
Well precisely. She remains human only for as long as she avoids becoming a zombie.
Z Nation revolves mostly around a guy who is “half zombie”. It’s the non-zombie part that is human. And indeed the zombie part never shows. He’s basically a blue guy with certain powers.
In The Flesh is a real curio. There has been a zombie plague but a medication can restore consciousness to the undead! Good science fiction aims at some measure of credibility. In The Flesh is not good science fiction. It veers towards the Biblically miraculous!
The point being that zombies can only be humanised to the extent that they are not zombies. (Granted that a werewolf in its wolf phase isn’t human but the whole point about werewolves is that they alternate.)
And to confirm this non-human aspect, zombies are utterly repulsive. There is no glamour in them at all. They are the yuckiest monsters. They do not have the aristocratic eroticism of the vampire. Nor do they have the magnificent animal vitality of the werewolf. They are rotting corpses that shamble about. [5]
And this utterly non-human aspect is what makes the zombie archetype so prone to mass formation. There is no other archetype so well adopted to the apocalyptic.
So what does the zombie apocalypse signify?
The zombies are basically just mouths that consume. They are ferociously unproductive. They are the ultimate example of useless eaters. Indeed they are far worse than useless. They destroy! They eat up everything and produce nothing.
Furthermore, their consumptive behaviour has zero feasibility. It is purely magical.
The Walking Dead illustrates this beautifully. Almost the first zombie that main character Rick Grimes meets is the so called “bicycle girl”. Like all the other zombies, she gropes towards him. She wants to eat him. But ... she has no body below her exposed rib cage i.e. she has no stomach. What drives her hunger?
Even decapitated zombie heads try to bite.
The bicycle girl
Furthermore, the zombies have spectacularly pedantic tastes! It has to be live flesh. Considering how slow the zombies go (no Danny Boyle fast ones here!) they’d never be able to catch anything.
And yet .... There are always vast numbers of zombies rummaging around. You can kill as many as you want. Their numbers never decrease. If anything their numbers seem to be perpetually on the increase.
It’s the ultimate Malthusian nightmare – the ravenous masses ever expanding, eating everything up but creating nothing. And they want live human flesh! They want the flesh of the few survivors.
And the state of being a zombie justifies the violence carried out against them. As a survivor you get to kill on a massive scale and you never have to feel guilty about it. In fact, the violence shown against the zombies is the most brutal violence you are ever likely to see in a fictional format.
And who are the survivors?
The survivors never settle into any stable society. As well as trying to eliminate the zombies, these survivors constantly war amongst themselves. They too, like the zombies, seem to be locked into this vicious fight over resources which, we are assured, are always rare.
It is the ultimate Hobbesian war of all against all only projected onto the largest screen.
This is the way the ruling class think. This is the hegemonic narrative relentlessly percolating down. The zombie genre encourages you into imagining that you are “hemmed in”, ever menaced by that appalling vile mass gathering darkly out there. There are a few others like you, a few that are real humans. But you can never fully trust them.
The zombie meme seems to me to be the most aggressive manifestation of ruling class pathology. It radiates sheer misanthropy and sadism. That it seems to foreshadow real life genocides like the one in Gaza is only all too logical.
*
[1] Fun fact: I don’t think that the word “zombie” is mentioned once in the entire WD franchise!
[2] You can hear his remarks around the 2 hour 5 minute mark here:
[3] From S T Joshi, The Modern Weird Tale. Page 80.
It’s no surprise that the immensely depressing, suffocatingly plastic TV film of The Stand features Gary Sinise – one of the most reactionary actors imaginable.
[4] We can discount shows like the Australian Glitch and the French Les Revenants (translated as The Returned) in which dead people come back to life exactly as they were. They are clearly not zombies.
[5] Fast zombies never seem like zombies. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later uses a jerky film technique to impart a weird inhuman quality to the speeding undead. But without that, they just look like regular folk running. This is the case with Black Summer .