la_marquise (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
la_marquise) wrote2012-10-23 05:58 pm
la_marquise) wrote2012-10-23 05:58 pm
Entry tags:
We are the zombies
I do not, if I'm honest, care much for zombies. They squick me. I'm not keen on anything which seeks to eat me alive: call me a coward, call me atavistic, but when it comes down to it, the idea of being ripped to pieces simply does not appeal. Nor would I wish that fate on others. As anyone who knows me well can attest, I'm just not keen on the whole being chewed on thing. Sharks? Beautiful creatures, in need of respect and protection. Alligators and crocodiles the same. But do I wish to share space with them? No, thank you. I will fight to protect their environments, but I will not get into that water. (Nor the swimming pool, until I've checked it thoroughly. And as for blue bedsheets... Well, let's just say that the marquis has a wicked sense of humour sometimes.)
And at least sharks and alligators would have a reason for eating me. They are living creatures, they need to feed. Zombies, in popular culture mode, not so much. The mass market zombie exists to create fear. It's a mindless, unreasoning thing, without scruple or thought or code, its sole function is to consume.
Which was, of course, the point George Romero was making when he filmed Night of The Living Dead all those decades ago. Across the western world, human volition, human agency, is stripped away by advertising and big business, replaced with desires for more possessions, more wealth, more for the self. They consume, therefore they are. It's a 70s vision of a world in which the culture of mending and making do was slowly being replaced by one of throw-aways and expensive, often false, short-cuts. Capitalism eats itself and looks for more.
And yet, even in the disillusioned 70s, Romero's films were cult, not mainstream. The vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf remained mainly in the realm of Hammer Horror and straight-to-video.
I don't know what changed. I'm not that clever. I don't have a clear-cut explanation for our twenty-first century Dawn of the Undead. And yet, and yet... Vampires and werewolves have minds and wills, can be spoken with, reasoned with, can be projected onto ourselves. Zombies? I'm not so sure. If the vampire is the secret lover and the werewolf the troubled misfit self, what is the zombie, that mind-stripped, ever-hungry, massed, unrelenting threat? What are we afraid of in our bubbles of things, our palaces of possessions? What lurks, just out of sight, trying -- or so we fear -- to steal our comfort? What haunts the heavy type of the tabloids?
The poor.
The immigrants.
The foreigners.
The stranger.
The have-nots.
The people who aren't like us.
The excluded.
They -- and it's always they, not us -- want our comfort. They want our privilege. They want homes and jobs and health care. They want food and clean water. They mass at the gates of the rich man's ghetto, on the steps of the corporation headquarters, on the refugee boats, at the soup kitchens and food banks, in the dole queues and on the street corners, hoping for their share. When they go through legitimate channels, we call them scroungers. When they reach out and take, we call them looters and thieves. When they ask why they can't have a share, we talk of deficits and boundaries, cuts and social necessity, responsibility and 'we're all in this together'. But we don't open the gates. Some of us want to, but are prevented by others with more power. Some of us stumble and are thrown out to join the mass outside. Many of us read the words of the red-tops and identify ourselves as the inhabitants of the mansions and the boardrooms, not realising that, to those who really do, we are just another type of danger, another hungry mob to be barred.
To be turned into demons. They are never counts or earls, those zombies. They aren't beautiful, they don't tug at our heartstrings. They're dirty and nameless, the mob, the crowd. They're the underclass of the undead world.
They're the underclass. The recent obsession with them speaks too closely, to me, to the fears that we are encouraged to feed, the interests we're encouraged to support, the image we're supposed to uphold -- that property is sacred, that rights are only for the few and that anyone new or different asking for help is out to eat our brains.
They're the midnight fear of big money, the Paris mob at the doors of Versailles, the poor asking for a fair wage and decent working conditions and decent treatment.
And popular culture -- that huge consumerist money-making machine that sucks in the beliefs and possessions of other places and peoples and times and turns it into Product -- popular culture gift-wraps that fear of loss of privilege, that fear of having to share, and transforms those asking for change into a mindless crowd that will eat our brains.
They're a metaphor. But they're no longer the anti-consumerist image Romero offered. That appealed to the few. This new version appeals to the many, to everyone who does not want to share, to help, to support healthcare and a social contract. This new version is the capitalist nightmare, that the poor might ask for some of the wealth, that immigrants might want to live next door. It's our fear of change, of difference, of loss of those things with which we keep ourselves safe. I doubt that any of the writers who write zombies currently have any of these things in mind when they right them. Most of them, indeed, seem to me to be concerned with ways of rebuilding society, of improving and reshaping it. But the zeitgeist, the ubiquity of zombies concerns me.
Because in the end, we are being told we are right to fear those things which differ from ourselves, we are right to label them dirty, dangerous, wrong. The words of the writer are overwhelmed by the weight, the mass of the cultural load.
And that is why I don't like zombies.
Skirt of the day: cream, black and white tiered.
And at least sharks and alligators would have a reason for eating me. They are living creatures, they need to feed. Zombies, in popular culture mode, not so much. The mass market zombie exists to create fear. It's a mindless, unreasoning thing, without scruple or thought or code, its sole function is to consume.
Which was, of course, the point George Romero was making when he filmed Night of The Living Dead all those decades ago. Across the western world, human volition, human agency, is stripped away by advertising and big business, replaced with desires for more possessions, more wealth, more for the self. They consume, therefore they are. It's a 70s vision of a world in which the culture of mending and making do was slowly being replaced by one of throw-aways and expensive, often false, short-cuts. Capitalism eats itself and looks for more.
And yet, even in the disillusioned 70s, Romero's films were cult, not mainstream. The vampire, the ghoul, the werewolf remained mainly in the realm of Hammer Horror and straight-to-video.
I don't know what changed. I'm not that clever. I don't have a clear-cut explanation for our twenty-first century Dawn of the Undead. And yet, and yet... Vampires and werewolves have minds and wills, can be spoken with, reasoned with, can be projected onto ourselves. Zombies? I'm not so sure. If the vampire is the secret lover and the werewolf the troubled misfit self, what is the zombie, that mind-stripped, ever-hungry, massed, unrelenting threat? What are we afraid of in our bubbles of things, our palaces of possessions? What lurks, just out of sight, trying -- or so we fear -- to steal our comfort? What haunts the heavy type of the tabloids?
The poor.
The immigrants.
The foreigners.
The stranger.
The have-nots.
The people who aren't like us.
The excluded.
They -- and it's always they, not us -- want our comfort. They want our privilege. They want homes and jobs and health care. They want food and clean water. They mass at the gates of the rich man's ghetto, on the steps of the corporation headquarters, on the refugee boats, at the soup kitchens and food banks, in the dole queues and on the street corners, hoping for their share. When they go through legitimate channels, we call them scroungers. When they reach out and take, we call them looters and thieves. When they ask why they can't have a share, we talk of deficits and boundaries, cuts and social necessity, responsibility and 'we're all in this together'. But we don't open the gates. Some of us want to, but are prevented by others with more power. Some of us stumble and are thrown out to join the mass outside. Many of us read the words of the red-tops and identify ourselves as the inhabitants of the mansions and the boardrooms, not realising that, to those who really do, we are just another type of danger, another hungry mob to be barred.
To be turned into demons. They are never counts or earls, those zombies. They aren't beautiful, they don't tug at our heartstrings. They're dirty and nameless, the mob, the crowd. They're the underclass of the undead world.
They're the underclass. The recent obsession with them speaks too closely, to me, to the fears that we are encouraged to feed, the interests we're encouraged to support, the image we're supposed to uphold -- that property is sacred, that rights are only for the few and that anyone new or different asking for help is out to eat our brains.
They're the midnight fear of big money, the Paris mob at the doors of Versailles, the poor asking for a fair wage and decent working conditions and decent treatment.
And popular culture -- that huge consumerist money-making machine that sucks in the beliefs and possessions of other places and peoples and times and turns it into Product -- popular culture gift-wraps that fear of loss of privilege, that fear of having to share, and transforms those asking for change into a mindless crowd that will eat our brains.
They're a metaphor. But they're no longer the anti-consumerist image Romero offered. That appealed to the few. This new version appeals to the many, to everyone who does not want to share, to help, to support healthcare and a social contract. This new version is the capitalist nightmare, that the poor might ask for some of the wealth, that immigrants might want to live next door. It's our fear of change, of difference, of loss of those things with which we keep ourselves safe. I doubt that any of the writers who write zombies currently have any of these things in mind when they right them. Most of them, indeed, seem to me to be concerned with ways of rebuilding society, of improving and reshaping it. But the zeitgeist, the ubiquity of zombies concerns me.
Because in the end, we are being told we are right to fear those things which differ from ourselves, we are right to label them dirty, dangerous, wrong. The words of the writer are overwhelmed by the weight, the mass of the cultural load.
And that is why I don't like zombies.
Skirt of the day: cream, black and white tiered.
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It's pretty clear, isn't it, how this current pop culture geist breaks down in class stratification. Which perhaps is why fantasy is so persistent about monarchs and monarchies are for the best, whether in the past or even now, at the so-called End of History.
I've just read a fantasy novel, the chronology set within the Age of Revolution, framed by a 21st century narrative -- and it's still about saving and preserving a monarchy of white people, via an Asian McGuffin and a Chosen One whose father was a West Indian slave. Does this make sense other than our persistent pull to identify self with royalty abnd kingdoms and all the rest? Because none of us can imagine ourselves not King/Queen of the World? So much so that in our fantasy of being a social justice exemplar, we even assume that slave's child should be the means of preserving a white European monarchy? And in the 21st century the fantasy presents a choice between Soviet Union style communism or magical monarchy. And in the monarchy we get to have the most wonderful clothes -- which we need do nothing to get except perhaps stand around in fittings -- live in a palace and occasionally make the ritual disclaimer that we really didn't want to marry the Prince and thereby become a Queen, but reader what can I do? I love him! It's very weird.
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Baffling.
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John and I often have conversations about the biology and ecosystems of zombies. There is a modern model of infection (Mira Grant, 28 Days / Weeks, Walking Dead) which I am now going away to think about in light of what you've said. It's a model where the zombie is the helpless tool of a virus which seeks to find new hosts - the merest scratch can turn you, or we all have it in some form or other and will turn on death, or some of us are immune and we need to find out why and how.
Which adds the concept of meme-as-virus to your theory - political awareness, religious conversion, disruption of bread and circuses - all these could trigger a zombie uprising.
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But yes, they can carry a lot of meaning. I just wonder whether the surge of popularity owes anything to the current high-profile anxieties about poverty and immigration, in our post-Greed Is Good world.
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LOL, yeah, that works!
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Lovely essay; very thought-provoking! I'll never look at zombies the same way again!
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Had zero interest in zombie movies (dull critters) until the comic versions started appearing, esp. 'Sean of the Dead' - whose interpretation may be closer to Romero's (do you remember the opening scene with all the slack-jawed commuters on the bus?). Also amused by 'Dead Snow' (Norwegian film with zombie Nazis.)
Re your analysis, you got me thinking of Octavia Butler, 'Parable of the Sower' and Atwood's 'Oryx & Crake', which are driven by the same terror of the have-nots. Neither take the side of the haves, but are pretty good at presenting the anxiety of the have-a-little-and-very-scared-of-losing-its. (I use both of these on my 'Gated Communities' course, alongside lots of other little bits from 'The Time Machine' to adverts for Bow Quarter! I'll give you a copy of my extracts folder some time if you're interested - maybe you can swap me an extract from one of the 'poor at the gates' movies you were writing about?
Oh, and on the conservatism of fantasy, you might like David Brin's article:
http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/
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And yes, Atwood and Butler were on my mind, too.
Sean of the Dead locates its heroes and its zombies in the same space, almost -- we are both, in our disorder and ineptness. It's almost an endearing portrayal.
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He has been seen to lurch (particularly in the evenings when leaving the Blue).
Bits of him keep dropping off or breaking , although he claims this is due to old footballing injuries.
He is clearly comfortable with the zombie world and devotes endless hours to watching his zombie friends on film.
Weekends are spent in search of new brains to feed to his quiz league .
He is out in London tonight with his fellow quiz league zombies so be careful out there ...
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I have a coffee zombie in this house...
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The poor.
The immigrants.
The foreigners.
The stranger.
The have-nots.
The people who aren't like us.
The excluded.
It's pretty scary just how many of those my family have been and in at least one case there, I still am.
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beautiful essay
I heard a fantastically syllable-heavy lecture by Marina Warner on zombies -- there's a mangled abbreviation on The Guardian website but it's not a patch on the original.
Re: beautiful essay
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Around here (a) cremation is the norm and has been for generations so rotting bodies just don't have that resonance; (b)there is a labour shortage; and (c)all that stuff about immigrants and the poor is being generally discussed as part of the whole national opinion and policy-forming process. So we don't have to get metaphorical about it, the arguments are going on out in the open already.
I agree with you that fantasy polities are hardly ever any kind of democracy, let alone People's Republics, real theocratic states, constitutional monarchies or technocratic bureaucracies (you only get oligarchies if they're fantasy-Venice).
Though interestingly, if you look at 'The Lord Of The Rings', which is usually cited negatively in this respect, the Shire is obviously a democracy of sorts (though I strongly suspect that there would have been a property qualification) and Sam the bog-standard, working-class Hobbit essentially becomes its real ruler by popular vote. That rarely happens in current multi-volume fantasy epics.
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I often think the real culprits in terms of comfort, monarchical fantasies are the Tolkien imitators, rather than Tolkien, because of the Shire and the various ways elves organise and indeed the various ways the early humans organise (Anglo-Saxon Enlgand was a lot more democratic than the feudal model imported by the Normans, and that shows in Tolkien). His world is middle class and waaay too white, but it also has social and racial flexibility in certain ways -- inter-species marriages, the ways hobbits can become parts of human cultures and so on. His flaws are many, but they aren't simplistic.
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Oh, indeed.
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But your reading complains not of what the stories don't do, but of what they do - which is always a better critique!
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