Status: maybe daily maybe weekly maybe not
Bandersnatches and Scapegoats
25 October 2011
Don’t Bury Me, I’m Still Not Dead!
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Among sophisticated society’s circle of adolescent intellectuals, there is a general consensus that the world will end in an outbreak of flesh-eating, brain-devouring pestilence. While we will of course allow the masses to dabble about in their silly natural and nuclear disaster theories, it is important that the Zombie Apocalypse is at least recognized and appreciated as being as legitimate as the doomsday threat it poses.
In a flurry of films like I Am Legend, Zombieland, and Resident Evil, America has been highlighting the significance of the living dead for the 21st century audience. Unfortunately, because of the massive influx of post-apocalyptic films in general hitting the box office, a large percentage of the populace has condemned zombie outbreaks not only as fantasy, but as nothing but gory comedy. I’ll be honest; even I thought Dawn of the Dead was a hell of a lot funnier than Shaun of the Dead, but there’s something underlying the Zombie Apocalypse that’s a little less glamorous than gunning down your zombified neighbors from the rooftops. It’s a philosophy. Who could ever destroy the billions of humans on this planet than the trillions and trillions of dead humans? Nuclear disasters and Robot Apocalypses—the Matrix, Terminator, Short Circuit, iRobot—seem outstandingly optimistic in retrospect: those who favor the domination of human beings by their mechanical counterparts are essentially saying that they can only be defeated by their own intellect, their own technological genius; it is arrogance at its most American. The Zombie Apocalypse is all the raw madness and wrongdoing of humanity rebounding upon itself in an immutably bloody pandemic even Will Smith can’t fight off. Zombies, all their purposes and visages and realities, are the gruesome truth: humans will be defeated and devoured by the irrepressible tidal wave of heir own dead punishing them for their ultimate sin against nature: intelligent life.
Like the Dark Ages, the Zombie Apocalypse will be an epoch of unlovely obliquity, made all the more horrifying by the corruption, erosion, and crumble of our vast concrete narcissus: civilization. It will start as it always has, with a sickness. The zombie outbreak begins with many discarded cases of people stuck in a death-like state in the autonomous regions of northwest China and West Africa. They are essentially dead bodies reanimated by an outside force (something we have yet to truly pinpoint). In African lore they are zombi (Haitian zonbi, North Mbundu nzumbe, Czech trouba, etc.): dead brought to life by a sorcerer and have no will of their own. The jiangshi of Chinese folklore move at night, killing living creatures to absorb their chi. All zombie stories hold a little bit of truth: zombies have no will of their own, but they do have knowledge of a purpose: to infect and to feed. Zombies eat brains, solely for sustenance (or chi); those whose brains are eaten do not become zombies, they just die. Conversely, in order to kill a zombie, one must blow out its brains. To infect, the walking dead must bite or scratch or tear, as is their instinct. What may be disappointing to fans of zombie horror films is that these creatures have no blood. No pumping blood, at least. They are corpses; all that would be left in the veins of older zombies would be crusty goo. Of course, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) are still more than worth a watch, but understand the biological limits of the walking dead.
At the heart of the zombie outbreak is not the opportunity to display unparalleled and inimitable gore in the movie theatres, but a fundamental paradigm of what humanity fears most: for long since the gloom of the Dark Ages, the human race has feared disorder. It is in the function and predictability of civilization that we find solace. Greed and corruption don’t inspire such primal terror as the walking dead because we expect them: we live with crime as the early Puritans did; in building society from the ground up, we construct first the government and then the prison, pillory, and graveyard. The enemy of our order and our holier-than-thou sense of superiority over all other natural life is our annihilation at the decaying hands of chaos. Seething with an animalistic rage against the human machine and a completely aberrant absence of fear, zombies are the plague that knocks humankind from its shiny ivory pedestal at last.
I’m sure the Zombie Apocalypse is open for interpretation, but I’m going to take a leaf from the pre-Reformation Catholic Church’s survival guide and say that if you don’t have the correct interpretation, you’re doomed. The virus that will destroy the homo sapien is imminent and unavoidable; the least you can do is appreciate the nature of this horrific crusade and show some respect.
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Among sophisticated society’s circle of adolescent intellectuals, there is a general consensus that the world will end in an outbreak of flesh-eating, brain-devouring pestilence. While we will of course allow the masses to dabble about in their silly natural and nuclear disaster theories, it is important that the Zombie Apocalypse is at least recognized and appreciated as being as legitimate as the doomsday threat it poses.
In a flurry of films like I Am Legend, Zombieland, and Resident Evil, America has been highlighting the significance of the living dead for the 21st century audience. Unfortunately, because of the massive influx of post-apocalyptic films in general hitting the box office, a large percentage of the populace has condemned zombie outbreaks not only as fantasy, but as nothing but gory comedy. I’ll be honest; even I thought Dawn of the Dead was a hell of a lot funnier than Shaun of the Dead, but there’s something underlying the Zombie Apocalypse that’s a little less glamorous than gunning down your zombified neighbors from the rooftops. It’s a philosophy. Who could ever destroy the billions of humans on this planet than the trillions and trillions of dead humans? Nuclear disasters and Robot Apocalypses—the Matrix, Terminator, Short Circuit, iRobot—seem outstandingly optimistic in retrospect: those who favor the domination of human beings by their mechanical counterparts are essentially saying that they can only be defeated by their own intellect, their own technological genius; it is arrogance at its most American. The Zombie Apocalypse is all the raw madness and wrongdoing of humanity rebounding upon itself in an immutably bloody pandemic even Will Smith can’t fight off. Zombies, all their purposes and visages and realities, are the gruesome truth: humans will be defeated and devoured by the irrepressible tidal wave of heir own dead punishing them for their ultimate sin against nature: intelligent life.
Like the Dark Ages, the Zombie Apocalypse will be an epoch of unlovely obliquity, made all the more horrifying by the corruption, erosion, and crumble of our vast concrete narcissus: civilization. It will start as it always has, with a sickness. The zombie outbreak begins with many discarded cases of people stuck in a death-like state in the autonomous regions of northwest China and West Africa. They are essentially dead bodies reanimated by an outside force (something we have yet to truly pinpoint). In African lore they are zombi (Haitian zonbi, North Mbundu nzumbe, Czech trouba, etc.): dead brought to life by a sorcerer and have no will of their own. The jiangshi of Chinese folklore move at night, killing living creatures to absorb their chi. All zombie stories hold a little bit of truth: zombies have no will of their own, but they do have knowledge of a purpose: to infect and to feed. Zombies eat brains, solely for sustenance (or chi); those whose brains are eaten do not become zombies, they just die. Conversely, in order to kill a zombie, one must blow out its brains. To infect, the walking dead must bite or scratch or tear, as is their instinct. What may be disappointing to fans of zombie horror films is that these creatures have no blood. No pumping blood, at least. They are corpses; all that would be left in the veins of older zombies would be crusty goo. Of course, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) are still more than worth a watch, but understand the biological limits of the walking dead.
At the heart of the zombie outbreak is not the opportunity to display unparalleled and inimitable gore in the movie theatres, but a fundamental paradigm of what humanity fears most: for long since the gloom of the Dark Ages, the human race has feared disorder. It is in the function and predictability of civilization that we find solace. Greed and corruption don’t inspire such primal terror as the walking dead because we expect them: we live with crime as the early Puritans did; in building society from the ground up, we construct first the government and then the prison, pillory, and graveyard. The enemy of our order and our holier-than-thou sense of superiority over all other natural life is our annihilation at the decaying hands of chaos. Seething with an animalistic rage against the human machine and a completely aberrant absence of fear, zombies are the plague that knocks humankind from its shiny ivory pedestal at last.
I’m sure the Zombie Apocalypse is open for interpretation, but I’m going to take a leaf from the pre-Reformation Catholic Church’s survival guide and say that if you don’t have the correct interpretation, you’re doomed. The virus that will destroy the homo sapien is imminent and unavoidable; the least you can do is appreciate the nature of this horrific crusade and show some respect.
♠ ♠ ♠
An article I wrote for the school newspaper. Unfortunately, I've been told to "dumb it down" for the masses before it'll print. Not illogical, I get it. Just, sort of disappointing, that's all.