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<\/a>While the scenarios zombies force living characters to confront may seem tinged with moralistic shadows, it does not actually seem ambiguous or complex to me. Sure, characters may wring their hands over whether to put a bullet in a friend who has just been bitten — but when it really comes down to it, if survival is the name of the game, there is only one choice.<\/p>\n
The zombies are stripped completely of their humanity, rendered into feral inhuman beasts. So, again, when a character wrings their hands over whether there’s “any trace of them left in there” — we already know the answer and the outcome. There’s not any trace. They’re already gone, and either you will kill them or they will kill you. It’s an easy bullet to fire despite initial shock and reluctance. Moralistic deliberating is shelved in the interest of survival.<\/p>\n
For a genre that seems at first to be soaked in the postmodern, I’m surprised that zombies actually seem utterly black and white. We want ultimate bad, we want easy answers but tough, gory, wartime-esque survival story along the way. We want to be able to see mass destruction and zombies getting blown up without that tinge of moralistic guilt — finally, an enemy who really deserves it no matter what<\/em>. It doesn’t matter if Jane was a sweet lady when she was alive<\/em>. She’s a zombie now and it doesn’t matter.\u00a0One man for himself. Screw the system.<\/p>\n In\u00a0American Zombie Gothic<\/em>, Kyle Bishop presents zombies as “valuable cultural indictors” that “cathartically, yet perhaps more destructively,” re-create modern social anxieties on the screen. (26).<\/p>\n Watching the system and the public be torn to shreds is thrilling and satisfying and yes, many times cathartic. The zombie as monster does take on metaphors for our postmodern anxieties; they objectify our anxieties about mass infection, terrorist infiltration, the total destabilization of society — but it doesn’t offer any way to then channel those anxieties into something else<\/em>. How does our consumption of zombies as monster change the way we interact with the everyday, real monsters (institutionalized marginalization, Muslin bans, internment camps, the terrifying triumphs of neoliberalism, etc etc etc etc etc)?<\/p>\n If anything, zombie narratives render me even more hopeless to combat these corrupted systems. Zombies, as Kyle Bishop points out, remind us of our proximity to inevitable death. (American Zombie Gothic<\/em>, 21). So what’s the point of trying to change anything? Time to either become a brainless zombie or a gun wielding survivalist. It boils down to a morbid, delightfully easy choice — A or B — which is perhaps what we crave most growing up in a postmodern landscape with a multiplicity of choices.<\/p>\n In this way, I think zombies could actually be damaging to how we understand our individual influence in society and our perception of “the public.” The key to resistance and enacting social, institutional, and societal change don’t arise out of the landscapes destruction porn presents: the masturbatory\u00a0media equivalent of watered down anarchism (with all the flash but none of the well articulated socio-political theory).<\/p>\n So consuming zombies is really about consuming the easy way out of the system. It strains our social contracts to their breaking points. When those amorphous, tenuous contracts finally break — a sigh of relief! — release from the postmodern soup. The life then actually becomes very uncomplicated: survival. That’s it.<\/p>\n I understand how and why the zombie has become a powerful symbol. However, \u00a0I’m unimpressed by the quality of popular zombie works: it is destruction porn with vague societal commentary that barely rises above the horror visuals. The zombie medium has the potential to, as Jeffrey Cohen wrote in Monster Culture (Seven Theses)<\/em>, prompt us to reflect on how we interpret the world and “re-evaluate our cultural assumptions.” (20).<\/p>\n But the zombie only makes it half-way around to showing us the nature of our own society and what it could be instead; it get stuck in the reveling of destruction and the same old science fiction\/horror tropes Sontag critiqued. It’s a fantastical catharsis but doesn’t push us further. Show me more zombie content that goes beyond the cheap, easy shot of critiquing the “public” or “consumerism.”<\/p>\n The zombie needs to show us more meaningful messaging to be a truly powerful societal mirror and crucible of change. We already know we’re suffering, exploited by neoliberalism and overwhelmed by the postmodern condition —\u00a0now what do we do about<\/em>\u00a0it<\/em>?<\/p>\n The zombie narrative is about reveling in the destruction of all our institutions. Society collapses and what little life is left turns into raw survival. The military, law and order, or the police can’t save us; the government is in ruins; everyone you know and love is dead. You’re on your own. In this way, … <\/p>\n<\/a>