This is the age of zombies, vampires, dragons and superheroes. Among other examples of pop culture, it seems as if we have a perennial fascination with fantasy, and with stories that involve both mythical as well as supernatural elements. We may say that this is a longstanding impulse on our part, and it harks back, perhaps, to our very origins as a culture, when the first prototypical humans gathered in bands and flocked together on dark nights next to a fire after long and arduous days, bonding together and creating a sense of solidarity in the evocation of new and fantastic threats that lurked in the darkness.
Far be it for me to disassociate myself from the great
explosion of fan culture. I am well aware of how we tend to heed still that
primal impulse to gather together in communities, and to share these somewhat
guilty pleasures. I call them guilty pleasures because I am well aware that
there are, as always, other imperatives at play, and we all feel the pressures
of an ever more alienating economy that pits one group against another, and in
which we are all in thrall to hidden economic and political forces that exert
control over our lives.
We worry about the undead and about malevolent ghosts and
other phantoms, and we shiver when we consider stories that, at a certain
essential level, assert that we have less control over our lives than we would
like to believe. And this is true,
because our corporations have become much bigger and predatory than any
mythical monster come to life, and in an age when we eagerly await the release
of the latest version of the Godzilla mythos, we have to reflect that we should
fear more the influence of Google and Exxon and the major multinational
corporations that, in conjunction with our governments, constrict and constrain
us in so many ways.
And yet, if we express our fears and dismay at the workings
of an economy that seems to disassociate itself from the small scale community rituals
that bind us together (a band of hardy individuals can hardly hope to
counterbalance that tsunamis of cash and influence that corporations can
wield), we are accused of harboring quixotic impulses or, at worst, of being paranoid.
I wonder at how the Tea Party movement has retained so much of its energy and
influence, and has morphed into an ever more aggressive entity that panders to
our worst fears, where the country is envisioned as a virginal body that has
somehow been corrupted, infected with the supposedly godless ideology of the
post-enlightenment era, and where the cry of “socialist” and “liberal” greet
anyone who dares to express an opinion about the need to preserve a secular
culture that takes into account a tolerance for diversity.
What happened to the Occupy Wall Street movement? What
happened to the great mobilization of the other side, the one that was to mount
an impassioned defense of liberal democratic values, and provide a
counterbalance to the forces of militant corporate greed? It fizzled out all
too rapidly, and while the Tea party continues to foist their deadly brew on
the rest of the country, we have little in the way of mobilization on our part,
and we are more disillusioned than we have ever been.
I offer these reflections as a way to hopefully understand
the continuing appeal of these tropes of supernatural possession, of corruption
and of violent takeover. We live in a culture that is feeding on itself in ever
more deadly fashion, stripped away the flesh, and where gentility and
understanding seem to be narratives that are relegated to the proverbial trash
bin of history in the face of all the threats that supposedly confront us, from
militant Islam to Obama care. We are obsessed with necrosis, and is it any
wonder that the cable television series The Walking Dead is the most popular
show on television?
It is a continued source of fascination to reflect on the
appeal of this show. There are groups of fans that obsess on the latest
installments, and the post-apocalyptic landscape as a metaphor for contemporary
society seems to grow all the more powerful. Now, we have reflected on these
fantasies in the past, in the cautionary fables, for example, of H.G. Wells,
and his portrayal of far future societies that had changed in bizarre and
dangerous ways. I am referring, of course, to novels such as The Time Machine,
but also, to other works that were to become a staple of the science fiction of
the twentieth century, tales that reflected alienation and grand impersonal
forces at play. Works such as Zamiatin’s We, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World, or of course the enduring nightmare scenario of George Orwell’s’
political fables, Animal Farm and 1984. Destruction, whether sudden
or evolutionary, didn’t necessary prove hospitable to progressive and utopian
projects. Perhaps every utopia necessary carried with it the seeds of its own
destruction.
In the television series based on Robert Kirkman’s
illustrated stories, we have a United States of the near future that has
disintegrated into isolated bands of scared humans who try to cope with the
reality of a world where government no longer exists. This would seem very much
to be in accord with the desire of libertarians and the ideology of a nascent
liberalism that sought to encourage self-reliance without the interference of government.
But what we see is that these few survivors have become themselves infected
with a disease that is much more corrosive that the putative biological agent
that produces zombies. They have become paranoid, and desperate, and
incapacitated by fear. They are running scared, and the zombies are ever on the
point of closing in.
I was first attracted to this particular comic series by the
assertion that it represented a return to a gothic sensibility. It is one that
was popularized in the 18th century, and represented a response to
the certainties and the rational awakening that had accompanied the
Enlightenment. It was, as such, to be expected, for when had light (the
intellect) ever been completely successful in quashing the forces of darkness
(the irrational)?
In the gothic we have mysterious forces at play, and we have
dark and brooding locales, and we have eerily suggestive acts and the hint of
macabre secrets that we would do well to consider whether we wish to bring them
to light. And in the Walking Dead, we have the illustration once again of such
a sensibility, for we have abandoned buildings aplenty, haunted by the remains
of a once vibrant humanity, reduced to rotting flesh and ever ready to pounce
at us from behind a hidden door or counter, wordless creatures of infinite
appetite.
These are dark landscapes, and the sense of menace is
pervasive. The band of hardy survivors stands little chance of survival, and
indeed, they are picked off and winnowed in a steady fashion, because the
mystery remains: what caused this zombie apocalypse? Who created this virus or
parasite or biological agent that seems to have infected all of humanity, and
that lies like a latent and malevolent impulse that will assert itself
inexorably? Is it a judgment from on high, a plague that evolved naturally as a
manifestation of the dark and destructive processes of evolution, or maybe, a
weapon of mass destruction that was consciously crafted and opened, like a
Pandora’s box, to haunt humanity as a reminder of the dangers of hubris?
I watch the series, and on the one hand, I can’t help but
reflect on the logic of a show such as this one that captures many of the dark
fantasies that seem to haunt us as a culture. It is the idea of a rot that will
waste away even the best of intentions, and will reduce yearning and striving
and culture and civilization to the level of fatuous will o’ the wisps,
fantasies that can’t measure up and that are as much inconstant as unworkable.
Rick Grimes and his band of friends are facing long odds, and while there is
something inspiring about the fact that they continue to struggle, we all know
that they are doomed, for the apocalypse descended swiftly and in sure fashion,
and at least we know that the zombies themselves are not morally ambiguous, for
they manifest their appetite openly, while humans are just as craven and
murderous as the zombies, but hide these impulses in ways that are heightened
by these circumstances.
How is it that zombies are ever on the periphery, shambling
along endlessly, at times moving along in great and giant waves of putrefaction
and an endless need to consume, eat, infect and destroy? Are they metaphors for
the great cultural threats that haunt us in our modern world, and that need to
be vested in physical forms? We are haunted by zombies, by zombies, by the
ghost of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, that mute and haunted creature that is such as far cry from the eloquent monster of Mary Shelly's novel, and by the mute expression of an endless
appetite that seems to be the sine qua non of the 20th and 21st
centuries.
At times, I find myself quibbling at the vision that is
offered to us. Zombies, of course, seem to defy the laws of physical dynamics,
not to mention biology, and thus incorporate an element of fantasy. They are
impervious to gunshots, they can survive for months on end without food or
water, squirming and moaning and shambling along, and they can evidently
survive extremes of temperature, from heat to cold. They are well-nigh
indestructible, and even when torn apart or reduced to disembodied heads that
are displayed in macabre fashion in the aquarium that lined the Governor’s
hidden room, remain active, with muscles snapping jaws even when there would seem
to be no viable mechanism to explain the survival of organisms without the
complicated systems that accompany any living creature. They are, quite
frankly, the manifestation of our deepest fears, those that aren’t subject to
physical laws, and are instead nightmares that have been resuscitated.
We are a culture that would seem to be living in sunlight,
actively pursuing our careers, paying our mortgages and going on vacations and
waiting for college acceptance letters, but also, on a deeper level, we are
still riven by fear, and we wonder if all of this activity isn’t, ultimately,
futile. We have no vision to sustain us other than that offered by fear, and
metaphors of contagion, corruption, invasion and dismemberment seem to color
our collective consciousness. We are afraid to admit them openly, for to do so
would be to invite accusation of being irrational, but consumption in a
material culture quite evidently doesn’t seem to be enough.
Perhaps this is a way of saying that the zombies are us. We
are urged forward by irresistible impulses that we are barely able to
understand, and we obey because we hardly seem able to acknowledge and accept
the responsibility of creating. Everything has been commodified in a material
culture, and is it any wonder that we fear having become commodities ourselves,
we becoming the Soylent Green of the famous movie from the seventies, in which
humanity has devolved into a culture of haves and have-nots, and where ultimately
what the most logical proposition, as in Swift’s A Modest Proposal, is that the
poor should eat themselves? What can possible contain our ravenous hunger, when
the mavens and ideologues of capitalist culture, those materialists who are
loathe to acknowledge the contributions of Karl Marx while ironically using his
concepts are their fundamental precepts, assert that we are identified by our
appetites, by our patterns of consumption, by our unconscious need to consume?
The zombie is enjoying a heyday in this modern epoch. We in
the western world have spread this virus as a cultural trope that has seduced
the rest of the world in a way that was much more irresistible than any avian
flu that might come from the unsanitary and inhumane manufacturing enterprises in
any emerging Asian economy. We are ultimately consumed by memes, those cultural
tropes (concepts) that have a way of insidiously overwhelming us without our
knowing it, and we serve as the Petrie dish that allows these memes to multiply
and morph into ever more startling form.
Zombies are popular for a reason. They make for good drama,
for they point to states of crisis, and conflict, and desperate parables of
survival and the search for integrity. But ultimately we are awash in objects
and subject to unacknowledged urges, and we fear disintegration. While it might
be easy to dismiss a show such as The Walking Dead as just the latest example
of cultural flatulence, or escapism for those who need to purge themselves from
the stresses of modern society. But I think that there are connections to be
explored.
The apocalypse, in the sense of the hidden truth to be
revealed, the great unveiling, is just around the corner. It is a collective
urge that both fascinates as well as makes us shiver. In its next incarnation,
it may not take the form of zombies. But whatever form it does take, it does
seem to draw attention as always to the fact that there are obsessions that can’t
be easily purged, however much we may hope to slough them off like some
detritus to be removed and buried in vast landfills.
When Godzilla, or the latest guise of this fable of
destruction emerges, whether it take the form of a virus, or atomic war, or the
next collapse of the worldwide economy, or fracking and the contamination of
our soil, or the continuing and unrestrained reliance of carbon production to
fulfill our energy needs, or political extremism, I would say that we would do
well to look at the things we are burying. What is out of sight is never truly
out of mind.
Copyright (C) 2014 Oscar G. Romero
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