Monstrous Mirrors of the Zombie Pandemic

Note: this is a lecture, to be published at a later date.
Please contact the author for any citations.

Monstrous Mirrors of the Zombie Pandemic

"The zombie again and again returns to this time just before the death of death, where - or when - the end of humanity functions as a vanishing point toward which the zombie shambles but never reaches."1

• Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz

"That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe."2 - Walter Benjamin

Introduction: All that refuses to stay dead

We are surrounded. Zombies are everywhere; ubiquitous in popular culture, in colloquial speech, an epidemic metaphor to refer to zombification from the mundane to spectacular. They are among us in various and multiple (re)incarnations of the brainseeking and the brain-dead, as the conditions of living death that (re)animate this monster continue onward, refusing to die. The surging specter of the zombie apocalypse in recent years has covered the media landscape in film, television, novels and comics, zombie comedies, videogames and endless home-made productions, internet applications and electronic media, while zombies have also shambled off-screen into theme parties and global public performances ${ }^{3}$, educational curricula from elementary to college levels, shooting target companies, survivalist groups preparing for the end of days, and training manuals by the Center for Disease Control ${ }^{4}$, private security corporations and counterterrorism scenario planning by the United States military ${ }^{5}$. The zombie has become so prevalent in our culture today that it certainly seems as if it has begun to stalk us in our waking life as well. Tongue-in-cheek zombie outbreak preparedness trainings are advertised as imparting real emergency skills for a fake apocalypse, offering transferable skill sets for natural and unnatural disasters. A mock-serious tone pervades zombie apocalypse warnings. Yet what does it mean when the CDC and US military get into the act? What are we incessantly joking-not-joking about?

As millions of people regularly enter into this mass fantasy via various routes, we are led back to ourselves. People of all ages are prompted to ask themselves and each

^[1]

other, “what would you do in the zombie apocalypse?”, repeatedly projecting ourselves into near-future dystopian scenarios of survival horror. The inexorable onslaught of zombie hordes represent the end of civilization as we know it, the total breakdown of human society, and the cannibalization of humanity. The explosive growth over the past decade of zombie apocalypse popularity functions as a dominant mythology ${ }^{6}$ of our time, a code for talking about the end of the world, a way to speak the unspeakable. Uncontainable viral infection in the zombie survival genre narrates bleak despair of, and cautious hope for, fundamental societal transformation. With terror and longing to be traumatically liberated from current conditions, a fictional enemy is repetitively summoned, one which subsumes anxieties surrounding the possible failure of social, economic, and technological networks. Dystopian visions come closer in time and space, not hundreds of years away on another planet, but the nearer and nearer future, a degree or moment away from here and now, just down the street, the day after tomorrow.

Monster stories can always tell us something meaningful about the society they come from. They do valuable work to embody the fears of a given age, revealing social repressions and prevailing cultural anxieties. “Monster” derives from the Latin monere, “omen” or “to warn”. What warnings or omens do approaching hordes of reanimated corpses signal to the living? Countless masses stumble towards us, a groaning, shuffling onslaught that raises buried histories, reflects dimensions of the present, and point to a future of certain destruction and uncertain possibility to re-start human civilization. “Initially, zombie movies shocked audiences with their unfamiliar images; today, however, they are even more shocking because of their familiarity.” ${ }^{7}$ This normalized familiarity, alternating between laughable brain-eating horror and renewed power to terrify in various media genres, needs to be rendered shocking. Zombies are monsters that (mostly) cannot speak. How can we listen to what they are saying with their wrecked, decaying physicality and their inevitable effects on the constructed environment?

The original meaning of apocalypse derives from the Greek apokalypsis, “lifting a veil”, “disclosure of knowledge”, or “revelation”. Alongside the widely understood meaning of the end of the world as we know it, the apocalypse that this once-human monster ushers in serves, time and time again, to reveal and warn against the deadening effects of modern life. ${ }^{8}$ For centuries, ancient cartographers included a monster region on maps, to demarcate areas of the unknown and unclassifiable. It now seems that zombies have gobbled up the map.

The zombie is historically tied to, and has been read alongside, the expansion of global capitalism, and the myriad anxieties associated with what is monstrous in an

^[1]

economic system "that seems designed to eat people whole"9. They vividly present the “‘human face’ of capitalist monstrosity” ${ }^{10}$, in its atomization within a larger group of alienated individuals or as the embodiment of flesh-eating systems of capital itself, heartless and insatiable, indifferent to human costs, “It is simply zombie - hungry, and hence focused on feeding and expanding regardless of the consequences.” ${ }^{11}$ The doomsday fascination with the zombie apocalypse surged in the first decade of the new millennium; popular infatuation with the undead reached new heights with the 2008 global economic crisis. Zombies’ blood-splattered mark on mass culture became so clear during 2008-09 that Time magazine declared zombies “the official monster of the recession.” ${ }^{12}$ Economist Paul Krugman labels “zombie economics” and “zombie ideologies” to refer to “policy ideas of the living dead”, defined as, "an idea that should have died long ago in the face of evidence that undermines its basic premise, but somehow keeps shambling along. ${ }^{13}$ No amount of logic can kill it.

As the “political unconscious” of an empire in decline, this omnipresent undead metaphor and increasingly normalized pop culture obsession speak to wide-ranging dimensions of the “non-human condition” of labor exploitation, unbridled consumerism, rampant militarism, networked neoliberalism and mundane unconscious routine. Zombies as threat and as comedy overlap as “monstrous placeholders” ${ }^{14}$ for an anomic society to release and rehearse fundamental tensions. The zombie apocalypse “speaks to some of the most puzzling elements of our sociohistorical moment, wherein many are trying to ascertain what lies in store for humanity after global capitalism, if anything.” ${ }^{15}$ In “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry noted the ubiquitous zombie is a "pessimistic but . . . appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for America in a global economy, where we feed off the products of the rest of the planet, and, alienated from our

^[1]

own humanity, stumble forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose. ${ }^{16}$ We can pose the question, is the zombie apocalypse what we are collectively imagining or what we are collectively seeing? Undead revenants from popular culture rather than monsters of folk belief, the zombie symbolizes for many Americans the current state of their own society and facilitates imagination of its eventual dissolution. "By forcing viewers to face their greatest fears concerning life and death, health and decay, freedom and enslavement, prosperity and destruction, the zombie narrative provides an insightful look into the darkest heart of modern society as it is now or as it might quickly become. ${ }^{17}$

The “blank and dead visage” of the zombie serves as a screen onto which perpetually shifting meanings can be cast, a “monstrous tabula rasa” whose enduring ability to materialize our shifting fears and anxieties serves to mobilize historically contingent social critique. ${ }^{18}$ Citing the sheer volume of zombie narratives in media as indicative of something more compelling and complex than a superficial trend, Kyle William Bishop observed, "[Z]ombie cinema is among the most culturally revealing and resonant fictions of the recent decade of unrest. The most telling barometer of this modern age, therefore, is to be found…in the unstoppable hordes of the zombie invasion narrative. ${ }^{19}$

This chapter interrogates the cultural work of zombie hordes, serving as endless rehearsal of the end. Normalized post-apocalyptic landscapes, and reflection of present non-fiction apocalyptic realities serve to process systemic social and environmental horror, economic crisis and decay. In this sense, the specter of mindless re-animated corpses, and the total societal breakdown they represent, simultaneously operate to embody realistic imaginations of the near-future, and to describe current conditions of living death. Often alternating between ironic humor and renewed power to terrify, diverse zombie fiction functions to bring apocalyptic anxieties intimately close while holding them at bay. Immersion in prolific undead fiction can steer us to nonfiction that is repressed or blocked from view. It is the monster that keeps returning.

Capitalist Hauntings

The corporeal figure of the zombie is devoid of memory yet infused with history. Zombies are the only canonical movie monster indigenous to the New World ${ }^{20}$. Unlike iconic European folklore monsters such as the werewolf and vampire, with established literary traditions before appearing in film, the modern zombie transitioned directly from

^[1]

folklore to the screen. The mythological origins of the zombie are rooted in Haitian voudou (known as “voodoo”) religion, a hybrid being that emerged from West African and Lower Congo beliefs of spirits, nzambi, zombé, which could become caught between worlds, trapped in a container, liminal beings not living or dead. Zombification was understood to be a reversible state of hypnosis under the control of a voudou practitioner who could work with spells or potions to make the living appear as dead, a form of mind control under direction by the zombie master. During era of the Transatlantic slave trade, the image of the zombi was adapted to the horrors that tore people from their communities, stripped them of their selves, reduced to laboring flesh for sale. Under the French occupation of Haiti, once the largest slave economy, the figure of the zombie was transmuted into figure of extreme reification, lacking personhood, condemned to endless plantation labor.

Zombie legends acquired their modern form during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-34), when US marines brutally deployed forced labor to build infrastructure, renewing the trope of the master who controls the animated dead. William Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island laid the template for the figure of the zombie to enter into American consciousness, describing voudou practices of Haitian culture, and eye-witness accounts of zombies as described in the chapter, “Dead Men Working in Cane Fields”. Soulless bodies were reputedly brought back from the dead by a priest or bocor and sent the sugar fields, raising the dead for incessant toil. Zombie stories circulated as a key lens to make sense of the colonial relationship between the US and Haiti, self and other, using sensationalistic and racist tropes of superstition and primitivism projected onto Haitian culture. As zombie legends took root in the US, they expressed imperialist anxieties associated with colonialism and slavery, fears of racial mixing and specters of white people becoming dominated through occult practices of zombification. Appearing in the American culture industry with films such as Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), the figure of the zombie may be understood in a postcolonial mode, as they revealed more about Western fears than Caribbean traditions and voudou beliefs and practices. "By allowing native voodoo priests to enslave white heroines, these inherently racist movies terrified Western viewers with the thing they likely dreaded most at that time: slave uprisings and reverse colonization. ${ }^{21}$ A perfect monster for the age, the zombie’s arrival in the US was linked both with the system of slavery and slave rebellion, as the Haitian Revolution of 1804 demonstrated a historic challenge to colonial economic structures.
"This view of the living dead, which entered the American culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s, carried a critical charge: the notion that capitalist society zombifies workers, reducing them to interchangeable beasts of burden, mere bodies for the expenditure of labor-time. ${ }^{22}$ While American audiences could watch zombie films that depicted the darkly magical “other”, this figure of a zombified worker held up a monstrous mirror to the loss of autonomy and freedom at home. Embodying mass

^[1]

mechanized labor, and reduction to pawns in larger forces that produced this frightening zombie condition of shuffling bread lines during severe economic depression.

Zombiism was first presented not as a disease but a reversible state, a hypnotized victim rendered a docile husk through occult practices. George A. Romero is credited with the permanent single-handed redirection of the depiction of zombies with his 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead, creating the distinct sub-genre of the cannibalistic horde, who replicate themselves through flesh-eating infection. Romero took “them” and made them “us”, eliminated the puppet master, and a new type of zombie was born, not located in another land or magical culture, but at home. Cannibalism, once projected onto the colonized Other, turned inward. Romero also bestowed the viral zombies’ one weakness: a shot or stab to the head. His 1978 follow-up film Dawn of the Dead shifted the earlier staging from private domesticity in a Pennsylvania farm house to public space, in the newly emerged structure of the public shopping mall. Embodying the hungry gaze capitalism directs towards humans and commodities, the re-cast zombie satirizes a consumer system collapsing under its own excess.

This juncture of images of the mindless worker and the mindless consumer lays bare the social and environmental violence of capitalist exploitation and accumulation. Forms of labor in megacorporations reproduce life-denying conditions for workers whose labor in turn makes cheap hyper-consumption possible. Amy Wilentz, in her article “A Zombie Is A Slave Forever”, invokes contemporary sweatshop labor, "There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. . . . The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much."23

The modern zombie cycle with Night of the Living Dead began on the eve of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, when images of death, violence and dismemberment were broadcast regularly in what became known as the “living room war”. "Americans identified with the film’s most shocking suggestion: death is random and without purpose. No one dies for the greater good or to further the survival of others. Instead, people die to feed faceless, ordinary America. ${ }^{24}$ America in zombie cinema is shown to be literally devouring itself, from the time of the Vietnam War to the present day. “Because the aftereffects of war, terrorism, and natural disasters so closely resemble the scenarios depicted by zombie cinema, such images of death and destruction have all the more power to check and terrify a population that has become otherwise jaded to more traditional horror films.” ${ }^{25}$

The emergent subgenre of the apocalyptic zombie invasion introduced by Romero’s Night of the Living Dead took inspiration from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel

^[1]

I Am Legend, which laid the blueprint for the undead narrative of a human minority confronting the mutant majority, and confronting one’s own mutated humanity in the process. Normal everyday surroundings are altered, with once-secure sites becoming claustrophobic, barricaded fortresses susceptible to imminent invasion. Indeed, "the primary details in Romero’s series of zombie films are in essence bland and ordinary, implying that such extraordinary events could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. ${ }^{26}$ The corporeal dimension of the zombie, turned into a collection of drives or instincts, with an incurably destroyed nervous system, shows victims as nothing but the meat, driven between hungry rage and catatonia. Carnality in zombie cinema and television utilizes hyper-graphic gore, with countless visions of the once-human eating other humans. In the popular zombie walks, flash mobs, and public performances in recent years, participants dress up as specific occupations and pastimes, zombie grooms and brides, cheerleaders, doctors, just as Romero depicted in his series, wearing the costumes of one’s former self, a reminder that “we are you”. Catastrophe inhabits intimate familiarity, mere degrees away. David McNally elucidates, "What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity, in other words, is its elusive everydayness, its apparently seamless integration into the banal and mundane rhythms of existence. ${ }^{27}$ Not a supernatural monster, zombies terrify not because of their otherness, but because of their uncanny resemblance to ourselves. The figure of the zombie horde relentlessly forces confrontation with the abject (Kristeva), the “me that is not me”, taboo elements of what has been rejected coming to light in a liminal space where the distinctions between life and death, self and other break down.

Apocalyptic narratives in which everyday people are irreversibly transformed into monsters allows for significant social critique. Kyle William Bishop, in American Zombie Gothic, noted, "By painfully illustrating the destruction of the social systems that have become so essential in the United States in the 1970s, Romero paints not a grim dystopian vision of how things might be but rather the way things already are., ${ }^{28}$ Characters in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead come to understand that zombies roaming the shopping mall act out of habit, reproducing the empty behaviors of their former, human selves. As the mall-trapped survivors gaze upon the moaning hordes scraping at display windows, one asks, “What the hell are they?” to which another responds matter of factly,

^[1]

“They’re us, that’s all.” ${ }^{29}$ Aalya Ahmed observes, from the late 1960s on, zombie movies could be read as critiques of what Naomi Klein has termed “disaster capitalism”; we are repeatedly shown how, in Ahmed’s words, "the zombie apocalypse stops the machine, but the machine’s effects clearly linger on in the survivors. ${ }^{330}$ The machine’s effects are brought into sharp relief against a backdrop of a busy world ground to a halt. This line between us and them, between the living dead and us, the “dying alive”, has enduringly served as a thought experiment on what is means to be human, to question this world we have created from the vantage point of its end.

Patrolling Boundaries of Self and Other

Zombies, as other popular monsters, are “difference made flesh”. Zombie narratives in popular culture reflect social anxiety about the breakdown of societal norms and the threat represented by “otherness”, often portrayed as unambiguous evil. The line between the infected and the uninfected is thin yet total. This manifest difference renders them eligible for destruction with impunity. Zombie fiction continues to reveal the lineage of enslavement, from Haitian history to modern warfare, including current enslavements of capitalism, governmental power and technology. The shift from zombie as corpse, possessed by a magical force through voodoo, to an infected, ‘enraged’ individual coded as a disease carrier, is significant.

Unresolved social violence makes itself known through zombie horror. What has resided in the public blind spot of denial comes into view. Sociologist Avery Gordon observed, " $[\mathrm{H}]$ aunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security). ${ }^{331}$ Like other body-snatching and blood-sucking creatures, zombies serve a dual function of terrifying and edifying us by exposing some disavowed truth about our world or ourselves. "Whether the eviscerated body on the evening news during the Vietnam War or the mindless consumption of goods in late capitalist society, the zombie has frequently embodied our socio-politico-ethical shortcomings. ${ }^{332}$ In response to public outrage of US military torture of Iraqis, former president Bush stated, “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values.” The zombie apocalypse haunts ${ }^{33}$ America’s post-9/11 imperial consciousness. With a

^[1]

journalism ban ${ }^{34}$ on showing flag-draped coffins, soldier’s funerals and the effects of bombing campaigns, zombies have arisen in greater numbers than ever before. It graphically depicts violent domination at home, as violent occupation abroad is abstractly justified as spreading freedom and democracy.

While the viral zombie of contagion narrative implicates everyone, the representation of body of the racialized colonial subject endures, in relation to contemporary realities. "The powerful have long marked oppressed populations as savage, frightening, and killable without guilt. ${ }^{35}$ In the common trope of the “killable horde”, the zombies of the film industry point to the fictionalized embodiment of the actual human multitudes that are deemed killable and ungrievable across the world. This necessitates a critical reading of familiarized images of “us and them” in the drifting, expanding overt and covert military operations towards who is currently deemed a threat, in a time of mass uprisings, food riots, upheaval and migration. All violence is rendered not only justifiable but desirable in the name of self-defense against bodies seen as uncontainably dangerous. The undead enemy does not require ethical consideration as to its humanity. "Against a zombie enemy, the West can feel justified in ruthless extermination, in self-defense. ${ }^{36}$ World War Z concludes on a graphic image that symbolizes the triumph of the global security forces over the planetary zombie epidemic: steep hills formed of massive piles of corpses. Gastón Gordillo observes, "The idea of calling this violence “a crime” is unthinkable. This is the one moment when Agamben’s ideas about “the state of exception” become tangibly real: when self-proclaimed civilized people condemn murder except when it involves a scary, dehumanized, hostile horde. ${ }^{37}$ The representational deployment of both zombie and virus in outbreak narratives serves to perpetuate an ethically and politically problematic logic of self-defense, spurred by fear.

Zombie genres constellate around a central axis of the terror/security paradigm: anxiety about constant threat and corollary urgency of security at any cost. In the long shadow of $9 / 11$, we have been inundated with messages about terrorist threats. Simultaneously the zombie has become a cultural icon, spawning countless iterations, its cultural oversaturation reinvigorated and recoded. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn presents the military as the ultimate zombie master, which trains soldiers to dehumanize themselves when in combat, whose subjects are terrorized by the actions of the dehumanized combatant. A recurring inquiry is the human cost at which security is gained in militarized survival. "True darkness located in a body that has lost its soul…the souls of the dead become
and enrichment, and obscure nighttime sites of forced labor circulate to describe the cultural economy of the global market system.
${ }^{34}$ This ban is a result of the Vietnam lesson of broadcast war violence eroding public support for war efforts.
${ }^{35}$ Gastón Gordillo, “The Killable Horde”, Space and Politics, Sept. 3, 2014
${ }^{36}$ Eric Hamako, “Zombie Orientals Ate My Brain!: Orientalism in Contemporary Zombie Stories,” in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on the Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, eds. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2011), 113.
${ }^{37}$ Gastón Gordillo, “The Killable Horde”, Space and Politics, Sept. 3, 2014

broken, torn away, and mercilessly disassembled to protect the soul of the nation. ${ }^{38}$ Concurrent with the “War on Terror”, huge numbers of people have participated in zombie apocalypse training scenarios, and immensely popular videogames, as our country experiences trauma at home and perpetrates trauma abroad in the name of selfdefense against a morphing enemy that is “everywhere” in an “endless war”. The viral zombie also evokes the terrorist, an “enraged corpse”, the imagined war on zombies paralleling the war on terror, against some constantly shifting Other, who can be anyone at any time.

Numerous film scholars have noted the parallel mirroring of the cinematographic blocking of the standard zombie attack with Hollywood’s long-standing depiction of Indian attacks in Westerns. A familiar representational formula of the savage other attacks the white heroes, who circle the wagons and shoot them dead. Some heroes are wounded, but the attack is repelled-though the attackers are not completely vanquished. ${ }^{39}$ In contrast, Native Studies scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy reverses this narrative to explain her use of The Walking Dead television series ${ }^{40}$ to teach Native studies courses, and elucidate intergenerational trauma of genocide from organized militias hunting Indians. "California Indians often refer to the Mission System and the California Gold Rush as ‘the end of the world’. What those survived experienced was both the ‘apocalypse’ and "post-apocalypse’. It was nothing short of zombies running around trying to kill them. ${ }^{341}$ She draws out the haunting question that arises multiple times in the series, “Do you think we can come back from this?”

Diverse zombie fiction continually explores the thin line between self and other, as draws it clearly, blurs it and questions the implications of its eventual erasure, through horror and humor. Humor can be evoked when it is impossible to distinguish between the zombie apocalypse and everyday life, as in the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, where the slacker protagonist Shaun stumbles through routine work as a electronics shop salesman and social life, deadening in its predictability. When the zombie outbreak is underway, he goes through the motions of his life, walking to the local store and back home, unaware that everyone around him has become zombified, as there is virtually no tangible distinction between mundane everyday of barely living and the reality of living death. Zombie cinema reveals an obsession with boundaries: us and them, what lies

^[1]

inside and outside the skin, inside the home and the outer world, the tension between quarantine and freedom, ethical lines of what separates us and renders us knowable.

Uncontainable Infection

There is an internet joke that all zombie movies begin with a man in a white lab coat assuring us “everything is under control”. Satirist Andy Borowitz, during the initial Ebola crisis, noted, "I don’t usually go in for conspiracy theories, but I believe that Ebola is a plot by a virus to prove that our government agencies are incompetent and our media idiotic. ${ }^{342}$ Indeed, this is what different strains of the zombie virus achieve in revealing to us time and time again. "The early modern paradigm for the human condition had a permanent place for plague - anxieties of collapse of familial, governmental, sacred institutions - essential elements present in the history of plague narratives and in modern zombie cinema. ${ }^{343}$ The social-realist vision of viral outbreak, whose aggressive spread quickly overwhelms the health, justice and military apparatuses, resulting in a rapid social breakdown so that only small pockets of survivors remain, serves as a recurring waking nightmare. The extremes of paranoid infection and body-panics reach biomedical climax in zombie outbreaks.

The narrator in Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009) offers the simple explanation, “Mad cow became mad person became mad zombie.” In the Resident Evil series, the root cause of the mutagenic t-Virus stems from the overreaching effects of corporate greed and militarism. The “rage virus” of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a film which contributed to the zombie renaissance, known as “the infection”, is a virulent, bloodborne virus that sends its hosts into a state of uncontrollable extreme rage. The mysterious zombie infection can be microbial, parasitic, a fungus that uses us as host ${ }^{44}$, even spreading via language mutation as in Pontypool. Zombiedom is defined as inherently biological state of being, as a type of illness or disease that needs varying periods of incubation. Drawing on early twenty-first century fears of a global pandemic (such as SARS, Avian flu, HIV, Ebola), biologizing the zombie reinforces its relation to infectious, microscopic life and the speed with which a globalized economy accelerates its travel. Identified by Priscilla Wald, the defining chronological features of the outbreak narrative formula, "begins with an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends

^[1]

with its containment. ${ }^{45}$ Whether the origins of the virus is attributed to vague extraterrestrial origins, hazy pseudoscientific mistakes, a wonder drug gone spectacularly wrong, or evil government machinations, the rapid effects of societal collapse are consistent staples of the genre.

Nearly all zombie films begin just after the outbreak has begun. Zombie movies are almost always set during or shortly after the apocalypse: established infrastructuresand the reassurances they can bring- cease to exist or crumble quickly amid obligatory scenes of disorder. Authorities who are looked to for protection or explanation themselves fall victim to the erupting mayhem and engulfing chaos. It is perhaps a core paradox that zombies, with their cultural identity as the slowest of monsters, are able to bring down society with such uncanny speed. Law enforcement, government, communications and electrical power systems cannot be relied upon, forcing survivors to dive into deep reservoirs of resilience and self-reliance. The embodied virus wreaks havoc on every institution humans have ever built. In plague and zombie narratives, we fear that the institutions holding our society together, often law, family, social norms, and belief in the sacred, will break down or reveal themselves to be false in the face of the catastrophic collapse of our consumer-based economic system. Reminding us indeed, that "All societies are constructions in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse. ${ }^{346}$ As the virus manifests in zombie bodies, unstoppable zombie hordes manifest the fragility of society. Zombie-wrought chaos metastasizes across the planet sending the repeated message is that no one is in charge of the world any longer.

With the invention of the electron microscope, the virus came fully into view, allowing the clinical gaze to penetrate deeper than ever before. Steven Pokornowski draws our attention to the intriguing historic connection between the Western interest in the zombie and the discovery of the virus in medicine. "A virus is not alive or dead. At nearly the same cultural moment, two invisible worlds emerged, each harboring a dangerous object that defied simple notions of life and death. ${ }^{347}$ Previously invisible worlds collided, and the visually elusive virus came to be manifest in the figure of the zombie embodying overlapping fears. Both the zombie and the microbe exist in the “zone of indistinction” (Agamben) between life that must be protected and the life that must be protected against. For the living audience, "The walking dead do not sit comfortably somewhere between a disembodied human essence and an infected embodiment but

^[1]

rather challenge the very existence of this divide. ${ }^{948}$, destroying the paradigmatic binaries that define the Cartesian model. The immune reaction protecting life slides into the autoimmune ${ }^{49}$ reaction destroying it; to secure life by dealing death is an established facet of zombie narratives.

We witness the fierce hope to maintain a grip on scientific rationality, as if the explanation will lead to the cure, to a justification, shreds of meaning, to an anchor of sanity. Central to this is the obsession with attempts to in zombie fiction there is an obsession with trying to understand the difference between our brains and zombie brains Dr. Edwin Jenner at the Center for Disease Control in The Walking Dead shows the group of survivors a recording of brain scans from “Test Subject 19”, during infection, death and zombified regeneration. Synapses are alight throughout the brain, then the frontal cortex is destroyed with a spreading darkness as the virus attacks, and the body dies, memory, identity, feeling are gone. He then fast-forwards to TS-19’s resurrection, “It restarts the brain?” a watcher asks. “Just the brain-stem,” Jenner corrects. "The human part - the you part - that doesn’t come back. ${ }^{550}$ The living are tissue with memory.

There is an obsession with marking how much time elapses after the outbreak, “Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “28 Hours Later”, “28 Days Later”, etc. The juxtaposition of markers of finite time with the shattering extent of societal collapse reveal the strength and speed of the virus. In 28 Days Later, a brief camera shot inside an apartment lingers on a fish tank, the water levels sunk low enough that the fish still swims, yet is barely covered. In the opening episode of The Walking Dead, protagonist Sheriff Rick Grimes is admitted to a hospital for a gunshot wound, we see a bouquet of flowers placed on his bedside table. When he emerges from his coma, the flowers have dried, and the world has irreversibly changed. 28 Days Later vividly depicts London under quarantine, its realism tangibly illustrating how easily this could happen. Fear hinges on the nearness of space and time, and the denial-breaking realizations that this new reality may not have an end. Jacques Derrida reminds us that, "Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by aggression that is ‘over and done with’."51

The recurring theme of total disintegration of the consumer-based economic system as a necessary prerequisite for new growth does not immediately translate into optimism about that new growth. Attempts to rebuild the social order may be as problematic as what they replace. Zombies both symbolize and destroy the flesh-eating machinery of manic accumulation and exploitation. In zombie narratives, as a contemporary spin on broader plague narratives, it may not be the specifics of an individual breakdown that are most important, but instead, "the very idea of breakdown,

^[1]

the dissolution of certainty and meaning that zombies represent. ${ }^{52}$ The “human” is closely bound up with language and time, "both of which seem to be disappearing, as we suffer widespread illiteracy and a mass forgetting of the past, thus we seem like zombies themselves to be slipping into a non-human aphasia and a monstrous timelessness. ${ }^{53}$ Hope also is shown to exist in these temporal frames, as we watch what happens when hope slowly rots or is dismembered, the rescue that never comes, the radio signal that goes dead, the crucial cure that fails, the answer for the cause of this catastrophe that leads nowhere. Memory becomes the shrinking island of the living.

Digital Shadows

Please wait while page is loading…
…Still working…
We live in the age of things “going viral”. In films such as 28 Days Later and World War Z, zombie swarms move at speeds impossible to battle, which may speak to the rapid rates of global infection, whether a biological pandemic, or computer viruses that can travel the world in superhuman time. ${ }^{54}$ The contagion outbreak of the mysterious zombie virus also allegorizes the hyper-speed of contemporary networked postmodernity. Indeed, the zombie’s undying power as monstrous mirror continues to satisfy a role for which is has been well suited since its inception: to serve as an abstract thought experiment - projected at first into religion, folklore, and then eventually into film, fiction, visual arts, and electronic media - for meditation on what it means to be human, now particularly amidst shifting notions of identity in the Internet age. For the Haitian peasant, zombification held the fear of becoming the one out of the many, for the networked digital subject, the fear may reside in transitioning from being the one to the many. As Collins and Bond argue, "Accustomed to instant communication with virtual strangers, insulated from the natural world and dependent on fragile transportation, communication and power networks, millennial audiences have good reason to fear the chaotic anonymity of zombies. ${ }^{55}$ A shambling, rotting corpse with no detectable intelligence, barely able to negotiate a set of stairs, and incapable of using a single tool seems a bizarre iconic villain for a technologically savvy, fast-paced generation. While

^[1]

films of robotic uprisings, sentient machines and artificial intelligence provide a forum to reflect on our techno-digital environment, zombie hordes represent the eradication of both our off- and online selves.

Zombie and cyborg cinema offer two dominant escape fantasies from current conditions, the breakdown of technology and the complete integration and assimilation into technology. As millions inhabit virtual realms, the figure of the zombie haunts the “evolved” cyborgian self-image of disembodied and “unfettered” consciousness, forcing engagement with bodies whose nervous systems are wiped blank, left only with a biologically amputated brain stem and singular unthinking drive. "We share a ‘blind corporeality’ with the zombie - and this fact dethrones a particular notion of the human as aligned with the intangible mind or soul as more-or less autonomous. ${ }^{56}$ It poses a direct challenge to the empowering but impossible fantasy of transhumanist disembodiment. This is the antithesis of the immaterial virtual ghostly body, a ‘body’ whose traditional corporeal boundaries are dissolved. As Martin Rogers provocatively argues:

Our film genres have become unstable because our conception of the body has become unstable: it is so thoroughly confused and implicated in the technological that body-horror and medical- or science-horror have become the same thing. Human consciousness is no longer solely figured through bodies. In the post-human world, the horror/sci-fi hybrid will visualize these transformational anxieties. Just as soldiers experience sensations from limbs long since amputated, the human body, amputated from its biological consciousness, will haunt the living information of self-aware technology. ${ }^{57}$
In the 2006 book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, author Max Brooks paints a future portrait: "In the new post-plague world order, practical survival skills eclipse the more rarefied expertise associated with a sophisticated but highly fragile information-based society found in developed nations before the war. ${ }^{58}$ Zombies are the physical shadow of the information era, and the apocalypse they wreak on a society dependent on digital infrastructure is the specter of total unplugging. No longer networked, what are we connected to? There are no selfies. No way to send updates on our latest activity. “When the dead rule the world, we will finally start living” is written on the back of every graphic novel in The Walking Dead series, informing readers "The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. ${ }^{59}$ Stumbling through a dreary, predictable life, the protagonist of zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead runs into an old friend who asks how it’s going, and he responds, “Oh you know, surviving.” Humor works in the film through the repetition of verbatim lines from pre- and post- apocalypse, showing the earlier zombification of daily life, and new life breathed into humans against the backdrop of imminent lethal danger.

^[1]

Covered in blood, still in his retail manager shirt, trying to save the life of loved ones, he runs into the same friend, is asked the same question, and responds, “Oh you know, surviving.” Traumatically liberated from a deadening existence, “surviving” takes on a more life-affirming meaning.

This theme of being “forced to start living”, forced to go outside to forage for basic necessities reveals another core dimension of this collective rehearsal of the future; zombies point us to the pre-historic and the post-human. On one level a mass huntergatherer fantasy, its sociohistorical popularity is significant at a time of unbridled corporate monopolies and seemingly inescapable privatization. Humans in this age of technology and automated routine labor are essentially zombies already. We already experience that loss of control, pulled on the strings of the digital bocors. Zombie fiction embodies our fear of loss of identity, even while the global zombie apocalypse continues to serve as the crucible for heroism and the testing ground for human values.

The zombie is an omnipresent reminder of viscerality and inescapable mortality, not virtual touches at a distance that collapse time and space, but dangerous touch that conveys infection, contamination, harm, death, disfigurement, mutilation. At a time of warfare approaching videogames, with remote-controlled drones, the obsession with upclose, indeed close enough to bite, battles is a graphic reminder of reality on the ground, not the view from above or beyond.

The Empty Highway

Zombie invasion narratives are closely tied to post-apocalyptic landscapes of destruction and regeneration. We are shown visions of a decaying built environment as nature takes it back, images of overgrowth and re-wilding, signaling the reduction of human control and predation. The term “mass extinction” is becoming commonplace in environmental reporting, forcing recognition of impacts on the planet that our zombieeconomy is rendering uninhabitable. At the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in The Walking Dead, Dr. Edwin Jenner refers to this outbreak as our “extinction event”. "We’ve never been here as a species and the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet. ${ }^{, 60}$ relates a recent news article titled, “Mass Extinction: It’s The End of the World As We Know It”, which could be the implicit subtitle of modern zombie films. Debates rage whether we are at a “point of no return”, as grave climate change nightmares are already here, with dire predictions for the future.

The zombie landscape juxtaposes vast emptiness and claustrophobic spaces. The iconic image of the empty highway illustrates the complete and literal stop of industrial civilization, frozen time, expansive space. Camera shots of urban and suburban landscapes show the earth taking over, growing through unmaintained cities, streets and homes, peacefully devouring artifacts of the built environment. ${ }^{61}$ In The Walking Dead and Zombieland, characters on a foraging run, the now familiar routine of life-risking search through depopulated ruins to find supplies, have revelatory moments confessing to themselves and each other, “I miss the noise”. Carol and Carl, in The Walking Dead

^[1]

reflect on the chronologically close yet unbridgeably distant past, sharing how much they used to long for peace and quiet in the “old days”; in the landscape of the zombie apocalypse, they would give anything to hear the sounds of human activity, of planes, of a rescue plane.

A peculiar relationship exists between this repetitive rehearsal of the sci-fi postapocalyptic future and our sci-non-fi apocalyptic present. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the economy based on the violent extraction of fossil fuels, resources and labor, is on a collision course with the ecological limits of the life-support systems of the planet. Embodying the death drive’s destructive energy, zombie hordes enact the necessary work of clearing away an outmoded way of life. At the same time, they create the path for epochal shifts previously unthinkable within the parameters of late capitalism. This catharsis via popular media may alternately enable a turning away from present conditions or act as a means to shatter denial regarding troubling forecasts that, “The ecological crisis is already feeding the historic dynamics of militarism, entrenched corporate power, and the systems of racism and oppression that have haunted the human family for generations.” ${ }^{62}$

Investigative journalist and outspoken critic of corporate globalization Naomi Klein, in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, reminds us that if we stay on the road called business as usual, life will continue to warm and change. Pointing to the hierarchical habits of mind that justify environmental destruction in the creation of wastelands and so-called “sacrifice zones”, sacrificial places and people are the “true costs” of capitalism’s death-cycle. At a recent conference in Oakland, California, Klein stated, "If neoliberalism is a car that enriches elites and stratifies the economy, then racial anxiety is the fuel. ${ }^{963}$ Zombies reside at the intersection of racial othering and economic violence. The capacity to write off the other is at the heart of our socioeconomic system rooted in the pursuit of short-term profits at any cost. Max Brooks states in The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection Against the Undead, "Conventional warfare is useless against these creatures, as is conventional thought. ${ }^{964}$ With zombies, we have created a pandemic that repeatedly confronts us with annihilation unless we radically shift.

Our culture’s use of an iconography of death and decay can be seen as a process to grapple with past and present horror, and apprehension of the future. How will “the machine linger on”? Longing for radical change and despairing of its potential, the paradoxes of the zombie obsession point to the entrenched hopelessness and profound desire at the heart of American empire. Ahmad states that the Z-generation popularity takes root in the zombie as a sign of "an unsated cultural appetite in the Global North for the type of radical transformations that a relatively affluent and politically complacent

^[1]

society cannot achieve. ${ }^{965}$ Radical transformations are however occurring, with the destabilization of climate, mass upheaval, spreading “dead zones” in the ocean due to chemical run-off and acidifcation, simultaneous desertification and “Biblical” floods. "Our lifetimes are witness to a slow-motion apocalypse - the gradual unraveling of the routines, expectations and institutions that comfort the privileged and define the status quo. ${ }^{966}$ What has been previously invisible in global capitalism is being seen in the natural environment.

The “eco-zombie” may be the genre’s most compelling emergent trend-the zombie reimagined as an avenger, infected with a biological agent from the earth, that refuses to accept environmental destruction and ultimately rids the earth of humans. ${ }^{67}$ “Greening” the zombie reads it as an ecological figure, “encoding the rift between humans and their natural environment perpetrated by capitalism, an economic system that centrally depends on the 'downgrading or devaluing of nature.” ${ }^{968}$ Lifting the veil that shrouds soul-crushing and ecocidal business as usual, zombies’ work is never done, it seems. The zombie apocalypse is a drastic “way out” of monstrous systems. The zombie pandemic evidences a desire to unplug and reboot. "Imagining the world as we know it collapsing around us gives us the opportunity to take a long look at what that dead world values and call it into question. ${ }^{969}$ As insightful and revelatory allegory, zombies both plague the living and reveal what plagues us. They paradoxically de-zombify humans, again and again, catapulting the living out of deadening routine and collective denial. The new millennium zombie apocalypse presents a humanizing challenge to audiences to become more fully “human”, reflective, cooperative, self-reliant.

Journey to apocalyptic landscapes guides us home after the credits roll, able to see the nearness of this vision, crawling through business as usual. Through zombie stories, we are not transported somewhere alien, we are where we are, arguably non-futuristic. This recurring mass fantasy can signal both a failure of the imagination and a summoning of the depths of our imagination to confront the apocalyptic non-fiction. Slavoj Zizek posed, “How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the planet, than a modest change in our economic order?” ${ }^{70}$ Ursula K. Le Guin, renowned science fiction writer, stated a recent award acceptance speech, "We live in capitalism. Its

^[1]

power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. ${ }^{971}$ She calls on fans of speculative fiction to become “Realists of a larger reality”, to imagine possibilities outside of what exists.

Blurring recent memory and real conditions of viral threats, myriad versions of the zombie pandemic tap into deep-seated fears of universal vulnerability, while holding them at a fictional, sometimes comical, distance. "In an America anxious over the fate of the social order, the zombie offers a talisman, a laughably horrific symbol about a fake apocalypse that keeps at bay real fears about social degeneration and collapse. ${ }^{972}$ Just as it seems the campiness gets old, the zombie invasion’s spell to terrify is reanimated. Zombies are the monster that keeps returning, again and again, to warn and remind, to horrify and reveal, to resurrect historical narratives that have been repressed in the cultural dialogue. “Do you think we come back from this?” is already the question circulating in the air. As this world is shown to unravel, what threads are we invited to pick up and begin weaving, from the remnants of the end?

^[1]