When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall…
-Possessed, “No More Room In Hell”, quoting “Dawn of the Dead”
…not be able to catch a train anymore on account of they’re too small, you idiot!
-The Guardian, quoting @pixelatedboat, misquoting “1984”
At the heart of so much lowbrow Orwelliana (including the master himself) lies an identical fault: biased, hypothetical fear of totalitarianism. Dystopian fiction and its popularity is a misfire of the fear that we’re already oppressed. We the American, the Mexican? No, every single person with the resources to read this, and then some.
There’s this Tumblr post I won’t bother to dig up, accusing white people of getting too comfortable aestheticizing cannibalism, which has been historically crucial to the myth of the black savage. While these false charges and their consequences are fact, other groups that have suffered the legal, even deadly repercussions of cannibal allegations include Jews, early Christians, Turkomen, Scots, North Koreans, drug users and Satanists (so queers).
These accusations are not aracial, not anymore. We live in a racist world and must examine everything through the lens of race. But they are pre-racial. They predate the modern conception of race, pointing to a more essential goal of civilization: demonizing the outgroup. By law of POSIWID, outgrouping is just about the only purpose common to all societies throughout history.
Back in film school, a teacher asked me what zombie movies represent. My amateur answer was ‘fear of society collapsing’. Now I understand zombie movies are society working as intended. Night of the Living Dead has received a multitude of thematic analysis. It’s about racism, the Cold War, Vietnam, mass media, even a precocious environmentalism. Chief among these is Dr. Kim Paffenroth’s assertion that, in breaking away from the Haitian voodoo zombie’s master-slave relation, Night instead evokes abjection, the inability to distinguish dirt from cleanliness. But the standard of cleanliness is social, and cannibalism is one of the great unclean acts. Zombie survivors are not perceiving abjection, they are subject to abjection.
‘Zombie’ was not the nomenclature used in Night, nor was it avowed by George Romero, who insisted he was making something ‘new’. Exasperation at being lumped in with the zombie crowd is entangled with the origin of the cinema zombie itself. Undead infection was likely pioneered by Romero’s inspiration, the I Am Legend novel. Failure to escape the ingroup has two potential outcomes. They bite virulently or they bite out your braaaaaains. You will think like them or not think at all.
Overlarge awareness of this leads to tortuous self-parody. Don’t call them zombies. Call them ‘infected’, because duh. Call them ‘walkers’, because they walk, unlike humans. Pontypool, otherwise a victory of low-budget filmmaking with a novel approach to the mechanics of zombification, begs you call them ‘conversationalists’.
Such catastrophic overcorrection does mean there’s something to correct. The illustrious ranks of media that still uses the Z-word includes the Brad Pitt World War Z, a tale of American heroism about defending South Korea and Israel, and Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, where a squad of international Hitlers mow down suspiciously dark-skinned hordes.
Target audience? A pretty trick of individualism. Even if our society, like the rest, is about the ingroup, everyone believes they’re in the outgroup. Note how quickly the emergence of the alpha male concept cued the autofellation of the sigma, who stands beyond the wolfpack instead of above it. Somehow the theoretical benefits of abandoning society are identical to those of winning society. That plus a tendentious sense of superiority.
So the modern zombie hero is the badass. Everyone loves Train to Busan, a bog-standard fast-zombies movie, because it has a badass dad (all the blockbusters are about dads now -- don’t laugh!). Dadliness here is just the trigger enabling latent badassery. You are one excuse away from casting off the shackles of society, and this would make you harder and better than the ingroup, instead of sickly and wild and paranoid.
An individual convinced that they’re outgrouped is vulnerable to fraternalization from someone else claiming outgrouping, even if that person is, for example, a Forbes broker, or a president. This is the west’s final form. Infectees hiding their bitemarks, convincing you to look the other way so they can pounce on your braaaains.
Whether this pandemic of confusion is more effective as a tool of social control than what preceded it, I don’t know. Certainly I doubt such a world will last. The opposite of a zombie movie is a disaster movie, a civilization under threat from without instead of within. Zombies and disasters have a yin-yang popularity cycle, and disasters are on the uptick. While the leaders of the G20 are red-knuckled with sinorussophobia, what’s killing the world is, simply, Twisters. And then there will be no more room in hell.