The flesh-eating zombie genre runs the gamut from the amateurishly banal to the disturbingly visceral as viewed through the prism of everything from comical self-parody to slick Hollywood “jump and holler Boo!” horror, but Romero was and is the master of taking the familiar and the commonplace and creeping the shit out of us by making it the backdrop for the disabling anxiety that emerges when friends, family and the fire department can no longer be relied upon to hold back the darkness. Being a frequently relapsed zombie movie junky, I have a fairly solid background in mindless cannibalism and often view confusing plots, bad dialog and gore as legitimate art (see http://toomuchfuzzylogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/planet-terror.html), but it is clearly not the fear of being eaten alive that drives the zombie box office; there is a much more toxic stew of psychological and sociological dysfunction at the heart of our fascination.
Starting with the Bible and running straight through to Dr. Strangelove and Mad Max, we have, as a culture, had an obsession with apocalypse for at least a few thousand years now. In fact, the peoples of the world will periodically get together and actually try to create one. Being social creatures like meerkats, dogs and ants, collective action is essential to our survival and we fear the loss of the support and protection of the pack. In a modern context this translates to panic over the loss of social order and structure and the mechanisms which theoretically shield us from violence, disease, starvation, boredom, flatulence and halitosis. We a
re afraid to be alone with no one to call because there is a lot of bad shit out there and we may need some help. Compounded by the primal fear of death, the ubiquitous distaste for anything rotting and our own deep suspicions about the reliability of our close associates, and even our own ability to control ourselves, the flesh-eating zombie neatly bundles a horror house of neuroses into one convenient, easy to swallow package.Because of the kaleidoscopic terror of the typical zombie, artists like George Romero can weave virtually any social observation into the fabric of their zombie apocalypse; for example, take the allegorical mid-life crisis zombie. This is the scene (patent pending); “the moon shines dull silver under the indistinguishable pattern of the decorative valances as the middle aged woman tosses restlessly in her middle class bed with shams on the pillows and her head filled with wisps of credit card bills, children, her fading beauty and a vague, formless fear. At some level deep below consciousness her mind knows that the rhythm of her husband’s breathing has changed and twenty-five years of normalcy is slowly being replaced by something foreign and sinister. She awakes suddenly from her restless sleep to find her husband standing by the bed silhouetted in the moonlight. His posture is odd, as if he were slowly deflating, and he sways slightly in time with the breeze in the curtains. Without knowing why, she is seized with a consuming urge to flee, but instead says, ‘honey, come back to bed.’ The man turns violently as if startled by her sudden presence, and she sees the vacant, soulless reflection in his eyes. She barely has time to scream as he snarls and lunges at her. The moonlight completely washes the red from the blood.”
Of course, this is what all too often happens when love goes zombie after twenty-five years of marriage. The woman wakes to find she no longer knows the man she is married to and begins to fear what he is capable of, and he, in fact, doesn’t even recognize himself or understand why he is now driven by numbing compulsions that he thought were long since buried. It is JUST like your spouse dying in the night and turning zombie before you can wake up and figure out what’s happened. And this is entirely the point; there’s a lot of zombie in all of us and George Romero knows it. From senseless rednecks to selfish manipulators to hysterical heroines, we all eventually succumb to the virus (or radiation, or chemical formula) and feed off our fellow humans without conscience or remorse. The zombie apocalypse is part of civilization’s genetic pedigree and is simply obscured for the common observer by religious ritual, crass commercialism and the comfortably inane flow of daily life. It is only when there is widespread breakdown of social order that the majority of people clearly reveal the mindless and relentless selfishness at their core, and the pathetic few fearless and giving among us are driven to exile and slowly and randomly eaten alive by the dull-witted masses.
The question that George Romero doesn’t ask or answer is, however, the one that plagues me. The Earth’s temperature is rising. Fossil fuels are being rapidly exhausted. The population is growing and the natural environment is collapsing under the strain. The sustainability of all human enterprise is being called into question. Relationships are being replaced by possessions and our intellectual lives consist of digital pabulum spoon fed to us by media overlords seven minutes at a time. We’ve never met our neighbors and cannot identify them as they come and go under cover of darkness. Our families are dispersed, our local businesses are consumed by corporate giants, and we must increasingly rely on total strangers to safeguard our wellbeing. We cower in fear of bird flu, swine flu, chemical terrorism, nuclear terrorism, biological terrorism, teenagers, minorities, random violence, economic disaster, natural disaster, war, famine, offensive body odor, erectile dysfunction, sunspots, asteroids, boll weevils, acne and pandemic rectal itch. So George, and those of you diligently preparing for the inevitable, when the zombie apocalypse descends upon us, will we even notice it?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment