Zombies again

I knew posting about zombies would hit a nerve. Ben Graber responds to my post about zombies. The remainder of this post comes from Graber:

I would venture a guess that the current interest in zombies reflects a mood that’s been well documented over the last decade. First, the state of perpetual and potentially interminable warfare since 2001 has drawn a whole host of comparisons, both implicit and explicit, to the Vietnam era. In that respect, the basic theme of Night – the terror of being a small island of genuine personality amid a sea of voracious “consumers” – resonated once again with dissenters in the Bush years who felt oppressed by popular sentiment as well as threatened by their government (see Night’ ‘s ending). Related to this and, I think, more universal, is the fantasy of a conflict that is everything the War on Terror has not been. Zombies are dead; killing them generally involves no moral repercussions. They are not intelligent and thus unable to turn the war into a morass of guerrilla skirmishes with no endgame. It’s a war in which the only question is how to survive, not why we are fighting.

As a response to contemporary culture, I think the zombie fascination is much more reflective of anxiety about what “we” have become than what “they” are doing to us – that is to say, the image of mindlessly, compulsively consuming automatons bears much more resemblance in the contemporary mind to the Western middle class than to migrants or the global poor. A zombie apocalypse is a chance to fantasize about what sparks of humanity are left beneath this lifestyle, to hope we have not lost the will to survive and overcome catastrophe. It’s an intriguing thought experiment for the individual: what would I do if I woke up tomorrow and dead people were walking around devouring the living? What would be my strategy? What resources could I employ? Where would I go, and what sort of life would I make for myself in the absence of every familiar convenience and security? Can I really do without all this stuff? In that way, it’s a fantasy, just as much as any shipwreck tale, of being rid of the clutter of mundane Western affluence and living by one’s wits and resourcefulness, of starting over.

Vampires and werewolves and slashers are all very well, but zombies are apocalyptic, a potentially global plague, and we’re in an era in which our fears run to global catastrophe. We’re wondering what will become of us, whether there will be a remnant when everything comes crashing down. Zombie stories are how we think through those questions out loud.