The
ever-changing currents of a nation's cultural fibre,
social mindset and mass psychology can often be traced
by engaging in an in-depth examination of the popular
culture prevalent at any given point in time.
Oftentimes, fictional pieces, whether in magazine, novel/novela,
musical/opera, movie or television show, when created
during said period of time can often reveal more
about mindset of contemporaries than most nonfictional
accounts, even those written during the time period in
question by so-called cultural observers and academics.
A poor, 1880s-era, B-grade novel from Great Britain
about some fictional character living in the ancient
Roman Empire can sometimes and in some ways tell you
more about Victorian Britain than it can about the
realities of ancient Rome. Further, it can often tell
you more about the lives and concerns of Victorians than
a modern non-fictional account, or modern fictional
account of this time period could. Not always, but often.
When
we look at movies and cultural themes, I am struck by
the prevalence of zombie movies and novels. They are
exploding all over the place. I have read World War Z,
the Zombie Survival Handbook, seen all the various Night
of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, 28 Days Later, Omega Man,
and various spinoff undead films, played video games
like Left for Dead and Resident Evil. I notice that
various survivalists and military-minded people
interested in spacial and situational/circumstantial
strategy are also falling in love with the genre,
publishing a myriad of underground, "what-if" e-novels
and short stories online. What will literary analysts
think, 100 or 200 years from now when they analyze this
current trend in American culture? What does it say
about us?
Already, today, numerous cultural scholars look at the
UFO/Space Alien/Flying Saucer science fiction films of
the 1950s and 1960s, interested not so much in the "art"
and message of such movies, but rather for what they
unwittingly communicate to us, across the span of time,
about the collective unconscious of Post-War, early Cold
War America. These films are filled with a sense of
dread of being vaporized by a clever, sinister,
technologically advanced "other." These "aliens" would
rain fire from the sky, turn neighbor against neighbor.
They would either "take over" through overt, high-tech
Holocaust from the sky or through unconventional, covert
subversive body-snatching tactics from within. The
heroes of these stories were standup, clean-cut
Americans, often youth consisting of a few athletic farm
boys and some buxom female classmates, who not only had
to save their friends and loved ones, but their local
communities and entire nation as well. Often, the fate
of the entire world rested in the hands of a handful of
rural American youth, an image and idea they were not
uncomfortable imagining.
Clearly, these directors and writers were unconsciously
betraying their own period-based anxieties, namely, the
collective paranoia Americans felt during the early
stages of the Cold War, where fears of nuclear
annihilation, Soviet invasion, World War 3, and secret
Communist subversion through spies, cells and
"brainwashing" were endemic. They also betray the Don
Quixote-style American mythos, where a handful of
zealously upright, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant youth
save the nation and the world from errors brought about
through society's selfish ignorance (failure to take
notice of the alien threat until it was too late to stop
it).
Clearly, these period pieces tell us more about
Americans during this period then they do about Aliens.
How does the Zombie genre differ from Cold War UFO/Space
Alien movies? What does the Zombie genre tell us about
the current mindset of Americans?
In
terms of the differences, first-off, the Zombie films
show a "before-and-after" snapshot of society. They show
society before the "outbreak" and society after the
outbreak. The pre-outbreak society they depict is one
that has reached the utmost limits of utopian
prosperity, tolerance, unity and goodness. A world where
everything is possible and where science and personal
freedom of the most intense sort, reign free. Cold War
UFO/Flying Saucer films show a calm, peaceful life in
both the urban and rural settings, but there is no
pretense of utopia, only the hope that we may one day
get there, through our own hard work, provided that
everybody knows their place, works hard, and is able to
root-out and identify hidden enemies among us who may
prevent us from getting to the promised land. In this
sense, Zion has yet to come for the heroes of 1950s
Flying Saucer films, whereas in the Zombie genre, we are
already in the Promised Land and for many of us, despite
being awash in milk and honey, it is not all that it was
held up to be. There is a pervasive sense of
disappointment, that the JFK-style "ask not what your
country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country" hopeful promises of prior generations were
misleading and that everybody is awakening to a giant
sense of reality-shock.
Second, in the Zombie genre the Apocalypse comes about
precisely because of Utopia. As with Milton, Paradise is
Lost not from without, but from within. The
freedom-seeking masses become licentious, reckless and
careless. When mixed with the poorly understood
scientific tools at their disposal, careless civilians
or scientists too weak to withstand the influences of
the reckless culture about them, disaster is inevitable.
This is quite unlike the UFO/Flying Saucer genre, where
catastrophe is caused not through the affirmative acts
of actual Americans, but through the affirmative acts of
the inherently evil "other." For the Flying Saucer genre
of the 1950s, the only "sin" Americans are guilty of
committing is not being vigilant enough in preventing
the catastrophe, and perhaps, of lacking the bravery and
fortitude needed in confronting it once it rears its
ugly head.
Third,
the Zombie films depict a world that is totally
destroyed from within, rather than from without. No
invasion or enemy attack caused apocalypse. No
Seven-Horned, foreign communist beast caused this Book
of Revelation. There is no external enemy (whether from
Mars or Moscow), no Doomsday Weapons killing us from the
sky, no foreign armies or ships; no external designs by
a sentient, thinking "other." Rather, the Zombie films
depict an anarchy of sorts. They show us a world where
law and order have totally collapsed. Where humanity
itself has become the enemy, turned into an unthinking,
uncivilized, animalistic mass of hungry, voracious
beasts. Creatures that resemble the "humans" they once
were, but who cannot control themselves, who victimize
friend and family alike without any ability to think or
ponder the nature, cause or consequences of their
actions.
We see
a virus or gas, a toxin of some sort spread through the
population. We see civilization grinding to a halt, as
everybody either turns into a zombie, flees the zombies,
or gets killed and/or eaten by zombies. The police stop
functioning. Water and electric stop running. No more
TV, no more telephones. No more mass communication. Mobs
of angry zombies running through the streets, like
guerillas in Mogadishu, Somalia, looking for innocent
American victims to prey upon.
We see
the horrifying consequences of internal unrest, anarchy,
mob violence (by zombies themselves, the surviving
military establishment which tries to enact martial law,
or by various lumpenproletariot who survive, due to
their close-knit social ties and weaponry and form gangs
to survive), a sort of Lord of the Flies situation gone
haywire in a much more sinister and more threatening
way. Unlike the UFO/Flying Saucer movies of yesteryear,
in the Zombie films, the enemy is us. The enemy is our
neighbor, our loved ones, the family down the block.
Nobody can be relied upon. Nobody can save you, neither
the government, the police, the army or the Church.
Fourth, unlike the UFO/Flying Saucer kitsch of the
1950s, where the heroes eventually triumphed, the good
guys often die in the Zombie films. The zombies, more
often than not, win. They take over, aside from a few
hold-outs of normal human beings surviving in scattered
rooftop dwellings and fortified outposts in remote
areas. Rather than usher in a new golden age, a New Dark
Age emerges, one where the good guys, like the
shell-shocked Europeans of the Dark Ages (where the
collapse of Rome created a massively brutal and anarchic
power vacuum in Western Europe) they hunker down, adopt
a militaristic siege mentality and surround their
community with high walls and fortifications. Utopia is
dead and so is any lingering sense of hope.
Militia-style survivalists thrive and seem to be the
only ones in this genre who "make it" out of the
wilderness of anarchy, who survive, and who have the
tools at their disposal to create civilization anew.
Fifth,
the Zombie movies glorify a hyper cynical, nihilistic
sort of individualism that would have embarassed the
John Wayne style heroes in the 1950s flying saucer
films. America in the 1950s was, despite all the
rhetoric of hyper-individualism, a pretty communitarian,
group-based society. Most of the men were military
veterans, served in either World War Two or Korea and
had the inherent comraderie, team-effort, platoon-based
mindset that inevitably forms after such large military
undertakings. As General Patton once said, and George C.
Scott immortalized in a movie about the famous general:
"An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights
as a team. This individuality stuff is pure horse shit.
The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for
the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real
fighting under fire than they know about fucking!"
Clearly, the Greatest Generations were more
communitarian and group-oriented than their
anti-communist rhetoric implied. Regardless, they
brought this group/team based mindset with them to the
corporate amd athletic arenas and it permeated American
culture. Teamwork and the group were king and it was
reflected in the flying saucer movies. Teams of youth,
working together, beat the bad guys. In the Zombie
genre, it is an anti-group, anti-person,
anti-communitarian uber-survivalist, armed with guns
galore and fired up on Ayn Rand that wins the day.
Hatred and mistrust of the group and a stubborn refusal
to enter teams and form alliances are what keeps these
anti-heroes alive. Those who put family, friends,
community and country first, tend to get eaten and
killed by the zombies. In the zombie films, the only
person you can rely upon is yourself.
What
does the Zombie Genre tell us about modern America? For
starters, it tells us that there is an overwhelming
sense of frustration, that the promises of our parents
and grandparents about the potential and future of
America were, perhaps, not grounded in reality. That we
will never reach the promised land.
It
also tells us that our real underlying fears today
aren't of some evil foreign aggressor, even a hidden
enemy like Osama Bin Laden, but instead, of the
overwhelming and totally enveloping spectre of
loneliness, of being alone, without friends and family,
surrounded by a world that is alien to you and, for all
intents and purposes, objectifies you and sees you as
something to "use" or consume. It shows us our
disconnect from other.
These
films also show us our growing anxiety over lawlessness.
The images of failed states saturate the
air-waves. Images of cities that have ceased
functioning, like Sarajevo, Grozny, Mogadishu, and
Haiti after the earthquake, like New Orleans after
Katrina and Los Angeles during the riots of 1992. A
growing sense, awareness of, and sense of powerlessness
in regard to a growing section of society that is
anarchic and lawless and ruled by gangs, of growing
poverty, a growing Lumpenproletariot and concomitant
demise of the middle class. Isolated islands of humane
civility taking refuge in a growing and ominous ocean of
predatory anarchy.
Perhaps it is gives us hidden insight on the mass
psychology of late 20th century/early 21st century white
Americans and Europeans, their objective and subjective
fear of imminent demographic decline, the latent fears
of a people who, in 1920, comprised 35% of the world's
population but who, due to 2 world wars and 30 years of
negative replacement rates, now comprise no more than
10% of the world's population. The demographic vacuum
left by such a state of affairs has led to massive Third
World immigration to both the United States and Canada,
with rising tides of xenophobia and neofascism arising
as a result. Could the Zombie films be an unconscious,
outward manifestation of modern white racism? A racism
that serves, rather than justifying the offensive acts
of colonialism, slavery and imperialism of yesterday,
but as a defensive, psychological reaction that
illuminates their current demographic decline and
simultaneous Third World immigration rates? I am not the
first who has detected the imagery of racial and
class-based stereotypes in the genre. That being said,
this genre is also popular in Japan and South Korea, but
then again, they, too, are facing similar demographic
decline and a massive influx of replacement labor from
abroad, immigrants who are causing a xenophobic backlash
similar to that currently seen in the U.S. and Europe.
They
also show us the perilous degree to which
hyper-individualism has taken root and the hypocrisy it
causes even within our own psyche. The zombies are a
group, but they do not act collectively. They are an
unruly mob of mass-consuming individuals. Clearly, from
a tactical perspective, collective action such as that
utilized by a military platoon or battalion could
eliminate many of these ghouls. However, the genre
doesn't uphold this. The genre views the zombies as
representatives of "groupism" and "collectivism," even
though, logically, this is not what they are. If
anything, they represent selfishness gone awry.
Regardless, the genre shows us that hardcore
individualists are the only ones who can survive,
showing us, perhaps, that this is the instinct prevalent
in the hearts and minds of countless modern folks in the
West. This is sad, because it is counterproductive. The
way to combat the hungry, materialistic atomized
horde/mob of mindless animalistic consumers is not to
isolate yourself and become atomized as a result. The
solution is teamwork, like that which our WW2-era
grandpas knew only too well. A major insight the zombie
genre gives us is how Americans today are trying to
solve the problem of hyper-individualism and
atomization/disconnectedness, by employing more
hyper-individualism, which invariably causes more
atomization, disconnectedness, loneliness and despair
and makes one more suceptible to the emotional
vacuousness of mass media, advertising, rank materialism
and all the other false-prophets of modern society. We
solve the problem, in this genre, by employing solutions
that exacerbate the very things that created the problem
to begin with. In a sense, then, the genre illuminates
the self-referential, self-sustaining and cyclical
nature of many modern social ills, how culture can
create and reinforce the the very things that will,
invariably, destroy said culture.
Taoist/Dialectical philosophy aside, the mass,
nationalist-inspired paranoid fantasies such as those
depicted in Cold War flying saucer films are normal,
perhaps even healthy indications of a vibrant
tribalistic society. They are outward manifestations,
through art, that display that such a society has a
"will to survive," that it can identify its perceived
"enemy," and wants to subconsciously mobilize the "us"
to fight the "them." Many native American/Plains
Indian chants, rituals and war-dances served the same
function. While they purported to be about a religious
or fictional event or story, they had the sociological
function of forming group cohesion and preparing them
for the challenge of competing with neighboring tribes
over mates, food, horses and choice camping grounds.
This sort of thing is a natural sociological phenomena
and has occured with great frequency in every culture
throughout world history.
What
we are seeing with the Zombie Genre is something
different. They portray the fears of a society and
culture collapsing, imploding in on itself. I am pretty
well-read and have strong research skills. Cultural
phenomena like that displayed by the Zombie Genre is
something that hasn't occured in cultural history with
great frequency. Apocalyptic imagery, when it has
occurred, has usually taken place simultaneously with
great religious and spiritual revivals, with all the
good and bad that often trails in their wake, such as
that which we saw with the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation
and the various Great Awakenings. We also saw similar
phenomena during the European Middle Ages when the year
999 became the year 1000 or whenever a new century was
about to pass. We saw this with Y2K, albeit to a very
faint degree. We see this, to some degree, with modern
Christian Fundamentalists in the United States who talk
of the "end times" and the "rapture," in all their books
and the novels from the "Left Behind" series, a
sentiment that reached its height during the late 1990s
and was co-mingled, to a certain extent, with hatred of
Bill Clinton, liberals, the United Nations and the New
World Order, as well as a love of survivalism. This, too,
is something the zombie films have in common with
American sectarian eschatology: an obsession with John
Wayne-style, Waco-style, Ruby Ridge-style survivalists,
holding out for Ragnarok or whatever currently
fashionable word they use to describe the collapse of
civilization.
These
are all part of the same mass psychological phenomena,
but that being said, it is not a cultural constant. The
zombie films depict uniquely modern secular fears and
anxieties in the West. Perhaps religious fears of the
end times, throughout history, were merely
manifestations of this inner secular fear and anxiety?
Perhaps these inner, natural, social and psychological
fears were merely articulated in religious phraseology
and rhetoric, because earlier European and American
societies were less advanced and only had the rhetoric
of religion with which to describe their inner-fears?
Who
knows. All I can be certain of is that the Zombie Genre
is unique to our time and it will play no small part in
the studies of future historians, social and literary
commentators when they try to discern and analyze the
the psychological and cultural preoccupations of late
20th and early 21st century Westerners.
