Tropemongering 405: Zombies, post-colonialism and the specter of the Other
I was thinking this morning, while I was slaughtering an undead foe in one of the many games that allows you to do so, how viscerally satisfying and even righteous it feels to destroy zombies and other risen dead. It occurred to me then, as it has before, that there is probably something to that - something fundamentally hardwired into our minds that inspires the gut-level loathing and terror that humans feel regarding zombies.
On the other hand, zombies are so overdone that I can barely stand to see movies about them anymore, much less engage in a conversation on the topic. The popularity of zombie media has divorced the concept from the powerful roots it has in deep cultural and psychological phobias and made it banal and safe.
Above: The Twilightification of Zombies
There are no shortage of words spilled furiously from frothing mouths about the diluting of zombie media, but that's not what I'm trying to express here, or at least not exactly.
This wired article points out the ways that zombie movies reflect the fears of a generation. Zombies can easily placed in a contemporary framework to become a metaphor/cathartic vehicle for communism, nuclear holocaust, global pandemics, terrorism, etc - whatever the current bugaboo might be. Romero's zombies reveal the dark, dystopian hopelessness of the Cold War generation. The terrifying, urban, fast zombies from 28 Days Later revitalize the foe and make them relevant and newly horrible in a post-9/11 world. The Walking Dead reveals, if nothing else, how passé zombies are by ignoring them completely in favor of incredibly bland character conflicts.
Above: Desperate Housewives with zombie extras.
The wired article, however, is a victim of its pop-culture roots, and fails to go far enough. Yes, zombies reflect the conscious fears of a generation, but they also reflect our dark, hidden terrors, and this is the ugly side of zombie media that goes unexamined.
Relative unknown Kyle Bishop argued in his dissertation that the zombie as foe was born out of the poorly remembered 1932 film White Zombie, as you might guess by the title, was a cinematic monstrosity born of imperialism, racism and xenophobia. Building on the real-life roots of the Haitain vodou zombie, White Zombie pins on the constructed Other of the Haitain witch doctor all of the west's fears about race, miscegenation, popular uprisings, paganism and witchcraft. America has never shaken its fear of the slave uprising, even well after the end of slavery. As Bishop says, "âThe zombie is, essentially, a colonial creation where the greatest fear is of a monster, a slavelike creature, and that those who had been enslaved would rise up and impose power on us."
Above: "The real crime here isn't that they're going to eat our brains, it's that they're doing it while black."
The racist tendencies of zombie media have been well documented, and while I do love to attribute sub-conscious imperialist notions wherever I can, I think that Bishop's dissertation is also missing the point.
Zombies may have their roots in racist Otherizing of Haitain religious traditions, but the undead have persisted through the ostensible end of imperialism, through the Cold War into a post 9/11 America. There is something even more pervasive than culturally embedded racism and xenophobia at work here.
I believe the zombie is a psychologically grounded ur-Other, the Platonic ideal of 'that-which-is-not-us' [in this case 'us' being the nebulous zeitgeist of 'the West' or 'America']. Zombies embody all of our fears, from benign to horrible, and that embodiment allows a unique and bloody catharsis in the form of zombie-slaying, which is singularly and consistently violent. Yes, World War Z is a thinly veiled lament of America's loss of world prestige, but it also expresses a fear of Otherized bodies: those of the diseased, the mentally ill, the alien. It is the inheritor of a terrible modernity we have been struggling with for a century:
This is the persistent root of the zombie image, that which makes them so terrifyingly real while being so preposterously fantastic. Their hunger reflects the unfed underclass in America and abroad; their rotting flesh and exposed organs symbolize the frailty of diseased bodies; their blind hatred and mindless ferocity embodies the true violence inherent in human beings. And to underscore these atrocious qualities, zombie media insists upon us that these traits are present in all of us: we can all become zombies, and with appalling ease. The zombie is both Other, and it is us - we fear our instincts to violence, the traitorous cells in our own bodies, the Eichmann in our souls. Zombies are the all-fear, modifiable to the viewer, the walking external self that our cultural mind needed to express its fear of the modern world, full of bodily terror and the constant promise of physical or psychological frailty.
Hence the recent trend toward 'safe' zombies, romantic zombies, funny zombies. Not only is this a natural, if unfortunate, consequence of excessive popularity, it is the historical trend of cultural ideas that proved dangerous to society. Pirates, gangsters, cowboys, Halloween, all sterilized and made safe by a cultural obsession with and fear of the criminal, of the Other, of that which cannot be properly absorbed and incorporated into society.
Even still, these newer works reflect something about the deeply rooted cultural fears of our modern society. Warm Bodies is probably as much a  reflection of a cultural fascination with and revulsion of necrophilia; The Walking Dead, personally, makes me ask more questions about an aging and decaying American South, the breakdown of the nuclear family and the effects of infidelity than it does about zombies; hell, I am not entirely sure that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was not meant to be a devilishly clever statement about the death of literature and twisted future of the English language.
Above: Undeath of the Author
In any case, the zombie seems to be a persistent cultural icon, but a troubling one. The fact that it remains a vehicle for our racism, misogyny, violent tendencies, fear of the unknown, xenophobia, mortality and collective hypochondria suggests that we, as a society, are not appropriately addressing these issues. Thus, for many people, the act of slaying a zombie or watching a zombie be slain is powerfully fulfilling - like the dragon of the Middle Ages, which represented dangerous nature, black magics, the devil and more, the zombie is an embodied punching bag to work out our aggression and fear upon.
Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
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