Of Zombie Media

I love zombie media.

I realize that such a sentence is quite loaded. I tell people that I love zombie media quite tentatively; it is one of those statements that can immediately label you as a type of person, like saying that you think Dane Cook is funny or that you really like Coors Light. However, I state it again: I love zombie media.

Within the past few years, zombie media has been resurrected (no pun intended) in a way that differs from prior zombie media. Very obvious criticisms on extreme capitalism can be drawn from the Romero Dawn of the Dead model of zombie lore, as well as other recent zombie media such as video game series Dead Rising that are oriented in hyper-consumerist settings and that follow in a similar vein.

Too close to home after Black Friday...

However, I’m interested in the post apocalyptic scenarios posed by other examples of recent zombie media, specifically Max Brook’s World War Z and AMC’s The Walking Dead, which is based on Image Comic’s comic book series of the same name (however, as I’ve not read the comics yet, I will only base my comments on the television series). Rather than utilize zombies as metaphor for tireless consumption, zombies become something akin to a natural disaster and an ultimate equalizer; and, of course, natural disasters are used often as the catalyst for a look at the human condition. As zombies are themselves the human form stripped of allegiances and arbitrary groupings, there is no better group to utilize in post-apocalyptic scenario of that sort. And, of course, cracking zombie skulls is far more entertaining.

One can look to classic post-apoc works literature such as David Brin’s The Postman to see the fascination with finding out how different groups people coalesce – or, more often – clash with one another even after being bluntly reminded of our common factor. More often than not, intimate interaction between groups that previously had not mingled so closely, such as the working immigrant class among white collar America, the military with the civilian, are portrayed. As Brooks states in an interview with the website Eat My Brains!

“I love my country enough to admit that one of our national flaws is isolationism. I wanted to combat that in “World War Z” and maybe give my fellow Americans a window into the political and cultural workings of other nations.“

World War Z takes a rather brutal look at this; from global scale nuclear warfare to the most self-regimented segregation, the social-political human factor is put on stage. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this occurs during one of the first “interviews” of the novel. World War Z is split in multiple sections, covering the initial spread of the infection, the “war” against the infected, and then the subsequent rebuilding of society and national boundaries through a series of personal interviews with survivors of all walks of life. The outbreak in India is portrayed by Ajay Shah, a self-professed white-collar “zippy”, and his attempts to escape the city of Alang as thousands of refugee boats attempt to escape the shores and make for safe ocean. The dead are walking from the washing shore and lurking beneath the tide, eager to grab a limb of a swimming to bring them below the depths.

Oh god, watch out for the floaters. Oh god.

The ship owners, in a position of power, extract demands upon the fleeing citizens in order for safe passage upon their boat: payments of possessions, money, sex, or else the demands of proper caste order are seen. Shah explains;

“I saw one ship’s crew that only wanted women, young women. I saw another that would only take light-skinned refugees. The bastards were shining their torches in people’s faces, trying to root out darkies like me. I even saw one captain, standing on the deck of his ship’s launch, waving a gun and shouting “No scheduled castes, we won’t take untouchables!” Untouchables? Castes? Who the hell still thinks like that? And this is the crazy part, some older people actually got out of the queue! Can you believe that?”

This situation displays, beautifully, Brook’s attentive attitude towards the zombie plague as a catalyst for reemergence of not-so-past attitudes toward segregation and racism. Of course, it can be argued that these differences become more settled as humanity realizes the gravity of the situation at hand and comes together. Yet, later in the novel, we see the upheavel of economic and social class and the bitterness it causes to those who cannot let go of the prior order of things. Arthur Sinclair, the director of the newly founded Department of Strategic Resources (or DeStRes, as Brooks puns about. Oh, how I love your word play), faces the challenge of reorganizing the work infrastructure of the United States, and putting to work the white-collar class. Being that those in law, entertainment, advertisement (ahem) and other fields aren’t able to use their specialized skillset towards the heavy reconstruction of the country and cracking a ton of zombie skulls, a great degree of training of these citizens under the hand of those trained in physical labor is involved.

Brooks drives it home when Sinclair alludes to a… distressing situation he observed as director of DeStrRes;

“The President gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the power to change the way people thought.  As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how to survive on very little and work with what they had. […] Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney. You’ve spent most of your life reviewing contracts, brokering deals, talking on the phone. That’s what you’re good at, that’s what made you rich and what allowed you to hire a plumber to fix your toilet, which allowed you to keep talking on the phone. The more work you do, the more money you make, the more peons you hire to free you up to make more money. That’s the way the world works. But one day it doesn’t. No one needs a contract reviewed or a deal brokered. What it does need is toilets fixed. And suddenly that peon is your teacher, maybe even your boss. For some, this was scarier than the living dead.”

As an aside, this hit rather close to home. Being the child of a first-generation immigrant, it’s a little dismaying to see the discrepancies between my own abilities to care for myself, my car, and the other physical elements that allow my life to “run” versus my parent, who is the type of person who will fix appliances until they cannot run a second longer before throwing them away. A hardy type of person.

But to get back onto point, this is obviously an example of an all too realistic scenario in which people refuse to come together as equals despite their previous place in life being, quite literally, eaten away from underneath them. The scenario is done gracefully too; the “two worlds collide” cheese factor is held at bay. While World War Z ends on the positive note of mending the earth and relations between different groups that previously would not interacted, a general lack of faith in a sustained unity is made clear. Many of the interviewed characters state their sureness that future generations will fall back into old patterns of self-segregation and pettiness. Oh, Brooks, you’re my glass is half-empty type of guy!

The Walking Dead takes this issue by the horns in a more optimistic manner.

Why are you aiming at Rick's ass, Shane? The zombie is in the other direction.

The show takes place in and around Atlanta, Georgia, following a group of survivors of all different social and economic backgrounds. While very much of the show is about the hype of near-escapes and the loss of loved ones to the jaws of the Walkers (AMC’s ratings wouldn’t do with that — and it’s more exciting, anyway), there are occasional confrontations that broach the topic of this blog entry.

For any fans of the show, the most obvious of these situations is the altercation between T-Dog, a black man, and Merle Dixon, who is a walking amalgamation of hillbilly neo-nazi stereotypes. The scene is almost painfully cliche: Merle refuses to cooperate with T-Dog, calling him a “nigger” among the mixed-race company of fellow survivors, and violence ensues. However, Rick Grimes, after going ass-kicking super cop and saving the day, says an incredibly profound quote that I feel encapsulates everything I am trying to get at:

“Things are different now. There are no “niggers” anymore, no dumb ass shit inbred white trash fools either. There is nothing anymore. Just white meat, and dark meat. It’s just us and the dead, We survive this by pulling together, not apart.”

You said it, Rick.

From that point on in the show, we see these characters banding together. The college educated woman becomes close to meek, abused housewife. The squirrel hunting brother of the neo-nazi teams together with the Korean pizza delivery boy and admire his zombie battling strategies. The team is tight-knit and unrelenting in their support of humanity.

This, in essence, takes the zombie genre in a new direction: a critique on the human element, rather than just a look at the irony of being consumed by being consumers. And that’s just fucking awesome; that is why I love zombie media so much. It takes the inhumane to get to the root of humanity. To end this heart warming blog post about our need to come together as a global community, let me share a beloved favorite image from Regretsy. The original post can be accessed through this link.

All we need is some zombies and Engrish to help us realize it.

Doesn’t it just warm your heart, like the sight of a lobo cracking a zombie skull clean?

And of course, if there are more examples of media that fall into this trend, please comment and let me know. I always love more things to watch and read, as if my “to read/watch” pile wasn’t towering high enough over me.