Zombies: An Origin Story (Part III)

To finish out my zombie post trilogy, I'm going to reference the Atlantic article that inspired me to write all of this in the first place. The article brings up some interesting questions about symbolism and meaning in today's zombie narratives. Mike Mariani, the author, notes:

there’s no longer any clear metaphor. While America may still suffer major social ills—economic inequality, policy brutality, systemic racism, mass murder—zombies have been absorbed as entertainment that’s completely independent from these dilemmas.

I just can't agree with this. Though I don't think zombie fiction, in general, always speaks to these major social ills, there are many examples that use zombies as complicating factors in cultural critique. In other words, there is some really great stuff out there. The BBC's show In the Flesh might be a bit slow, but it packs a strong emotional punch and complicated, dynamic characters. It uses the reintegration of zombies into society as a way to deal with issues like post-dramatic stress, homophobia, and economic inequality. Colson Whitehead's Zone One (one of the few books that scared me enough that I couldn't read it at night) uses zombies and reanimation to question the role of the hero in postmodern society, racial tensions, and 20th and 21st century American exceptionalism. The zombie still has much to say, especially because it becomes a kind of blank slate in terms of symbolism - we can write whatever fear we want onto it, especially when we tweak the normal zombie narrative, giving zombies a chance to play multiple roles within a larger whole. Take Max Brooks' World War Z: in that text, zombies stand in for terrorism, global epidemics like AIDS or Ebola, rampant consumerism, immigration, cold war hysteria... and the list could go on. The plurality of symbolism doesn't negate the meaning behind each metaphors. Plural does not mean unclear - it just means we have to look harder at how characters react to zombies, as each metaphor puts ever more emphasis on characters instead of the monsters they fight.

Later in his article, Mariani also states:

American pop culture has used the zombie, fraught as it is with history, as a form of escapism, rather than a vehicle to explore its own past or current fears. 

This has me even more frustrated. As someone who is constantly trying to defend genre fiction - whether science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, or romantic fiction, etc. - to my fellow academics and readers alike, this feels like the onslaught that constantly bombards most fantastic literature. Yes, there are many forms of sf/f (science fiction / fantasy) that read as little more than pulp fiction, with few, if any, depths or layers of meaning. But that does not preclude zombie fiction, or any speculative fiction for that matter, from having real meaning and cultural importance. I'm going to briefly look at  The Walking Dead  and Fear the Walking Dead to discuss this a bit more. I'm using these two shows because 1) they are extremely popular and 2) they are specifically referenced in the Atlantic article. (I have issues with how the article addresses post-apocalyptic stories in general, but I think I leave that gripe for later). I'll try to keep myself to vague, non-plot specific stuff to avoid spoilers.*

From what I can tell, much of what Mariani finds problematic in The Walking Dead franchise is its lack of realism. His major issue centers on the escapism inherent in zombie fiction. He finds:

The monster once represented the real-life horrors of dehumanization; now it’s used as a way to fantasize about human beings whose every decision is exalted. 

Though he later acknowledges the death of most of the population as a way to give meaning back to the decisions and actions of the few who survive, he finds that kind of emphasis on an individual's choices worrying. In other words: if there are only a few humans left alive, of course what you decide to do matters... but isn't that just an escapist fantasy for the viewer? We all want to matter in some crucial way, just like the characters on these shows, but we will only find that meaning in fiction, not in reality.

I find escapism, however, more important than Mariani does. The fact that such escapism exists inherently in the show (and is so popular) tell us much about the culture that created it and consumes it. We, as viewers, want to watch these characters find meaning in their lives because we have, perhaps, lost our way in our own lives (perhaps due to economic reasons, or personal issues, or simply through some kind of postmodern malaise). This kind of viewing may be problematic in terms of how we deal with our own issues, but that isn't the show's fault - the escapism it promotes actually sheds light on current cultural feelings of discontent. The show's so-called flaws, its uses of heightened importance and individual agency, reflect the concerns and flaws we can easily find in our own society. Hell, even some of the characters in the show complicate how we view this kind of escapism. (I'm thinking specifically of Gabriel, who is constantly trying to convince himself his actions don't matter, or even Michone, who's escapist tendencies provide some intriguing character development in season 2).

In Fear the Walking Dead, escapism becomes more firmly linked to real life. Some of the characters, especially Daniel Salazar, bring the question of escapism and personal agency into sharp relief. Salazar, an immigrant from El Salvador, left his country for the US because of the Salvadoran civil war. His past (which I won't get into here, but is covered very well in an article from NPR) highlights how one man's choices really can affect society and how escapism works in the 'real' world. History does have a place in these shows, and when this emphasis on escapism works well, it allows characters to evolve beyond stereotypical or archetypal character structuring. The escapist, speculative qualities of these shows, then, have a point, even if an uneven one. We can find meaning in all this - and we don't even have to look very hard for it.

The other main issue Mariani has with The Walking Dead is its setting. He writes:

Zombies, in their American incarnation, strip earth back down to its essential parts: mankind, nature, survival. Think of The Walking Dead’s Georgia, a desolate but oddly idyllic expanse of camps, fields, abandoned motels, and forest clearings. In this way, post-apocalyptic zombie scenarios are as much utopian as they are dystopian. The landscape is cleared of industrial plants, oil derricks, real estate developments, traffic jams, construction sites, and urban blight.

I have some big issues with what Mariani says here. While I agree that utopian impulses abound in The Walking Dead, as in much post-apocalyptic fiction, the way utopia is presented in the show (and in Fear the Walking Dead) immediately renounces any true utopian leanings. That idyllic Georgian forest the article references has more to do with Southern Gothic or a Cormac McCarthy novel than a true utopian, quasi-transcendentalist 'new' society. There are always zombies in the trees, as well as something much more dangerous: other people. Two-legged wolves roam those woods as well giant hordes of zombies. And the sites Mariani claims are missing from the show are all there, in very specific ways, serving a similar purpose as the forest. The seemingly empty cities, railway stations, real estate developments, traffic jams, and construction zones appear to be great places to build new, utopian settlements, far from threats. But all of these idyllic clusters of civilization inevitably fall. And they fall because humanity, for all its many redeeming qualities, is flawed. Unlike the very, very, very frustrating film version of I Am Legend, where a safe haven exists and hope can survive, there is no hope in these woods, nor in the secluded cabins, nor in the perfectly built sustainable housing. If there are utopias here, they all fall, fulfilling one of the main definitions of dystopia: a fallen utopia. This is where much of the meaning in the show comes to the fore - everything has flaws, everything can fall. So how will we continue? How will we survive?

So, yes, The Walking Dead is about mankind, nature, and survival, but in this case, survival depends on how you define the word. And that is what makes the show so interesting - what does survival actually mean? And what is more important, the survival of mankind as a species, the survival of mankind as a civilization, or the survival of our 'humanity'? And since this is a serialized TV show, not a film or a novel, the constant repetition of episodic rising and falling, finding hope and losing it, adds to the shows meaning. Survival will never have one true definition here, and the plurality of its meanings, for me at least, makes it all the more interesting. 

In a nutshell, then, I think Mariani's article dismisses current zombie narratives too easily. Yes, the history of zombies and the cultural appropriation that has led us to the zombies we know today complicate how we can view zombie fiction. And, yes, much of the zombie fare we see today is riddled with clichés, stereotypes, flattened archetypes, and sensationalism. But that doesn't mean the zombie is an unclear metaphor or empty symbol. It just means we need to look at the zombie with new eyes are spend time close reading each text or film or TV show to find the nuances that, added together, make zombie narratives worth our consideration. 

* I'm not saying this show is the best thing out there, but to dismiss it, and to dismiss zombie fiction in general, is to dismiss a cultural phenomenon that has more depth than it's given credit for.

Zombies: An Origin Story (Part II)

The story of zombies as unwilling somnambulists serving voodoo masters still appears in popular culture today, mostly in comics or comic based TV shows, like the show Constantine or the Hellblazer series that inspired it, or in pulp fiction or B-movies, like I Walked with a Zombie (which was used as the basis for the zombie film discussed in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman). When most people think of zombies, however, they are referring to a creation very different from the Haitian zombies I referenced in my last post. I use the word creation for a reason: these things, formerly human, are an amalgam of many different traditions, cultures, and literary tropes, re-formed through the medium of film. There is a history of zombies on Wikipedia, if you want to look at it, though it is mostly just a list and not an explanation of how things come together to create the zombies we recognize in popular culture today. The post, like most of Wikipedia, is partial and flawed, but nonetheless useful as a starting point.

The zombies we know today have roots reaching back to the Enlightenment and 19th century literature, adding layers to their relationship with Haitian culture and slavery. The idea of reanimation - using science to bring people back from the dead - is a large part of our zombies today. Novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or texts by authors of Weird fiction (including Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs) form part of the foundation for 21st century zombie fare. This obsession with science re-animating corpses can be seen in the way infection drives so many of our zombie films - though we don't try to bring people back to life (we have learned from our literary predecessors in many ways), we are still haunted by the idea that bodies that come back to 'life' leave the soul behind (if there is really anything like a soul in the first place). This is a commentary on our times as much as on our incorporation of a literary heritage, as it presents a very postmodern approach to the idea of reanimation.

There is a specific text, however, that marks a turning point in the evolution of the zombie as a trope, though zombies are never specifically mentioned in the book. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, written in 1954, is a post-apocalyptic novella based on the premise that the main character, Robert Neville, is the last man standing after a virus has turned everyone else into vampires.* Matheson's vampires, however, though they have the usual aversion to sunlight and garlic, and can be killed by a stake through the heart, do not act like archetypal vampires should. I won't set up too many spoilers here, as the book is definitely worth reading (the science in it is very suspect, but the way Matheson portrays Neville's loneliness is the progenitor for so many of the post-apocalyptic Last Man narratives that come after). What stands out about these vampires is the way they interact with each other and with Neville. They create a mob, mostly mindless, attracted to the activity and life they find in the last man on Earth. They want to kill Neville, for no other reason than the fact he is alive. They come in waves, with no end in sight, and are supremely hard to kill. George Romero used Matheson's novel as inspiration for his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which is usually considered the first modern zombie film. For both Romero and Matheson, the focus is not so much on the monsters menacing society, but instead on how individuals and society reacts to those monsters. The mob mentality, the Otherness of the creatures, the fact that those who are killed will return as monsters themselves - all these features say more about the society that created or reacts to the threat than about the threat itself. Of course, most monsters are reflections of the cultures that create them, but zombies, especially these iterations of the zombie trope, are more akin to aliens than to werewolves or Dracula. They are completely unknowable, inhuman things that cannot be reasoned with and cannot be understood.

This is why the zombie has become such a draw over the years since Romero's first zombie film - it gives filmmakers and authors a very interesting way to deal with symbolism and thematics. The zombies are, in some way, a blank slate that can be overwritten with almost any agenda. And zombie fiction becomes a way to critique society at large by creating an apocalyptic event that highlights our worst fears (losing ourselves without the hope of some kind of salvation, as we become zombies ourselves). The second film in Romero's Living Dead series, Dawn of the Dead, is considered by some to be even more influential than the first film, as it very specifically introduces a connection between the zombies as trope and capitalistic mass consumption. The survivors in Dawn of the Dead barricade themselves into a shopping mall (this is what I like to call "let's hit everyone over the head with a baseball bat" symbolism - it's very obvious, but you definitely get the point). This film, and the franchise that extended out from Romero's work, transformed the loose conglomeration of films about zombies into a fully fledged genre. I could go on for quite a while about symbolism and thematics in zombie fiction and film, but I think I'll leave that for another post (looks like we'll have a part III to this series).

To continue with the evolution of the zombie leading up to how we view zombies in the 21st century, there is at least one more iteration that deserves mention. Most of the zombie fare in the1980s and 1990s followed the archetype set out by Romero's films, though the cause of each outbreak differed and symbolism was not consistent. The 2000s brought several different approaches to zombie fare, including films that used the zombie as comedy (see Shaun of the Dead) or as part of larger family dramas (see Fido). 28 Days Later, one of the more important additions to the zombie genre, introduced zombie-like creatures that reference the zombie's reanimation roots. These monsters are not dead, but are instead scientifically infected with rage. The infection creates twitchy, incredibly fast moving predators who, like zombies of the past, are drawn to light or human activity, only subsist on raw flesh, mindlessly attack anyone in proximity, and spread their disease through bites or blood. Though some critics don't consider 28 Days Later to be a true zombie film, as the creatures aren't actually the dead brought back to life, the movie incorporates countless genre tropes and greatly influenced later zombie fare. In part, the film reminded viewers what zombie fiction is supposed to be about: the survivors (the second half of the film is more about how society will kill itself, even without the help of zombies). It also showed filmmakers and audiences that the zombie as a trope is still viable today, even after its connection to consumerism seems cliche. The Walking Dead, both the comic and the tv show, continue that idea, changing small parts of expected zombie genre norms, yet emphasizing the focus on survivors, not zombies, that is so important to the genre as a whole. I'll use The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead as the main examples in the third post in this series...

*Interestingly, I Am Legend isn't just post-apocalyptic because of the vampire threat. The novella alludes to some kind of nuclear explosion that has turned much of California into a wasteland and that may have had some kind of influence on the virus that causes the vampirism. This is just one of many examples that point to WWII and the Cold War as important influences on why zombies have become such an important contemporary popular culture trope. Our fear of mass destruction on a global scale, introduced dramatically by the atomic bomb in the 1940s, has direct influence our fear of the zombie apocalypse.

Zombies: An Origin Story (Part I)

I've been thinking a lot about zombies lately, and about how I'd love to teach a class on the history of zombies and zombie fiction. Funnily enough, as soon as I started setting up a post about it, I came across an article in The Atlantic that addresses the original usage of the term zombie. The article, which you can find here, reminds us that zombies were first found in Haitian slave mythology and goes on to say,

In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins—and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy.  

I'm intrigued by this article for a few reasons, not the least of which because I don't agree with all it says about what zombies have become. I therefore want to lay out a quick overview of how zombies have progressed over the course of the last century and then tackle the question of whether or not they have simply become escapist fantasy or have evolved into something very different from their origins, but just as important in terms of popular culture. I'll use this post to lay out what the article says and say a bit about how popular culture presents zombies before WWII (which, for me, is really the turning point in how zombies are used symbolically). Then I'll add a second post to go into contemporary zombies and what they mean today.

I'm not as conversant with Haitian zombies and the folklore behind them as I want to be. The article I cited earlier spends some time outlining the zombie's roots in Haitian culture, noting that the idea of living death comes from the belief that those who die in slavery will not be able to escape it and must continuing living as slaves forever. This becomes a potent trope for the atrocities of slavery and a way for black Haitians to work through the complicated realities of slavery at the time. After the Haitian revolution the zombie myth becomes entwined with voodoo religious practices, which the article sees as a problematic move away from a more culturally pure symbolism. It states,

The zombies of the Haitian Voodoo religion were a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they were with occult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombie’s roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution.

The article thus sees every step zombies take away from their original meaning as a step away from true cultural potency. It argues that the 1932 film White Zombie takes this further, introducing white colonials as "interlopers in the zombie legend," taking things to the point where

eventually the memory of Haiti’s colonialist history and the suffering it wrought—millions of Africans worked into the grave—would be excised from the zombie myth for good. 

For me, this raises the question of whether symbolism can evolve without becoming appropriated and therefore weakened, or whether this reassignment of meaning really implies that the trope has become diluted (trope, in this instances, means something figurative, like a metaphor or symbol, that is repeated enough to become universally recognized). Zombies, then, are a colonial issue within their narrative frameworks, but are a post-colonial issue when confronted as cultural products. They are also a transnational issue, as other nations and cultures, particularly the United States, have come to see the trope as their own.

The Atlantic article goes on to say that the zombies we see in popular culture today are devoid of meaning because they are so far removed from where they began. And their prevalence in society has taken away the potency of their use in earlier narratives. While I think there is some legitimacy to these claims, I wonder if the two things cannot live side by side - contemporary zombies and their original counterparts... especially if we acknowledge how far zombies have come.

This is especially interesting because the zombies portrayed in fiction and film before WWII appear so different from those we see today. When Hollywood gets ahold of the zombie trope in the 30s, it does not initially equate zombies with the dead who rise again. Instead, zombies are somnambulists, sleepwalkers or those who live in some kind of comatose state. They are controlled by a voodoo priest or some other nefarious villain, but can be woken from that state if the villain dies. Nor can the zombie spread it's fate like a disease. Zombies and whatever evil they do can be traced back to one man or woman, and though multiple deaths usually occur in zombies films, they are always attributed to either the main antagonist or are considered collateral damage. At this stage, then, zombies are symbols of both colonial oppression and fear of the exotic Other.  Interestingly, the Haitian zombies (who are almost always present in these films) are usually just background characters, like henchmen. Things only become dire when a white man or woman is taken and transformed.

These zombies, then, are not the zombies that inhabit The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later. Could we, perhaps, therefore see them as distinct tropes? (I don't think we can, but it's a worthwhile question.) And if they are not distinct, what does that mean for how we view zombies now? That's the question I'll address in my next post...