The zombie as an analogue for a mindless humanity is at the same time both humorous and tragic. We could all “land parts” in the growing number of zombie films because, after all, it’s a role that we have been auditioning for all of our lives. “Anybody can shamble along looking vacant.”[i]
The great grandfather of, or at least the most famous of the “living dead,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not like today’s zombies. Nor was the zombie in Jacques Tourneur’s film I Walked with a Zombie (1943) because she did not eat human flesh or pose a danger to those around her. It took George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968) to “flesh” out the scary visage we see on today’s screens.
“The thing about these newly empowered 21st century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-beings. According to current convention, the individual reanimates can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorable advancing zombie population is in its numbers; the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-growing demographic.”[ii]
As Terrence Rafferty points out in his New York Times Book Review entitled “Zombie Resurrection,” zombies in fiction have the problem of not having personalities and don’t make interesting characters in a story. That’s probably why the series of books on which the HBO series True Blood is based has vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, and shape-shifters, but no zombies.
Even the federal government has jumped on the zombie bandwagon. The Centers for Disease Control issued the online and tongue-in-cheek “Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide.” The site crashed after receiving too many hits. What apocalypse are we talking about? What are the underlying causes of the popularity of this ubiquitous, ominous and terrifying semi-human creature that we all know is not “real.” And yet, we also know that it wouldn’t be so captivating if it didn’t have some basis in reality. If even the government acknowledges that there is an impending apocalypse, then enough people are feeling anxiety that it is time to talk about what is real and what isn’t. It is time to talk about Simple Reality.
Plain questions and plain answers make
the shortest road out of most perplexities.
— Mark Twain
After we have had our fun with zombies as symbols of human behavior, we would miss an opportunity for a deeper understanding of why we behave the way we do if we did not pursue the issue with simple, yet critically important questions. Fortunately, Terrence Rafferty did just that when he begins our sequence of questions by wondering about the significance of the zombie phenomenon.
“Why do we choose to fear this, and why now?”[iii] His answer begins our probing which we will continue to pursue. “In the case of Zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet’s dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us.”[iv]
This same concern was the theme of the film Soylent Green where the primary source of food in an overpopulated world “soylent green” turned out to be recycled people, the exact same food that zombies love only not as fresh, not as “natural.” Maybe that’s why zombies are so healthy, they don’t eat frozen food and only eat locally grown food.
Overpopulation of the planet has been on the minds of humankind ever since British economist Thomas Malthus’ (1766-1834) theory that the population of the world’s people would exceed its ability to feed itself; and also Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968). What both Malthus and Ehrlich failed to understand is that the problem faced by the global village is not too many people but too many unconscious people. The grim reality in P-B is that virtually all of humanity is expressing the mindless false self; that we are zombies might seem an overstatement and yet: “The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it’s a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people—undocumented immigrants say, or the entire population of developing nations—whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled.”[v]
Alas, my poor Rafferty, the truth is even darker than that. We are all zombies feeding on each other and so it has been since the dawn of time. The chief characteristics that we humans have in common with zombies is that both of us lack consciousness—that is to say, we are both unaware of who and where we are and are relatively ineffective in creating a sustainable or satisfactory existence. (I don’t think we have ever seen or heard of anything resembling a happy zombie in fiction or film.)
Just because we are not paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not after us. But many of us are becoming increasingly paranoid, with good reason. If the Other is not after us yet, they will be. As long as the Other is part of our narrative, as it most certainly is in P-B, they will eventually show up when conditions are favorable and the fear is sufficiently intense.
On the other hand, why don’t any True-self characters inhabit our fictional books and films? Well, at long last we have one. Joshua Gaylord (with the pseudonym of Alden Bell) has written The Reapers Are the Angels (2010) with a heroine, 15-year-old Temple, who copes with zombies while “retaining, heroically, a sense of wonder at God’s Creation, ‘all that beauty in the suffered world.’”[vi] We can sense that Temple has managed to be in the present moment despite formidable odds: “you gotta look at the world that is [P-A] and not get bogged down by what it ain’t.”[vii]
Rafferty is on the right track in understanding what the problems of humanity are today (most of us also know them but don’t like to think about them) but he is clueless, like virtually everyone else, as to what to do about them. For example he concludes his book review with: “if you take the time to see and feel and think, the world, dire as it is, can lose some of its terrors.”[viii]
We have been trying for some time on this planet to see (relying on the senses to define reality), to think (relying on the human intellect to avoid the coming apocalypse) and to feel. We haven’t made a distinction between feeling (being in the present moment) and emotions (creating suffering by reacting to the illusion of P-B). Until we do, we can expect zombies to keep coming at us in our media and in our nightmares because they are expressions of our own unconscious understanding that something is happening that we don’t want to look at, except in a darkened theatre, where our popcorn and soda remind us that what is on the screen isn’t really happening.
Or is it!
.
Zombieland: Fiction is Reality, Reality is Fiction
[i] Rafferty, Terrence. “Zombie Resurrection.” The New York Times Book Review. August 7, 2011, page 17.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
_____________________________________________________
Find a much more in-depth discussion in printed books by Roy Charles Henry.
