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| Night of the Living Dead (1968) - Directed by George Romero |
"I have always liked the 'monster within' idea. I like to think of
zombies as being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters." - George
Romero
The most heinous thing a human can do is eat another human. Fear of
cannibalism along with the other two great taboos, incest and
inter-family violence, are the bedrocks of human culture. Without these
taboos there is no human civilization, yet zombie cannibals are
everywhere, from the most popular TV shows in the US and Europe to the
most played PC games. Everywhere we look there is a zombie dragging
his feet looking for human prey. The ubiquitous nature of this meme of
semi-human creatures that survive only by breaking the most fundamental
of human taboos is a clear indicator of a collective cultural pathology.
Humans must not only kill and eat plants and animals to survive, we must
make sure they keep coming back so they can be killed and eaten again
and again. Life needs death; we must kill to live, and eventually we
all wind up food for someone else. This paradox lies at the core of the
world’s religions and mythologies and the fear/repulsion of eating
other humans is the keystone of our culture, without it we turn on
ourselves and self-annihilation ensues. The zombie meme is a modern
myth pointing to a deep fear of self-destruction.
The great psychologist and mystic Carl Jung was asked if a myth could be
equated to a collective dream and he answered this way, “A myth…is the
product of an unconscious process in a particular social group, at a
particular time, at a particular place. This unconscious process can
naturally be equated with a dream. Hence anyone who ‘mythologizes,’ that
is, tells myths, is speaking out of this dream.”
If a person had a recurring nightmare that she was eating her family it
would be a clear symptom of a profound psychological disturbance.
Cultures don’t dream, but they do tell stories and those stories can
tell us much about the state of the collective psyche.
Many of the themes in our popular culture are conscious story telling
devices with the definite purpose of social engineering/control, but
others seem to just emerge from the collective unconscious like the
stuff of dreams. The zombie meme is clearly of the latter variety.
It's pointing to a fear that something has broken in our culture and
what awaits us is a collective psychotic break of apocalyptic
proportions.
In the 1950’s there were widespread fears of a communist takeover that expressed themselves through films like The Village of the Damned or the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
But the zombie meme exposes something much darker in our collective
psyche. The fundamental taboo around cannibalism is a pillar of human
culture, yet the zombies are obsessive cannibals and we can’t seem to
get enough of them.
What does this new archetype of a cannibalistic apocalypse reveal about
out culture? By nature archetypes point to transcendent themes that
evade definition. They are not symbols that have a clear equivalent,
they can only point in the general direction which in the case of the
zombie meme is the inverting of some of our most sacred myths and the
embracing of our most horrid taboos.
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The Walking Dead - The most watched TV show
in the 18 to 49 year old demographic in the United States. |
The zombie meme emerged onto the American consciousnesses with George Romero’s 1968 cult classic, The Night of the Living Dead. The archetype was invigorated with Danny Boyles’s 2002 film, 28 Days Later which introduced an important new element: the apocalypse.
The meme reached maturity in 2010 when AMC launched The Walking Dead, now the number #1 show on US television for viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. The Walking Dead was created by Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption, and is based on a comic book series written by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. The key to the success of The Walking Dead is the dystopian zombie apocalypse in which the story unravels, allowing it to outperform even the ultimate social opiate, Sunday Night Football.
This is not simply an American phenomenon. In France the series The Returned (French: Les Revenants) has been very popular with both viewers and critics. The Returned
puts a fascinating twist on the return of the dead- they just start
walking home after having been dead for many years as if nothing had
happened. The BBC’s In the Flesh focuses on reintegrating zombies, victims of PDS (Partially Dead Syndrome). World Z had Brad Pitt save the world from fast moving zombies on the big screen, and Mel Brook’s son Max even wrote a book titled The Zombie Survival Guide.
The Inverted Christian Mythos
In one episode of The Walking Dead the zombies are scene
shuffling under the arch of an episcopal church inscribed with a passage
from the gospel of John, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has
eternal life”. Over a billion Catholics in the world regularly
transform bread and wine into what they believe is the actual flesh and
blood of their savior, Jesus of Nazareth, and eat him. Catholics
believe this sacramental right gives them eternal life. In the zombie
meme, the infected humans die and are born again but not unto salvation
but into a hell of insatiable appetites and mindless meandering.
The Christian myth is agricultural; Christ is killed, buried, and comes
to life three days later as the seed emerging from the ground, just as
the moon hides for three days behind the sun each month, only to be born
again. Christ’s body is the ‘sacred’ meal, the sacrificial food of the
gods, his blood is their elixir. The Catholic acts as the god
receiving the sacred meal and by doing so gains the eternal qualities of
the gods by breaking the most embedded of human taboos – the eating of
human flesh. It’s certainly a curios paradox that the sins of man are
forgiven by committing cannibalism, as Catholic doctrine clearly states
that Jesus was both man and God and the transubstantiation of the
Catholic mass physically changes the bread and wine into the flesh and
blood of Jesus.
As the Christian myth begins its third millennium, is the zombie meme
telling us that this religious story is no longer viable ? Are billions
of ‘zombies’ eating flesh and drinking blood but finding no
nourishment? The vast majority of Western people have a profound
belief in science and science tells us that the story of Jesus is not to
be taken literally, yet our churches insist that the ‘myth’ of Jesus is
historical. The Christian software no longer works as the science
‘virus’ has rendered it useless.
Myths are other people’s religions and for Westerners in need of
spiritual ‘food’ the Eastern systems of yoga and Buddhism, which don’t
depend on dogma that contradicts science, seem to be more palatable to
their scientific worldviews. Unfortunately, those ‘programs’ where
written for a machine other than modern Western man.
Joseph Campbell described believing in a literal, historical God as
someone eating a menu believing that they were really eating the food.
One clear component of the zombie meme is the spiritual starvation we
are experiencing in the West. We are eating the menus so the speak-
old, meaningless books written by foreign peoples from far off places
thousands of years ago, and they give us no nourishment.
The Hunger
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| Dawn of the Dead (1978) George Romero |
Another essential quality of the zombie is it’s unquenchable hunger. No
amount of flesh and blood seems able to quench the longing to consume
live human flesh. Modern man has a similar problem- no amount of
money, sex, gadgets, job titles, drugs, entertainment, pornography, art,
religion or gurus seem able to quench our thirst. We live in constant
hunger.
If we equate the zombie ‘hunger’ for flesh to the human desire for
money, the comparison becomes almost uncanny. Most adult humans spend
most of their day either making money or spending it while being
constantly bombarded with propaganda/advertising to keep them hungry.
From the most humble street vendor to the billionaires on CNBC, no one
seems to ever have enough money. Zombies need to eat live human flesh
and money is at its core, human labor. Our craving for money is really
the craving for the work of others, for the sweat and blood of millions
to furnish us with unlimited amounts of food and consumer goods.
The vast majority of Westerners have ceased to create anything tangible.
Only one in five Americans actually produce anything. Eating what
one produces on a farm or trading manufactured goods for food connects
us to life. But when people spend ten hours hours a day in an office
looking at a computer screen and two hours in traffic, somehow eating,
and living, become abstract. What are we actually doing to create the
food , heat, and the shelter we need?
Our hunger for food and things far outstrips our practical needs and has
become the cause of our ever more obese, angry, unsatisfied society
while our spiritual hunger leaves us addicted, chasing empty consumer
thrills. There is no end to what can be consumed and there is never
enough for even those with billions; we always need more.
Zombies Don’t Surf
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| Halloween surf contest in Santa Monica - Lucy Nicholson/Reuters |
Zombies don’t think, they simply move in big herds looking for their
next meal, reminiscent of the herds piling up behind the doors of malls
on Black Friday. Curiously, the only way to kill them is to shoot them
in their least vulnerable point, their brains.
Modern man is almost entirely without out any practical skills. He
doesn't know how to grow food, hunt animals or build a house. He uses
all sorts of electronic tools whose core technologies he doesn't really
understand and which he doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix.
This set of circumstances is a recent development in human history,
beginning in the 18th century and growing exponentially in the last 30
years during the information revolution. We are helpless slaves to
technologies we don’t understand and to media that programs us to
believe all sorts of propaganda designed to keep us from actually
thinking critically.
The Zombie Apocalypse
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| Dawn of the Dead - 2004 Re-make |
At least since the time of Christ, western man has been waiting for one
apocalypse or another. Be it the return of Christ, the turn of the
millennium, nuclear war, killer meteorites or UFO’s, apocalyptic fears
are nothing new to us. Yet it’s no coincidence that just as the zombie
took over prime time with The Walking Dead, the term 'preppers'
began to appear. Apocalyptic thinking is nothing new, but it’s
intensity has noticeably increased in the last years as shows like Doomsday Preppers is the most watched program in the history of the National Geographic Channel.
The latest wave of apocalyptic furor to take over the US is not based on
fears of nuclear war or the return of Jesus, but on the collapse of the
financial system which gave us a shot over the bow in 2008. We are so
far removed from any practical and productive activities that if the
extremely complex financial and logistical infrastructure of the world
gave way, how would we survive? If our stores were suddenly empty how
many people in the West would be able to produce food, fuel and shelter?
The vast majority of us are so far removed from the practical
necessities of life that we are in a very real sense, mindless,
insatiable, endlessly consuming zombies.
Not only do we not understand the technologies we use, we seem to trust
that the complex systems that maintain us will continue working
seamlessly even as doubts grow over the people who brought us the
sub-prime debacle, the Iraq War and quantitative easing (QE). What
would happen to the world supply chain if the confidence in the dollar
as a reserve currency were lost? Is the ever increasing gap between
rich and poor about to explode into all out class/race war? A key
element of the zombie meme is the underlying fear of societal collapse.
The Myth is Dead
Sometime after Galileo but before Newton, science lost the need for
meaning. For Galileo the universe, including the earth, was alive but
by the time of Newton it was a dead machine. The importance of this
shift cannot be overestimated. Galileo was describing something that
was alive, that had a soul, a soul humans participated in, but by the
time of Newton and the Enlightenment we were existing in a cold
universe. The world went from breathing like a mother to ticking like a
clock.
From the earliest known cave paintings made over 40,000 years ago to the
mystery schools of pre-Aryan Europe through to medieval Christian
Europe, the West has been guided by profound mythical stories.
Science can give us answers to almost all our questions, yet in the end
its meaninglessness is disquieting. Science gives us technologies and
deep understandings of the mechanics of the universe, but it's unwilling
to the breach the topic of meaning. We are asked to live for cliches,
consumerism, hedonism or fundamentalism. Rejecting science is absurd
but embracing it is deadening.
If we were able to understand our own religions in the same spirit that
we decipher the religions of others (myths) while embracing science
(with its limitations), than maybe we could find our way to a new myth
that would shed meaning on our cold world. But myths emerge, they are
not consciously created, and for the moment we wade in the void of
knowing how but not why. We consume but are never filled, we seek but
we do not find.
We are all zombies.
