Every culture has its own myth about the End of the World, and you can usually tell a good deal about it by how it anticipates its own death. Rather like if you asked someone how they would like to die if they had the choice (I don’t recommend doing this: these days you’re likely to be viewed as morbid at best, criminally creepy at worst): one person might say in a warm bed, surrounded by loving family members. Another might say on the field of battle fighting for his country. Still another might say in his sleep so that he didn’t have to anticipate it.
What is our End of the World myth? Not so long ago it was nuclear war: the final, cataclysmic confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that would destroy both. With the fall of the USSR, nuclear war has become a little less likely (though the good people of Iran and North Korea seem eager to bring it back), and the nuclear war myth has fallen out of favor. No, today our most prominent End of the World myth, I would say, is the Zombie Apocalypse.
Zombies are everywhere these days: just spend about five minutes on any entertainment-related website and you’ll see what I mean. Whole books are written (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) about surviving the coming zombie uprising. There are ‘zombie walks’ where a bunch of people get together (sometimes for a specific cause, sometimes just for fun), splash on some fake blood, and shamble down the street. I’d say that zombies are the monster of the present era, their only possible rival being vampires (who these days are less monsters and more superheroes, but I’ll deal with them in a later post).
The Zombie Apocalypse myth, like all myths, has a number of variations, but the basic outlines remain fairly consistent: for some reason, the dead begin rising again to feed upon the living. Sometimes they are born of a virus (usually developed as a bio-weapon), sometimes from radiation from space, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. If a zombie bites you, you become a zombie (anywhere from immediately to several hours or even days later). In this way, the zombie hoard grows and grows, usually unnoticed at first, but soon swelling to an overwhelming level. Society breaks down, carnage fills the streets, lawlessness and terror reign as people try to flee the major population centers, or turn on each other in suspicion or blind attempts to save themselves. The only way to kill the undead is to destroy their brains (“Kill the brain, kill the ghoul”). A small group of people from various walks of life band together in some specific building – a cabin, a mall, etc. – and barricade themselves against the onslaught. At first they manage to keep the hoards at bay, but somehow, usually due to the stupidity or selfishness of one of the members, the group’s defenses break, the zombies enter their refuge, and they either must flee to another place of relative safety or are overwhelmed and killed. The story usually ends with either the final triumph of the undead over the living or some radical shift in society that allows the survivors to live on, but in a harsher, more primitive manner.
The above is a summary of the basic form of the myth: in any given version, things will play out slightly differently. A couple of key factors to note: the undead are born in one of two ways, either completely unpredictably or through the actions of some authority figure or institution (a major company, the military, etc). The zombies remain unnoticed at first until their number grows to an unmanageable size. The zombies are infectious, so if even one zombie remains unkilled, it can create a new hoard of zombies. Society breaks down quickly, and only a small group of people – usually led by one or two intelligent and level-headed individuals – manage to survive. This group is itself undone by the stupidity or selfishness of its members. Finally, there’s the fact that it’s very rare for society to recover from the zombie outbreak: it is either destroyed or changed forever.
What does this say about our society? Well, the first and most important thing is that it expresses a dissatisfaction, or even outright hatred, of the society we live in. The whole story is effectively about how sick modern Western society is. Depending on the story, the entire outbreak might be the fault of the government or corporate greed (note the anti-authoritarian bent). Once it happens, society fails to notice anything wrong (we are dehumanized and insular: unwilling to face problems until it is too late), then almost immediately collapses once the outbreak is made known (our ‘civilization’ is a house of cards, doomed to fail at the first serious disaster). Most of the population is devoured or turned into zombies (we have no practical survival skills and cannot act properly in a crisis). The rag-tag band of survivors, meanwhile, is led by one or two intelligent and ‘enlightened’ individuals who serve as the audience surrogates. The viewer assumes that he, who sees through the sheep-like nature of the modern man and recognizes how sick society has become, will be one of the leaders who gathers his small band of followers, recognizes what they must do to survive, and barricades them inside the mall. One thing to note is that this leader is often a white-collar, middle-class worker: a reporter, a student, etc. He is almost never a soldier, policeman, or other ‘authority figure’ (though such a person is often included in the group). Despite the enlightened individual’s efforts, however, the stupidity and greed of one or more of the group allows the zombies to enter the refuge, killing all or most of the survivors (again reflecting that we are a selfish, stupid, and unprepared society). Finally, society is either destroyed or altered, suggesting that we are doomed to failure and a return to a more primitive, yet enlightened form of life. Often times a little hip satire is worked in, questioning how like zombies we are with our consumerist, sheep-like culture.
So, let’s sum up: our culture a). is suspicious or actually despising of authority figures b). feels that it is dehumanized, weak, materialistic, and insular, unable to identify threats or problems before it is too late c). has few or no practical skills and little ability to deal with crises d). exalts the few who do not follow the pattern, the non-conformists who see through the regulated, sheep-like nature of the culture e). suspects that things would be better if we could just listen to the few enlightened individuals and if the stupid, selfish average person would just get out of the way f). disparages the tools of the state, such as policemen and soldiers as unthinking, incompetent drones who cannot be relied upon to protect us and g). feels that it is doomed to collapse into anarchy and/or despotism.
Does that sound like a healthy culture to you?
Now, as horrible as the Nuclear War myth was, there was at least a kind of grandeur to it: a final, cataclysmic duel between warring super-powers, sometimes envisioned almost as the Apocalyptic showdown between the forces of Good (the United States) and Evil (The Soviet Union), other times as the folly of mankind at last reaching its peak in a final, useless war to end all wars. The Zombie myth, however, is anything but grand. It is meaningless, sometimes lacking even an explanation. It’s just random, helpless events spiraling to a random, hopeless conclusion, one filled with violence, decay, disease, and vice. Its trappings are rotting corpses, human entrails, dirt, dust, festering sores, vomit, and blood. There is no good, there is no evil, there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is only survival and death. The Zombie myth tends inexorably towards an atheistic and nihilistic worldview: the Apocalypse for the Godless.
What are to make of a culture that seems to so thoroughly despise itself? What do we say to a society that condemns itself as ignorant and immoral, then goes on to predict its own horrific destruction? This alone should alarm us: we appear to loathe our own culture and society. Our heroes are the ones who see through and push back against it, the rebels and renegades, and we imagine it collapsing, not at the hands of some foreign superpower in a great war, but in meaningless, bloody corruption: almost literally rotting itself out of existence. A culture that thinks like that cannot long endure.
Basically, there has to be something wrong with our society if this has become our favorite End of the World scenario. The individual theses of the Zombie myth may not all be correct, but at least some of them must be, or else they would not strike such a chord. The truth is, we are materialistic and we are dehumanized (I mean, for goodness sakes, we think killing unborn children is a fundamental right and that a man trying to have sex with another man is natural and healthy). We do tend to not want to face problems until it is too late (take a look at the US Government’s utter refusal to address its unsustainable Medicare program).
I am not, by nature, a cynical man, but the whole ‘look at these sheep-like drones’ attitude the Zombie myth embraces is something I am very cynical about. From what I can tell, practically everyone in the country thinks this way, rendering the whole thing a rather pathetic bid to feel important or enlightened (indeed, if this attitude really were as rare as its adherents suppose, we wouldn’t see so many popular films and books expounding it). I am also cynical about self-styled non-conformists, since it seems to me they tend to be the most conformist and narrow-minded individuals of all, blindly attacking things like government, religion, and the military at every opportunity without even considering that they might be wrong to do so. The idea that the average citizen would be a more capable leader in a crisis than a soldier or a cop, meanwhile, is often little more than a laughable fantasy on the part of the storyteller (the writer, director, author, etc). I also think that things like 9/11 showed that we are not necessarily as hopeless in a crisis as some seem to think.
Then there’s of course the fact that a Zombie uprising is, to say the least, a rather unlikely scenario and even assuming it did happen would probably be far more easily dealt with than is generally depicted. For one thing, biting isn’t a very good way of spreading diseases (consider: when a dog gets rabies it doesn’t mean that hoards of rabid dogs will soon be marching on major cities), especially not against victims that can kill you from a distance, like humans can. For another, the zombies probably wouldn’t last long after their bodies stopped working, since there’s a reason corpses rot and fall apart. Even assuming a massive hoard of zombies appeared on the scene and didn’t get wiped out by the Air Force (which seems oddly absent in most versions of the story), they would probably last about a week at the most before the maggots, flies, feral dogs, and so on finished them off.
But despite the above caveats, I think the Zombie Apocalypse myth sheds a lot of light on our present culture and deserves to be taken seriously. If you want to know what a culture is like, don’t ask its adherents, for they will make it sound too good, nor its detractors, for they will make it sound too bad. Don’t look at the art, for the artists are often a culture onto themselves, and don’t look at the government or the religious leaders, since they too are usually set apart. Look at the stories it tells, particularly the stories that are told over and over, the ones that practically everyone knows about and which are consistently popular. You will see in those stories the reflected attitudes, beliefs, and values of the culture. And the fact is, what we see reflected in the Zombie story is a very ugly culture indeed.
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