At the bar the other night, they had The Walking Dead on. We do seem to be in a zombie moment right now. One can’t but wonder what it means. I hadn’t seen the show before, but I did read the comic books it’s based on. (Whatever; I like comics.) The comic version is notable for having the least threatening zombies around; in one scene, a normal guy is trapped overnight in a room with dozens of zombies, and kills them all. With his bare hands. Sure, you don’t want them to bite you, but that goes for bedbugs too. (It’s also notable for its exceptionally blatant ripoffs of other zombie stories, like the opening lifted straight from 28 Days Later. But maybe that sort of borrowing is the sign of a vital popular form?) More to the point, it, even more than the run of post-apocalypse survival tales, valorizes traditional, masculine authority. Not for nothing it’s set in the South, and the main character is a cop; that’s a departure from most of these stories, which get their juice precisely from the ordinariness of their protagonists. My friend Ben makes the interesting observation that a very large proportion of horror movies are set in decaying industrial landscapes. But that’s not the case with The Walking Dead. There, the spaces the human characters defend against the zombies are iconic enclaves of order: a gated subdivision, a prison. Their central challenge, literal and metaphorical, is to keep the fences in place.
And on the other side of the fences, the zombies. The specific characteristic of the zombie, as opposed to other horror genre monsters, is their lack of individuality. They look human but have no minds, souls or personalities. Their behavior is mechanical, and they only ever appear in groups. The classic vampire story is of the monster stealthily infiltrating our society. You can’t tell that story about zombies; they have to be everywhere. Nor can you deter them or manage them, they don’t follow the various rules vampires are supposed to. All you can do, is kill them. Indeed, one of the themes of the comic-book Walking Dead is the danger of empathizing with the zombies. In one plot arc, a group of farmers are keeping their zombified relatives and neighbors locked in a barn (again, these are some seriously wimpy zombies) in the hope that they’re somehow recoverable. The heroes, naturally, put aside sentimentality and exterminate them. They may look human, is the point, but they’re really just part of the formless, threatening mass. The idea of a small group of civilized people holding some redoubt against a human-looking but impersonal mass is a familiar one in the culture, from Fort Apache to Fort Apache in the Bronx. (My father used to point out that the trope of the small band of white settlers facing a mass of Indians stretching the horizon reversed the historical situation almost exactly.) In this sense zombies slot neatly into some important political myths as well. It’s not a coincidence that in Max Brooks’ World War Z, the most mainstream recent zombie book, the two countries that are best prepared to deal with the worldwide zombie plague are Israel and South Africa, the latter explicitly thanks to apartheid-era plans for defense of the white minority against the African hordes. In terms of the logic of zombie stories, Brooks made a good choice. The idea of a small group of fully-human individuals defending themselves against a faceless, anonymous mass has deep roots, but it comes most clearly to the surface in settler societies. Here is Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, on the original confrontation between his Spanish ancestors and the ancestors of the Indian and mestizo poor all around him:
Men like Father Bartolome de Las Casas came to America with the conquistadores and abandoned the ranks in order to collaborate with the vanquished… This self-determination could not have been possible among the Incas or any of the other pre-Hispanic cultures. In these cultures, as in the other great civilizations of history foreign to the West, the individual could not morally question the social organism of which he was a part, because he existed only as an integral atom of that organism and because for him the dictates of the state could not be separated from morality.
It seems to me useless to ask … whether it would have been better for humanity if the individual had never been born and the tradition of the antlike societies had continued forever.
There’s the settler creed, with unusual frankness. We are capable of moral choices; they — that is, everyone “foreign to the West” — have no individual existence, but are only parts of a larger organism. We can sympathize with them; they can’t even sympathize with themselves. We are human; they are “antlike.” Or zombielike. But why now? Well, of course the entertainment industry needs new material; vampires are mostly played out and werewolves don’t seem to touch any commercially viable anxieties. (Maybe this one will do better.) James Frey is betting on aliens; we’ll see. But there might be a deeper reason. Look at that picture above, of the zombies pressing up against the fence. It doesn’t take a degree in semiology to see what that represents. But it’s not just the border. My friend Christian, who is finishing a book on the politics of global warming, describes one of the main forms of adaptation in the rich countries as the armed lifeboat. It’s adaptation to climate change as exclusion and repression, and that’s much easier if you can imagine the excluded as faceless ant people. If we don’t find a better way to translate climate change into a political vision that can mobilize people, then the white policeman with the gun, ruthlessly exterminating the masses outside the lager and strictly maintaining order inside it, is an idea we may be increasingly asked to become comfortable with. If so, one could read zombie tales like The Walking Dead as a warning — or, less charitably, as helping to prepare the way.