"Now Streaming: The Plague Years"--The Zombie Apocalypse Movie Theme Lives On

[KoKo]

Now Streaming: The Plague Years--The Baffler
A. S. Hamrah

We want the Zombie Apocalypse to happen because it is the one disaster we are truly mentally prepared for.

The zombie apocalypse, our favorite apocalypse, seems to unite the right and left. It combines the apocalypse brought about by climate change and the subsequent competition for scant resources with the one loosed by secret government experiments gone awry. Better still, both of these scenarios, as we’re typically shown in graphic detail, will necessitate increased gun-toting and firearms expertise.

More than that, the fast-approaching zombie parousia allows us to indulge our fantasies of a third apocalypse, one that only the most clueless don’t embrace: the consumerist Day of Judgment, in which we will all be punished for being fat and lazy and living by remote control, going through our daily routines questioning nothing as the world falls apart and we continue shopping. Supermarkets and shopping carts, malls and food warehouses all figure prominently in the iconography of the post–Night of the Living Dead zombie movie, reminding us that even in our quotidian consumerist daze, we are one step away from looting and cannibalism, the last two items on everyone’s bucket list.

Still, despite its galvanizing power to place all of humanity on the same side of the cosmic battlefront, the zombie apocalypse, like all ideological constructs, nonetheless manages to cleave the world into two camps. One camp gets it and the other doesn’t. One is aware the apocalypse is under way, and the other is blithely oblivious to the world around it.

To confuse matters further, people move in and out of both camps, becoming inert, zombified creatures when obliviousness suits their mood. People blocking our progress on the street as they natter into their hands-free earsets stare straight ahead, refusing to admit that other people exist. At least they don’t bite us as we flatten ourselves against walls to pass them without contact. A paradox of the ubiquity of zombie-themed pop culture is how there are surely next to no people left who have not enjoyed a zombie movie, TV show, book, or videogame, yet there are more and more people shuffling around like extras in a zombie film, moving their mouths and making gnawing sounds.

The smartphone-based zombification of street life is a strange testament to Romero’s original insight, which becomes more pronounced as the wealth gap widens. The disenfranchised look ever more zombie-fied to the rich, who in turn all look the same and act the same as they take over whole neighborhoods and wall themselves up in condo towers. This, indeed, is exactly what happens in Romero’s fourth zombie movie, 2005’s Land of the Dead, which predicted things as consequential as what happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and as minor as the rise of food trucks.

The Zombie Apocalypse is also a parable of the Protestant work ethic, come to reap vengeance at the end of days. It assures us that only very resourceful, tough-minded people will be able to hack it when the dead come back to life. If the rest had really wanted to survive—if they deserved to survive—they would have spent a little less time on the sofa. But here, too, the simple and obvious moral takes a perverse turn: the best anti-zombie combatants should be the ones who’ve watched the most zombie movies, yet by the very logic of our consumer-baiting zombie fables, they won’t be physically capable of survival because all they did was watch TV.

Much More........a Long Read at......

http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/now-streaming-plague-years

[longship]

1. Never saw Romero, not into zombies that much, but this is a good read.

But I bought Max Brooks' World War Z at the book store last week. I've started reading it. One has to get used to its oral history style, which actually works fairly well. I am going to pick it up again this evening.

This article is a recommended click through. And no, it is to too long.