"Why would you write about zombies?"
Whenever I tell someone I'm a zombie/horror writer, I get this question. What would make a reasonably sane looking woman want to write about zombies? Married mother of two, respected in her profession, field trip chaperon, and cookie baker, why do you have zombies in your head, lady? Zombies have a lot to say about us. Layla and Cricket are my avatars as I brave the why of the zombie trend. But there is also a philosophical answer to "why zombies?" The Zombie Papers seeks to address that answer...
The Hollow Men Rebooted;
We are The Walking Dead
“Don’t
open. Dead inside,” a warning spray-painted on a hospital door in the pilot
episode of The Walking Dead, neatly summarizes
the theme and symbolic significance of the zombie movement in contemporary popular
culture. Zombies no longer hunger for
brains. Zombies no longer amble to the
mall. A comet doesn’t transform us into
the undead. When T.S. Eliot wrote, “this
is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper” (97-98) he was not
talking about a zombie apocalypse, but he was talking about agonizing emptiness
and loss. The zombie trend in popular
culture addresses this same symbolic significance. The zombie apocalypse
results in catastrophic loss: mankind dies.
The emptiness, deadness, we feel as a result of living in a
disconnected, desensitized, othered society causes us to suffer zombie-like
famish. How do zombies feed their
insatiable hunger? They
consume—everything—and so do we. Zombies, in the mindless pursuit of oral
satisfaction, come to serve as a symbol for deep sense of emptiness and loss
felt in contemporary western society.
Zombies
amble in mindless pursuit of something or someone to consume. Today’s iterations of zombies would have Sigmund
Freud chewing on his cigar as he choked back an “I told you so.” Zombies today are a metaphor for every psychological
and social ill Freud envisioned: a physical incarnate of the death instinct and
with a focus on oral consumption as its pleasure principal, discontent with
civilization ending in its destruction, and the all-out reign of the id—if you
hope to survive the zombie apocalypse. Contemporary
zombies consume everything: fingers, entrails, limbs, and even the occasional
chicken. They are no longer the connoisseurs
of human anatomy the way they were in the 1970s and 80s. Rarely, and poignantly, do contemporary
zombies have a preference for brains. These days, zombies will consume
anything. The zombies’ oral fixation is
a post-mortem instinctual pursuit of satisfaction. As Freud notes, “the purpose of life is
simply the programme (sic) of the pleasure principle” (25). Through oral consumption, zombies seek
satisfaction. Few zombies have sex, thank goodness, but Freud notes in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
that the “oral instinct becomes auto-erotic” (408). A zombies’ oral urge, however, is never
satisfied. What does it say about us
that in our undead form we still seek to satisfy ourselves through consumption? As a result of the zombie apocalypse, mankind
becomes a mindless eating machine. Zombies,
and their endless drive to consume, are a reflection of the social problems of
modern life. In western cultures, we
consume our way through food and goods, our environment, and our interpersonal
relationships, all the while being over-exposed to violence. It’s no wonder we feel “dead inside.” We don’t need a zombie apocalypse. We are a zombie apocalypse.
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