Zombies: The Anti-Socialist Metaphor Behind the Undead
Now, more than ever before, Zombie Media is booming. It dominates Tv, Movies, Video Games, and has even made some interesting forays into literature. This broad, rapid expansion of the Zombie Media phenomenon prompted two American Authors, Paul Cantor and Chuck Klosterman, to look into what the social reason behind our recent infatuation with the undead could be. Their investigation prompted me to do my own investigation to determine what I saw as the root of this zombie media epidemic, starting with a look at what they found in their essays. I will examine their essays and the flaws therein, because I believe their view to be the predominant view of zombies as a metaphor within the general public, but towards the end I will present other examples in which Zombie media goes in different directions.
In his essay, “The Apocalyptic Strain on Pop Culture”, Cantor argues that zombies represent globalization because of their oneness. They are a single entity split up over billions of bodies. No uniqueness, no personality, simply an unending horde. This is a point Klosterman largely mirrors, though Klosterman does not identify globalization as the culprit, instead focusing more on the boring slog of corporate tasks we are asked to complete day in and day out. Klosterman observes, “Zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work emails on a Monday morning”(386). In truth, though the two men’s culprits vary in name, they aren’t separate. Globalization brought us to, was spurred on by, and benefits corporations. So ultimately, the two seem to agree on the matter.
Unfortunately, though they may have indeed come to something of a makeshift consensus, its a faulty one. Zombies do on some level represent the mindless drones many feel corporations have made them into, and those ideas do stem from the fear of globalization but there is something even deeper that drives the Philosophy of zombies that these men just aren’t quite grasping. Zombies, and zombie media(especially The Walking Dead) represents a corporate fear. Zombies are one group of people coming together, united in a very specific goal. They achieve that goal through violent means and along the way they pick up more of themselves. In the zombie media this singular goal is presented as being to “eat your brains” which carries with it a whole other side of this argument. But in the metaphorical sense, would it really be too much to presume that zombies, especially zombies in high budget corporate media, represent a fear of unionization?
Before moving on, its best to address that bit about zombies eating brains, because admittedly that is both monstrous and evil and does tend to suggest that the zombies are the villains. But consider this: this depiction of zombies is the one the corporations want you to see. A mindless horde that wants to take your mind, and therefore your individuality, as well, could very well be a corporate view of socialism and socialist behavior. The stigmas, and propaganda surrounding unions and socialism have conditioned people to view them as hideous monsters hell-bent on destroying America as we know it. The corporations only benefit from these stigmas, so why would it be too much to assume that’s the intended meaning of the modern piece of zombie media.
This idea of zombies as a fearmonger’s version of socialists holds more weight if you look at the people who are almost always chosen as the enemy of these zombies. White dudes with guns, dressed in traditional western or southern American garb. The main character is supposed to represent the average American man after being given a dose of good-old American Rugged individualism. This American man then fights back against the zombies, seen here as socialists, who are mindless and evil, and despite there being more of them every day the American man fights back to keep them down. The strong focus on traditional American symbolism seems to give away their message as Individualist propaganda.
There’s even more evidence to this claim in zombie media like the video game, The Last Of Us. In it, you play as Joel, a gruff loner, tasked with escorting the one girl immune to the zombie virus, which is to say the one girl capable of saving humanity from the zombie virus, to a safe location. At the beginning of the game all he wants to do is complete his mission, get paid and go back to his loner lifestyle, living off the land and surviving. He fully commits to the stereotype of what is genre-standard for the protagonist. A southern man dressed in a flannel shirt(though he doesn’t have a cowboy hat), carrying guns and kicking the ever-living shit out of people. He is very much the idealistic common individualist man the Capitalists would like you to believe in. And by the end of the game, after forming a strong bond with Ellie, the girl he is sworn to protect, Joel, given the choice between curing the zombie virus, meaning Elie would die, and letting Ellie live but never finding a cure, Joel chooses the latter. He chooses to put his own selfish needs for love and family above the world’s needs. This could very much be seen as an allegory for Joel hoarding money to himself, with people(the zombies), anxiously searching for some way to afford their treatment. This would be par for the course for zombie media, but the unique thing about this story is that while Joel gets away with this action, the game, while still allowing you to feel sympathy for him, paints these actions as villainous. The final scene in which you play as Joel is one in which you murder doctors who are literally trying to save the world, so you can experience personal happiness.
Which brings us back to Klosterman and Cantor, both of whom got very close to the issue, citing social media and globalization as the problems, but they missed the biggest reason that zombie media is so popular.]Corporations have been beating America over the head with individualist propaganda for over a century now and Americans are now trained to eat it up, to view each other as the enemy, to otherize groups of people they don’t agree with instead of turning their anger towards the system.
Cantor blames globalization, he blathers on about the American Dream, and then he claims that that Rugged Individualism is actually a good thing and that its good that our main characters represent that. His basic claim is that deep down Americans don’t want to live their lives according to the whims of Institutions, and that without the security of these institutions the common man would revert to the more traditional American values. This argument essentially boils down to the ancient, fallacious belief that men are strong and must protect and provide for women, who must cook and take care of children. Its a disgusting belief. It’s also a flawed one for several reasons. First of all, he assumes that the majority of Americans want to return to that lifestyle as evidenced by the oversaturation of zombie media. Secondly, he assumes that Americans don't want to live their lives according to the whims of corporations. They do. More and more of them are growing wise and campaigning against the corporations with a single minded focus(these are the zombies), but the majority of Americans, as of right now are more than happy to go where the corporations tell them to go, and do what the corporations tell them to do. Americans don’t watch zombie media because they want to return to the days of rugged individualism. They watch it because they've been told so and so long as American media allows these corporations to broadcast this propaganda the corporations will continue to control their lives.
However, as ingrained and as flawed as the rugged individualism within Zombie media is, there are other metaphors at play within the genre. While I think the vast majority of contemporary zombie media represents a strawmanned version of socialism, this is not true of the original Romero films. The Romero films are unique in that the zombies are simultaneously a metaphor for about a dozen different things, none of them intended by Romero, or at least Night of the Living Dead is.
But due to the time of release, Night of the Living Dead, which ends with a black man being unceremoniously executed by a deputy, and whose intense gore was uncommon for the time, was able to capture the extremely chaotic atmosphere of the late 60’s. Fred Hampton, MLK, massacres at anti-war protests, Vietnam, the Tet offensive, the my lai massacre, Charles Manson, and Watergate was only a year out. It was a deeply confusing time and I think its this atmosphere that clouds Night of the Living Dead. Because Night of the Living Dead wasn't actually about anything, not really, not specifically. Romero never intended it as a metaphor for race despite its parallels with MLK and Hampton. It’s not really about My Lai, even though the parallel of a mindless bunch of people with one goal committing atrocities does seem rather pointed. Its not even about Manson. But because of the time of release, it had to be about all of those things and more. It then went on to inspire the rest of the zombie genre which would become increasingly steeped in metaphor over time.
Even Romero’s own later zombie films picked up the metaphors in greater detail. But Night of the Living Dead is devoid of a central metaphor, which I think is what created a vacuum for the very corporate American read of the genre to dominate. With vampires, massive corporations can do vampire films, but its hard to make vampires less a metaphor for sex or disease. Its hard to take their queer coding out of them. With Werewolves, it’s hard to divorce Lycanthropy from modern concepts of toxic masculinity, or, more archaically, from concepts such as rabies or disease. One could argue Werewolves as a metaphor for class mobility, in that they appear normal by day, but unleash their savagery by night. This could be seen as a metaphor for poor folks infiltrating the spaces that once belonged to the elite. But zombies? There is no set metaphor there. No undivorceable idea tangled up into their very existence. Which allowed corporations to simply project their anxieties onto us, to inundate the public with media that specifically depicts us as the villains, but one that does so in such a way that it’s frankly really hard for us to notice. So, if we want to continue enjoying zombie media outside of this corporate framework, the best method would be to try to redefine the metaphor. So I posit, that though the corporations frame zombies as monsters needing to be put down by the heroic gun toting white man, I argue the opposite. Zombies are a metaphor for the oppressed, the tossed aside and forgotten, those society pushes and pushes and expects no resistance. Zombies represent the very edge of humanity to which corporate structure often pushes its victims and the very metaphor itself represents the ways in which those in power demonize their victims, citing violence as the wrong way to fight back. And yeah, we the zombies can get a little violent, but you put us here.
