A Stitch in Haste

What better way to start summer than with the politics of zombie movies?

But most important, what ensures survival in a zombie story are the progressive ideals of common cause and collective action. A small group of people from varying backgrounds are thrust together and find that they can transcend their differences of age, race, and gender (the typical band of survivors is a veritable United Nations of cultural diversity). They come to understand that if they’re going to get out of this with their brains kept securely housed in their skulls and not travelling down some zombie’s gullet, they’ve got to act as though they’re all in it together. Surviving the tide of zombies requires community and mutual responsibility. What could be more progressive than that?

To which a libertarian replies:

The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death—on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.

To which I replied:

What a Randroid would say, not entirely incorrectly, is that zombie movies celebrate reason over mysticism. Ever read Rand’s West Point commencement address with its brief “science fiction” introduction?

Besides the obvious anti-religion backdrop required in any zombie movie, the people who survive are invariably the ones who think, reflect, reason and act. The ones who just sit, hope –and eventually scream — are the ones who perish.

A better question would be why so many of these movies have anti-Romanticist endings these days (i.e., the protagonists perish in the end anyway).

“Cloverfield” comes to mind, as does “Alien 3,” “The Happening,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978 version), as well as the cut-away endings of the video games “Dead Space” and “F.E.A.R.”

Leaving an opening for a sequel is one thing, but there’s something disturbing and unfortunate about the popularity of gratuitous, existentialist, “it was all for nothing” endings in zombie and apocalyptic fiction.

I’ve also noted, but off-blog I think, the no-mere-coincidence that George Lucas made droids (i.e., not people) the main target of mass destruction in I-II-III at about the same time that Peter Jackson did the same with orcs (i.e., not people) in LOTR. Easier to justify the violence that way.

Another important trend to watch is the ratio of “government caused this” scenarios (e.g., “Day of the Triffids,” “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” “TDTESS v1.0″) to “capitalism caused this” scenarios (e.g., “Jurassic Park,” “Poltergeist,” “Mad Max,” “Waterworld,” “TDTESS v2.0″).

Previously:
–Klaatu’s Externalities, Then and Now

Filed under: Capitalism, Society, Religion, Culture Wars