The cultural significance of the zombie

It is believed that Buddhists play the following mental game. For a moment, they imagine that everyone around them is enlightened. By observing humanity through this lens, they are said to gain insight into deeper spiritual truths. For example, if a man who never bothered to bathe instantly became an enlightened guru, he becomes a living lesson on attachment to appearance. The bodhisattva who curses you out at the DMV is secretly challenging you to remain unperturbed.

A variation of this game is played within a sociological context. To play, one must simply assume that there is meaning behind every cultural fad, craze, or fascination. Of course, there is no real point to this, but you didn’t play the enlightenment game to become a better Buddhist. It is in this spirit that I wish to discuss the triumphant rise of the zombie.

Zombies now occupy a place in our consciousness that dinosaurs and aliens held a decade ago. This is surprising to me for many reasons. One can imagine cute baby T. Rex’s and hip saucer cruising grays. But it is quite hard to make reanimated corpses palatably PC. Furthermore, dinosaurs were featured in prehistoric battles and aliens were in pursuit of global domination. In comparison, zombies seem to lack life both figuratively and literally.

But the zombie has overcome these handicaps to become a preeminent social force. The deadpan manual “How to Survive a Zombie Attack” is a cult bestseller. In a recent video game one plays as Stubbs the Zombie and attacks the living as the ‘Rebel without a Pulse.’ Bloodstained T-shirts parody the sandwich chain with the slogan: “ZombWay- Eat Flesh.” But the zombie’s influence penetrates further still.

A very pretty girl I know participated in a zombie walk. Essentially, she put on pancake white makeup, torn clothes, and fake blood. She then paraded in public with a group of similarly attired enthusiasts. I later asked her on a date, but she declined. I believe that the role of zombies cannot be entirely ruled out on that outcome either.

People who live the zombie lifestyle are paralleled by other moderns who yearn to become pirates. However, I find the desire for the pirate’s life more understandable. Pirates are daring and cool. There is even a congressionally sanctioned day devoted to speaking like a pirate. However, speaking like a zombie would only get one so far and I doubt the motion could even pass the House of Representatives.

The most obvious cause of our zombaphilia is 9/11. The connection is not hard to establish. A third mental game related to me by a friend is to constantly map out contingency plans if a zombie attack occurred THIS VERY SECOND. Boredom would vanish since you would always be thinking of escape routes, combat techniques, and necessary supplies. Replace ‘zombie’ with ‘terrorist’ in this theoretical game and you have the ever vigilant mindset that should be present in a nation at war.

In fact, the stated purpose of the zombie walk group Zombie Squad is to promote disaster preparedness. They claim that if you can survive a zombie attack (or the more catastrophic Zombocalypse), you can survive anything. Indeed, this survival aspect is very apropos. From the wreckage of the World Trade Center, everyday Americans rose as half dead survivors, devastated and too shocked to think rationally. When we saw it, we became zombies too.

But that does not explain why people would want to be zombies. To properly analyze this, we must return to the origin of the mythos. In the traditional zombie creation narrative, a boko (or voodoo priest) would get into a dispute with a neighbor or fall in love with a maiden. Since dark voodoo sorcerers were not known for their charm, they were usually disliked by their community and were not favored as husbands. Thus scorned, they would give their victim a drug that placed them in a coma which mimicked death.

Three days after the burial, the boko would dig the victim up and give them a second drug that induced heavy amnesia and rendered them minimally capable. The combination of being buried alive and chemically impaired made the zombie a confused and complicit servant. However, if the zombie ate salt or drank blood, it would immediately realize what had happened and would furiously attack anyone nearby in the hopes of punishing the boko. The hapless zombie maiden or neighbor would then dig futilely at the ground, trying to return to the grave.

Zombies lost much of this depth once they entered the American mainstream. Instead of being tragic figures trapped by Caribbean dark magic, they became ‘Romero zombies’. The voodoo zombie was a body raised without a soul. The Romero zombie is a monster created without a budget. Round up a few dozen extras, tear their clothes, tell them to moan and walk aimlessly, and you have an instant army of the undead.

We must remember these monsters were fairly low on the horror movie totem pole. Such classics as Zombies of the Stratosphere and Zombies on Broadway (starring Leonard Nimoy and Bella Lugosi, respectively) attest to their status. But after Night of the Living Dead the zombie became a horror icon which continued to our present big budget fright fests. In current movies like 28 Days Later, the zombie becomes a plausible threat.

What is most visibly omitted in these Romero zombies is the reason for their existence. No solid creation narrative is necessary or given for the zombie. It can be a virus, nuclear radiation, or even a cell phone malfunction. Likewise, Romero zombies are killed via a shotgun beheading. Compare this to their voodoo ancestors, who die only once awakened to their own tragic fate. There is none of the allure of a vampire, the transient humanity of a werewolf, or the pathos of Frankenstein’s monster. And somehow, we seem to like that in our zombies.

There is no reason to dress up like zombies except for the fact that we identify with them. We see in the zombie not a flesh eating corpse but fellow creatures who, like us, also lack meaning or purpose. We, the living, have many interests but never any animating force. Our protests to government go unheeded, the economy sucks, and the ice caps are steadily going to melt. The zombie is as senseless and disoriented as we are, but is somehow happier in its apathy. We want to be mindless and tell other people they’re mindless too. If we stumble around in shopping malls murmuring for brains, I think we’re really trying to say: ‘We are the walking dead and so are you. You just don’t have the guts to show your guts.’

How the zombie transformed from a prisoner of black magic to performance art and fad will probably be irrelevant six months from now. But to understand the zombie’s place in our collective unconscious is more than just a mental exercise. It embodies our reaction to tragedy, our inner desire for numbness, and a call to find meaning in our humdrum lives. The pretty girl, once dressed in rags and splattered in blood, was having the time of her life. I don’t know if she was thinking about the meaning of her actions. But I wish I could have been with her then, for a moment no longer tortured by the burden of existence. Happy now that we have finally reached the era when the living envies the dead.