Symbolic Significance of the Zombie in Early 21st Century Popular Culture

Cafe Society
21

You are all making a gigantic mistake.

In zombie movies zombies are never the monster. Never. They are a detonator, a symbol of nature against man. A natural disaster. They aren’t more of a monster than an earthquake or a sinking ship are. They are an illness, something you can’t reason with, or feel anything for.

The monster in zombie movies is human nature. The pattern has been clear since Night of the Living Dead:

A) Disaster strikes

B)a small community of people is forced to band together in order to survive.

C)tensions and prejudice between the small community threaten to destroy, and sometimes succeed in destroying its members.

There’s where the meaning of a zombie story is. In the group of people and their actions to survive in dire circumstances. It’s never in the zombies, who represent, at best, fear of death and sickness.

22

I see zombies as a metaphor for the subconscious mind-they spring up in situations where people are traumatized by disasters. And they eat the brains of the living-which is why the conscious mind is terrified of them.

23

Agreed. The zombie movie is really about the breakdown of society. The humans are forced to fend for themselves, and invariably tear themselves apart. Thing is, in a realistic disaster like a volcano or hurricane we wouldn’t believe that the humans would turn on each other like that, because we actually have experience of natural disasters, and it turns out that in real natural disasters human beings bond together and help each other, rather than turning into sociopaths.

But the zombie natural disaster is enough different that our bullshit detectors don’t go off. We can’t say it’s unrealistic, because there never has been a zombie apocalypse and never will be. Even a kaiju attack is a lot more like a hurricane or earthquake. People will run in panic and so on, but they won’t turn on each other.

If humans are the real monsters, like zombie popular culture argues, how the heck did we survive to 2015?

24

Well, yeah, I guess that a more direct comparison with a disaster should be some sort of extended tragedy that lasts a long time, like a famine or a war, rather than an earthquake.

25

Like someone said upthread, the comparison to a contagious disease outbreak fits pretty well.

26

I’d be willing to bet that the recent (10 years) popularity of zombies is symbolic for poor people or illegal aliens.

27

This is a really interesting interpretation. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal combines this explicitly with the medieval version of the Zombie Apocalypse - the Plague. There are a couple of scenes in the movie where a plague victim is either killed or left to die (in a situation that would be callous in any other situation), which echo the need to keep murdering human-like zombies in modern zombie fiction.

Zombies don’t have any of the sexiness or deliberateness of vampires, or the super human powers of werewolves, so they move and kill like a non-sentient infectious disease. There doesn’t need to be a specific disease in the public consciousness for that to be a powerful fear.

ETA:That’s not to say I can’t see the value in socio-political explanations as well.

28

The rise of Romero-derivative “zombies” mostly represents present popular culture’s loss of connection to history and lore. Because technically they’re “ghouls.” “Zombies” in Creole tradition are something a bit different. Not knowing any real zombie stories, the present generation eat up stories about ghouls and think that’s what zombies are. That’s ignorance.

So looking for more meaning than that ignorance may be assuming too much. The explosion of “zombie” media is just a bunch of uneducated goobers going for the simplest, most familiar concept, not selecting from a range of eerie concepts.

29

That was Little Nemo’s point…I was disgreeing that it applied to one of his examples, since aside from Laura’s father all the other characters in Carmilla are ‘foreign’ (to the British writer and audience), too.

(Though it applies perfectly well to Dracula and arguably to The Vampyre (though Ruthven is a British peership).)

30

Romero Zombies have superseded Voodoo Zombies in the general public’s mind. No one is ignorant of anything because they’re two different concepts that use the same word. We call those homophones in English.

31

The meaning is in the popularity. It doesn’t matter what you call them. The Walking Dead never uses the “Z” word. In 28 Days Later and The Crazy’s, they are just dangerous sick people.

What makes zombie films and shows so popular is that I think they represent conflict between man vs society, taken to it’s logical extreme. The zombies can represent anything - consumerism, right-wingism, liberalism, religion, whatever. Any time you look at a bunch of people and say “look at those idiots doing/believing/worshiping/voting for…” that’s what zombies represent. And since zombies don’t actually have any sort of ideology beyond killing or converting people to be just like them, everyone can enjoy zombie films.

IOW, zombies represent everyone’s fear of society collapsing on itself because of the infectious spread of some idea they don’t support.

32

You’re overstating the point. Yes, people are the real monsters is generally the upshot in zombie fiction. But it’s simply not the case that zombies are never the monsters, as shown by how irritated fans of The Walking Dead TV show get when an episode goes by without an actual zombie showing up and either being killed or killing. Furthermore, World War Z (the book) is considered an exemplary take on the genre, and it deals very little with man’s inhumanity to man in a crisis. It focuses again and again on people rising to the challenges they faced with thoughtfulness and humanity. Shawn of the Dead gets credit for managing to be a good example of the very thing it’s parodying, but the things that go wrong in that movie are due to human frailties winning out over good intentions. None of the humans are monsters. I’m sure I could find more examples if I wrack my brains, but these are drawn from very popular instantiations of the genre and show that mankind-as-the-real-monsters is neither necessary to the genre in World War Z and Shawn of the Dead, nor sufficient in The Walking Dead, since people get cranky if the more literal monsters don’t actually appear.

There is a kind of cliche of the genre in which zombies appear just as tensions among the living arise, as if they’re heavy-handed symbols of that tension. See the Walking Dead video game for examples of this over and over again. As for brain eating, it’s worth noting that only a small portion of the genre uses this trope, so it doesn’t explain the larger phenomenon of the popularity of zombies.

There was a Cracked article that made the point that the genre tends to ignore the fact that humans in real-life crises prove more inclined to cooperate than to constantly thwart each other. But in the zombie genre, any attempt at civilizing things turns out to be a mini distopia that breaks apart from the original sin at its center. They’re not getting real when everybody decides to be an asshole out for themselves. That’s actually the less realistic scenario.

I think you can claim that as the underlying premise of Land of the Dead. I’m pretty sure Romero intended something like this. The analogy fails, however, because the movie expects us to come to sympathize with the zombies, but it’s hard not to sympathize with the people having their flesh torn from them while still alive just because there was some ethnic and class conflict leading up to it way milder than what we see examples of in real life. The analogy would have held better if it turned out that the zombies didn’t actually eat flesh or demand anything the living couldn’t afford to give but for their greed.

Famously, the zombie genre avoids the word. That someone conflated the voodoo zombie with this type of monster that fits better with what used to be called a ghoul is perhaps an irreversible fact of folk etymology. If I recall correctly, the word ‘ghoul’ is used once in Night of the Living Dead by someone speaking over the radio. Mind you, even that usage which would have been more correct to adopt for these creatures is forgetful of the origin of that term as a kind of djinn. Is that more or less of a violation of technicalities and slump into ignorance than how we’ve misappropriated the word zombie?

Technically, the term would be polyseme.

33

I would disagree. It’s true that Romero zombies differ from traditional zombies. But they also differ from traditional ghouls. Traditional ghouls were not mindless, were not animate corpses, did not have a human origin, and did not spread ghouldom to their victims. And while traditional ghouls eat dead people, zombies eat living people.

I’d say Romero took some aspects of traditional zombies and some aspects of traditional ghouls and created a new type of monster.

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Also note that modern “zombies” are a lot closer to the original folkloric concept of the vampire. Vampires were originally rotting corpses that clawed their way out of the grave to feast on the blood and flesh of the living. The “civilized” vampire was an innovation.

So the walkers on “The Walking Dead” aren’t zombies, they’re vampires.

35

Zombies absolutely can be a blank canvas to thoughtlessly project stereotypes upon. They aren’t necessarily so. In modern media, like Walking Dead, zombies are more of the hostile setting than the main antagonists. Humans with unknown motivations tend to be the biggest danger.

36

It counterpoints the surrealism of the underling metaphor. And stuff.

37

I posted this a few years ago on the subject:

Well, “death” would be the obvious answer. The zombie horde is an in-your-face reminder of your own mortality, without any sort of reassurance of an afterlife or eternal reward. Ghosts, for example, are scary, but they’re also evidence for the existence of a soul, that after we die, some part of us goes on. Vampires, at least in the Stoker mold, are the same. If Dracula is damned, then that means there must be grace for at least some of us. And his reaction to a crucifix indicates that there’s some validity to the concept of a Christian afterlife. The more modern “vampire as protagonist” stories that jettison the religious component of the vampire myth are merely replacing it with a different sort of immortality. Sure, a vampire can kill you, but it can also bring you back with superhuman abilities, eternal youth, a trendy black wardrobe, and all sorts of other great side-benefits.

The zombie horde is different. There’s usually no supernatural background to it. The zombies are either the result of science gone awry, or are presented with no explanation at all. It brings us face-to-face with death without any comforting evidence that the universe is anything other than random and pitiless. It also presents death in a way few of us like to confront it. There’s always something faintly ridiculous about zombies. They aren’t sexy and cool, like a vampire, or mysterious and otherworldly like a ghost. The archetype of the zombie horde isn’t a charming European aristocrat or a beautiful spectral woman. It’s an overweight housewife with a pink teddy bear sweater and a gaping head wound. Like real death, being turned into a zombie robs you of your dignity, and turns you into something that is at once ridiculous and repulsive, like the pile of zombies trying to claw its way up the down escalator in Day of the Dead. This fusion is so effective that even movies that are supposed to be comedies, such as Shaun of the Dead, are still highly effective as zombie movies.

The other potent cross-fertilization in this genre is the plague aspect: death as contagion. It’s not enough that the zombies kill you, they turn you into one of them. And not through ritualistic seduction, like a vampire, but by random idiot chance. A superficial bite wound, often received during a moment of victory, and the sickness is in you. You’re already “one of them,” even though you’re not dead yet. And then there’s nothing you can do but wait until you turn on the rest of the survivors, or put a gun to your head and end it quickly.

Lastly, there’s the human commentary. The zombies aren’t evil. They’re a force of (un)nature, apocalyptically deadly, but wholly unmotivated by desire or intent. Essentially, a human-sized virus. But the destruction they entail creates a backdrop in which “normal” humans become monsters themselves. The naked confrontation with death inevitably brings out the basest reactions of the survivors. Faced with the total collapse of society, people quickly revert to the worst sorts of barbarism. Essentially, the zombie horde destroys you even if it never catches you, by revealing you to be an uncivilized animal who will violate any principle or ethic in order to survive. Although, like all monster movies, the zombie apocalypse film is ultimatly moralistic: the characters who most eagerly pursue their own survival over the common good of his fellow survivors, the more graphic his eventual demise at the hands of the zombies will be.

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As a social commentary I’ve found that I’ve begun to appreciate the benefits of a functional civilization after seeing the worst aspects of what anarchy brings. It makes paying the tax collector a lot more palatable.

39

Zombies are an excuse for a dystopian nightmare. Somewhere in the darkest corner of everyone’s mind is the counter-example to their conception of ‘good outcome’. Good and bad create each other, see #2. The constant pressure to paint a picture of only one side of the coin eventually creates a sense of kitsch, which, while appealing, becomes obviously dishonest and builds tension because something is therefore wrong, even though everything appears just right. Depictions of a complete reverse-utilitarian ‘bad outcome’ relieve this pressure, which makes people feel better because it literally releases endorphins (or something), such is the power and scope of,… propaganda?.. in America today.

The next step would be to expose the folly of dualism, but zombie movies aren’t quite that good yet.

Getting back to reverse-utilitarianism, the ‘zombies’ of 28 Days Later achieve this best if the result of being infected means that first you try to eat your friends, and then you eventually slouch gibbering into some ditch and starve, suffering horribly all the while, world-wide. It is a picture of terrible, terrible suffering; if life is suffering, here is a snapshot of the globe, kitsch-less. As an added bonus, the 2nd law of the conservation of energy isn’t broken; maybe stretched a bit, but if you can’t accept this, you aren’t prepared for fiction.

The Walking Dead exemplifies ‘bad outcome’ in spades. In the earlier seasons, the protagonists want to live in a prison, it is by far preferable to the outside world. They do their honest best to keep things stable, but of course the Governor has to show up, behead Herschel in front of everybody, then start blasting the prison towers with the tank he brought along for that purpose, bashing down the crappy chain-link fence and sending gunfire (and zombies) everywhere. Few shows on TV hit such a high note. Maria Carey maybe, I can’t think of another example right now.

Generally, The Walking Dead expresses an extraordinary range of drama. Because of the powerful emotional appeal of situations in the show, you almost have to call it a soap opera. The apocalyptic setting gives males an excuse for watching a soap opera, because let’s face it, there is an urge in our culture to be especially masculine. Even if you are as straight as an arrow, it can be cast as weird to have any feminine traits at all. Watching soap operas is a feminine thing, no? But men need the lessons of soap operas too, so some need an excuse to watch them at all.