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Zombies As American Zeitgeist Proxies
blackbearnh writes "No doubt, there will be more than a few brain-munching glassy-eyed zombies showing up on the typical doorstep tonight, demanding brains, brains, brains, or at least some Milk Duds. But according to this essay over on Forbes.com, zombies are more than just the trendy monster on the block, they are to Americans what Godzilla is to Japanese: a personification of our fear of science and technology. 'It seems you can't throw a half-eaten cerebrum these days without hitting a posse of zombies brought to life by some kind of biological mishap (28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Planet Terror, Quarantine). Like Godzilla, zombies keep up with the times, always ready to mirror whatever aspect of science and technology people feel most uncertain about at the moment.'"
For your next trick, can I get an article about how movie vampires represent world-wide fear of religion?
This entry belongs in Idle, which incidentally is perused exclusively by zombies.
I'm pretty sure that in Dawn of the Dead, Romero wasn't trying to convey a fear of new technology, but rather a disdain for commercialism.... the bulk of that movie took place in a shopping mall, fer cryin' out loud!
Both 28 Days Later and Resident Evil were made respectively by a UK director (in the UK), and by a UK company (FilmFour)....
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Seems more likely a personification of fear of death.
However, I personally don't lend much credence to these mumbo-jumbo pseudo scientific explanations of things people do for the sheer fun of it. Some things don't have a deeper meaning.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Just like how people's love of Star Trek led geeky engineers to develop the real cell phones we have today, some researchers must be working on development of a real zombie virus to use as a military weapon. We've seen this theme in movies several times. If it's at all possible, it will happen sooner or later.
... you just needed a convenient enemy for an FPS? Something in the uncanny valley that is human-like but not quite human that the average person will feel compelled to blow away?
So now you've decided on zombies, you've got to figure out how they were created so the plot makes sense. Supernatural, or science. If science, pick from alien technology, radiation, biological means, or something a bit more wacky - other dimension, your large Hadron collider malfunctions, I don't know.
There are only so many explanations the public will buy to sate their desire to blow away not-quite-human things. You have to pick one.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Of all the examples he could have chosen, he chose zombies? In most films, if there is an explanation for their existence of the zombies in the film, it's usual mystical or related to disease or something (as the writer cedes). But the writer had better examples he could have chosen. Like the "evil computer" - e.g. Hal 9000 from 2001, or Skynet from the Terminator films.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
The original Romero zombies were flesh eaters that preyed on our fears of being eaten much like in pre-civilized times when it was a constant threat. They are closer to the fear of cannibals like Hannibal Lector than atomic bombs. Although some modern zombies aren't specifically trying to eat flesh they all bite and kill.
Hell with zombies. I know how to tell a scary story.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Zombies are fun. They're fun for costumes, they're fun as horror movie bad guys, they're fun to blow away in video games.
Pirates and ninjas and vampires are fun, too, but they've been overexposed. Zombies are about to go the same way, I suspect, and they'll drop off the cultural radar screen for a while. Then they'll come back (they always come back ...) after people have gone through a few more cycles of archetype-of-the-week.
That's really all the explanation needed. Trying to read some deep cultural significance into what monsters are popular at the moment is almost always a fool's game. Even Godzilla very quickly outgrew its origins as a nuclear metaphor, and just became a fun monster.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
the real reason we have zombies everywhere is political correctness. it's a lot safer for game makers to use pretend antagonists than human beings. if a game has you shooting human beings, somebody's going to complain; monsters or robots are much less likely to offend the hyper-sensitive thought-police tipper gores of the world.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The first zombie movies were a visual metaphor for blind consumerism.
The more you know.
-GMJ
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.
Agreed. And Americans are mostly willing to embrace technology that's been well advertised as either cool or sexy. Even the very well educated non-scientists in America (read: humanities professors) are largely fearful of or hostile toward science. When I've been in France and Germany, that's not been the case. Also, regarding the GP's rejection of the zombies-represent-fear-of-science hypothesis, look back to early zombie movies. They tend to clearly state that the zombies arose because of some new phenomenon that was pulled (and distorted) from relatively avant garde science of the day. Just wait - we'll soon have zombies based on gamma ray bursts or the sequenced human genome.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Terminator is a personification of a fear of technology. Zombies are obviously a personification of a fear of society.
Which is almost odd because typically zombies ARE humans that had something done to them. Robots, aliens, or monsters that aren't human at some point would be easier to push past the radar (at least I would think so).
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
i for one welcome our zombie godzilla overlords
The zombie genre has its roots in the novel 'I am Legend'. In the book, the zombies have some sort of vampire virus that comes with the wind.
I haven't seen the Will Smith movie (nor the earlier adaptations), so I have no idea how it relates back to the book.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There were NO zombies in 28 Days Later.
. . . pets peeve, tries to calm down, wonder why he brought his goat anyway . . .
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
If anything, the proliferation of zombie movies is not the product of fear of technology, but the result of not having clearly defined enemies. Ask an American "who is your country's greatest enemy?" you will probably get the answer "radical Islamist terrorists." But where are they? And how can you be sure? When an American soldier pulls the trigger on an Iraqi, is he doing the right thing? And how do we live with ourselves if we kill innocents?
But zombies....zombies just need to be shot.
There is no question, "Is this a good or bad zombie?" or "Am I killing the right zombie?" That certainty is appealing because there is no doubt, no question.
Although sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe zombies will deploy some particle acelerator thingy to harvest more brains and end up recreating the begining of the universe killing us all?
Unless you live in Australia... (looks at Left 4 Dead 2 with pity...)
They scare me.. More than vampires, demons, serial killers. Zombies represent the fear I have of losing my mind. They represent how I feel when I people passed out in front of a television or parroting some mindless religious or political drivel. The zombie state is how I feel when penned up in my cubicle. Zeitgeist for the times?? I dunno, but zombies scare me in a way that nothing else can.
Why odd?
Zombies are moving corpses that aren't interested in anything besides your brains. You can't talk to them, convince of the errors of their ways, or let them be. You can't make them normal again. They're the perfect target to mindlessly slaughter with no regrets.
Robots, aliens and even monsters are very often humanized. They often have human level intelligence, and some sort of motivation. It takes a lot more effort to come up with a reason to kill something sentient. If you don't do it right people are going to root for the "wrong" side.
don't forget diabolically deliberate acts of biological contamination such as "V for Vendetta"
These views express my own personal opinions, not those of the other voices in my head
If anything, I think zombies symbolize a breakdown of technological society, and the survivalist chaos that would arise in its absence. Most popular zombie movies feature the complete or near destruction of human civilization by the zombie horde. The humans then spend the movie scrounging for weapons, food, shelter, etc, and other humans generally pose at least as great a threat to them as the zombies do. The zombie apocalypse is fundamentally a survivalist fantasy, in which those with guns make the rules and there is an unlimited supply of enemy targets that are only dangerous in numbers, easily fooled, and which can be shot to pieces without ruffling any ethical feathers. In short, a survivalist paradise. This is what appeals to the (probably mostly male) audience. Men are built for violent competition in an environment with no technology and competing, relatively small groups of people, and by largely removing technology from the picture, zombies put us in exactly that situation.
Or a simple: if (0 fork()) exit(0);
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I would argue that zombies are nothing related to a fear, but rather the geek's hope for a post-apocalyptic world where they can go back to the basics.
No more 9-5 jobs.
No more waiting for the release of the next piece of entertainment.
No more races for popularity, money, and possessions.
A simple fight for survival where those who are still alive are considered the successful, the happy, and the free.
I would have put that label upon Frankenstein. While perhaps not of American creation (are zombies?), Frankenstein is as well known as Mickey Mouse. And, as opposed to zombies, Frankenstein is, in every iteration, a creation of humanity; whereas Zombies can become as such thanks to any number of suddenly-unearthed virii.
I would say, though, that zombies strike more fear because they are more unknown. In most versions, Frankenstein answers to someone or can be stopped by some repressed sense of humanity (or a woodchipper, whatever). Zombies, however, have a bloodlust that is rarely stopped short of a shotgun to the head.
But that might be the reason for the popularity of zombies currently: they have a much more versatile origination scenario than does Frankenstein.
I'm dressed as a zombie right now and I'm looking for head! Head! HEAD!!!
But is "zombieism" a pre-existing condition? My insurance company....
Let us celebrate obscurity: The Saragossa Manuscript.
Or the equally excellent original: href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manuscript_Found_in_Saragossa
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Heck, many if not most of them worship one. Not to mention the unspeakable things they've done in his name...
http://www.zombiejesus.com/
This is scary.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Zombies in no way personify a fear of science and technology. They personify a fear of the elderly. Every American I have ever known to be preoccupied with zombies is a young person. The monsters of elderly Americans' generations were King Kong (Blacks) and, before that, Dracula (Jews).
Zombies are catatonic, un-dead creatures that forcibly feast on the brains of the living in the same way that elderly Americans forcibly rob younger generations of progress, instead co-opting the best and brightest to work to extend their lives indefinitely, turning them into zombies as well in an unsustainable, exponentially-growing process.
"You'll eat your young." --some American
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
What technologies are the focus in the original Night of the Living Dead?
THL phish sticks
Representations of the Zeitgeist, sure. What the Zeitgeist is? Eh, no. How about representing many of the things Romero intended? All that stuff hasn't really changed. Mass consumer culture; a rebellion against a sterile, mindless society; unease and dissatisfaction with the state of the country and the world - and the attendant social unrest. Forbes' analysis is interesting, but off the mark, IMO.
The issues that were salient when the original movies were made are just as salient now, if not more so.
Yeah, zombies represent, to me, my fear of Microsoft software, and of losing my mind, which may be the same thing.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
People. These are real people. After an assassination, things are gory, including blood and internal organs (brains in this case).
And the emotional state of people is not going to be all that much cleaner, either.
Presidents and vice presidents, and their family, are real people. When we expect them to be superhuman, we've already lost any war that's important, including metaphorical wars with the undead.
And if it's just the gore itself that's so scary, well, again, welcome to reality.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I think zombies reflect our empty commercial lives.
We're skeptical of pretty much all systems of meaning, so we see ourselves as "half alive," merely cannibalizing on each other (pretty much.)
Braiiiiinnns.... uhhhh....
Zombies are not about the fear of science. They are about isolated individuals or small terrified groups struggling to survive in a world that will eat them alive the instant they drop their guard.
When I was in University, I once had some leftist student try to convince me that Batman was evil, using a Marxist analysis. That is, he's a rich man, who tries to keep the poor of Gotham down under his boot by going out at night, scaring beating the crap out of the proletariat for daring to stand up to him and his exploitive, capitalist parents.
While rather amusing (I don't think he was fully serious, I hope), the truth is, you can see whatever as a metaphor/representation/whatever of anything you want, but at the end of the day, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Zombies are cool cause they eat people. That's my analysis.
i've always thought that the american fascination with zombies was because they combined a representation of the "mindless hordes of communism" with america's favourite paranoia about Fifth Column subversion of the American Way Of Life
plus, of course, americans love the Lawless West mythology, that a single good man with a gun can save the day. add to that the survivalist wet-dream of A World Gone Mad and you have the perfect fantasy fuel for everyone, especially the RKBA nutters.
(that said, i love a good zombie flick myself. or even a bad one)
oh yeah, while i'm dissecting the american zeitgeist, i'll also mention that the american obsession with robots from the 1950s onwards is due to the white middle class desire to have an obedient slave race that won't revolt....indeed, CAN'T revolt due to Asimov's Three Laws being built-in. robots are proxy black slaves with all the uppitiness removed.
That the antagonists in horror movies are often allegorical representations of the creators' fears is hardly a shocking observation.
That zombies as a metaphor represent fear of technology seems wrong. Technology has largely replaced the supernatural as the favored MacGuffin in realistic fiction, horror included, simply because it's a more believable way to accomplish incredible things. Likewise, when our story-time villains mostly used magic, exploring our fears about magic was rarely the point of the story. Dracula was not a metaphor for the dangers of magical progress but instead for aspects of the darker side of human nature.
It's those aspects... that darker side of human nature, that our villains and foils most effectively and most often represent.
Mass hordes of zombies represent the Wellsian fear of (economic or social) underclasses rebelling against their rulers. They may be slow and stupid but there are so damn many of them and they don't stop.
The assertion that zombies = fear of technology is ridiculous. First of all, bio engineering is not technology in the way that most movie audiences think of it as (big shiny, metal, like terminators) and in the classic survival horror genre technology is usually used to overcome the zombies.
Of all the examples he could have chosen, he chose zombies? In most films, if there is an explanation for their existence of the zombies in the film, it's usual mystical or related to disease or something (as the writer cedes).
Mystical elements were big in early films featuring zombies, but "Night of the Living Dead" has thrust the zombie apocalypse genre firmly into the sci-fi horror camp ever since. You generally don't see masses of zombie hordes bringing an end to civilization in mystical zombie films because that kind of zombie is rarely self-propogating, and a true zombie apocalypse requires that.
Ever since "Night of the Living Dead," the causes of zombie horror have mostly been either due to scientific experiments gone wrong or due to disasters caused by the march of science and technology. Let's look at a few:
Anyway, this list isn't comprehensive, but I'd say that in most movies either: (a) the plague is the result of scientists' actions usually on behalf of the military or an evil corporation, or (b) the cause for the outbreak is a natural disaster / unexplained and a part of the background of the movie is the inability of those in power (including scientists) to do anything about the situation.
Unexplained plagues are becoming far more common in the past two decades as the zombie apocalypse has become and established genre, and movie-goers don't really feel a need for an explanation for the setup. After all, these stories are really about the collapse of civilization, a more bloody version of Lord of the Flies.
Science being dangerous isn't all that important to the genre anymore, just like the Godzilla films stopped being about atomic horror long, long ago and started being more about cool giant monsters duking it out over a city. It's important to genre in the 60s-90s, but it's not such a big deal anymore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Superhero origins are far more representative, actually. Consider: Spiderman and the Hulk both get their powers from radiation in the 60s, and from genetic engineering in their more recent movie versions.
Pirate zombies vs Ninja zombies
It seems that Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer [...] disagree, and they seem to have good chunk of the popular imagination in the United States.
Yes, because modern takes on ancient legends are incredibly valuable for telling us how they originated and why they seem to have been so pervasive across culture before the advent of modern communications technology.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yeah, we seem to abhor GM foods, anything having to do with medicine, or any of the DNA hokum on CSI.
But your example (and few by other posters) don't contest per se the idea that it is a phenomena with US origin (origin being the key word here)
For example: Big Macs (and similar) are eaten and made throughout the world. Doesn't mean that they are no longer of US origin (and yes, the meals of that form might not be of US origin in reality, I don't know; but you get the idea...)
Also, it would be usefull to look at the scale of things; I guess US leads in production of zombie films by a large margin.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I thought that in the article the most useful thing was the reference to the optimism of the Apollo era. We will not get that from greenie tech, and unfortuntely, we will not get that from our current space program. The Russian's on the other hand are starting out with the right idea, with new propulsion tech. And it seems obvious to me that they have in the back of their mind a permanent manned colony on Mars, perhaps eventually a rather big one. Say 100 years out. Otherwise, on a technical basis, why not chemical rockets. So I suspect they will get the benefit of the optimism and the economic spinoffs. Maybe they will not make any zombie movies.
Don't you mean "braaainzzzzzzz..."?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sounds like a computer nerd can't fathom that computers aren't the only "tech" out there. There is such a thing as biotech these days, if you haven't heard, and most of the diseases that cause zombism in movies are a result of biotechnology. Screw your head on and think!
"Mrs. Kennedy was getting very warm, she had blood all over her hat, her coat...his brains were sticking on her hat.
That description of Jackie has me all worked up. I'd pull up her skirt and hit it right there.
Kill init, kill the ghoul.
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND /sbin/mingetty tty6
3065 tty6 Z+ 0:00
In fact the earliest story I recall (can't remember the name) had a religious figure raise the zombies - kind of like the biblical stories. But the point is, the zombie is controlled externally, and discards logic. Seeking what it lacks (brains) it destroys others. Sounds like a fundy to me (of any stripe :-).
It's actually very simple. Zombies are cool, so are shotguns and chainsaws, and the Zombie Apocalypse is an awesome way for the world to end. It's really not more complex than that.
There's a reason the zombie apocalypse has made such a come back... people wouldn't mind a reboot. Honestly, every time people feel the world (or at least their world) has gone to the crapper (politically, socially, economically), some sort of apocalyptic mythos springs forward. Zombies as the main current mythos has a lot to do with actual animosity people hold for those they feel only take from society. They fantasize about it... about finally being rid of the 8-5 daily work schedule, about the mundane life. People would welcome a reboot so long as they would have the opportunity to fend for themselves.
I would absolutely have to say that Vampires run the shit in the USA. When was the last time you saw a zombie on the cover of People? I can't buy gum without seeing a goddamned vampire playing to the sexaholic tween behind me in line. Not saying, i'm just saying.
There is not one single zombie in 28 Days Later.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The crucial part of this is that its a zombie apocalypse. A significant part of this fantasy is that, well, everyone else is dead. In these films you rarely see a lot of remorse from the survivors; instead, you see them fighting for their own lives. And usually oversome in thw end by the teeming mindless hordes.
It is clearly more about our fear of being overcome by mindlessness, and a relief of finally being free of the howling of the pressures of present day society that drives this zeigeist. I just want some space, man, I just want to breathe a little. I want to do all of those things that I can't do now because there are too many fucking people in my way, and I want to give in to unbridled consumerism. Almost every movie has "a loot the grocery store" scene cause we're tired of having to make choices and we want to have it all. And at the end of the day we know that we're going to have our brains sucked out of head too, cause the enemy is relentless, and relentless, even if slow and stupid, will overcome our will to survive.
That's what it's about. It has very little to do with fear of tech, that's lazy analysis.
--
$tar -xvf
I don't t that zombies represent our fear of science and technology, but rather the lack of them. We're afraid of what would happen if mankind were to revert back to a primitive state of being.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Along with nuclear waste and mysterious space-borne radiation, pandemic plagues have also spawned zombies. This zombie type has become the dominant movie form over the last few decades, no doubt a reaction to AIDS, Ebola, cloning, genetically modified foods and the remainder of the brave new world of biotechnology.
I have to take a moment to totally disagree with this assessment. --As many have already pointed out, bio-tech gone wrong (or whatever) is just the McGuffin used to get the story rolling. You can't have zombies without some sort of half-baked explanation at the outset. Nobody cares what it is really, so long as it isn't entirely implausible. In this case, the monster is definitely the Thing, (Ha Ha. Pun intended.), and the reason we are, as a culture, so fascinated with Zombies is based on, as per usual, the rumbling proto-awareness bubbling up from our subconscious. --Because we can't quite get a fix on the source of threat with our conscious awareness, the Deep parts of ourselves step in, conjuring up images for us to contemplate until we figure out the enormous stress vector we've thus far failed to recognize in the world around us, but which is trying its damnedest to consume us.
And if you'll notice, there is another trend in film and television which is closely related to Zombies. . .
Dollhouse (Programmable people.)
Terminator Salvation (Programmable robot people which think they're real.)
Moon (Programmable clone people.)
Surrogates (Remote controlled robot people.)
Gamer (Remote controlled real people.)
Avatar (Remote controlled alien people.)
I'd also add a few others such as. . ,
Dexter (Dangerous fake people who don't think like us.)
V (People which look like us but are really noxious alien lizards.)
See the trend? I sure do. Everything looks peaceful, but our cultural subconscious is screaming.
All in all, plain old Zombies are far less disturbing because they're mindless. The idea of somebody else controlling zombies raises the skill level beyond simple shotgun solutions. I'd wager that the reason our world is such a mess is precisely because we've utterly failed to deal properly with the problem of fake evil people, and worse, the fact that regular folks are so very easy to turn into fake evil people. This is upsetting, and it's the reason, I think, behind the whole Zombie thing.
-FL
While rather amusing (I don't think he was fully serious, I hope), the truth is, you can see whatever as a metaphor/representation/whatever of anything you want, but at the end of the day, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Rather amusing? You're assuming that just because the crowd believes what it is instructed to believe, that it must be true. --Which always works out for the best. (Sarcasm)
Actually, your leftist student was very close to the truth. Many of DC's Superheros are fixated on catching bank-robbers and otherwise protecting the established power structures and property wealth. --Unless you've noticed, the banks today are the villains in all the news stories, (unless, of course you happen to be a millionaire republican TV commentator, in which case it's the poor and ill-educated who are to blame). Given that the banks create the entire money supply out of thin air through fractional reserve lending and then have the gall to charge interest on top of that, (interest which is not actually possible to pay back as a society since the only supply of money is the bank system itself), the actual intent was always slavery and social control. It was by no means accidental. --And there's no argument I've heard yet (and I've heard a lot of them) which can logically defend the history of this system unless the argument out and out declares that people deserve to be treated like livestock and that the already-wealthy should be at the top of this sick food chain.
If Bruce Wayne was such a genius, he would have taken out the elites instead of beating up on the poor and neglected, which setting aside the Joker, is exactly what he does. I put it down not to his being evil, but to his writers being naive child-men.
Left or right, that's the truth of it. So yeah, a cigar may be just a cigar, except in this case, few seem to understand what a cigar actually is.
Superman is an even bigger dummy. At least in Frank Miller's work, Batman was partially aware that the government was self-serving and untrustworthy.
-FL
Pirate zombies versus ninja mummies.
That would be epic.
(Zombies are too messy to be good ninjas.)
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
OK, let's put on the hip waders here. So if my watching Romero Zombie movies is correct there are no happy endings.
People fight as hard as they can and die. Or become undead (I'll let a follow up posters explore that).
When everyone works together they have a chance. When infighting occurs, it all goes to heck.
So what I get out of it is:
1) You are a victim of forces you cannot control.
2) Cooperate or die.
3) Even if you fight hard, you can die.
This is in addition to the racial and social commentary.
Basically 1 through 3 defines your basic worker for a large corporation. I'm not sure if management == zombies though.
But in terms of layoffs and taking control of you life it speaks volumes.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Resident Evil 5 Got some political attention for having African American Zombies if I recall correctly.
I see zombies as being everyone around me, and the joy of surviving by having to kill everyone around me.
I mean, it's a symptom of stress, and when your stressed, you wish everyone was zombies...
Be seeing you...
maxume is not entirely wrong. Romero drew his inspiration from Matheson's "I am a legend", but instead of vampires he literally created the "zombies" as we know them. Till "Night of the living dead" zombies were - to the middle western- a bizarre Caribbean folklore.
I'd wager that the reason our world is such a mess is precisely because we've utterly failed to deal properly with the problem of fake evil people, and worse, the fact that regular folks are so very easy to turn into fake evil people.
And how does one go about this exactly? Most of us average folks don't have a dentist chair with bright brain-lights on it in our houses.
And how does one go about this exactly? Most of us average folks don't have a dentist chair with bright brain-lights on it in our houses.
Ignorance of the various methods is the key to successful conversion.
Are you SURE you don't have a chair with bright brain lights directed at it in your house? I bet you do.
Did you miss the last election? The last couple of wars? What are your views on Religion? Democracy? Torture? How were those views shaped?
Did you stand in your school for the national anthem, or did you stop and ask, "Why are we all doing this?"
-FL
You don't even need some kind of Alias-style programming room.
Humans are distressingly easy to get into "just following orders" mode. It's awful how little effort it takes to turn a decent person into an Auschwitz guard. The Milgram experiments are an informative, albeit horrifying, place to start.
Unless you live in Australia!
Left4Dead 2 was just banned here due to the extreme levels of realistic violence in the game. Apparently shooting zombies is realistic, if they bleed, but not if they don't.
I'm still pretty raw about that. I digress.
The thing I always find scary about zombies is that they can't be reasoned with, there's nothing to connect with. If you look at many of the other horror movie/story staples, there's often something that can be connected to. Frankenstein's monster had some humanity left that could be connected to, the same with vampires, and even serial killers, but the zombie is unable to communicate, and can't be connected to. (unless you're talking about one of those weird zombie movies where they can, like one I watched part of on AMC the other day, I want to say return of the living dead or something, about some kids in a mortuary). At the same time, I find the older style zombie stories about the witch doctors less scary for this exact same reason. Perhaps the witch doctor can be reasoned with, or in some cases even the zombie itself. It's for this reason that I didn't really find the serpent and the rainbow http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096071/ a scary movie at all. At the same time, I did find it an interesting and good movie.
I've read a transcript of an interview with Romero. He stated that the idea of the zombies was as a social commentary of the 'mob mentality' or arguably peer pressure.
I don't think technology was even on his mind at any point. ...maybe commericialism in an off-beat secondary kinda way. It's too bad i'm at a terminal and cannot google the interwebs for links for ou guys...
If you take any of Elias Canetti's ideas seriously zombies can be seen as the modern version of our ancient fear of out groups. The Dead is the biggest and oldest group of 'others' that can be found. Canetti said there was an inherent fear in people that everyone who ever died was sitting around somewhere, in a giant group with malevolent intent. Despite being modern and civilised and having overcome a lot of our hard wired beliefs, the popularity of zombie films (and the fact that a single zombie is never scary) bears him out. That's not the interesting thing about zombie films though. The most interesting thing in zombie films for me is how the zombies become a single minded thing, basically one giant organism, while the humans become even more individual. I haven't seen a zombie film where every major plot event didn't come out of one of the characters personal strengths or weaknesses. The zombies are usually just a predictable, avoidable, slow moving force that brings the main characters into relief.
Zombies are a combination of our xenophobia and our realization that our fragile lives and civilization depend not on what we do, but on what everyone else (AKA the fucking morons who barely have the brain cells to tie their shoes) does.
And right now, we're realizing that we're in deep shit because an awful lot of idiots have failed to use their heads. Hence, our lives and civilization hang in the balance.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
They're fear of people. Fear of the sprawling masses, to be precise. While vampires are the opposite: fear of (and/or attraction to) secretive elites.
I find the zombie apocalypse genre disturbing because it tells me that people have become comfortable with mass dehumanisation of their neighbours. And that's not a good place to be as a society.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Have you ever seen Romero's batshit film Knightriders? It was his first big studio film. It's about a traveling jousting troupe that rides motorcycles instead of horses. (It's also a fucking disaster of a movie -- watch The Crazies if you want more good early Romero.)
Anyway, these biker-jousters live noble lives, going from town to town to perform these great honorable jousting acts. And what are their audiences like? Brainless, artless, drunken idiots; people who live with no purpose, no ethics, and no honor. The people in the biker-jousting shows are zombies.
This, I claim, cracks the code of Romero's zombie metaphors. In Night and Dawn, the living survivors holed up in the house/mall represent Romero himself and his film crew -- people attempting to be aware of their own existences, and attempting to bring meaning to their lives, and generally trying to live fully. We, the audience, vicariously live by watching their movies; we live by feasting on their ideas. We're the zombies.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
I don't fear zombies at all. I hope we are invaded and eaten because modern society sucks. We spend most of our 80 years of life doing completely insignificant things. A zombie invasion would wipe all this nonsense out.
Does anyone know why AVG blocks the Forbes link above? Thanks, Your Faithful zombie overlord.
As far as I can tell Zombies are actually used in most movies as an "easy" excuse to remove civilization. It's always a Zombie armegeddon in the context of the story telling. They are nothing more then a hammer, a tool, to quickly eliminate the trappings of civilization so we can explore some wasteland. The zombies themselves are rarely the story, it is the survivors that matter and the fact there is no society, civilization, to support the survivors. The only real exception I have ever seen to this theory was Resident Evil where the outbreak was contained (Ignoring the God Aweful sequels...)
Quarintine wasn't event focused on the "infected" but rather commentary about the quarintine itself and it's repercussions on those being contained.
Vampires and their stories reflect on the vampires themselves. The typical villian horror flicks focus on the villians. Zombies... they have always been more of a prop then a character which makes them versitile in story telling.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Godzilla is a representation of America. The argument posted for this article is so weak, I don't know where to begin arguing against it.
Are you SURE you don't have a chair with bright brain lights directed at it in your house? I bet you do.
I'm pretty goddamn sure I don't. Devices to directly overwrite the human brain don't exist, as much as you want to believe that everyone who watches TV is a sheeple beneath your towering heights of Free Thought.
Of course, the funny thing is how often I see you "FREE THOUGHT!" types go along with sheer craziness. To paraphrase an old saying that rings true, the man who believes in Free Thought does not believe nothing but believes everything.
What are your views on Religion? Democracy? Torture?
Religion? Masorati Jewish. Democracy? I'm in favor of it, DUH. Torture? It's evil.
How were those views shaped?
I shaped them.
Did you stand in your school for the national anthem, or did you stop and ask, "Why are we all doing this?"
I stood and tried to sleep while standing, because the time when schools like to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" is the time when my body wants to sleep. No matter my right to it, protesting the bloody anthem by not standing would have interfered with my sleeping by drawing heckling from the teachers.
Eventually I decided I'd rather sing "Ha'Tikvah".
Oh dear, did I fail to live down to your expectations?
Did anyone outside of a highly authority-centered Western culture ever replicate the Milgram experiments?
Oh dear, did I fail to live down to your expectations?
Dude. You subscribe not just to a monotheistic religion, but a branch of conservative Judaism. You did *more* than live down to my expectations. If you don't think you're running a plethora of ego-protection programs in mad, tight circles, then you're fooling only yourself. And barely that, I'd guess, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered to comment at all let alone even notice my post.
Television is not just a tool of message and propaganda delivery, but the CRT flicker demonstrably alters your brain wave patterns as measured with EEG equipment. It essentially puts viewers into a mild state of hypnosis. This is why it's so hard for people to remember the commercial they watched ten seconds ago. Though the message goes right on in and does its magic. --But don't bother researching that. Your head would explode from all the compressed masses of cultural mind-game horseshit programming you've undergone since birth.
I'd feel sorry for you, but you'd probably just piss me off first. I have little patience for head-cases when I have to deal with them directly. From a distance they do get my sympathy, though.
Please don't expect a committed response from me. Your brand of insanity is usually just too toxic and intractable to deal with effectively. Too much work.
Good luck. You'll need every ounce of it you can get.
-FL
I'd feel sorry for you, but you'd probably just piss me off first. I have little patience for head-cases when I have to deal with them directly. From a distance they do get my sympathy, though.
Ah, the old-fashioned argumentum ad crazium: "You believe differently from me, therefore you're crazy and I won't even bother trying to reason with you, won't bother trying to engage your viewpoint, and will consider everything you have to say totally worthless."
Television is not just a tool of message and propaganda delivery, but the CRT flicker demonstrably alters your brain wave patterns as measured with EEG equipment. It essentially puts viewers into a mild state of hypnosis.
Have you considered opening a tinfoil-hat store?
This is why it's so hard for people to remember the commercial they watched ten seconds ago.
I'm sorry, are you saying that someone actually made people sit and watch commercials for ten seconds? Sane people get up and do something worthwhile during the commercials. Clever people get our television programs from something other than broadcast/cable so that we don't have to watch commercials at all.
I think if someone couldn't remember what commercial they watched ten seconds ago, it's because their brain wasn't watching in the first place. They probably spent the time on something good like thinking about their SO.
Though the message goes right on in and does its magic. --But don't bother researching that. Your head would explode from all the compressed masses of cultural mind-game horseshit programming you've undergone since birth.
Yeah, but you're a Free Thinker! Nothing is true! Everything is permitted! No god, no country, no master who isn't paying you!
Seriously, are you some kind of wannabe Topher Brink? I've never heard a more condescending tinfoil-hatter nihilist... except on Reddit. EW.