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.'"

Comments

Way to over-analyze, Forbes

[mewsenews]

For your next trick, can I get an article about how movie vampires represent world-wide fear of religion?

umm....

[realityimpaired]

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!

Fear of Science and Technology?

[icebike]

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.

Re:Fear of Science and Technology?

[Threni]

Exactly. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", as a number of people, including Freud himself, are alleged to have said.

Re:Fear of Science and Technology?

[icebike]

People are very sensitized to risks of technology that they don't understand

Defined sensitized.

We jump in cars and elevators without a thought, we yak on cell phones and play on computers, we plug things into electrical outlets without a care, buy game consoles, and generally adopt new technology readily, be they gadgets, GPSs, phones, emission controls, electric vehicles or solar power.

Sensitization to risks, to the extent it exists, is not driven by Joe User, but rather by the fear mongering groups opposed to something and their press lapdogs.

30 years of Nuclear fears generated by hype from green movement groups is now seen by those same groups as having been a huge tactical mistake. But it will take 20 years to undo the fear, with the coal plants running full tilt in the meantime.

Americans have great faith in Science, largely justified.

But, beginning in the 60s this believe has been progressively poisoned by years of attempts to ban/reduce everything from peanuts to salt to coffee to aspirin to sugar, potatoes, wheat, and rock and roll. The stories of lake Eire being permanently a dead lake, of imminent death due to any number natural disasters largely foisted by pseudo-scientists with a political ax to grind has taken its toll. Always the FUD before the FACTS, the Fear before the Data, the Restrictions before the Research.

Re:Fear of Science and Technology?

[Artifakt]

There have been some interesting major shifts in what gets made into horror movies, (and books, radio, or TV horror)

For one, for about 20 years just before the stage production of Dracula took off, Mummies were really big, with dozens of stories in horror magazines and such each year. Vampires were practically unknown. A lot of things Stoker originated just sort of collectively jumped into people's minds after that - Vampires took on distinctive fictional features such as not crossing running water, or turning into mists or bats, for the first time. Within a decade, just about anyone you polled had heard of them, and most thought that Stoker's additions to the legends were centuries old parts of the original legends instead.
      Zombies did something similar. There were a few films with voodoo style zombies, animated by a Hougan (usually called a witch doctor). There were lots of references to New orleans style Voodoo (Fewer to Haiti or African roots of vodou), and a whole lot of superficial references to Vodou beliefs and practices. If one of those zombies killed somebody, it probably slowly shambled over to the victim as a witch doctor directed it, and crushed or strangled the victim. Night of the Living Dead rebuilt the zombie, giving them an appetite, which soon became focused on brains. Now, I suspect if you surveyed a lot of people, most of them know of the Zombies - Brains connection, but most of those think it's something from original myths and legends, not George Romero.
      Alien Invaders and Atomic Mutants caught on in the 50's, but there was a more general common trend, to horror that didn't involve the supernatural. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of or read H. P. Lovecraft seem to have found themselves agreeing with his arguments from 20 years before about horror without religious overtones.
      When people suddenly shift positions to a new focus, in vast numbers, and they don't know where the new idea comes from and instead talk as though the idea has always been around, that's why psychologists think there are deeper meanings. A huge shift in what is sometimes called the zeitgist happens, AND many people in the middle of the shift claim things haven't changed, attribute new ideas to fictitious or ancient sources, and often, deny vehemently that they themselves have changed their opinions in the slightest. A hundred million adult people read a series of books about a boy wizard written for young readers, when five years before they would have had no interest in such things and the idea of such a series making the author the richest author ever would have sounded totally absurd to them.
      If there's no deeper meaning behind such shifts, maybe there's also no 'deeper meaning' behind election landslides, stock market crashes, or political witch hunt movements either. Maybe such things just happen, with no underlying causes. That, if you really follow the train of thought to its logical end, is scarier than real zombies.
 

Or maybe...

[turing_m]

... 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.

Fear of Tech?

[lyinhart]

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.

Oh, FFS

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Not necessarily of US origin..

[Philip K Dickhead]

Zombies. Yawn.

Pirates. Yawn.

Ninjas. Yawn.

Strippers? O.K. Where's the Gin?

Not science and technology

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Zombies As American Geek Expression of Hope

[Memroid]

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.

Re:Zombies just need to be shot

[Dunbal]

If anything, the proliferation of zombie movies is not the product of fear of technology, but the result of not having clearly defined enemies.

      Or how about "the proliferation of zombie movies is the result of lazy Hollywood companies that simply want to cash in on a fad, because frankly Hollywood ran out of ideas years ago"?

What's scary about that?

[reiisi]

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.

communist hordes and subversive neighbours

[cas2000]

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.

Ugh.

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:Ugh.

[maxume]

Ugh all you want, 'zeitgeist' is the topic of discussion.

Re:Frankenstein?

[blyloveranger]

Frankenstein is, in every iteration, a creation of humanity

I agree whole-heartedly. You can only watch Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein do it so many times before you begin to think, "Enough already. I get it. Dr. Frankenstein was a creation of humanity. Now stop showing Dr. Frankstein's ugly-ass parents having sex and start showing Dr. Frankstein create the monster."

Re:Dammit!

[Valdrax]

There were NO zombies in 28 Days Later.

    . . . pets peeve, tries to calm down, wonder why he brought his goat anyway . . .

Okay, then, what's the functional difference? People are infected with a plague via biting (or any other blood exchange) that robs them of their humanity and turns them into cannibals doomed to eventually collapse when their food supply runs out. The plague also makes them extremely dangerous and hard to kill. Society falls apart due to the plague and the remaining uninfected throw out conventional morality in a bid for survival. There's military quarantine, there's impotent scientists, and there's all the classic scenes where people have to deal with their loved one turning.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. It's not like all other movie zombies are undead, and few have any resemblance to the Haitian Voodou origins of the word "zombie." The rage-infected humans in that movie ARE zombies as much as the monsters of any other zombie apocalypse film are and as much as the "vampires" from "I Am Legend" are. They'd even be zombies if the origin of the plague was parasitic wasps (Dead Rising) or alien parasites (Slither).

What???? No. Sorry. Just, No.

[Fantastic Lad]

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

A cigar is ALWAYS a cigar, what is a cigar?

[Fantastic Lad]

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